Mountain Vacation Getaway

by Guede

Summary:

Shinra makes Sephiroth go on vacation, so he decides to go to the most isolated mountain range on the planet, where nothing and no one can bother him. And then he takes the wrong path, is caught in a massive blizzard, and is pulled out of the snow by a man with wings.

It’s not exactly a rescue.

(It’s still a superb vacation.)

9/6/25: Vincent is a tea connoisseur.

Chapter 1: First Vacation, Day 1

The Nibelheim mountain range is more impressive when viewed from on foot rather than from the air, Sephiroth decides. Leaning out of a helicopter, one can take in more ground but the broader field of vision has a flattening effect, rendering the landscape into an especially detailed map, and he looks at enough of those as part of work. And if he’s going to be forced to use his PTO, then he is going to use it.

“It’s nice,” Zack says dubiously at Sephiroth’s shoulder. When Sephiroth looks back at him, the man is looking not at the soaring peaks all around them, but at the buildings lining the small town square. They’re weatherbeaten and certainly not as pretty as the marketing collateral, but they’ve both stayed in worse places. “Okay, then, so, pick-up’s in a week, oh-six-hundred, we’ll call up to ops here the day before—”

“Zack, please leave,” Sephiroth says.

“You know, when I said I completely endorsed this idea of getting away from it all, I was thinking you’d actually kick back and relax,” the other man mutters. He keeps fiddling with the phone in his hand, dividing his attention between frowning at it and frowning at the buildings. “Not wondering about signal reception when Lazard tries to call you because I’ve screwed up something.”

“Lazard isn’t going to call me unless someone hands him a satellite phone,” Sephiroth says, looking at the one in Zack’s hands. “I believe those were your exact words.”

Zack twitches, then sheepishly slips it into his pocket. “Uh, yes, they were, but also, I admit I was not exactly doing any recon outside of the Lone Wolf section of Weird Gaia Travel, and maybe that wasn’t really on-point for what you’re looking for—”

Sephiroth takes his own phone out, considers the complete lack of bars on the screen, and then puts it not back into the inside pocket of his coat, but into the end pocket of his duffel bag. “It’s fine, Zack. I’ll see you in a week, and we can talk about anything you’ve screwed up at that point, if you haven’t already gotten Angeal to fix it.”

“I’m trying not to do that to him anymore,” Zack says. He takes a step back, raising his hand, but then looks around the town again. “And okay, taking the hint, I am encroaching on your time away from Shinra like a big, black, Shinra-issued…but also, last chance to jump back on the chopper for somewhere warm and sunny and definitely equipped with table service.”

Sephiroth looks at him.

“Right.” Zack snaps his fingers, points them at Sephiroth, and then heaves a sigh when Sephiroth doesn’t reciprocate. “Have a good time!”

“I will,” Sephiroth says, and when Zack blinks hard, he smiles at the other man. “This is what I wanted, Zack, and I appreciate your research efforts. Now leave.”

Zack opens his mouth, catches himself, and then catches himself a second time when his hands attempt to move into another gesture. He turns himself around and starts walking back up the steps of the landing platform.

Nibelheim the town is so isolated that for much of the year, any supplies they can’t make themselves have to be airlifted in, and the approach between two guardian peaks is so narrow that helicopters are generally preferred over planes. The one ferrying Zack back to Midgar kicks up a tremendous backdraft, but the few townspeople staffing the platform don’t so much as raise their heads from their tasks. Nor do they pay much attention to Sephiroth, although they have to know of him: their supply flights are staffed by SOLDIER, and from time to time Sephiroth has had to personally approve an emergency medical flight.

It simply seems to be the local microculture that they keep to themselves, as Sephiroth finds once he’s walked the short distance into the town proper and found his lodgings. The proprietor shows by far the most interest in him, being a retired SOLDIER who has a spare room he’s more than happy to rent out to Sephiroth, but even his greeting is much more muted than what Sephiroth’s accustomed to. They settle matters such as mealtimes and door codes, and then the man excuses himself to go tend to some business at the lone chocobo farm that supplies the town.

But this suits Sephiroth. He puts his duffel bag on the bed in his room, takes out a few things he’ll need in the evening and arranges them in the adjoining washroom, and then walks back outside. One or two heads turn but just as quickly turn back, and he remains unmolested as he does a leisurely circuit of the town.

That takes him roughly an hour. He spends another hour walking about the outskirts until he’s located the trailhead that’s marked out on the local guide file Zack assembled for him, then returns to his lodging for lunch. It’s plain but filling enough that he notes he won’t need the rations a paranoid Angeal had shoved into his bag at the last minute—Genesis is the gourmet but Angeal has an irrational belief that anything north of Midgar is a barren wasteland—and with that in his stomach, he decides he won’t put off trying the trail till tomorrow as he’d originally thought. There’s really nothing to settle into here, and while normal wireless reception is poor, there are satellite phones in town: he can see one on the kitchen shelf from where he’s sitting.

So Sephiroth turns his steps back to the trailhead and then follows its trail for the better part of a half-hour before he runs into another person. He and they both startle, and then the man resumes walking towards Sephiroth with a distinctly cautious air.

It wasn’t the unusual lack of company that had lulled Sephiroth into a distracted state, so much as how silently and suddenly the man had emerged from the landscape—which isn’t barren but which is decidedly minimal, with few plants taller than knee-high and mostly grey-green mosses over everything. And the man is blond, which, now that Sephiroth has spotted him, stands out like a lighted flare against the subdued palette of the mountain.

“General,” the man says, nodding his head when he’s near enough for speech. “Sorry, they didn’t announce any operations for today.”

SOLDIER occasionally stages survival training in the area, although they generally deploy from villages further down in the foothills, and Sephiroth is still wearing his uniform because this trail should be far less strenuous than the last major operation in Corel. He could have left Masamune behind, he supposes, but Zack had painstakingly highlighted all of the wildlife warnings. “There aren’t any, I’m only here on a personal trip…”

The man pauses, his eyes flicking around Sephiroth as if he’d actually rather leave than provide his name. Then he seems to consider how odd that kind of behavior would be. “Cloud Strife, General.”

“Are you a hunter?” Sephiroth says, nodding at the blade peeking out over Cloud’s shoulder.

“I…sometimes,” Cloud says, his hand rising from his hip and then dropping. He’s right-handed. “I live pretty far out from town, you have to sometimes.”

“It’s not illegal, Mr. Strife,” Sephiroth says, wondering if that’s the cause of the man’s concern. He can see part of the blade’s lower end sticking out from behind Cloud as well as the hilt, making it a rather sizable sword for a civilian to carry, but in this area he doubts Cloud is the only one. “Is anything stirring today?”

“Is that what you were looking for?” Cloud asks, and again there’s an interesting thread of caution in his voice. Then he turns around and points up the trail. “You take the left fork, it’ll bring you down to a tarn where you can usually spot something even if it’s just a tatzelwurm or an aurochs herd.”

Sephiroth looks at the faint divide in the trail. “And what’s up the right fork?”

“Mountains,” Cloud says. He turns back to look at Sephiroth, and now, strangely, he seems to be sizing Sephiroth up. It doesn’t have that sizzle of aggression to it, so he’s not looking for a fight. “It’s not the time of year for that part of the trail. Nobody here takes it.”

“I see,” Sephiroth says, inclining his head. “Thank you.”

Cloud nods back, and then steps off the trail to pass Sephiroth. As he does, Sephiroth glances over for a full look at the man’s blade; it might actually be an old SOLDIER sword, ground down and reshaped, but he’d need a closer look to confirm.

He’s not going to get one. Strife walks without suspicious speed but certainly with purpose, and it’s not long before he’s crested a slight rise in the trail and disappears from sight. Perhaps he’s only wondering if Sephiroth will be on the trail when he returns from his business in town.

At any rate, Sephiroth doesn’t actually care to look into it. Before he’d left, Genesis had been musing almost constantly about how Sephiroth would never actually be able to give up control long enough to ignore work, even in somewhere as remote as Nibelheim. Genesis tends to reveal more about himself than anything else when he’s criticizing Sephiroth, but Sephiroth admits that he’d been a little curious himself about what this vacation would be like. He hasn’t truly had time on his own like this since his teenage years, when unexpected puberty-driven health issues had forced him to spend days in the medical research lab with his mother, lying in one machine after another as she’d frowned over the readouts.

Thankfully, they had resolved once he’d fully matured, and since then SOLDIER has fully preoccupied his time. He hasn’t always enjoyed it, but it suits him, and these days he’s old enough to see how the unpleasant parts are relevant to the whole—and if they’re not, he’s powerful enough to do something about it.

But this is…interesting, he finally concludes as he starts up the trail. This is new, the lack of company, the lack of requests and demands and innumerable tightly-networked considerations that make up his usual day. The…not complete silence, with the occasional rush of wind down off the slopes and the crunch of rocks under his boots, but the quietness of the sounds around him. It’s new, and in a way that doesn’t impose on him, which is almost shocking in its alienness.

He ends up a few yards down the right fork before he realizes, so deep has he fallen into thought. When he does notice, he slows and looks over his shoulder. Then in front, but he can’t really see why Cloud had warned him off the trail. Yes, it goes up the mountainside, but it’s clearly marked and not over particularly challenging terrain, at least for what he can see of it.

Sephiroth does notice that the trail seems to loop sharply about a large outcropping, but he judges that from where he is to that point will only take him another half-hour, so he sets off for it. And once he’s reached it, the view is more than worth the minimal effort.

Nibelheim looks much more picturesque from here, he thinks, the distance blurring away the marks of wear and making the predominant blues and dark greys of the buildings look crisp against the dull mossy landscape around it. He can still make out the occasional moving dot—he turns away from that, pushing around the side of the outcrop to consider the rest of the trail. Then, when he sees how sharply it twists along the slope, he jumps onto the outcropping for a more aerial look at it.

Much more challenging from hereon out, and he can see why Strife might look a little dubious about a newcomer trying it. The weather can be unpredictable at this time of year, just entering the snow season, but today the forecast allowed a helicopter landing, so Sephiroth doesn’t think he’s being particularly risky if he continues hiking. And if his eyes aren’t fooled, he thinks he can see the edge of a glacier further up the trail—that would be correct on the maps Zack downloaded for him.

Which are on his phone, back in his room. Sephiroth’s briefly annoyed with himself, since he could look at those even without reception, but then he shakes it off. The line of sight back to Nibelheim is straightforward, and even if he lost the trail, he could easily find his way. So he drops back onto the trail and continues on his way.

* * *

The glacier is slightly farther than Sephiroth estimated, and by the time he reaches it, the sky is starting to darken. Night probably will catch him before he can return to the town, but not when he’s very far out from it, and if the sky remains cloudless his night vision is good enough. So he doesn’t rush to turn around, taking a little time to explore the edges of the glacier. He’s never seen one in person before—there’s nothing here to interest Shinra, not even a strategic buffer against any other region—and the occasional deep, cracking groans that it emits feel fascinating. They vibrate through his bones and if he closes his eyes, he can almost imagine the subsonics forming words in his head.

Sephiroth opens his eyes and looks at the glacier. An odd thought, he thinks, and then he flinches as something splats against his cheek. He twists around, looking up as he wipes off his face: cold and wet and melting, that clump of snow, and more falls on him as he stares up at a patchwork of thick, low-bellied clouds that seems to have come out of nowhere. Even as he watches, the holes begin to swell closed.

“Damn,” Sephiroth mutters. When he gets his hands on the idiot who pulled today’s forecast—

He’ll have to do that later. He walks off the glacier, running over the distance he has to travel in his mind, and then realizes something and climbs up onto the first handy rock spur he sees to confirm it. The trail winds around the glacier’s leading edge, making a very time-consuming loop, and if he crosses the glacier itself, he should be able to shave off at least half an hour.

A long, shivering moan rises up through Sephiroth’s boots when he steps onto the glacier. He pauses, then takes Masamune off his belt and uses the tip to test the ground ahead of him. It seems sound enough despite the noise and he moves on, shaking his head as the snow starts to stick to it. Thick clots of it, quickly piling up as he strides towards the far side of the glacier.

Sephiroth’s boot slides once but he catches himself without much effort. He’s slightly more careful for a few steps, but since he’s gone past the halfway point, he drops that for speed instead. The snow is mounting at an alarming rate, and while he doesn’t doubt he has the strength and stamina to make it back to Nibelheim, he isn’t immune to frostbite—

His foot slips again, this time catching on a hidden irregularity so that he’s knocked down to one knee. He stabs Masamune into the glacier and uses that to push up against, then braces himself in a crouch. And then he leaps the rest of the way.

He lands on solid rock, not ice. Sephiroth takes two breaths to recover, then turns his back on the glacier and his face to the trail, and steps straight through a thin sheet of ice.

The crevasse underneath is so narrow that his back and his knees both are scraped raw within seconds. It slows him enough to swing Masamune about and catch it on one side of the crack, so he can then jam his feet against the other. Sephiroth pants—like some overfed city pet, he thinks, furious with himself now—and looks at the edge of the crevasse over his head. It’s a few yards.

Between Masamune and his height, he manages to hike himself up until he can throw his sword over one side of the opening. His hand drags through snow so thick and wet that the chill goes straight through his glove, and by the time he’s gotten both arms over, his fingers are spasming against the ground. He has to let go of Masamune to push against the dirt, levering himself further up, and then part of the edge crumbles down his chest.

Sephiroth curses, scrabbling at the ground with his fingers and kicking at the side of the crevasse with his feet. His left boot catches but then more of the edge crumbles away, so that he loses as much as he gains. The side of his hand smacks at Masamune and he hears it spin softly away into the snow as he stops himself, holding perfectly still even though his muscles are starting to burn and the melting flakes running down his coat-collar are painfully icy. He holds, focusing himself, and then he heaves up and over.

He can feel that he almost makes it. One knee comes up, but the other drags and then more dirt falls away, leaving his balance hanging in the air. His center of gravity is posed precisely on the tipping point—if the rest of the crevasse’s edge remains stable—

It doesn’t. A large chunk breaks off, knocking a fiery pain into Sephiroth’s left thigh as it goes, and his weight is falling back, not forward.

And that’s when something seizes his shoulder and flings him out of the crevasse and into what feels like a solid wall of stone.

* * *

When Sephiroth wakes up, he’s being rolled off what he realizes is a shoulder, as his carrier straightens up and he sees them leaning over him. A tall man—unusually tall for the area—with long black hair and eyes that suggest Wutaian heritage. But he’s far paler than Wutaians usually are, as pale as Sephiroth himself is, and his eyes have blood-red irises.

He also has a pair of black leathery wings arching up towards the ceiling of the…cave they’re in, if his eyes hadn’t been enough to tell Sephiroth he’s been subjected to genetic modifications at some point. They spread and fold as he stares expressionlessly down at Sephiroth. And then, as Sephiroth starts to ask him who he is, the man stretches his mouth open in what appears to be a yawn, baring unnaturally long and sharp canines and a tongue that seems to change its length and width as it twists between them.

Sephiroth pauses and the man closes his mouth, going back to staring at Sephiroth. There’s something…off about it, something that makes Sephiroth rethink saying anything at all. It’s not madness—the man’s attention seems very focused, and also he’s clearly comfortable waiting for Sephiroth to make the first move, and that’s an uncommon combination in the insane. It’s also not…anticipatory, Sephiroth thinks, as he takes in more of the situation and realizes the man is completely naked, and acting neither ashamed about it nor flaunting it.

If anything, it reminds Sephiroth of the time he’d come face-to-face with a wild Leviathan while carrying out a naval operation in Junon. There’d been intelligence in those eyes, but of a completely inhuman nature.

But this is a man, even if he has wings and—Sephiroth stops pushing up on his arm and goes still as something dark and long lashes out from behind the man. Wings and a tail, Sephiroth mentally amends, watching the newly-revealed appendage easily sweep away a pile of snow that’s drifted into the cave.

They’re only just inside of it. There’s light coming from somewhere, light and a source for the warm air that flows over Sephiroth’s shoulders as he glances outside. The snow is falling furiously now, nearly a foot deep, and as he moves the chilly outside air rushes in to push back the warm draft, awakening all kinds of pains in him. He doesn’t think he’s broken anything but he’d want to check once he’s in a position to.

He looks at the man again, who hasn’t moved. He’s simply crouching in place, looking at Sephiroth, and—apparently changing every time Sephiroth checks, because now his left hand has sharp claws on its fingers, while its skin has turned dark bronze and gained what seem to be hardened overlapping plates, like the scales of a drake’s belly. He isn’t advancing on Sephiroth but Sephiroth keenly feels the loss of his sword.

There’s still a knife in his boot. Sephiroth pushes himself up into a half-sitting position against the cave wall, keeping his eyes on the man, and folds his leg to where he can reach at his boot. It hurts and he suspects he’s sprained both knee and ankle, but moving slowly doesn’t seem to alarm the man, who finally blinks but who still keeps a relaxed posture.

At least, until Sephiroth’s fingertips touch the top of the knife. Something whips at him and he jerks over, shoving his hand into his boot, only to realize that the tail was only a feint—but by then the man’s closed the gap and is wrenching his wrist up. The knife clatters to the ground, then is inadvertently sent spinning away as Sephiroth instinctively kicks out at the man.

Who is fast enough to jump over that, and flexible enough to twist himself upon landing so that he can come down behind Sephiroth’s now-extended legs, pinning them up with his knee as he yanks at Sephiroth’s coat. His claws tear right through the leather—on purpose, as it turns out, when a strip of it snags about Sephiroth’s wrists.

Sephiroth hauls himself free and tears apart the half-cinched strip, then bangs up against the far wall as he tries to get his feet under himself. Liquid fire pours into one knee, but brute strength pushes himself nearly to the cave entrance; as he lunges past the man, he sees the wings sweep aside and diminish till they completely disappear.

He also glimpses, possibly, a look of irritation on the man’s face, but he doesn’t stop to check as he plows into the snow—

The snow. It’s like mud, but with the chill that immediately sinks into his muscles and makes them spasm with weakness, slowing him. He goes two steps, the second at a third of the speed of the first, even with adrenaline flooding through him. The third step is like dragging an ocean behind him, and the fourth sends him floundering into a hole at least as deep as his shoulders. And it could be deeper, he thinks he can feel the snow giving way rather than packing under his kicking feet, and more snow is coming up over his nose and mouth and damn it, he thinks, damn it, you can’t drown in snow, but he’s going to.

An arm plunges through the snow and hooks under his left shoulder, then hauls him easily out. Sephiroth knows who it is and tries to roll away, only for the man to abruptly let him go. When he overbalances, the man grabs him again and slews him through the drifts, using his own momentum to sling him back into the cave.

Colliding with a rock wall again knocks the breath out of Sephiroth. He has to lie there for a few seconds, gasping, and by the time he’s caught his breath, the man has tied his hands with another leather strip. Not from his coat, he can tell just from a tentative twist at it—whatever animal yielded up this hide, it’s going to hold him.

The man uses it as a handle, dragging him further into the cave. Sephiroth tries to gather his feet under himself, but the fight has packed enough snow onto him that he’s leaving a slippery wet trail and his knee or his boot always seems to slip on it. He’s only wearing himself down and after a few yards he settles for just trying to keep himself from swinging into the walls.

The cave soon opens into a sizable chamber, with a firepit and a…a nest of some kind, furs piled up into a stone-ringed circle, and some earthenware vessels lined up against the wall near the firepit. Smoke off the fire rises straight up, sucked out into some sort of ventilating hole that Sephiroth can’t make out before he’s flipped onto his belly. He gets up onto his elbows before a hand closes over the back of his neck.

It has claws, and two of them are positioned to pierce into his carotid artery if they push deeper. He holds still and the man uses a knife—possibly Sephiroth’s knife—to slit off Sephiroth’s clothes. “If you can use tools, you’re not an animal,” Sephiroth mutters, his teeth clicking involuntarily as his body tries to shake off the cold.

The man crooks his head, briefly meeting Sephiroth’s eyes, but his movements don’t falter as he crumples the scraps up into a small pile. He stabs the knife into its middle, then pulls at Sephiroth’s neck so that Sephiroth starts to sit up. This is incorrect and he pushes Sephiroth down again, then flicks his tail out over Sephiroth’s feet.

“My boots?” Sephiroth guesses.

The man settles into another crouch, his hand clamped over Sephiroth’s neck. Sephiroth considers his options, and the fact that the man clearly can at least test him on strength and speed but hasn’t yet gone for a fatal strike. And there’s a snowstorm outside, in unfamiliar terrain and yes, Sephiroth could still try to free himself and run for Nibelheim, but even pride can’t convince him that that would be a simple task.

So he grits his teeth and slides carefully onto his hip, hissing whenever a streak of pain is jarred loose. Now that they aren’t actively fighting, the adrenaline is starting to fade and Sephiroth is shivering badly. As warm as it is in this area of the cave, it’s counteracted by the ridiculous amount of snow that clumped into his hair and that is now drenching him with icy rivulets as it melts. He’s probably mildly hypothermic at this point, and while that’ll right itself given enough time, at the moment it’s making his fingers shake.

He bends up his leg and fumbles with the laces, irritated at his clumsiness and very aware of the claw points skittering along the side of his throat whenever he moves his head. It takes nearly snapping the lace, but he finally loosens that boot and then kicks it off. Then he moves to the other foot, but he’s barely gotten his knee to hip-height when it spasms so painfully that he has to slap his hand against the floor and will his breathing to calm.

“Wait,” Sephiroth says, thinking he feels the claws sink in. “I’m—one moment.”

The man continues to be silent, although he doesn’t rip out Sephiroth’s throat. Sephiroth bends over again, pushing his torso down rather than forcing his leg up, and pulls at the bootlace. The dangling end of the strap tied around his wrists gets in the way and he bats it off, then sucks back a curse as the ends of the lace also flutter out of his trembling fingers. Impatient, he hooks one finger under the lace and simply breaks it. Then he kicks that boot free as well, and leans back till he can just glimpse the edge of the man’s profile.

“Well?” Sephiroth says.

It could be the flickering play of the firelight, but for a brief moment Sephiroth thinks the man’s lips twitch. But he’s moving as well, pulling Sephiroth down by the throat and then reaching over from behind to catch the trailing end of the leather strap. When he takes hold of that, he lets go of Sephiroth’s neck—but almost immediately something else winds around it, far closer to choking than his hand had been. Sephiroth can’t help an instinctive swallow against the press and then the bands writhe over his skin: he’s being leashed with the man’s tail.

And very firmly as well, as Sephiroth is hauled back to his feet and then dragged towards one of several man-size openings at the far side of the space. He doesn’t actively resist but simply leans on his weight a few times, and he doesn’t notice any strain in the other man in adjusting for it. The tail keeps flexing around Sephiroth’s neck, muscular enough that he might need to fear a snapped neck over strangulation if the man really wanted to.

It has to be genetic engineering. The man is barely a couple inches shorter than him but his shoulders aren’t as broad and his musculature, while well-developed, clearly runs towards the lean side. He doesn’t have the mass to be as irresistible as he is, and yet he…

They enter into another, smaller space, with billows of steam that briefly obscure Sephiroth’s vision so he slows his pace. He’s immediately yanked forward and loses his balance, falling to one knee and being dragged on it for a few inches before the man finally stops. It’s the wrenched knee and Sephiroth is gritting his teeth against the fading starburst of pain in it when the steam clears, showing him piping set into the wall and a small, round pool of water under it.

The smell in the air is faintly earthy, so the hot spring probably is natural. The piping obviously isn’t, and consists of hollowed-out bamboo that isn’t native to the area. As for the pool, it might have started out as a natural feature but it’s clearly been shaped and lined with rocks for human comfort. The entire set-up speaks to a considerable amount of human intervention over time, and Sephiroth is half-thinking through Shinra’s history in the area when he's abruptly pushed into the pool.

His still-chilled limbs twitch and twist on their own for a few seconds—not actually out of pain, but they spasm as if it should be, against the sudden heat swirling fluidly around them. Sephiroth hisses and arches himself against the wall of the pool, watching his feet jerk below him in the water, and it’s a good few minutes before he notices that one, nothing is around his neck, and two, his hands are now bound to a thick metal ring set into the wall.

Three…three, the man is squatting at the edge of the pool, just out of kicking range. He pulls his hair back over one shoulder and then cups his hands into the water, bringing some up to splash over his face and then to rub down his feet. He doesn’t appear to be doing it to warm himself so much as to get rid of some dirty streaks, and when he’s done, he turns towards Sephiroth.

He's still using that unsettling stare, focused but feral, and even though the setting around them proves that a lie, Sephiroth finds his skin prickling under it. “When did you leave Wutai?” Sephiroth asks.

The man doesn’t blink or flinch. His tail does make an idle loop in the air, drawing over Sephiroth’s eyes, and then he slips into the water and is nearly up to Sephiroth by the time Sephiroth snaps his gaze back. His claws scratch at Sephiroth’s thigh, stopping it before it can hike up any further between them. Then he pushes that back against the side of the pool, forcing Sephiroth to flatten backwards as he steps forward.

Sand is under Sephiroth’s feet. He curls his toes into it as the rounded stones lining the pool dig in across his back. His head is well above the water, which only comes to just above his nipples, but the pool is deep enough that his arms are now stretched over his head. He and the other man stare at each other as that hand on his thigh curls around it—one claw over the artery there, of course—and then goes still. Long-fingered, narrow-palmed, with some callusing on the fingers; as warm as the water is, Sephiroth can still make all of that out.

Sephiroth’s thigh twitches on its own, a chill unexpectedly working itself out. He stiffens immediately, but the man has enough control to avoid stabbing him. Instead he brings up his other hand, catching Sephiroth’s leg between his palms. He still hasn’t blinked as he starts to slowly stroke his hands up and down the thigh, pushing in with the heels against the seams between the muscles.

His hands have barely moved before they trigger another spasm, and then another, until light brown sand is swirling through the surface of the water, kicked up by Sephiroth’s twitching feet. The damn cold settled farther into Sephiroth’s flesh than he’d thought and strips of it seem to peel up under the man’s kneading hands, burning briefly but fiercely before they dissolve into the hot water.

It aches. And also, Sephiroth has to admit, it feels very good, once the first raw flush of the ache is over and it’s started to settle. He leans back against the stone wall, panting, and when the man finishes that thigh and moves over to the other, Sephiroth braces his back and hips for it.

That earns him—not an actual expression, but some sort of closer consideration, the man’s eyes flicking over him as those long fingers run down Sephiroth’s leg, smoothing the tremors out of its muscles. Sephiroth mulls that over, that and the man generally: he’s very attractive, with the kind of fine features usually deemed ‘pretty’ except for the jawline, which is sharp enough to tip him over into ‘beautiful.’ Hard to gauge his age, except that he’s well away from puberty. Genetic modifications often arrest physical signs of aging so he could be anything from Zack’s age to decades older than Sephiroth.

His hands urge up Sephiroth’s leg as they work towards the knee, and Sephiroth lets the man lift and bend it so he can start to probe around the aching joint. His thumb slides into the back of the knee while his fingertips circle the edge of the kneecap, and when they flex the joint from sore to painful, Sephiroth lets his flinch sway him well into the man, close enough so that wet black strands draw up and stick to his face.

The man turns and his mouth is slightly open, barely the space of a few hairs away from Sephiroth’s own. Sephiroth can feel the air pull quicker across one side of his jaw when the man breathes in—no more hurried than before, as he drops the knee and then puts his hands on Sephiroth’s chest and pushes Sephiroth back against the side of the pool.

With his hands, not his mouth. He’s close enough for it, if either of them so much as tilted their head, but Sephiroth is testing, not seeking, and…the man seems to realize this, if the slight smile he wears as he pushes himself back is any indication. Slight but richly amused, and as he runs his hands up onto Sephiroth’s shoulders, his lips part further to show those intimidating fangs.

Sephiroth lets his head rest against the stones and continues to study him. The man continues his massage, fingers working deeply into the muscle just under the collarbone before dragging back over the shoulders. With hands bound over his head, Sephiroth isn’t about to untense those any time soon, but the man is skilled enough that he wants to. Probably the point, considering the cold spasms have died away and Sephiroth feels warmed through. His knees and that ankle still hurt, but that’s also subsiding and by the morning he expects he’ll be fully fit again.

The man picks up on his reserve and drops the smile, although there’s still no sign of worry or fear in those red eyes. One more stroke along Sephiroth’s shoulders, ending in the tickling graze of claws across his throat, and then the man abruptly steps back and pulls himself out of the pool. He pauses to squeeze the water out of his hair, then walks away.

When it becomes clear that he’s not returning right away, Sephiroth twists around and pulls himself out as well. He has enough slack on his tether that he can sit at the edge of the pool, and the tether’s only tied to the ring anyway.

If he freed himself, he’d still have to go through the main area of the cave. This part appears to be a dead end, and he doubts that the man is suddenly cavalier about his personal safety. Better to continue to wait, and so when the man returns with a folded fur and a bowl of something that smells meaty, Sephiroth is still sitting by the pool, half-wrung-out hair in his hands.

The man pauses very briefly before he squats down across from Sephiroth. He puts the fur down first, on top of Sephiroth’s legs but well short of the half-risen cock Sephiroth is making no effort to hide. He waits till Sephiroth has kneed the fur over to where it can be rearranged, mostly under and behind himself since the steam from the spring keeps the air warm enough, and again, doesn’t seem distracted.

His tail does flick out and wrap itself around Sephiroth’s ankle—the damaged one. “You are fond of that,” Sephiroth observes, and the man’s lips twitch once as he shifts close enough to lift the bowl to Sephiroth’s lips.

It looks like broth, with slivers of some kind of pale meat in it. It smells like only broth, and Sephiroth generally can smell all of the common sedatives. It also smells as if there are other ingredients, herbs and root vegetables, and as Sephiroth inhales a third time over it, the man sticks his finger into the bowl and then into his mouth.

“Ah,” Sephiroth says, before pressing his lips to the edge of the bowl.

He is hungry. Lunch has long since passed and his preternatural abilities demand a high daily caloric intake. He can push that out of his mind when he has to, but now that he’s not, he finds it a test of his will to not drain the entire bowl in a single swallow. As it is, one pause to take breath turns into an unplanned tremble that knocks his chin against the bowl’s underside.

The man steadies it, and then, as he tilts the remaining contents into Sephiroth’s mouth, his curled finger rubs along Sephiroth’s lower lip, sweeping up that trickle. Sephiroth swallows the last of the broth in the bowl, then leans back, his mouth open…but the man merely takes the bowl over to a stream running off from the pool and ultimately into a pipe that carries the used water into the cave wall. He washes bowl and hand under it, then leaves again as Sephiroth absently wipes at his chin.

Something rises hotly in Sephiroth and he pulls his legs back from the pool before he realizes it’s not actually a physical flush, but an emotional one. And then he’s more irritated at himself for being so easily roused in the first place. He’s not an immature youth either.

The man isn’t susceptible. This is useful, but hardly something to dwell on, and so Sephiroth pushes that out of mind. And when minutes continue to pass and he’s left alone, he pushes the fur out over the stone and then resettles himself on it so he can lower his head. He doesn’t think he’s going to be killed or molested, so he might as well rest and gain back his strength. After that, he can deal with the man at his leisure.

Notes:

Aurochs were a real, megafauna take on wild cattle. Tatzelwurms are not, but cat-headed snake cryptids are cool, so why not.

Chapter 2: First Vacation, Day 1 to Day 2

When Sephiroth wakes, his internal clock tells him it’s several hours later. He does need to sleep every day, but unless he’s badly injured, tends to only nap ninety minutes at a time. A longer nap tells him his blunder at the glacier had used up more energy than he’d felt at the time, but it’s still not that concerning. And he doesn’t hear anything in the rest of the cave.

The constant trickle of the spring could be masking that, but on the other hand, it also covers up the sound of Sephiroth carefully picking apart the knot tethering him to the ring on the wall. Once he’s free from that, he briefly rubs his wrists against the sharpest-looking rock in the area, then decides to put that off—the other knot is positioned where he can’t easily reach it except to try and bite at it from below, and neither that nor working it against a rock is going to go quickly. He’s not that hampered and he can take the time to free himself after he’s found a way out.

So Sephiroth eases himself down the short tunnel till he can get a better read on the main room. It seems empty, and when he finally peers into it, he doesn’t see the man. The fire has been banked with some dampish branches that hiss and sputter, as one would if trying to keep it smoldering through a planned absence, and the rest of the cave looks neatly arranged. Sephiroth’s clothes are gone, as is his knife—he doesn’t immediately see where the man could have put them, but perhaps they’ve just been thrown away.

This is going to be an inconvenience, but he’s more regretful about not having Masamune—there is a tracker on it so hopefully, once he has forces at his command again, retrieving it will be possible. But in the meantime, he trades the fur the man gave him for a smaller, more manageable one pulled off the ‘nest’ and then considers the cave’s untried passages.

Going out the way he’d been brought in seems unwise, since he can still make out faint footprints over the rocky floor and it appears to be a well-used entrance. Sephiroth slings the fur over his shoulders as he makes his way to the nearest of the other passages and takes a look. He can sense air flowing through it, so it should emerge outside, and it seems fairly straightforward—no hidden niches or offshoots where surprises could be lurking—aside from one sharp bend. But there’s a little snow piled up just past the bend, which is promising.

He ventures down it, and then pauses as he gets a good look around the corner. There actually is a wall of sorts blocking the passage, but it’s made of woven branches that haven’t stood up to the volume of snow and several places in the wall are broken. Past it the snow is nearly waist-high, and Sephiroth can’t make out very much over it; if that’s the sky he’s peering at, it’s still dark out.

He retraces his steps and tries the next passage. This one also has a wattle wall, but it’s clear of snow and the door cut into the wall is held only by a rock. Sephiroth pushes it open and makes his way further down till he’s standing in a small patch just outside the entrance where the snow is only ankle-high because of the way the mountain slopes around it.

It rapidly deepens, he can tell that from the way that the crests of the snow drifts have blown about into deep concavities in some places. He looks around for something to test the depth with and spots a straggling evergreen near the top of the entrance.

Getting at its branches requires Sephiroth to climb up around the side of the opening, and he’s no sooner put his hands and feet down than they’re badly slivered, blood running down his forearms to drip off his elbows and join the blood pooling up around his toes. The storm’s iced everything over with a nearly-invisible coating that crushes at the slightest pressure into razor-edged fragments. Sephiroth drops back onto the relative safety of the bare rock inside the entrance, cursing, and then he hears something that makes him instinctively crouch down to the ground and look up.

He can see the sky from here, an unpromising dark purple with barely enough light coming through for him to make out clouds still swollen with potential precipitation. It might be morning at this point, but…

He hears it again, a low resonance that comes up through the floor and then seems to run down from the ceiling, as if he’s standing inside a giant drum. Sephiroth presses his lips together, still not seeing an obvious source for it, but he’s already taking one step back into the cave when the rumble abruptly turns into a roar and a tumbling waterfall of snow comes down into the passage. Avalanche.

Sephiroth scrambles backwards as the snow sluices up past his knees in the blink of an eye. He’s able to stay on his feet until he hits the wattle wall—he’d forgotten, damn—and then the snow mounts so quickly that he can’t swing himself through the doorway in time. He’s trapped up against the wall, the pressure on his chest so great that he can feel it compressing even as he gasps to draw air into it, and only the fact that the branches behind him are also bending saves him from broken ribs.

As it is, when the wall snaps and tumbles him over, he’s far too busy trying to expand his lungs to try and keep his head up. The snow closes over him and everything is dark.

* * *

When Sephiroth wakes up, he’s on his back with his limbs spreadeagled across something soft and furry. Nothing’s covering him and he’s free to breathe, which he does as he takes in his situation.

His wrists and ankles are bound. He looks up his right arm and sees that a leather band has been…stitched into place, the seam pressing snugly into the back of his wrist when he tries to turn his hand. He can only move it a few inches, because a second loop attached to the first fastens his wrist to what appears to be one of those metal anchors that climbers use to set their ropes. Something like that can only be manufactured in a factory.

Sephiroth turns his head the other way and then starts as he finds the man squatting at his left hand and looking at him. He settles back to reserve his strength, as he’s very aware that blood is still clotted over his palms and the soles of his feet. Also, he’s still naked.

“You realize that there’s no way Shinra will not come looking for me,” Sephiroth says to the man.

Who’s silent as always, but whose facial expressions are developing, albeit slowly: he gives Sephiroth a deliberately disinterested glance as he slides his hand under Sephiroth’s left one. Sephiroth starts to curl in his fingers, then grimaces as the still-healing skin breaks open and starts to bleed again. The man makes a low but distinctly annoyed sound as he grabs Sephiroth’s fingertips with his other hand and flattens them out of the way, and then Sephiroth can only watch as he leans down till his nose is almost dipping into the fresh blood.

“My understanding was that Wutai couldn’t find enough money for anyone to be willing to go after me,” Sephiroth adds.

The man glances up, his lips doing that amused twitch again. He isn’t some isolated mountain hermit, Sephiroth is almost positive of it, but he doesn’t give very much away. But then, Sephiroth thinks irritably, he’s had very little to do compared to the elements and luck, and Sephiroth’s own carelessness—

He dips again, and this time his tongue slides out from between his lips. Long and growing even longer as Sephiroth watches, breath caught in his throat: a wet, deeply scarlet snake that twines through the blood welled in Sephiroth’s palm and then curls back into his mouth. He laps at it again as Sephiroth tenses up, both his hands pinning Sephiroth’s open and flat against the floor, and when his tongue rises this time, it smears the blood over not only his lips but the long white canine peeking out from between them. Then it rubs over that tooth again, cleaning it, as he stares at Sephiroth.

Not an animal, he’s not, Sephiroth cannot believe that, not with all the evidence otherwise, but when his tongue drops to rasp through the blood and pushes up against the torn flesh, it sends an entirely primitive shiver through Sephiroth. He’s fixed in place, watching this, when he should be—should be struggling, or at the least, disgusted.

It stings. That tongue burrows along the cuts in his flesh and it stings, stings and then blooms into a more layered pain as the lips of each cut are pushed apart against the wet, warm rounded length. Then there’s a brighter flick as something hard and sharp stabs into Sephiroth—no, out of it, the tiny chip of rock arcing out from the man’s tongue to skip off across the cave. Sephiroth unconsciously flexes his fingers and the man presses his whole mouth over the spot, lips closing over the cut, tongue teasing at its flayed edges, cheeks hollowing as the blood’s sucked away, and when he lifts his head again, Sephiroth’s breathing is coming in ragged pants.

The man wipes at his mouth with the back of his hand, then licks that clean. Then he looks at Sephiroth’s hand, turning it slightly between his two; Sephiroth’s fingers are hanging limply between them before he sets it back down on the rock. He leans over and gives the palm a couple more swipes of the tongue, considerably more perfunctory, before pushing up onto his knees and crawling around to Sephiroth’s other hand.

Sephiroth doesn’t immediately turn his head, though the blind side of his throat and shoulder and arm are all tingling with awareness of the man, and of his own vulnerability. He raises his left hand as much as he can, folding it so he can see the palm, and while there’s still a fine pinkish film of blood over it, the bleeding has been staunched and the cuts are puckering up. Which means they’re healing, but it looks as if that’s been accelerated even beyond what Sephiroth normally—

That hot mouth sucks down the middle finger of his right hand and Sephiroth cries out before he can stop himself. It’s a low, frayed cry, barely above a grunt, but it’s still patently out of arousal rather than shock or anger. He twists his head around, then sucks his breath over his teeth as the man proceeds to perform the same treatment on that hand. Laving and slurping each cut free of any debris—the tongue mostly pushes it away but once the man stops to spit to the side—before going back to suck the blood away. And it feels incredibly good.

Sephiroth’s rutting his hips back in short, sharp motions by the time the man finishes, his cock fully erect and starting to ache from lack of touch. Sweat is sticking the fur under him so when he pushes against his bonds, clumps of it cling to his shoulderblades and the small of his back before the weight of the fur drags them free. It itches, the feeling of the fur peeling away, itches like a false caress that makes him squirm harder against the fur.

“What are you doing?” he asks, stupidly, as the man moves around him towards his legs. “Why are you—”

The man gives him one glance over the shoulder, then reaches out and flicks his finger at Sephiroth’s left foot. The nail strikes through a scab and half-lifts it so Sephiroth hisses and jerks his foot against the spike, only to shudder to a stop as the man’s fingers rake over its top, through the blood on it so that the air slightly chills the newly-bared stripes of skin. And then his tongue swirls down the same paths, sending shudders all the way up to the crown of Sephiroth’s head. His skin seems to pull nerve-tight against his body, every tingle going through it setting off a cascade that leaves him helplessly groaning.

“Spit,” he manages to mutter, as the man’s tongue twists in and out of his toes, dragging over the delicate, sensitive webbing between them. “Something in your—your—”

All he earns is a soft huff. The man gives his left foot a last nuzzle, then slides over to the right foot. By the time he finishes with that, Sephiroth is dazed and shivering between the four spikes holding him down, unable to do more than hike up his chin when the man gets to his feet and the fire throws his shadow across Sephiroth.

That, and to use his eyes. The man’s not unaffected despite his lack of expression and speech, because there’s his cock, lifting up against his belly, deeply flushed with a gleam of wetness at the tip. Sephiroth rolls his hips and his own cock slaps against his stomach, the precome leaking out of it leaving a sticky spray up to the bottom of his pectoral, and he sees the man look.

Look, but do nothing else, even when Sephiroth jerks his hips up again. This time it’s as much out of frustrated need and that makes his movements stuttering, desperate; he sees how amused that makes the man and snarls. “You want to, don’t you?” he snaps. “If it’s not Wutai, then it’s your own interests, and you want to. You want to.”

The man nods. Sephiroth blinks sharply at the response, and by the time he shakes off his surprise, the man’s already two strides away, stooping down near the firepit. The leather creaks but holds as Sephiroth wrenches at the spikes, getting his head and shoulders off the floor to look after him—the man doesn’t bother, continuing to busy himself with feeding more sticks into the flames.

It’s on the tip of Sephiroth’s tongue to call the man back, but he’s already furious at himself for succumbing to such an obvious ploy. He bites back the words, then lets himself flop back onto the fur.

His cock is still hard. When he balls up his hands and the spit tracked over them wells up between his fingers, it’s a paltry ghost of the way the man’s tongue had circled each of them, but it’s still enough to make his cock twitch. He lets out a strangled, frustrated noise, uncaring for a moment that the man can hear him, and stares at the cave’s ceiling. His cock is aching, the ache flowing deep into his ball sac and whenever his thighs flex he can feel that move all the way up into his groin, as if he’s taunting himself with the inadequate tug at his balls. He needs more, and he’s obviously not going to get it.

A sound makes him look over. The man’s gotten back to his feet, and as Sephiroth watches with mounting disbelief, he ambles across the cave and down the passage Sephiroth had tried. Sephiroth bites down on a thoughtless call for him, then lies there, stewing, as the faint sounds of snow being scooped and swished around become audible.

* * *

Eventually, Sephiroth’s erection flags from lack of stimulation. Eventually. It takes far longer than it should, and while it’s not the most excruciating experience he’s ever been subjected to, it’s certainly one he regrets having to have.

And now he’s hungry. When the man comes back in and puts something to roast on the fire, the first drifting aromas of sizzling fat make Sephiroth’s stomach try to tie itself up against his spine. He jerks roughly against his tethers, then forces himself to stop when he feels how sharply the strain bites at his joints.

He’s hungry, and he hasn’t taken in nearly enough calories for everything he’s been doing; the broth from last night had tasted delicious, but hadn’t been that fortifying. It’s probably not enough to affect his healing yet, but if it keeps going like this, it will. And also he’s thirsty, and his bladder is full.

The man appears by his head as if he’d called, which he didn’t, but since he’s here…Sephiroth stares up at him, trying to decide what approach to take. Aggression admittedly has produced very poor results so far, and while Sephiroth has his pride, he also is determined not to die in some isolated cave in Nibelheim because the damn weather caught him.

“I need to relieve myself,” he says to the man, trying to modulate his voice to neutral. The man continues to look at him and Sephiroth twists impatiently before he stops himself. “I—am not going to run, if you let me. Can you—can you let me up?”

The man continues to stare at him and Sephiroth feels aggravation eating away at his patience, but at the same time, he’s hardly able to do anything for himself. He has to wait, and so he does, until the man finally squats down by the right-hand spike.

Something stirs in the air, and instinct tells Sephiroth to hold still a second before the tail drops across his throat. It lies there as he resists the urge to let out a grim snort. Then tucks itself around his neck twice, a little looser than previously. The man gives him a second and when Sephiroth does nothing, he frees Sephiroth’s hands.

The bands are still around Sephiroth’s wrists, and before the man moves down to the ankle spikes, he threads a piece of metal through the bands’ eyelets and casually crushes it into a closed loop with his hand, the one with the odd plating on it. There’s about six inches of straight rod sticking from it, which he pairs with his tail for handles as he leads Sephiroth down the tunnel Sephiroth hadn’t gotten to.

This one comes out onto a narrow tongue of rock barely large enough for a helicopter to land on. It’s been cleared of snow and apparently, what Sephiroth needs to do is squat at the edge to piss off at a sheer drop that seems to go all the way down to the bottom of the mountain.

He’s allowed his hands for this, but the man takes hold of the rod again as he takes Sephiroth back into the cave. Before he does, Sephiroth notes that it is day now, but very dark because of the clouds, and that snow is already falling further down the mountain.

Once they’re back inside, the man leads Sephiroth not back between the spikes as Sephiroth had been expecting, but to a spot near the firepit. There’s a metal ring embedded in the ground, barely above the rock—from the nest where Sephiroth had been lying, the firepit blocks any view of it—and the man bends the end of the rod through the ring and then squeezes that shut before he unwraps his tail from Sephiroth’s throat. Sephiroth has to kneel there and watch as the man finishes up cooking the roast.

It's some kind of wild fowl, rubbed over with oil and salt so that the skin crisps golden-brown and Sephiroth has to keep swallowing as his mouth waters. His stomach is cramping continuously at this point and he finds himself pulling at his hands, trying to reach for it.

And then the man sets it aside and gets up as if he’s going to leave. The roast bird is only a few yards away and Sephiroth bites off a protesting snarl—not before he’s heard, and when the man turns, Sephiroth merely looks back, because there’s no point in explaining what the man already knows what he’s doing.

Oddly, the man looks annoyed. He walks over to one of the earthenware vessels along the wall and reaches into it, then pulls out a cup that he carries back over. When he’s near enough, he tips the cup so that Sephiroth can see its contents: water. And he does all of that with the slightly exaggerated motions of someone whose patience is being tested.

Sephiroth forces back his initial urge to snap a remark about their relative positions and leans forward. He looks up at the man, raising his brows, and the man holds the water close enough for Sephiroth to get his lips over the cup’s rim.

It’s only water, and lukewarm from sitting in that jar for who knows how long, but it slakes the scratch in Sephiroth’s throat. He’s frustrated when he finds himself noisily sucking air, far too soon, and when he looks up again, he catches that flicker of irritation in the man’s face again. The man shifts back, holding Sephiroth’s gaze, and then jiggles the cup. Then glances at the roasted bird.

“The meat,” Sephiroth says firmly, and then snorts when the man nods and sets the cup down and then rolls off his knees to get the roast bird, all with that faint air of tested patience. “Well, you hardly invite conversation, do you.”

The man hears him but doesn’t respond except to bring the roast over. He carries it on its spit, leaning one end against his knee and tilting the bird up. He considers it, his other hand hovering over the headless neck, and then turns it slightly as he ripples his fingers into gaining claws—they don’t simply swap for the blunt nails, Sephiroth notices, but seem to extrude into the claw form. Then he proceeds to carve strips off the fowl as neatly as any butcher would with a proper knife.

He actually does offer the first strip to Sephiroth, who blinks in surprise. And then ducks down to snag it into his mouth, when the man starts to move it away. It’s unclear if it’s deliberate or not, but either way…it doesn’t actually matter, since the situation is already humiliating. Debating the degree to which it is would be a waste of time.

But the meat is delicious. Sephiroth barely remembers to chew it before he swallows, a shiver running down through his arms so that the bent rod rattles against the eyelet. He licks a splash of juice off his lips, then feels something brush up against them and sucks in the next strip. And the next, and the next, until he’s leaning as far over as he can, hovering a few inches over the bird so that as soon as the meat peels free, he can lip it into his mouth.

A good third of the bird disappears down his throat before the cravings settle and he’s able to pull himself back. He has fat and juice smeared about his mouth and onto his jaw, and it’s caught a few strands of his hair. He tries to get at it with his tongue but only succeeds in pulling the strands into his mouth, and when he reflexively lifts his arm—well, he can’t.

He drops back onto his seat, thwarted and chewing on his frustration, and the man takes the opportunity to disjoint one of the bird’s thighs for himself. When the man eats, he rakes his canines along the seams of the muscles like a cat, saving his claws for cutting around the tendons and the cartilage and picking out the bits from his teeth after he’s swallowed. Then he tosses the bone into the fire and glances at Sephiroth.

“Water,” Sephiroth says.

The man gets back up and scoops another cup out of the jar. He sets what’s left of the roast bird into another jar while he’s by that part of the wall—that thigh can’t possibly be enough for him, genetic modifications on his scale always accelerate the metabolism—and licks casually at his fingers as he comes back over. This time he stays standing as he tips the cup against Sephiroth’s mouth.

The hair’s still sticking over Sephiroth’s lips. He takes a sip with it like that, but it’s irritating, and as petty as it is, and as much as he’s not in a position to be petty—but then he’s in such a ridiculous position that things like petty or not petty seem almost irrelevant. So he leans back and he’s trying to twist his shoulder around to rub the hair out when the man reaches around the cup. Sephiroth turns his head back to look at him and the man pulls the strands off his mouth.

Not only that, but he rubs them between his fingers and his thumb a few times, looking calmly down at Sephiroth. There’s a thick film of dried sweat and dust on Sephiroth, as well as some oilier smears on his back and legs which he thinks come from the fur, and he’s suddenly very aware of it as he sits under that gaze.

Not ashamed, considering it’s not his fault, but—aware. “A bath, perhaps?” Sephiroth says, and then shrugs as the man’s brows rise. “I’m behaving, aren’t I? Is that what you’re looking for?”

A suppressed noise comes from the man’s throat. His lips don’t move, and the noise is too low to assign it any emotion. He considers Sephiroth for another moment, then bends down and reaches for Sephiroth’s tether.

* * *

The rod the man’s using to lock Sephiroth’s wrists together is too short to fasten to the ring mounted over the pool; if he were to, Sephiroth could only drop his body to the waist into it. Instead the man simply pushes the free end back into a closed loop and then moves out of lunging reach, apparently giving Sephiroth the first dip into the pool.

Sephiroth doesn’t turn it down, dropping all the way to the bottom and ducking his head until his hair is thoroughly soaked. With his hands still bound, he can’t reach all of his back so he uses a handful of hair to sweep at it, then swings the tail over his shoulder so he can roughly comb his fingers through the strands. He hears a soft noise and straightens up to find the man gone, and a bar of soap sitting at the edge of the pool.

The bamboo piping is Wutaian, but he’s positive now that the leather making up his wrist- and ankle bands is drake leather, because it’s not stretching at all underwater, and drakes are southern beasts. And the soap, when he swishes it through the water, smells very strongly of Mideel honey blossom. Whoever the man is, he certainly isn’t in Nibelheim most of the year, as none of this would be readily available even as imports via the supply flights. Besides, Sephiroth has access to the flight manifests and he’s certain he’d remember requests for items like these.

He's in the other room for most of Sephiroth’s bath, moving around and occasionally doing something that periodically results in a heavy flapping sound. Then that fades away and the wood in the fire spits and pops as it’s stirred about.

Sephiroth pulls himself out of the pool and then sits by it, methodically wringing the water from his hair. Every few minutes, he stops and cocks an ear. The first time the other room goes quiet, he stays still until he hears the scrape of pottery on stone.

The second time, a few minutes pass and he still doesn’t hear anything. His hair is as dry as it’s going to be here, so he makes his way down the passage and emerges to find he’s alone again. The fire is built up and the area around it has been cleared, no signs of cooking; when he walks to the pots along the wall, he sees that the half-eaten bird has been removed from the one, while the others are all capped with lids tightly netted in complicated ropework that would be difficult to remove without showing signs of tampering. And the furs in the nest have been…changed, not just wiped or fluffed. At least two of them are a different shade of grey.

There has to be somewhere where the man is keeping all of the items he regularly produces. He walks around without any clothes and while Sephiroth’s aware of modifications that could account for the wings and tail and other appendages being able to disappear and reappear, he’s not aware of any that’d allow one to store things like soap within one’s body—at least, not without employing the body cavities and that just isn’t a believable explanation, given the variety of items.

Sephiroth takes a step towards the nearest passage, then pauses. He doesn’t recall seeing any places in any of them that could be used as storage, though admittedly, his trip through the last one had been a forced march and he could have missed something there. But…he doesn’t know where the man goes either.

He does know what’s happened when he tries to go out, and what was it that Genesis says? Stupidity and determination are shield-brothers to heroes, or something like that.

So when the man comes back down the passage some time later—the one he’d brought Sephiroth in through—he slows his entry into the room, surprise and interest on his face as he looks at Sephiroth. Who’s dragged a fur off the nest so he can lie nearer to the fire, with his hair spread out over another rolled-up fur to dry before the flames. “Is it still snowing?” Sephiroth asks.

There’s no snow on the man, but his hair looks damp and he’s leaving wet footprints on the stone as he crosses the space. He takes up a position on the opposite side of the fire without answering Sephiroth, squatting with his palms facing the fire. He’s not shivering but as the minutes tick on, he clearly relaxes as he warms up.

“Why not use a fur?” Sephiroth asks.

He’s not expecting an answer at this point, but the man raises his head. Then gets up and goes over to the nest, where he bends over and runs his hand along the furs.

“No, I didn’t soak it through,” Sephiroth says, a little nettled. “I realize from your perspective it’s been additional trouble having me here, but you also intentionally—”

The man drops onto his knees, then arches back his shoulders so that the wings of his shoulderblades seem to pull out of his skin. They don’t break through but they wrench so unnaturally high that—and then they abruptly darken and widen and sweep back into those immense black wings. Fully extended, the tips nearly brush the top of the cave.

Sephiroth is still looking at where they’d touched the ceiling when the man abruptly folds them up around himself into a snug cocoon. He’s completely covered, not even his toes sticking out, and…and probably lying down, or at least curling over his knees, judging from the orientation.

“You are truly determined to avoid any kind of conversation,” Sephiroth finds himself saying after several minutes have passed.

The cocoon is a cocoon.

This is insane, Sephiroth thinks, with a surprising lack of rancor. He should be far more disturbed, but aside from a lingering exasperation at the man, he’s…simply unable to find a reasonable reaction to any of this. Which is why he’s not reacting, he supposes.

And no one’s trying to make him either. The man’s attitude is bizarre, but it’s also completely the opposite of what Sephiroth is usually subjected to. He doesn’t need help, he only seems to counterattack, and he apparently doesn’t care what Sephiroth’s opinion of him is. It’s strangely refreshing.

Of course, Sephiroth’s still a naked, bound prisoner in his cave, and it was only hours ago that the man was deliberately tormenting him. No, none of this is rational, and for some reason Sephiroth is content to simply let it be. His eyes start to close, and when he realizes, he tucks a fold of his fur under his head and fully shuts them.

Chapter 3: First Vacation, Day 2

When he wakes, he thinks it’s the same day. The fire hasn’t burned that far down and he doesn’t think it’s been restocked—he looks over at the nest and the man is still there, wrapped up in his wings. Sephiroth pushes out his legs, stretching, and the wings flutter soundlessly apart till a gap is created at the head, letting two glowing-red spots be seen.

“Can I go relieve myself?” Sephiroth says, looking at the man. When those eyes simply continue to gaze at him, Sephiroth slides his legs under himself and pushes up onto his knees. Then onto his feet, letting the metal linking his bound wrists scrape against the rock. “Do I need an escort?”

He takes a step towards the correct passage. The gap in the cocoon neither widens nor shrinks, and he takes another one. Then, deciding that continuing to watch is too much catering for him right now, he turns on his heel and keeps walking.

Sephiroth makes it out onto the rock spur unmolested. Based on the sky, it’s near the end of the day. There’s still thick cloud cover, but it isn’t hanging nearly as low in the sky and he judges that the storm may have finally wound down. Of course, the snow is so deep that it’s probably swallowed up most identifiable landmarks.

It’s deceptively fluffy-looking as well, he finds once he’s emptied his bladder and then gone to the side of the spur where some has drifted down from the slopes. When he pushes his hand into it, the first inch or so yields easily, but by the time he’s gone three inches deep, the snow has packed into a dense mass that will probably freeze into ice once he lifts his hand. Dangerous stuff to walk on.

He thinks as he raises his head, and then his idle glance along the side of the cave entrance picks out an unnaturally straight ridge running up the rock. Sephiroth stands up and goes over to it, then brushes off the snow to find a grey cable, which runs down the slope, well past the bottom of the rock spur. It’s stapled at regular intervals and when he cracks the layer of ice on it and gives it a two-handed yank, those staples seem firmly set.

Sephiroth leans further over, looking down the length of the cable, and then senses something behind him. He crouches down a little, then jerks up as he spins around.

He’s not used to opponents with wings. Too late he sees the shadow wash over him, and by the time he’s turned back, the man has landed on the sliver of rock between Sephiroth and the sheer drop beyond. Quite comfortable on that, so much so that his wings snap sharply back and the buffet they swirl up pushes Sephiroth a step back. He pushes his arms up over his head to block any blows and the man takes the opportunity to seize the dangling metal loop, dragging him down onto his knees. A hard, clawed grip clamps over the back of his neck to force his head nearly to the rock.

“I was—I was only looking,” Sephiroth snaps. “Can I not look?”

Which is when something slaps across his right buttock. Sephiroth hisses and twists violently away, more out of surprise than anything else, and they slew around so that his head is hanging over the edge of the spur. The rest of him is pressed very firmly against the ground—the man’s let go of his wrists in favor of straddling him so his chest is crushed against his knees—but he’s still very aware of how a few feet could abruptly change that.

He breathes in, then out, willing himself to relax. It’s not out of bravado, but an attempt to show he’s no longer fighting. The claws around his throat flex a little as the man leans forward, and then, instead of peering at Sephiroth as Sephiroth had been expecting, he reaches down and uses his other hand to turn Sephiroth’s head to look at the cliffside.

His hand leaves but his tail stretches out, curling around that cable so Sephiroth naturally focuses on it. And then something strikes Sephiroth on the buttock again, harder and broader than the thing that’d lashed before. Open palm versus tail, Sephiroth thinks. Then he jerks as he’s slapped a third time, and this time the initial sting is followed by the almost-ticklish drag of claws.

Almost, but then the newly-parted nerves flare hotly and he hisses through his teeth. This is ridiculous, a small part of him says—he remembers seeing something like this, on a dog training video that some of Angeal’s team had sent him a little after Zack had attached himself to the man. Negative reinforcement, hold the animal’s nose in it and then make it a disagreeable experience for them, but he’s not a—

The man strikes him a fourth time and Sephiroth has had enough of it. He tenses his arms and legs, then wrenches himself upward, throwing the man off.

Springboarding him into the damn air—the damn wings. Sephiroth snaps his head up, then scrambles backward, but he’s also forgotten his positioning. He’s just started to tip over the edge when the man seizes his forearm and hauls him up, back onto the spur, back into the side of the entrance where the rock grinds painfully into his back and buttocks, while the full length of the man sears him from neck to knees.

The man is upset, his lips pulled back from elongated canines that are a hair away from stabbing into Sephiroth’s face. Sephiroth holds very still but the man is actually trembling—that worked up, he’s trembling, and his tongue lashes roughly between his open jaws before he abruptly shuts his mouth. His lips immediately compress into a thin, grim line.

Then he lets go of Sephiroth. He takes a deliberate step back, then squats down. Then, still looking at Sephiroth, he reaches out and hooks the cable with his hand. He gives it a hard downward yank, not side-to-side like Sephiroth had a moment ago, and then lets go and deliberately raises his eyes.

Something chimes softly high above them, sounding incongruously like music. The man watches for another second, then swiftly steps forward and spins about at the same time so that he’s facing out, shoulder to shoulder with Sephiroth, as icicles nearly the same size as them smash into the rock. Some of them are so heavy that they actually chip out pieces of the rock.

“I see,” Sephiroth says, once the ice has stopped falling.

The man looks at him, then twists around and stalks back into the cave. It’s by far the most emotion Sephiroth has seen in him, and it strongly reminds Sephiroth of Angeal on the rare occasions the man loses patience with a new recruit.

Sephiroth rubs his hands over his face. He steps back to just inside the cave, then notices that a fragment of ice managed to cut him across the thigh. He rubs off the blood—the cut’s so shallow it’s already healed—and then turns around. He thinks for another second, then walks down the passage.

When he reaches the main room, the man appears to have calmed down and is crouching by the fire to put another log on. The man raises his head upon Sephiroth’s entry, impassive again, and then turns away and climbs back onto the nest, his back to Sephiroth. He starts to fold his legs under himself, but pauses as Sephiroth comes to the edge of the furs and drops onto his hands and knees. Sephiroth also pauses, considering what he’s about to do, and then decides that thinking any more is only going to make him dwell on how surreal this is. And it is, but it also is happening, so it’s a waste of thought.

“Here,” Sephiroth says, putting his wrists by one of the climbing spikes.

The man keeps his eyes on Sephiroth’s face for a moment. Then slides them to the spike, and then back to Sephiroth, without any particular feeling of urgency about it. But there’s interest, Sephiroth can see that. He hasn’t fully restored that calm of his.

“Clearly, I’m not leaving while conditions are this bad,” Sephiroth says. “I admit that. And this is preferable to waiting it out in a snowdrift.”

The man blinks. He tilts his head, then holds that position for long enough that Sephiroth has to resist the urge to move his arms. Then he snakes across the furs and takes hold of Sephiroth’s right wrist. A few twists and he’s secured Sephiroth to the spike. He sits back at that point, clearly expecting a second act.

“Are you still going to provide food and water?” Sephiroth asks, and when the man’s mouth twitches, Sephiroth can’t help himself. “I’ll cooperate.”

The man snorts incredulously. Sephiroth presses his lips together, briefly regretting this, but then the man starts to move as if he’s going to go past Sephiroth and off on whatever he does when he’s not here and—damn him, he can’t do what he’s done and then ignore Sephiroth.

He stops when Sephiroth swings himself across the man’s left leg. On his belly, and yes, his weight is holding the man down, but he’s naked with his ass positioned very deliberately before the other man and he knows the marks from the man’s blows and scratches are still visible. He can feel them, when he tightens his buttocks and the bruised flesh sends stripes of pain down into his thigh and up into his back.

“This,” Sephiroth says. His arms are twisted awkwardly because of his tether and he can’t straighten them without moving his knees, which might give the man room to slide free. “This is the point you want to make, isn’t it? Well, I’m listening—” he thinks he hears a soft, irritated huff “—I am. So if you want to say something—”

The man snorts again. And then, as irritation starts to get the better of Sephiroth’s intentions to try and find common ground, however absurd, his hand suddenly cups over the unmarked buttock.

Sephiroth goes still. He inhales and the coolness of the air suddenly feels like sucking water straight off an icicle, with how it seems to burrow down his throat and then farther, sending fingers into his gut so that that pulls in towards his spine. His thighs tighten as well, lifting him slightly, although he doesn’t realize it until the man pushes him back down. Gripping him by the buttock and the heat of the hand suddenly reminds Sephiroth of the way they’d pressed together against the cliff outside, the way that’d stopped everything, the moment before he'd seen how upset the man was.

The man holds him down for a moment. Then rolls those fingers over Sephiroth’s buttock, petting at it as Sephiroth shifts in surprise. He shifts again, not entirely of his own volition, as the man reaches over with his other hand and pulls Sephiroth by the shoulder till he’s lying completely across the man’s legs. The man pushes those out so that they’re straight in front of him, then scoots both of them a few inches so Sephiroth’s arms are pulled straight out from their tethering spike. And then he puts his hands on Sephiroth’s buttocks again, thumbs rubbing from the tops down along the swells, not neglecting the still-tender scratches.

Sephiroth bites back a groan. This is not exactly what he’d been expecting from the other man—anger usually requires an outlet, and if he’s going to cohabit with the man until the weather’s better, he can’t afford to antagonize him. Pain is something he’s familiar with and something he’s not particularly afraid of, but this is—this is—

A finger dips between his buttocks, then trails lightly over his hole as he arches in surprise. He rocks tentatively against the man’s thighs, letting his cock drag a little, and the man seems to respond positively with a series of circling strokes across his buttocks, pleasantly firm. Sephiroth rocks again and he’s sharply slapped across the previously-unmarked buttock.

“F—” he cuts off his exclamation and flattens himself in place. He’s already breathing hard, heat flushing into his cock as it starts to harden.

The man draws his fingertips across the spot he’s just struck, the touch light and uneven as if he finds it surprising, that a blow would result in Sephiroth’s flesh turning hot and jumpy under him. Which is about as true as the idea that he’s always up here, because the next blow he delivers is precisely angled to overlap with the first, half of it driving the existing sting deep into the flesh while the other half makes the freshly-abused skin dance as Sephiroth drops his head against the furs. His claws are there, Sephiroth can feel their tips, can feel them just barely skittering against him at the end of each blow and the man’s holding them up on purpose. Just promising that, reminding that he could do it, but he isn’t right now—Sephiroth presses himself up and feels the points just begin to sink into him, brightening the pain.

For a second, before the man jerks his hand away. It’s still there, the heat coming off it running a shadow across bruising flesh, and then the man presses his forearm across the small of Sephiroth’s back and delivers three crisp blows with his other hand. They’re so quick that the full impact doesn’t light up Sephiroth’s nerves until he’s inhaling after the last, and then the swift blossom of pain across his buttock makes him gasp.

He rocks up, expecting another blow, but it doesn’t come. Instead the man moves to his other buttock, massaging and kneading at it until the flesh starts to ache just from that, just from being rolled repeatedly between the man’s fingers. It’s a different, slow-burning ache compared to the still-sharp sting of the bruised buttock, one that seems to reach straight into Sephiroth’s cock and lift it stiffly against his belly as he ruts into the man’s thigh.

The man moves back to the first buttock, giving it the same treatment—only on bruised flesh, it hurts. “I thought—” Sephiroth mutters, caught off-guard, and the man strikes him again.

Then again, and again, alternating buttocks until they both feel equally covered in hot, biting welts. Sephiroth’s rubbing his cock over the man’s thigh and he can feel the man’s erection trying to push itself up against his side; he flexes himself down against it, pushing his hips up, and the blows suddenly stop.

“Damn it, I—I’m only trying to do what you—” he grunts, because even aroused and panting, he can pick out the pattern. The metal loop locking his wrists together clanks sharply as he pulled up on his arms, trying to look up at the man.

Then it clanks again as the man makes a vee out of three fingers and wedges it roughly between Sephiroth’s buttocks, rubbing their tips over Sephiroth’s hole so that they catch its rim on every downstroke. The welts flex a different way, changing how their aching washes through Sephiroth, and he drops back onto his elbows, disoriented. The man doesn’t waste the moment and eels out from under him, then shoves his legs up and apart. His cock swings down to flop against the bedding, suddenly without friction or pressure, and the soft brushing of its tip across the fur sends a shudder crashing through him. He’d been damnably close to coming, he realizes. So close, and now it feels as if he’s being dragged back from that peak with tearing hooks.

One hook: the thumb the man drags over Sephiroth’s left buttock, digging and scraping every welt in its place before it settles over one of the sorest and pushes it into a white-hot point as he presses the buttock out of the way.

Another hook: his tongue, suddenly worming into Sephiroth when Sephiroth never even sensed it at his hole—just a flutter of air and then it’s in him, wet and coiling, constantly coiling, thin one moment and shockingly broad the next, so that Sephiroth’s body doesn’t know what to adjust to.

The third: the man’s other hand closing around the base of his cock, firm and immovable as Sephiroth swings between that stabbing thumb and the tongue spreading him. Sephiroth snarls and yanks at his wrists, but only manages to seat himself more deeply on the man’s tongue, feeling it lick him so far in that the flick of its tip sends tremors radiating up his back into his shoulders. So he sags against the spike, sags and lets himself sink into a dazed stupor.

This isn’t pain, not like he was thinking. It’s better and worse—better in how it feels, how want suffuses every single inch of him, but worse in how he can’t find his way out of it. He breathes and he tastes it, he inhales and he smells it. He lifts his head and he hears the wet smack of the man’s tongue against his buttock—and then he feels it, as that small jolt turns into a shiver into him bonelessly sprawling over the furs.

“Please,” he groans, and it doesn’t even surprise him, that word coming out of his mouth. “Please, damn it, stop—”

Everything stops. Even the tongue stops, sliding out of him as suddenly as it’d entered. He jerks in place, untouched, ragged noises spilling out of him as the aftershocks initially seem as they’ll be enough. But they slow and weaken, and he’s going loose instead of tightening up, no hooks in him, only falling back on his own.

Sephiroth pushes himself up onto his knees. His thighs are shaking from how spread they are but he can’t spare the energy to pull them together. “Please,” he grates. “Don’t stop, just stop teasing, damn it, make me—”

The furs to Sephiroth’s right move, and when he turns his head, he sees the man crawling up alongside him. Not down where he can do something, can touch Sephiroth, can take his aching cock and wring from it that last little push he needs to tip over—Sephiroth is about to snarl, beg at him to do that, and then something shoves into Sephiroth just as the man pushes his leg down between Sephiroth’s, trapping Sephiroth’s cock between it and Sephiroth’s belly.

That’s enough. Sephiroth climaxes, dropping onto his side as he rocks in a frenzy against the man’s thigh. The thing in him drives steadily across his prostate, stiffer than the tongue but still flexible enough to roll from side-to-side, a combination that has him arching his head into the furs till he can feel his own spine creaking.

And then he’s released from that. His head falls forward and he mouths aimlessly at the fur under him, so dazed he’s blind for all that his eyes are still open. He feels the thing leave him, snaking across one thigh, and then the man’s tail lifts into the air as it swings behind him. The man himself presses up against Sephiroth’s front, head tucked under Sephiroth’s chin as he rubs his cock over Sephiroth’s belly, using his hand to roll it through the come splattered over the skin there till he hikes himself roughly once and adds his own splatters to the mess.

They lie there for a few minutes. The man’s breathing slows faster, but he’s still panting a little when he pushes himself back and then up onto his feet. He goes across the room, then returns with something that he presses to Sephiroth’s lips.

The cup, with water in it. Sephiroth laps clumsily at the water, then struggles to lift his head so he can drink properly. Something slides under his cheek, then levers him higher. He rides the man’s knee until he can fold his elbow under himself, then tilts his chin for the man to pour the water into his mouth.

When he’s done, the man runs his finger under Sephiroth’s lower lip to gather a few stray drops. Sephiroth licks at it, then, when the man pauses, sucks it into his mouth, letting his eyes drift up the man’s body to amused red eyes.

“I think, if you wanted to speak, we might have worked out a satisfactory arrangement earlier,” Sephiroth says, and the man actually starts to roll his eyes. “Or this is just how you like to entertain yourself.”

The man snorts. He puts the cup aside and then looks over the nest. Now that the heat of their activities has started to dissipate, the furs are growing unpleasantly damp and sticky.

“What do I have to do for another bath?” Sephiroth asks, and when he has the man’s attention again, he leans over and licks up the man’s left inner thigh. “Unless you’d like to produce a book or other alternative? This is what you want, isn’t it?”

The man looks at Sephiroth for a long moment. He’s still amused but the quality of his humor has changed, gaining a puzzling kind of thoughtfulness to it. Perhaps he didn’t plan all of this, but he certainly can’t claim to be unaware of the effects his improvisation was going to have, or how his behavior could be interpreted. But then, that thought he’s mulling over doesn’t seem to have the shape of regret.

He reaches over and unlocks Sephiroth’s wrists from the spike, then pulls Sephiroth up from the bedding and down the passage to the pool. This time he gets in with Sephiroth and helps rub off the come stains, until his hands drift pointedly between Sephiroth’s legs and Sephiroth hauls himself back out of the pool so the man can climb on top of him. There’s no oil or other lubricant that Sephiroth can see, but the man is already slick when he sinks down on Sephiroth’s cock—slick and velvet-tight and Sephiroth’s hands jerk back over his head as he rolls his hips up into the other man.

The right move, it appears, since when Sephiroth’s arms lift at one point during their second fuck, the man abruptly jams his fists against Sephiroth’s shoulders and drops his jaw to bare his fangs. Sephiroth doesn’t flinch, only shudders and presses his bound wrists against the floor and hooks his chin back to stretch his throat at the man.

Who dips his head, then pulls himself roughly back and rides Sephiroth till they both climax. Which necessitates a second wash in the pool, although at this point, hunger is starting to get the better of Sephiroth and he makes brisk work of cleaning himself.

The man sniffs once, then withdraws to the other side of the pool and acts similarly. They go back into the main cave and then Sephiroth pushes through the furs to find the few clean ones while the man briefly disappears, only to return with bread, cheese, and smoked red meat of some kind. These all look like local products, although Sephiroth keeps that observation to himself as he eats his fill; he’s allowed to use his own hands this time, but has to ask the man to refill the cup for him.

When they’re done, Sephiroth wraps a fur around himself and then lies down near the fire. He’s tired but full, and the sex was very relaxing. Part of him thinks again that this is not the reaction he should be having, but he’s not particularly concerned about it. Neither is the man, from the way he quietly moves about the cave, unhesitating about turning his back to Sephiroth as he tidies up. He’s still at it when Sephiroth falls asleep again.

Chapter 4: First Vacation, Day 3

Day three of Sephiroth’s vacation opens with him waking up to find himself back in the nest area, with fresh furs piled under and around him and a full cup of water near his head. His left ankle also happens to be fastened to one of the spikes and he considers that as he sips slowly at the water.

When he’s nearly done with it, the man returns and releases Sephiroth so he can relieve himself. Then they have breakfast consisting of the leftover bread soaked in some milk. “I need more protein,” Sephiroth remarks. “You should too, with all that mass shifting.”

The man doesn’t snap his head up, but the look he gives Sephiroth is unusually sharp. Sephiroth wipes milk off his lips and crawls over, pausing briefly as the man seems to ponder withdrawing.

When he doesn’t, Sephiroth licks and sucks at his cock; he’s not done with his bread and keeps eating it, though his free hand drops to comb through Sephiroth’s hair. It catches a few times, and the last time, the man pulls all the hair to the side and then curls his tail around Sephiroth’s throat to hold him in place.

That’s enough to earn Sephiroth a snack of some kind of jerky, which he methodically shreds between his teeth as the man produces a comb from somewhere and works the snarls out of Sephiroth’s hair. Then they re-snarl it, as the man pushes Sephiroth belly-down by the fire and fucks him with that tongue, then two fingers. Once Sephiroth’s brought to orgasm, he turns over and then keeps his mouth open for the man to come down his throat.

They spend most of the day that way, alternating between fucking and odd little household chores. Sephiroth still can’t figure out where the man is storing the items he brings in and out, although judging from how long he needs, it must be fairly close. Most likely there’s another cave higher or lower up the mountain. He has the wings, he could fly up to it and so that’s how he’s unbothered by the snow cover.

And then the man leaves just after an early dinner, and it rapidly becomes clear that he’ll be out for a while this time. Sephiroth rests in the nest for the better part of an hour, but when he’s still alone, he turns restless. The sex is rough but he’s had twenty-four hours of enough food, and in all honesty, probably twice as much sleep as his work usually grants him. He’s healed except for a particularly deep scratch on one thigh, but that’s scabbed cleanly over, and he has the energy.

Still, he finds himself reluctant to break the equilibrium he and the man have found. He’ll have to sooner or later, and then he’ll have to deal with all the thoughts he’s been putting off—but not today. That truly isn’t what he’s thinking, when he ventures out onto the rock spur and then studies the cliff face above it.

He can’t stop worrying at the question of where the man keeps going. And why, which is rapidly becoming the greater mystery—the cave certainly has more than enough room to keep all his possessions in it, and even if it’s not difficult for him to go somewhere else to retrieve an item, it still seems like an unnecessary inconvenience. And the way that the man acts, that kind of eccentricity doesn’t fit him. He clearly puts thought and intent into everything he does, so there must be a functional reason for it.

Sephiroth doesn’t pull at the cable again, but he does try to track it with his eyes as far as he can. He steps back along the rock spur, mindful of its edge, till he thinks he can make out the small depression of another cave or at least hollow where the cable seems to run into the mountain. And why a cable, he’s wondering, when he spots something dark moving across the sky.

He immediately steps back into the cave. The spot is so far off that he can’t make out any details, but he can tell it’s coming in his direction. He hesitates, then returns to the main room.

About fifteen minutes later, the man walks in. He’s very cold to touch, to the point that Sephiroth winces and pulls his hands back as the man rolls onto the furs. The man snorts and continues to make himself comfortable as if he had no expectation Sephiroth would react differently, pushing the furs up around himself and then turning onto his knees and arching his back so that his shoulderblades strain into the air.

Sephiroth remembers this and pushes himself quickly over the furs, gritting his teeth against the cold and curling up around the man as the wings flare out. The man twitches, genuinely startled, and Sephiroth feels the hand under his head briefly gain claws. Then they turn back into blunt nails as the man worms out that hand, only to hold it a little above Sephiroth’s shoulder as he looks down and Sephiroth looks up.

Sephiroth deliberately pushes his knees more securely against the man’s heels. The man’s lips part and the edge of his tongue presses out between them, then disappears.

He drops his wings much more slowly than before. First they rest against the ground but still cupped out to the side, and then he pulls in the one on the side opposite Sephiroth. It’s still long enough that part of it brushes over the soles of Sephiroth’s feet and he reflexively curls in his toes. Not because it’s rough—it’s not silk by any means, but the membrane stretching between the bones is smooth and relatively hairless, and it’s also warmed up much quicker than the rest of the man.

A few minutes later, the man’s tail flicks up along Sephiroth’s back. Sephiroth raises his chin, expecting to feel it winding around his throat, but once it’s worked under his hair, the tip only settles against his nape. Then the other wing comes down, carefully tucking around them.

As it does, the man slips off his knees and partly onto his side. The wings rustle against each other as the two of them figure out how to fit their legs around each other, and then press in so closely that the one over Sephiroth feels almost like a glove pulling over his back and buttocks and shoulders. And it’s not pitch-dark under it like he’d thought—the membrane is translucent enough in places that he can still see the play of firelight, blurred though it is. And he can see the man’s glowing eyes.

They narrow as he moves his head near them. He pauses and feels the man’s warm breath coast over his cheek and down the bridge of his nose, and he slips his tongue out to taste at the moist air. His night vision is good enough that eventually he can make out the outline of the man’s face, but the dark wipes away all the nuance, leaving only unreadable angles and planes. Still, he thinks that the man isn’t unmoved by his display.

“You’re interested, but you still don’t treat me as if I fit into this,” Sephiroth murmurs, and then smiles when he sees the blink. “I could ask you any number of things about where you’re from, or where you go, but after some thought—that’s not the point, is it? You can get whatever you want, that’s clear, but you come here. You set up yourself like this. You don’t want anything, you want something very specific, and now you’re very careful to keep me away from it, as if I’m still intruding on you.”

There’s a short, airless sound from the man, a little more than merely an exhale but not enough for Sephiroth to identify an emotion. But he isn’t unwrapping his wings, or stopping Sephiroth from speaking. Interested.

“Admittedly, I was. It wasn’t my intention, but I wonder if it was really your intention to ruin this over me,” Sephiroth goes on. He pushes his hands up, letting them deliberately run along the man’s arm so the bindings on his wrist can be felt. Then he settles them against his chin, using his knuckles as support so he can tip his mouth towards where he can feel the other man’s breath gather. “Besides, you want to have me here. Why you’re not trying harder—why you’re stopping yourself, I’m not clear, because at this point it’s not as if you can take anything back. It’s not as if I can pretend I don’t see it.”

The man shifts and for a moment Sephiroth thinks—but his lips graze Sephiroth higher, just over the upper lip, while what presses against Sephiroth’s mouth is a set of wet, hard…not claws. He’d thought that but then they slide vertically against his lips and they’re too rounded for that. Fangs, the man is rubbing his fangs against Sephiroth’s mouth.

Sephiroth pushes into them and they abruptly disappear, and when he pushes further forward, the man seizes his jaw and holds him in place. One inhale, slow and deep, and then the man exhales a low chuckle.

“What?” Sephiroth asks, suddenly irritated again. “What do I have to do to have you fuck me? Are you that fragile that you need to hear me say I wa—”

The man dips into his mouth. Tongue-first, a curl that’s so quick Sephiroth doesn’t feel it over his lips, only against the roof of his mouth and then it’s gone, stealing both air and moisture from him. He sucks a breath, swallows, and before he’s done the man’s craned down again and this time properly sealing their mouths together.

He rolls Sephiroth’s head slightly over, then uses the hand under Sephiroth’s chin to turn it cheek-down against the furs again. It’s a punishingly deep kiss, deep enough that when they part, Sephiroth draws in air for a good few seconds before he feels any reach his lungs, but his lips aren’t split or ripped. The ache he feels isn’t the surface ache of a quick crush but something that reaches all the way into his blood and bones, and he wants.

When Sephiroth leans forward again, the man’s hand drops from chin to throat, closing about that just firmly enough to make his point. He shifts around a little, making it clear he’s settling down for sleep. Then he lets go of Sephiroth’s neck, but as he does, his tail glides over the side and around the front and then underneath to the back again, replacing the hold with a single coil.

Not now, Sephiroth thinks, and in spite of himself, a short laugh breaks through his frustration. “Very well,” he murmurs, knowing the man isn’t yet asleep. “But I don’t have all the time in the world, even if you do.”

The tail twines another round about Sephiroth’s throat. Sephiroth rocks his head a little, adjusting to how it angles his head against the furs, and then closes his eyes.

Chapter 5: First Vacation, Day 4

After they eat breakfast on the fourth day, the man pulls Sephiroth down the passage to the rock spur, then leaves Sephiroth sitting just inside the entrance. It’s already bright, the sky clear and the sunlight a blinding crystalline white in the way that only seems to happen in the thin air of the mountains, and even though Sephiroth doesn’t have any furs with him, it’s not immediately uncomfortable.

The man walks two steps towards the end of the spur, springs into the third and leaps up on the fourth, his wings unfurling and his body darkening and bulking up until he’s a broad-shouldered, furred beast with a massive muzzle. That’s as much as Sephiroth sees in the one overhead wheel the man does before he abruptly dives down the side of the mountain.

Minutes pass. The sun shifts in the sky, and Sephiroth is now shivering enough to be considering going back inside, even though the man obviously wants him to wait for something. He’s just shifting his weight to rise when a movement across the opposite peak catches his eye.

Seconds later, the man’s landed on the spur. It’s a bone-crunching, bloody landing, with the body of what looks like a young aurochs cushioning the man’s hands and feet. He crouches on it, still in his full shifted form, and immediately begins to rip open the body. Still precise, Sephiroth can’t help but notice: he starts at the throat and goes down the centerline like a professional butcher, then wrenches the legs open and rolls the body over onto its back so that the legs’ weight helps to butterfly the corpse. Then he plunges in his arms to the elbow.

By then blood is smeared all across his body, and the skin under it is rapidly paling. He’s turning human again, and when his hands emerge with the heart cupped in it, vivid red arterial blood still flowing out of one severed vessel, he looks up with the face that was curled next to Sephiroth all last night.

He holds Sephiroth’s gaze for a long moment, while the blood stops flowing and starts to clot in the cold. Then his eyes drop. He opens his mouth wide and then tears a huge chunk out of the heart for himself. Then another. He chews with surprisingly little noise but that doesn’t diminish how unrepentantly gory it is.

And it’s not a display, not after he looked away. He’s efficient about eating the heart, and he’s already licking the blood off himself in between bites. By the time he’s finished it, his left hand is almost clean of blood. He quickly renders his right hand the same, and then he gets up and goes over to a snowdrift, taking up handfuls of it and letting it melt a little before using it to roughly scrub himself down.

There are still pink traces of blood on him when he pushes himself up and turns towards Sephiroth, who breathes in once and then pushes himself down onto his hands and knees. He looks up at the man as he does it, and he sees the quick flash of surprise. Surprise and pleasure, and then the man smiles with his fangs overlapping his lower lip as he stoops over to hook Sephiroth’s bound wrists off the ground.

He drags Sephiroth past the dead aurochs, letting out an amused huff when Sephiroth slows to look at it. He doesn’t have Sephiroth there but farther out on the spur, near enough to the edge that the tips of Sephiroth’s hair float over it as he shoves Sephiroth face-down against the rock.

First he licks Sephiroth open, his hands rubbing up and down Sephiroth’s thighs to warm them to burning as Sephiroth writhes under him. Then he pushes in two fingers, working them in and out till the spit starts to dry in the cold air. Sephiroth’s more than hard at that point, distracted enough to try rubbing himself into the unforgiving stone, and when the man jerks his hips up, he hisses as the pressure on his erection lifts enough for him to feel the patches where pebbles have scraped the skin raw.

The man goes back to licking at him, holding his hips up so he can’t bring himself off. And then because he can’t hold himself up, too. He’s shaking too much, his nails bleeding where he’s scraping them against the ground, electric waves of lust washing through him. He can feel how hot and stretched the rim of his hole’s gotten, sensitized to the point that when the tongue abruptly leaves him, the mere flutter of air in its wake makes his knees fail.

Three fingers push into him to hold him up, and as he bows himself back into them, his hands slip off the spur. He doesn’t pay it much attention, what with all the other sensations sweeping through him, but then the man slides up his back, mouthing and nipping along his spine, fangs leaving bruising imprints in their wake, and his arms push out so that the metal hooking his wrist cuffs together jerks off the rock and dangles alongside his fingers.

Sephiroth lifts his head, blinking back the sweat from his eyes. He sees how close he’s been pushed to the edge and levers himself up and back, only to stop with a shudder as the man buries his fingers to the last knuckle in him. His elbows splay out and that gives him the false impression of stability for a moment, before the man grabs his upper arms and hauls him up onto his knees by them.

His body convulses once around unexpected emptiness, once and then he’s seated onto the man’s cock in one smooth stroke. Sephiroth claws at the air, unable to do anything but bend back against the man as one of his knees drags to within an inch of the edge. His arms are kept high up and folded against his chest so he can’t reach over his head or snatch at the man’s hands, and his legs keep sliding out from under him as the man fucks in and out of him. He tries to turn his foot, to get some sort of purchase with his toes, and something tightly wraps up the length of his cock and then starts rippling.

The tail, of course, the tail, pulling up and down his cock as firmly as any set of fingers. He hitches up into that delicious drag and both his knees push to the very edge of the cliff; he can feel the rock dust squeezing out from under them and falling away. When he tries to squirm backward, he ends up pinning himself on the man’s cock, head thrown over the man’s shoulder and buttocks trembling around it. The man sucks hotly along the side of his throat, leaving a line of burning, swollen spots in his wake, and then ducks down to set the beginnings of a second line in parallel with the first as Sephiroth gasps and whines.

He could fall. All the man has to do is let go, and even his preternatural abilities can’t survive a drop of that height. That knowledge races in his mind like spring meltwater rushing down the mountainside, but even so, it doesn’t quench his arousal.

If anything it highlights it, hones it, cutting away any other consideration until there’s only the thoughts of what he needs and what could happen swirling about each other. He needs to come, if he comes the man might or might not stop, if the man stops he can’t come—they swirl and then they eat each other, heat and cold taking turns to overwhelm him until he can’t hold either and convulses sharply around the man’s cock.

The tail strokes his own cock through the orgasm, and he senses the come whipping off the tip of his prick and flying out over the great space below. His leg spasms out and his foot snaps off the cliff with him unable to do anything but watch his own limb betray him, and for a moment he feels himself drop—

They swing backward, both of them, the backwash of the man’s wings stripping all the heat from his front while burning sweat sluices over his back where he’s pressed to the man. His foot comes down on solid rock, and then he’s shoved face-down again, forearms slapping against the ground as the man rises up behind him to drive deeper and deeper till Sephiroth wonders distantly if the man means to break his spine this way.

And as he thinks that, he feels come slicking out around the cock in him. The man shudders, lets out a harsh, rumbling cry that makes Sephiroth’s teeth rattle, and then slumps down with him as he sprawls against the ground.

They settle there for some time. When the wind picks up, the man flops one wing ungracefully about to partly break it, which delays how chilled Sephiroth gets. But eventually he’s shivering, and not for pleasurable reasons. He rolls his hips, feels them unhinge, and stops to pant. Then rolls them again, trying to tug himself off, and at that point the man pushes himself up.

He hauls them a few feet back towards the cave entrance, then makes a frustrated noise and unseats Sephiroth from his cock. They both shudder, Sephiroth is gratified to see, and then he loops an arm around Sephiroth’s waist as they stumble back inside. Warmer there, even warmer by the fire where the man finally lets them stop, and for a moment Sephiroth lets himself lie in a loose curl around the flames.

The man pushes at him and he smells meat and water. He levers himself onto his arms and drops his head over the cup, slurping at it without any care for how it looks or sounds. When half of its contents are down his throat, he moves to the piece of meat the man’s holding out, biting off pieces of it the same way. After one half-hearted attempt to push his head up, the man simply pinches the meat up for him; when he glances up, he sees that the man’s eating another piece and watching him with a bemused look.

“What, revolted? You?” Sephiroth can’t help rasping.

The man’s mouth curves into a smile. He scrapes off some smeared fat from his finger, then pushes the last piece into Sephiroth’s mouth. As Sephiroth chews, the man curls his hand under Sephiroth’s jaw and pushes it so that he can lean over and lap off the juices. Sephiroth swallows and then bends his head to press their mouths together. Then rolls half-onto his hip, wincing absently as that wakes up aches and pains all over his body, in his body, as the man draws over him for a deeper kiss.

He can still taste blood in the man’s mouth, and as he realizes that, the man pulls back and studies him, no longer smiling. Sephiroth opens his mouth, then stops his comment and simply looks back. The air touches on his lips, drying them till they itch, so he licks over them. And then again, opening his mouth wider as the man’s gaze sharpens.

“Did you honestly think I wouldn’t be able to bear it?” he says.

The man stares at him for another moment, then laughs. Not chuckles but laughs, full and deep and long enough that lack of breath makes it falter.

And then he reaches down and drags Sephiroth back up to him.

* * *

They take a turn in the pool. The heat of the water and the steam soaks into Sephiroth, turning him sluggish and loose as the man drapes him over the side and then strokes the water lazily into him to clean out his hole. Afterward he crawls out but then flops to the ground, letting the water run out of his hair as the man finishes scrubbing over himself. When the man climbs out and then pulls his arms out to fiddle with his wrist bindings, he yawns and watches.

He's hauled back to the main room, to the nest where the man ties his ankles to the spikes and then pulls his arms behind his back and relinks the wrist cuffs. His bared hole twitches in the air, still sore from its earlier treatment, and the man leans over and gives it a long, teasing lick that makes Sephiroth groan and pull his knees against the spikes.

He can’t close them, they’re too splayed for that. He can only drag and rock on them, as the man periodically drops by to lick or finger him for a few minutes at a time, slowly working him back to aching hardness. The fur under him sticks to his cock, then to his belly and thighs as he smears himself, trying to rub off against it; whenever he starts to rut too much, the man goes around to his head and pulls it up to fuck his mouth. Not just with the man’s cock but with fingers, with the tail—at one point the man even forces his inside thigh against Sephiroth’s lips, making him nurse it till his lips are sore and cracking from dryness.

At least he’s left his own mark, one dark-red bruise fading to light purple that he occasionally glimpses as the man walks around him. He’s watered, once, and then, finally, fucked.

The man unties him and they have another meal, lunch or dinner, Sephiroth’s not keeping track at this point. Sephiroth stumbles back to the rock spur to relieve himself, but the sight of the aurochs’ bloodstains—the aurochs itself has disappeared—brings the ghost-taste of blood in the man’s mouth, copper-sweet, and when he goes back inside, he finds the man and drops between his legs and licks up his thighs till the man pushes his cock into Sephiroth’s mouth again. Then the man lies down and twists his head around till he’s sucking at Sephiroth’s cock, that tongue of his drawing up it when his lips draw down, hot and tight and perfect.

The two of them collapse in place after that, still pillowing on each other’s thighs. This is entirely without thought, primitive in a strangely easy way, no need for adaptation so much as simply…pushing one’s head under, and holding it there.

But obviously it can’t last. Sephiroth can feel that nibbling at the edges of his mind—not so much things such as how long it’s been or what the weather is like outside or what is likely to happen once his absence is noted, but how lacking in strain he is. He luxuriates in it, that’s true enough, but also he can’t not think forever. He’s not made that way, he knows himself. And this…time he’s had, it’s not truly pretending to be someone he’s not. He knows himself, and he doesn’t see any contradiction between the genuine pride he has in his work and the genuine enjoyment he’s feeling right now. This isn’t work, and work will never be like this. They’re separate spheres, but there’s no reason he can’t move between them.

So it’s not a break. But it is temporary.

Something brushes over his shoulder. He looks up and finds the man resettling himself alongside him, lying on his side and one hip as his hand continues to run idly over Sephiroth’s shoulder and down his arm. The left hand, its nails changing to claws and back in a way that grazes pleasantly at Sephiroth’s skin.

“It must be difficult to find somewhere like this,” Sephiroth says.

The hand stops moving. The man doesn’t take it away, nor does he blink, but his face has become mobile enough that Sephiroth senses some wariness in him. Sephiroth smiles, because relaxed and thoughtless doesn’t mean he’s any less likely to take advantage, when he sees a chance. And then he leans forward and presses his mouth to the left side of the man’s clavicle, because he won’t relent but he can change his tactics. He’s enjoyed himself enough for that.

“This doesn’t concern Shinra, or anyone else who might have interests where Shinra goes,” Sephiroth murmurs. He nuzzles at the collarbone till he feels the man curl his arm about his head, fingers sifting into his hair. “I can’t guarantee the entire company, but I have no interest in drawing their attention to it. I would like to come back here.”

The man’s fingers still again, and stay still even as Sephiroth lips at him. So Sephiroth stops, only resting his mouth where the clavicle sits atop the breastbone. He’s starting to wonder if he should have left this for later, when they’re both up and moving—but then the man slips his fingers between them and pushes Sephiroth back by the forehead. He looks at Sephiroth, running his fingers slowly down the side of Sephiroth’s face, and then pushes Sephiroth’s chin over so that he can start suckling down the side of Sephiroth’s throat.

Sephiroth groans and pulls up his own hands, wrapping them around the man’s waist as they roll over. Once more, he thinks. One more time.

Chapter 6: First Vacation, Day 5 and After

In the morning—it is morning, when he finally walks down the passage he’d been brought here through—the man is gone. For good, and Sephiroth knows this because when he sits up, the first thing he sees is Masamune set down next to the furs, with his boots lined up on one side and a pair of folded pants and shirt on the other.

He flexes his fingers against the furs, working through the initial flare of…exasperation, he thinks. Which almost tips into anger when he looks closer and realizes that the clothing is his own, somehow taken from his rented room in Nibelheim. But when he lifts his hand to jerk that closer, he sees he’s still wearing the leather band on his wrist.

On both his wrists, and on his ankles. The spikes are still planted in the floor around the nest but the jars against the wall are gone, as are any other portable items. He checks all the passages once he’s dressed himself, going around as he unpicks the seams of the bands. The cable is still there, running up the side of the mountain, but after a few minutes of staring at it, Sephiroth goes back through the cave and then outside.

It's warmed enough that the snow is starting to melt, the once-crisp tops of the drifts caving in so they’re pocked over with hollows. There’s a distinct trail kicked through it from the cave to what appears to be part of the trail that had brought Sephiroth up here.

He doesn’t have any food so he can’t linger even if he wanted to. So he sets off down the trail at a brisk pace, and about an hour later, he runs into an overjoyed Zack, a clearly-misplaced Reno, Strife, and a woman who Zack introduces as another local, Tifa Lockhart.

“Your host called in that you just disappeared the first night—well, he tried, but with the storm nothing got through till day three, not even email, but you better believe we got up here like our asses were on fire after that,” Zack says, happily patting Sephiroth over as if there’s actually snow to remove. “We had to waste another day and a half waiting for the weather to get better—Cloud there saved me from drowning in a giant sinkhole of the stuff when I first tried to go out, seriously, we’re never coming back here—”

“Is there actually a search party deployed?” Sephiroth says, looking at Reno.

“Shit, you’re looking at it,” Reno mutters, shivering under a borrowed, too-large down coat and flinching every time an icicle snaps in the breeze. Then he straightens marginally as Sephiroth narrows his eyes. “I mean, it’s sitting pretty back in town, but before we sent everybody else out, our guides here said we should check whether the trail was actually clear or else we’d lose more people.”

“It’s not a great trail this time of year,” Strife says. He doesn’t appear to be mocking Sephiroth or gloating over the chance to rehash his prior warning, but something about his manner is slightly studied. And he and Lockhart had both looked singularly unsurprised at Sephiroth’s appearance, aside from the first flash of recognition. “Anyway, you probably want to eat and warm up, so we should get back before there’s another storm.”

Zack nods absently. He already has a rations pouch in his hand that he’s trying to open, and when Sephiroth sighs and takes it from him, he gives Sephiroth another thump on the shoulder. “Not that you don’t look great for almost a week stuck out in the wilderness, but yeah, let’s go. General’s secured, there’s no invasion from below—”

Lockhart and Strife glance at each other. They cover it well enough, but when Lockhart realizes Sephiroth is watching them, she quickly tucks her head down and pretends to be redoing her ponytail. She also takes the opportunity to elbow Strife, who maneuvers them to the side so Zack and Reno are between them and Sephiroth.

“—the Turks can just skedaddle back to whatever sewer they’re currently spawning in—”

“Fuck you, Fair, see if we let you have our fucking intel again,” Reno mutters.

“Intel?” Sephiroth asks, and then smiles when Reno glances at him. He keeps the smile on as Reno winces. “Why are you here, Reno? It was only a few days, and during scheduled PTO with the express intent of exploring this region. I see nothing there to trigger the Turks’ interest.”

Reno blinks slowly and incredulously, but just stops himself from a smart remark. His eyes do slide over to Zack, who’s looking very confused as well. “Well…sure. Right. Our mistake, General. It’s just your bo—ah, Commander Fair here came wanting to know if we had anything unusual on record for this area, and it did once have a big old cult drilling holes all over the mountain. Apparently they believed a voice coming out of the core was telling them what to do.”

“The last of the Jenovans died out way back when my grandfather was alive,” Lockhart pipes up. She’s wearing the bright, uncertain smile of someone who’d like to be the center of attention but who isn’t yet confident she’s secured it, while her eyes are far more focused. “They’re mostly just a scary story we tell kids to keep them sticking to the trails. We do still find their caves, but they put them in places you can barely get to on a good day with a proper climbing party.”

“They’re not really on this side of the peak either,” Strife adds.

Zack nods as if this is a familiar debate to him. “Yeah, I know, I know, but I was gonna check all angles here to make sure we got Seph back. I mean, this place was my rec, I’d feel like shit if you ended up dying because of me.”

“Well, as you can see, I haven’t,” Sephiroth says dryly, and turns the conversation back to what kind of forces they’d brought with them.

Two helicopters’ worth, which makes Sephiroth grimace internally, but it could have been worse. He’ll have to provide some formal explanations but it’s still a small enough group that he can probably delay things till they’ve returned to Midgar, and at that point, he thinks the will to investigate Nibelheim will have been sapped. If they wish to pester him, he can handle that easily enough. Even Reno’s taskmasters shouldn’t be too problematic.

Zack, on the other hand, can be deceptively superficial at times. “So you sure you’re okay?” he asks once he’s up in Sephiroth’s rented room, testing out the bed Sephiroth never bothered to use. “You do look very chilled out for someone who got lost in the mountains for a week. Which usually means you actually ripped through someone else’s squad.”

“I haven’t inadvertently started a war, Zack,” Sephiroth says patiently.

“Okay, sure, there’s barely enough people up here for a square dance hootenanny,” Zack says amicably, as he continues to bounce on the bed. “But you keep this up in Midgar and Gen’s definitely going to clock it. And he’s him, you know.”

Sephiroth stops with his hand on his duffel. “Clock what?” he says, sharply enough that Zack sobers.

“So, you needed a vacation,” Zack says after a moment’s thought. “I…think you got one? That’s something I one-hundred-percent support, okay? It’s just…you look…you look like you’re going to miss this place. And that’s just not you—you like this place, okay, I get why. But I get that it’s because of all the things it’s not, and you don’t miss a bunch of negatives, Seph. That’s all I’m saying.”

Sometimes Zack’s insights can be exceedingly inconvenient. But they shouldn’t be disregarded lightly, and Sephiroth considers the man’s words as Zack fidgets on the bed. “I don’t miss this place,” he finally says, taking up his duffel. “But…”

Zack rolls off the bed with a quiet speed Angeal often prays aloud he’d show in the field, watching Sephiroth intently.

“…it was an excellent vacation,” Sephiroth continues. He pushes the door open and steps out into the hall. “I’ve had very few of those over my life.”

“Oh. Got it,” Zack says, his shoulders relaxing.

He lasts till they’re in the sitting room before he starts rambling on again, congratulating himself on his travel research skills. Sephiroth lets him entertain himself and the relieved host, and, when an opportunity presents itself, leaves to go find Strife or Lockhart.

As it turns out, he’s able to locate both of them in the small building that houses the helipad operations, with Reno who excuses himself in a hurry. Sephiroth looks after him, then back at the pair of locals, who don’t look very embarrassed about Reno but who do look very nervous about him.

“I recall you live in that direction anyway,” Sephiroth says, pulling one of the wrist cuffs out of his pocket. He tosses it to Strife, who catches it, gives it a glance, and shifts his expression to strangely resigned. “If you can have that fixed and leave it in the cave, I’ll pay you well.”

“That doesn’t look as if it was made around here,” Strife says.

Sephiroth studies him. The man is stubborn enough to not look away, but his feet scuff against the floor until Lockhart puts her hand on his shoulder. “Listen, that’s not going to do anything,” she says. She ignores the sharp look Strife gives her as she pulls the cuff out of his hand and then holds it out towards Sephiroth. “If you want to send a message—”

“We can’t do that,” Strife says abruptly, and then grimaces. “We’re not—we’re not trying to cause trouble—”

“It’s just, if you want to send that kind of message, you should just sit tight. It’ll be quicker,” Lockhart finishes.

“Quicker?” Sephiroth says, raising his brow.

“Nobody comes here most of the year,” Strife says. He gives Lockhart another look, and whatever he reads in her face doesn’t make him happy, but seems to be decisive. “Nobody comes here. You’re leaving, aren’t you? So if they want to find you, they’re not going to come here to do that. Not that we have any idea, because—”

“We don’t,” Lockhart says, staring up at Sephiroth with the kind of clear, levelheaded, fully aware honesty he’s unused to seeing in even experienced SOLDIERs, when subjected to his interrogations. “We don’t get interested in outsiders. They can come if they want, but we don’t look into them and they usually don’t care about us.”

That doesn’t make the food the man had had up in the cave a figment of Sephiroth’s imagination, but only some of it had been locally-made, he has to admit. It’s a complicating signal, but on such little information he can’t say it’s a contradictory one to the story these two are clearly trying to tell him. Tell, not sell—he thinks.

He can’t make much out of this now, unless he wants to draw attention that he’d rather duck himself. So he takes the cuff back and then walks out of the room.

* * *

Once they’ve all returned to Midgar and Sephiroth has fended off any formal inquiries into his time in Nibelheim, he starts to look into the man’s identity. He doesn’t think it should take that long, given the man’s many distinctive attributes, but work immediately starts to interfere. The other Firsts did an admirable job—aside from one ridiculous incident involving Rufus’ dog and a training dummy—while he was gone, but no matter what, SOLDIER is a complex department sitting within an even more complex organization. It’s an enormous amount of effort to simply ensure day-to-day operations run smoothly, and then there’s the politics, internal and external.

So Sephiroth hasn’t gotten very far when he’s scheduled to have a meeting with Lazard, Tseng, and a freelance consultant for the Turks that Tseng wants to make a courtesy introduction to. In fact, he and Zack are deeply engaged in debating a report of suspicious activity in Corel when Zack pushes the conference room door open on what appears to be a filled body bag lying on the table and Lazard wildly asking someone why it was necessary to bring it.

“The microchips are in his colon,” says a deep, soft voice, tinged with more than a little irritation. “Waiting for them to pass would have put me three hours past the window, and anyway, it was a kill contract.”

“But it’s here,” Lazard groans.

“Director, with all due respect, this is something we handle on a regular basis,” Tseng is saying patiently. “And I did ask if we could push this back twenty minutes.”

“Well, you didn’t let me know why—oh, General,” Lazard says, swinging nervously around to look at the door. “And, ah, Commander, I’m very sorry, but I think—”

The man from the cave is standing at the other end of the table. He looks so transformed that it’s actually more of a shock than the wings had been: black hair pulled back into a sleek tail at the base of his neck, elegant black suit under a dark red leather duster, sleek black leather gloves on both hands. His eyes are red but other than that, he doesn’t show any of his other attributes, and nonnatural eye colors are available at the consumer level.

He gazes at Sephiroth without any appreciable change in expression, but a slow, warm prickling sensation spreads over the back of Sephiroth’s nape, across his shoulders and down his back, and he doesn’t think it’s only psychosomatic on his side.

“—we should reschedule,” Lazard finishes. “Mr. Valentine here—”

“Vincent,” the man says, and then he produces a slim black tablet, matte-coated like covert operatives prefer, which he then sends gliding across the table with a quick flick of the wrist. “There’s the paperwork for the body disposal. I remember the forms around here.”

Tseng is doing a much better job at hiding his amusement than Zack, but he still has to resort to ducking his head as he walks behind Lazard. He starts to reach for the tablet, then blinks hard as Sephiroth picks it up first.

Sephiroth powers the tablet on, glances at the files that pop up, and then hands it to Zack. “Deal with this. Director, Zack could also use a word with you outside.”

Zack gives Sephiroth a startled look. “I…okay, I guess—yeah. Let’s go…talk, right, and maybe get you some coffee to wipe out the bad memories, right?”

Lazard is still too flustered to protest very much, although he tries to hiss something at Tseng on his way out. Tseng frowns and starts to walk after him, then pauses. He and Vincent never look directly at each other, but a second later, Tseng shrugs and turns out of the room.

“You know the forms here,” Sephiroth says, hearing the doors swing quietly shut behind him.

“I was in the Turks for several years when I was younger,” Vincent says. He turns to face Sephiroth as Sephiroth comes around the end of the table, alert but not precisely nervous. Sephiroth does have the impression that the man is watching him for something potentially dangerous, and that’s a change from in the cave, when the man seemed at most to expect him to be foolish. “I know your mother.”

“‘Know’?” Sephiroth echoes, catching the present tense. Then he stops. “That Turk.”

Vincent nods.

Sephiroth considers the man in front of him as his thoughts reorganize themselves. That would make Vincent at least twenty years older than him, not that it remotely shows in his physical appearance. And it’s unlikely that Vincent didn’t know who he was—but that was never likely anyway, with his reputation and his own unique appearance. It didn’t show in the man’s mannerisms before, and Sephiroth can’t think of why he’d want it to now. Actually, he very much doesn’t want it to. “Do you talk to her?”

“When I have to,” Vincent says, and then almost grimaces, highlighting the slip. He doesn’t flinch away from Sephiroth’s gaze. “It probably works out to about once a year. We don’t talk about you.”

“I see,” Sephiroth says after a long, silent moment, during which Vincent continues to not flinch, or to show any other outward sign of discomfort. It’s Sephiroth that the man expects to show that, he suddenly realizes. He takes another step towards the other man, watching how Vincent slides one hand away from the edge of his coat and lets it rest against the table. “So do you want to talk to me now?”

Vincent raises his brows.

“I would like to talk to you, now that you’re deigning to speak,” Sephiroth says. He glances over at the body, then back at Vincent. “I wanted to leave you a message, to clear up something—”

Vincent raises his hand as he steps forward and Sephiroth grabs it by the wrist, stopping it in between them. He looks at it, then pulls its glove off with his other hand, dropping that on the table as he examines the thinner but still distinctly plated scaling on that hand. It flexes its fingers, nails reshaping into claws, and then twists free to take Sephiroth by the throat. Sephiroth can feel the claws skitter across his skin, lagging well behind the heat flashing through him, but pulls his arm out from between them and lets Vincent drag them together.

Within seconds Sephiroth is clenching his fist against the table for support, his other hand hooked over Vincent’s shoulder as Vincent rolls his tongue around the inside of Sephiroth’s mouth. It’s as long and coiling as it was, as skilled at unstringing Sephiroth’s knees as before—Sephiroth shoves them back and Vincent’s hand drops from his throat to swing behind them. Then the man abruptly sits in one of the chairs, his other arm closing around Sephiroth’s waist as Sephiroth hauls himself onto the seat to straddle him.

“I go there a couple times a year to clear out my head,” Vincent says when they break for breath. “I’m usually not there. I wouldn’t have read any message you left till I’d come back again.”

“So I’ve been told,” Sephiroth says. He grabs at the back of the chair and dips his head to lave along Vincent’s jaw, as the other man works his fingers under the chest belts and then pulls at those, making Sephiroth feel the tug of them across his ribs and over his back. He groans and pulls back to Vincent’s mouth, sucking at its lower lip. “I misspoke before. I don’t want to only revisit that place, I want to know you. That isn’t the place for it, pleasant as it was, and since you’re here, I take it you agree with me.”

Vincent pauses. Then slides one hand down Sephiroth’s spine and out from under the coat to grip over Sephiroth’s thigh. It’s his left hand, and his thumb regrows its claw as he runs it up the straining inseam. “When did you decide that?”

“You’re questioning me now?” Sephiroth says, amused.

“Well, I decided I did want to speak to you,” Vincent murmurs, his tongue flicking teasingly at Sephiroth’s jaw before he suddenly pushes under that, fixing his mouth tightly over the side of Sephiroth’s throat. “So yes, I am.”

He sucks hard enough for it to hurt, spurring a rough gasp from Sephiroth, and then someone walks back into the room.

“—right here and fuck.” Zack and Tseng stand there in the doorway, staring. Then Tseng, professional that he is, steps sharply backward and stops someone else from coming into the room, even though his eyes are still wide with shock.

“Oh—what—Seph—” Zack babbles.

“Yes?” Sephiroth snaps.

“Body,” Tseng says, gesturing at the table.

Vincent detaches his mouth from Sephiroth’s neck. It hurts more with that gone, the flesh immediately throbbing, and the air cooling the spit smeared over it isn’t remotely soothing. Then Vincent rubs his thumb over it, pressing down so that Sephiroth turns to look back at him. “I didn’t think you meant that place, when you said you wanted to come back. You weren’t looking at it,” Vincent says. “But I thought I’d come and ask to be sure. Where would work for this?”

“Okay, so…cancel all your other meetings?” Zack interjects.

Sephiroth quashes his initial wave of irritation, then pushes himself off of the chair and back onto his feet. Vincent gets up with him, keeping one hand on his neck, which helps. “Yes, Zack, now deal with it,” Sephiroth says.

“Yep yes sir, right away, fuck, I’m so getting out of the way of this,” Zack says, scooting back out through the doors.

“This way,” Sephiroth says. He moves his head towards the door; the motion draws Vincent closer since he’s still not letting go of Sephiroth’s neck, and Sephiroth finds himself smiling. “Let’s finish this somewhere else.”

Notes:

So, Jenova existed but the conscious, independent entity part of her was disposed of several generations ago and all Hojo recovered was her DNA.

Chapter 7: Side Scenes: Zack Gets Blanked and Gets Some Blanks Filled In

Zack Attempts to Arrange a Search Party

“Cloud, we’ve got a problem,” Tifa says as he comes in through the back door. He hands her the empty crate and she absently shoves it next to a full one of beer glasses as she nods out towards the main room. “Two choppers of SOLDIERs landed and their leader’s out there trying to talk Herne into renting him chocobos to go out looking for the General.”

“Shit,” Cloud says.

He crosses to the side of the pass-through and then peeks out at the man animatedly waving his hands in front of a very unmoved Herne. Who’s not stupid, but if they let this go on, SOLDIER is probably just going to requisition the chocobos rather than ask nicely, and then they’re screwed. Reception’s still too bad to try and call Vincent, even on the shielded satellite phone, but maybe if he takes the salt-lick path…

Tifa nudges him. “Redhead,” she says, pointing out a miserable-looking man hunched over his phone and shivering even though he’s got all of the tavern’s free blankets bunched up around him. “Turk, I think. He let slip that Zack, the other guy, thinks the General might’ve holed up in one of the old Jenovan caves.”

Then again, even Cloud doesn’t really want to try hiking up that side of the peak in this weather. He’s born to Nibelheim but that doesn’t mean the mountains don’t still try and kill him. “They looking for guides?”

“Redhead said he’s got maps but he doesn’t really look like he wants to use them, and Zack will probably take whatever anybody offers him,” Tifa says. She shifts over as one of the waitstaff calls an order to her, writing up a ticket and then clipping it to the carousel behind her. After spinning that to the kitchen side, she looks back at Cloud. “So, you want Hot and Needy, or Hot and Easily-Distracted?”

Cloud stares at her for a moment. She’s genuinely worried, he can see the tension in her face, but she still manages to give him a knowing smile. “What, we’re going to let them split up? In this weather?”

Tifa blinks. Then ducks under and grabs a case of clean beer mugs, which she relinquishes when he takes the other end. He boosts that through the pass-through while she pulls out two for them, drawing a good foaming pint each from the taps.

“Yeah, you’re right,” she says, handing him his pint. “You want lunch first or did you eat already?”

“I did, but might as well eat again,” Cloud says, looking out at the room again. “We’re probably going to need it.”

* * *

Zack Attempts to Be a Search Party

Zack admittedly has very little experience with snow. It’s just not ever an experience he felt the need to have; he’s a hot-climate guy and doesn’t feel any inadequacies about that at all. But also, he’s a SOLDIER First-Class, and one personally trained by Angeal Hewley, so he can deal with it if he has to. A little snow isn’t going to stop him from finding out where the hell his friend and general’s gone.

He really, genuinely, honestly means that, one hundred percent. And when they dig him out of this hideously freezing pit of freezing he’s dropped into, he’s still thinking about how, if Sephiroth is trapped somewhere in this weather, they really need to get to him fast. It’s just he also feels as if his arms and legs are gone and feeling like your limbs have been chopped off except you can’t feel them is kind of terrifying.

“Okay, take off his clothes, we need to warm him up as fast as possible,” orders Tifa as she wrestles with Zack’s sweater. She uses the heel of her hand to crack off the ice coating, then claws the stiff folds up his belly. “Reno, get his trousers. Cloud needs to build the fire.”

“Fine, fine, I’m not trying to let him die, okay? I just happen to actually know him and you don’t,” Reno snaps as he reluctantly yanks at Zack’s belt. “Just don’t take this the wrong way, Fair. I don’t need some gay-panic bullshit taking up space in Tseng’s inbox because you can’t fucking step where you’re supposed to.”

Gay-panic bullshit is exactly what Reno is selling right now, Zack would say, if his teeth weren’t chattering so badly. The best he can do is just not resist them as he’s stripped naked and then shoved into the back of the little lean-to Cloud’s whipped up with some branches and a piece of canvas. By then Cloud has the fire going just outside, and is pulling his belt off to tie the tarp down so it’ll funnel the hot air over them.

And then Cloud pulls his shirt off, while Tifa kicks off her leggings. Reno shuts up and stares and Zack can’t really disagree with him, because Zack has been trying very hard to ignore how attractive they both are. Seriously, his best friend is missing and this place is an icy hellhole, he’s not going to get laid while Sephiroth could be out there freezing to death.

Except then he does.

He feels really guilty about it, but…he’s warmed up now, and is positive he’s not going to lose anything to frostbite, because between the two of them, Cloud and Tifa have confirmed he’s still got feeling everywhere. And also, who knew but Reno’s better with his mouth full than empty? Which, okay, Zack needs to get his priorities straightened out now.

“We have to get going,” Zack says, trying to squirm out from the post-coital pile.

Cloud’s hand clamps around his arm. For someone who hasn’t been through SOLDIER, he’s much stronger than he looks. “We need daylight, if you go now you’re just going to fall into another hole.”

“Listen to the locals, Fair,” Reno mumbles into Tifa’s breasts. “And no, not sex, because we aren’t fucking doing this again. I saved your life once and that’s plenty.”

“You didn’t fucking save—you barely got my pants off, asshole,” Zack mutters, but he’s being inexorably drawn back into the pile. Which is warm, and sexy, and warm, and…yeah, he thinks moodily, staring out through the flap at the cold, dark, maneating-hole-filled mountains. He should be methodical about this. Gaia knows he fucked up with his travel research, he can’t do that twice to Sephiroth.

“I think he’s probably okay,” Cloud offers, and then bites his lip when Zack looks at him, like he wishes he hadn’t said that. “Like I said, I walked by him, and he looked like he was in good condition. As long as he has shelter to wait it out, he’ll still be alive. It’s only been a couple days.”

Zack sighs. “Yeah, I know, and if anybody’s going to kick this mountain’s ass, it’d be Seph, so…he’s just my friend, so I can’t help worrying.”

Cloud nods, while over his shoulder, Tifa also looks sympathetic. “We can try trekking back to town for supplies in a couple hours, if the sky clears up and we at least get starlight,” she says. “We’re still too early in the season for the storm to last much longer. We’ll resupply and then check the trail again first thing tomorrow.”

“Yeah, we’ll come back with you,” Cloud says, and Zack smiles. At least he’s got help.

* * *

Zack Tries to Figure Out What’s Going On

Zack can be shocked. Maybe more than he should, but he dares anyone to walk into a conference room that already contains an assassinated corpse, catch Sephiroth making out with a mercenary even Tseng is deferential towards, and not be shocked. Besides, what really matters is the recovery time.

“Okay, one officially unrecognized hit properly booked and filed, Turks are aligned, Lazard got an espresso from R&D’s coffee stash, now I think I’ve earned an explanation, Seph,” Zack says as he stalks into Sephiroth’s personal conference room the day after.

Angeal and Genesis turn and look at him, while the enticing aromas of a truly impressive spread of Wutaian foods waft towards him. Zack wouldn’t call himself a gourmet—if it’s good, he’ll eat it, whether it comes from a five-star restaurant or a roadside shack—but Wutaian’s one of his favorite cuisines and he regrets how it’s gotten harder to find in Midgar since the political situation shifted last year. So yeah, he stares and slavers a little.

“Help yourself, Zack,” Sephiroth says calmly from his seat on the other side of the table. “Vincent should be along any time now, but I don’t think he’ll mind if you try out his cooking first.”

“…he cooks,” Zack says, somehow avoiding any drooling. Which believe him, is a real effort right then.

“Excellently,” Genesis says, picking his chopsticks back up. “Although that only increases my curiosity. How in the name of the Goddess could you have found someone with adequate martial skills, actual talent in the kitchen, and he doesn’t want to kill you?”

“Okay, let’s…cool the questions,” Angeal mumbles, hastily swallowing the dumpling he’d just stuffed into his mouth. He reaches for his cup and clears his throat with a swig. “I mean, I’m curious too, but he literally just joined Shinra so—”

“Actually, I worked in the Turks for five years back before Sephiroth was born.” Valentine stands politely in the doorway while Zack yelps and flushes and then hastily circles around a smirking Genesis to a free seat. Then he walks around the table to the empty spot by Sephiroth’s right. “I’d like to only do this once.”

“Do wh—” Angeal starts, frowning.

“You’re that Turk who helped his mother get promoted over Hojo, aren’t you?” Genesis immediately asks.

Valentine nods as he sits down. He takes the empty bowl and chopsticks Sephiroth offers him, but just sets them by his elbow while the rest of them serve themselves—yeah, Zack takes some food, because this is shaping up to be epic and whatever goes down, he’ll need calories to deal with it. Once they’ve filled their bowls, Valentine gets some rice and a couple pieces of braised pork, but that’s it. And he’s still not touching it.

“Anything else?” Sephiroth asks. He definitely wants Valentine to be there—Seph still won’t share his creamer with anyone but Angeal, even though Zack topped Angeal on covering up inconvenient Turk issues last month—but he’s getting that murderous-statue expression on his face.

Angeal looks around the table, visibly uncomfortable, and then starts to say something, only for Genesis to get there first again. “Rumor is you did it out of love for her.”

“Gen,” Angeal hisses, paling, and Zack nearly snaps his chopsticks swiveling to look at Sephiroth’s face.

Sephiroth does look pissed off, but he’s not already trying to stick Masamune through Genesis’ skull, so…maybe he was expecting Genesis to go there. Maybe. He still looks like Genesis should have known better.

As for Valentine, he doesn’t even look fazed. “I thought they’d met her,” he just says to Sephiroth, picking up his bowl.

The irritation fades out of Sephiroth’s face, though he’s still staring hard at Genesis. “They have.”

“Not love?” Genesis presses.

“No,” Valentine says, turning back. He nibbles at some pork. “I did help her. I was on shift in her lab as long as someone was in it, which averaged eighteen hours a day for two months, and once we were on speaking terms, we agreed the department needed a change of leadership. Which turned out to be the only thing we agreed on, once the dust settled.”

Genesis spares Sephiroth a satisfied look, but it’s obviously distracted, and he’s much more interested in Valentine now. “So then you left Shinra, and…occupied yourself with other activities? And now you’re back in the fold?”

Valentine lowers his chopsticks and smiles at Genesis. Nothing else but something about it makes Zack flex his hands for his sword. “I kill people for money. Shinra offered me a satisfactory long-term contract, and I have no interests in opposition to them.”

“I don’t think they’ll find any reason to have interests in opposition to you,” Sephiroth says, relaxing enough to be amused. He reaches for a plate of stir-fried noodles and then his hand jerks back as someone keys in a passcode.

His mother walks in and everyone stiffens, even Sephiroth—even though he doesn’t actually look surprised to see her, and the first time she dropped in on him was the first time Zack found out the man could make that expression. She also doesn’t look surprised at the company, and in fact, zeroes in immediately on Valentine. “Vincent,” she says.

“Lucrecia,” he says, in a completely different monotone than the one he’d been using. That one had been neutral but this one is stripped of emotion.

They study each other. She gives Sephiroth a quick glance but clearly she’s here for Valentine, and Zack has to say, she doesn’t look thrilled to see him. Also not unhappy, which is why Angeal isn’t actually getting up from his seat like he’s white-knuckle threatening to do so, but…okay. All of it over in one go. That is pretty Sephiroth of Sephiroth.

“You’re staying,” she says, and then indicates Sephiroth with her eyes. “With my son.”

Valentine nods.

“You could have told me that over the phone,” Lucrecia says, looking irritated. “I had to put reaming out Heidegger for inadequate safety protocols on hold to come down here. Usually you call.”

“I’ll call next time,” Valentine says after a second’s pause. He leans back in his seat, as if her behavior just…as if this just isn’t that big a deal to him, now that he’s seeing it, and she snorts and turns on her heel and walks back out. Valentine sighs and picks up his bowl again. “I tell her if I have to be within Midgar city limits so we don’t run into each other by accident.”

“Do you just kill scientists or something?” Zack can’t help asking. “I mean, why would you two even be near each other, aside from that whole Hojo drama thing?”

Valentine shrugs. “It’s happened. We both agree it’s better not to have it happen again—I suppose that’s one other thing.”

“Well, two points of agreement’s…a lot, with her,” Angeal says cautiously. Then he blows out his breath. He rubs his hand over his face, then leans over and grabs at some of the steamed buns, tossing one to a startled Sephiroth. “Look, Seph, you’re insane sometimes but is this making you feel better? Because that’s the only thing I want to ask here.”

Sephiroth holds the bun between his thumb and forefinger as if it’s an explosive device. He glances at the door behind Angeal, then presses his lips together and resettles himself. When he’s done, he’s got the bun down on his plate and is dividing it precisely in half with one chopstick as a guide for his tearing fingers. “Yes, actually, it is.”

“If I didn’t ask my questions, we’d still all be chewing on them every time he walks into the room,” Genesis says, back to pleased with himself. “Very well, welcome back to Shinra, Mr. Valentine. I do hope you know what you’re getting into, and I don’t mean the work by that.”

“Thank you,” Valentine says dryly.

“Your cooking is exquisite, by the way,” Genesis adds. “How often do you plan on displaying such talent?”

“Are you assuming you’re going to benefit from it?” Sephiroth says sharply, looking irked again.

“Okay, okay, let’s just—okay, sorry, I have one more question for Vincent,” Zack breaks in, over the sound of Angeal kicking Genesis repeatedly under the table. “You know how I can get hold of Cloud or Tifa?”

Valentine and Sephiroth both go still and silent, and for long enough that Genesis, distracted as he is with slapping at Angeal’s knee, notices. He looks up and frowns at them, but it’s Angeal who gets in first this time. “Wait, weren’t those the two guides you hired in Nibelheim? Why would—”

“Why would you ask him that, Zack?” Sephiroth says, and Zack knows the man well enough by now to pick up the little thread of worry under all that baritone menace.

He honestly hadn’t meant to upset anything or anyone; he’s not Genesis, trying to slice open all the wounds just in case one gets infected. “Hey, look, I didn’t mean anything bad, I just…” he sees how Sephiroth’s eyes narrow “…okay, so while I was liaising with the Turks, Reno let slip that your, I mean Val-Vincent’s contract says he gets free shipping space allocated on the Nibelheim weekly flights, and I just…figured you’d been there from that, so you’d probably met them, the place isn’t that big—”

“Sorry, I have to—so how did you two meet, exactly?” Angeal interrupts.

“Satisfactorily,” Sephiroth deadpans.

Zack coughs and just gets his hand up in time for it, while Angeal studies Sephiroth, then grins slowly. He’s still looking pretty closely at Sephiroth. “Just checking,” he says quietly.

Sephiroth’s glare softens to neutral. “I know, Angeal,” he says. He pauses, then smiles himself. “You’re going to cut off his circulation.”

“He doesn’t need that leg, he can always sub in Rapier,” Angeal says, as Genesis finally explodes into an outraged flurry of insults and elbows against the other man.

Zack slides a little further away to give those two room and then startles as Valentine lifts a cup to get his attention. “I do visit Nibelheim from time to time,” he says, and while Sephiroth’s calmed down, Valentine is definitely still keeping an eye on him. “Mostly because the people there are aggressively uninterested in me or what I do.”

“So…that’s a no,” Zack interprets, sliding a glance back at Sephiroth. “Which is cool, you can just forget—”

“Have you taken your phone to IT lately?” Valentine asks, weirdly.

Zack blinks. “No, and I don’t know what things were like back in your day, but you don’t go to IT unless you—oh, wait, you’re in the Turks—”

“So you have no idea if Tifa bugged your phone or not,” Valentine says. “You should check that. She’s very good with electronics, she helps her father out with repairing the sat phones up there.”

They all pause, except for Valentine who continues eating. Then Angeal sighs and pushes away from Genesis to hold his hand out. Zack also sighs as he pulls his phone from his pocket and gives it to the other man, who fiddles with it for a moment and then makes a face at the screen. Angeal digs around in his own pockets, then hunches his shoulders sheepishly as Genesis passes him the cable he needs to jack his and Zack’s phones together to run a scrubbing program.

“Okay…thoughts on whether that’s a ‘call me maybe’?” Zack says, watching Angeal work. “Cloud’s got nearly a First-sized sword and he’s pretty good with it, I was thinking I could send him some spare training manuals.”

“Oh, Gaia, just make a recruiting trip out there, Fair,” Genesis says, rolling his eyes. He gives Angeal a last shove on the shoulder, then asks him to pass the steamed vegetables. “Since apparently, now we have to account for that godforsaken town.”

“It was actually very accommodating, considering their limited resources,” Sephiroth says, with just the faintest hint of fuck-you in his voice. He reaches over and helps Angeal get to the vegetables, then sits back. His hands and Valentine’s hands are all visible, but there’s a weird little moment between them when his arm bumps into Valentine and the two of them glance at each other. Specifically, it suddenly reminds Zack that now he knows what Sephiroth’s hickey face looks like. “But if you have no interest in it, Rhapsodos, we’ll deploy you elsewhere.”

“Please,” Genesis mutters, as he happily scoops up vegetables. “I’m more than willing to wait with bated breath in a proper city for your return. Vincent, is that lemongrass or galangal I’m tasting in this? And where did you actually find galangal in this urban swamp? You’ll have to show me.”

“We’re not doing this just once, are we,” Zack mutters, slouching down in his seat as Sephiroth resumes trying to peel Genesis’ face off with his eyes.

“Nope,” Angeal mutters back. “Not even a chance.”

* * *

Zack More or Less Gives Up (In)

Zack’s enjoying himself in the mountains, he honestly is. The air smells great, he can’t get over how much elbow room he has—literally, he can spread his arms and not touch anyone, and outdoor sex is definitely the best way to get back to nature. “It’s just this place keeps trying to kill me,” he still has to say, after the umpteenth time Cloud and Tifa have pointed out the sinkhole or the poison-by-touching plant or the cliff-face ready to crash down if he sneezes. “I mean, I’m from Gongaga, we get sometimes the natural world wants to keep it real, but I seriously don’t think it likes me.”

“It’s a mountain, Zack, it’s like this with everyone,” Cloud mutters. His lips are warm and soft and brushing right up against that spot under Zack’s collarbone that mainlines directly to his cock. “It’s not you specifically.”

“Don’t take it so personally,” Tifa says, curling in from the other side, her hand snaking down the sleeping bag just in time to catch that jolt going through Zack at its destination. Her breasts roll up against his arm as she makes a concerned noise. “You do take forever to warm up. We’ve been in here how long—”

Cloud’s hand shows up for a second opinion, and then Cloud nuzzles his way under Zack’s chin. “Yeah, you’re right, we should be doing something about that,” he says, right before he starts making out with Tifa over Zack’s head.

“Okay, I see your sexy redirect and—” their fingers mutually wrap over Zack’s cock and Zack probably should be more worried about how easily they keep deflecting his highly-trained SOLDIER reflexes “—yeah, okay, not objecting, just—wanna come to Midgar? My next rest rotation’s in six weeks and I could show you around.”

Zack says dumb things when he’s getting laid. He’s very self-aware about this, and that’s why he extends one free pass to anyone he falls into bed with about dirty talk that sounded a lot dirtier in your head, or yelling wrong names, or, say, asking the hot local guide couple to come hang out at his place literally two hours after finally convincing them this wasn’t just a divide-and-recon mission to spy on their buddy-and-now-Sephiroth’s-romantic-partner Valentine for Shinra. So when Cloud and Tifa stop moving their hands and go still for a couple seconds, Zack grimaces and then wills himself to not bring that up again for the rest of their camping trip. Because yes, he actually would like them to come to his place, but first, he’d like to make sure they don’t just think all of Shinra is full of mountain-incompetent idiots who proposition the first person who saves them.

Thankfully, they seem to shrug it off and then go back to what they’re doing, which saves Zack an awkward rest of week and ensures the only thing that’s torturing him is the urge to ask them to just yes/no whether Valentine was the reason why Sephiroth came back completely chilled out from a week lost in the mountains. Anyway, so it’s kind of a total surprise to Zack when five weeks later, Cloud and Tifa hit him up to let him know they’re catching the morning flight in.

“Neither of us have ever been to Midgar, and Vincent said if you were busy, he could put us up in a safehouse somewhere,” Tifa says, totally unconcerned about the use of the word ‘safehouse’ and very concerned about that shade of sick pale Cloud’s face is wearing. “But the landing was a little rough.”

“Yeah, wind’s a little—” Zack recognizes the twitch Cloud’s mouth makes and hastily yanks a public trashcan off its chain for the man “—well, you’re on the ground again, and we can take the shuttle train most of the way to HQ if you think that’d be better than a car—”

“No bike?” Cloud mutters, with maybe a little wistfulness under all the retching.

Zack tries not to smile. Then sees how Tifa is frowning at him and really doesn’t smile, and just concentrates on patting Cloud’s back. “Uh, normally yes, but it’s not really balanced for luggage so I just grabbed a taxi…”

Cloud spits into the trashcan, then glances up at the same time Tifa looks him and herself over. They both have one decent-sized backpack, basically the same thing they’d used on their camping trip, their preferred main weapons—sword for Cloud, a pair of clawed metal knuckleguards for Tifa—and themselves.

“Sorry, we probably should’ve planned more,” Tifa says, as if she has to take responsibility for counteracting Zack’s shitty observational skills. “It’s just the fault shifted and snapped some of the cables so for a week the whole town was down to sat phones and about three Internet-connected computers. By then we figured it’d probably just be less trouble if we got here and then got anything we needed.”

“No worries!” Zack says cheerfully. “You got yourselves here and Midgar’s my town, so it’s on me from hereon out. Let’s get Spike some water to rinse out his mouth and then get you two somewhere more comfortable.”

The commuter shuttle is definitely better than braving Midgar traffic, but except for the start and end stretches, it’s still going over the same roads and more importantly, ventilating in the same smog. Cloud’s motion sickness more or less clears up, but something in the air has Tifa sneezing her head off within minutes, and by the time they do pull into SOLDIER barracks, she’s trying to hide her puffy red nose behind her hand. SOLDIER does issue everybody face masks for bad pollutant days, but Zack’s so used to it now that he doesn’t bother with them—so those are the first thing he grabs from his room, once he’s dropped Cloud and Tifa off at SOLDIER medical to see if they can give the poor woman anything.

The second thing he does is redo his dinner reservations since he’s pretty sure neither of them will be up for the gut-busting tour of Midgar’s finest under-Plate street stalls on the first day. Which maybe was always a stretch, but Tifa had been pretty enthusiastic about hearing about all the different foods you can get in Midgar and Zack had caught Cloud bookmarking places, so…day two, Zack figures. Day one, they can just hit up one of the places Genesis doesn’t turn his nose up at, and Zack can make up for the lack of cool bike by getting the bill.

Once that’s set, Zack heads back to pick them up, only to find that they apparently wandered over to the training area next door, along with half of the medical staff. Because some asshole from Genesis’ division saw Cloud’s sword, tried to make a big deal out of it, and got his ass handed to him straight through three obstacle walls.

“He said spar,” Cloud says, hunched up over his knees on one of the benches along the wall as Tifa perches next to him with her arm over his shoulders. He looks like he’s debating between hugely embarrassed and worried. “We sparred.”

“He did say spar, and also they said these were supposed to be training blades,” Tifa says. She reaches over, arm still on Cloud, and grabs a piece of twisted steel that’s sticking out of the floor near them. After pulling it free, she taps it lightly against her knee, then really whacks it down while bringing the knee up so that the metal snaps in half. “Is it supposed to do that? Isn’t it a little unsafe for them to be this fragile?”

“They’re, um, training blades because the edges are blunted,” Zack explains lamely. “Because we don’t—so standard training doesn’t cover a lot of the off-blade moves you both like to use. The idea isn’t to use these for that kind of sparring.”

Cloud winces. “Oh. Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it, Roche should be fine once medical’s done with him and he could use a lesson in not getting too attached to a single fighting style,” Angeal says as he extricates himself from a gaggle of bystanders and comes over. “Anyway, I only came in at the end, but that was very impressive. I’m Angeal—are you two Cloud and Tifa? Was Zack showing you around? If you want to stretch out in a better set-up, we can take you—”

“Sorry about this, General, but I really need to get these two to my place so they can rest up after their flight,” Zack says, begging Angeal with his eyes to get them out of here. Because shit, not only Genesis’ division but Roche, and yeah, Zack needs to just cut today short if he wants Cloud and Tifa to actually want to speak to him again. “I’ll check in with you later about the training room thing?”

“I…yeah, of course,” Angeal says, blinking a little at Zack.

For a moment he seems on the verge of inviting himself along, just out of sheer curiosity, but just then they all hear the dulcet tones of Genesis Rhapsodos demanding to know what dramatic event he’d been left out of. Zack ducks behind the other man as Angeal sighs and then gestures hastily to Cloud and Tifa, who thankfully don’t ask any questions as they follow him out of the room.

He gets them to his quarters without incident, then just orders delivery. Tifa at least did get something that’s temporarily cleared up her sinuses, but both she and Cloud seem happy to call it for the day and just move quietly around the place, unpacking and taking turns in the shower and at least enjoying the halfway decent view over the Plate that Zack gets. So Zack puts the leftovers away, plops down on his couch, and takes a second to just breathe into his hands, because seriously. He’s better than this. He’s in Midgar, for Gaia’s sake, he can’t even blame the location.

Something damp but warm drops onto the couch next to him. Zack frowns and looks up, only to have another damp, warm body bookend him. “More towels?” he says uncertainly, because those do appear to be missing.

“No, we found them,” Tifa says, very naked. “But it’s a little cold in here.”

“Yeah, I thought you said Midgar was warmer,” Cloud says, also naked.

“Oh, it is, I can turn the thermostat u—” Zack starts, and then catches himself just as Tifa starts to sigh. “Or, you know, the bedroom’s a lot less drafty.”

“Yeah, it is,” Cloud says, and then he pulls a pillow and a folded blanket out from behind him. “So what are you doing out here?”

Well, Zack was going to give up his bed, because the couch folds out into a single and his bed’s a full, and also, he didn’t want it to feel like they were trading sex for a place to stay. But…okay, maybe they’re good on that front. “No idea, I’m an idiot,” he says, as Cloud and Tifa push him up. “Can I take a stab at fixing it?”

“Not like we came here for the scenery,” Tifa says dryly, pulling him into the other room.

* * *

Zack Just…Has to

“This is great. Seriously,” Zack starts, and then tries not to. He really does…and then he silently prepares to get thrown out of his own room. “But I’m just going to break something if I can’t just—”

“Vincent’s been coming to Nibelheim since we were kids,” Tifa says, from where she’s snuggled against Zack’s pecs. “Maybe?”

“Yeah, something like that. He doesn’t really say when he’s going to be in or anything, you just notice him,” Cloud says, sounding sleepily comfortable under Zack’s arm. “I mean, if he wants you to notice him. I kind of accidentally scared off an aurochs he was hunting when we first met, so he took me home to my mom.”

“He doesn’t talk a ton, but he can be nice,” Tifa adds. “He and Zangan have tea sometimes. And he got Cloud his sword, and after that people stopped being so mean to Cloud and his mom.”

“Okay, that’s nice of him,” Zack says, taking all of that in. “And so…you still had no idea what the guy does for a living?”

“Well, we’d talk about it a little, between me and Cloud, but we weren’t going to ask him. He told us he comes there to get away from work so that would’ve been rude,” Tifa says, raising her head and frowning. “He did his thing and we did ours, and I guess now he told you he’s dating the General?”

Zack opens his mouth, then pauses.

Cloud raises his head. “So you haven’t asked?”

“Um. No,” Zack admits. “I mean, Seph put in all the paperwork and officially, Valentine’s listed in all the right places, but…uh, no, I don’t—I mean, they seem cool, so I don’t think I need to…okay, okay, I get it.”

“You good, then?” Cloud says, frowning like he’s genuinely concerned about Zack’s mental state and that hand wandering around near Zack’s groin isn’t, well, wandering. Or shifting the blankets so Tifa’s breasts just keep rising up out of them, right into Zack’s peripheral vision. “Was there something else you wanted to know?”

“Oh, I get it,” Zack can’t help saying, because this is some blatant manipulation here, and he’s not dumb. He’s just…being manipulated, blatantly, with Tifa’s hand in on it now too, and actually, he is good with it. “Yeah. Good. I’m good.”

“Great,” Cloud says, and then pulls the blankets up over all of them.

Chapter 8: Interlude: Vincent Comes Back from a Business Trip

When Sephiroth arrives at his quarters, nothing seems immediately out of place but he pauses as soon as the door opens, catching its edge and holding it from swinging fully wide as he puts his hand to Masamune. Then he lets go of the door and takes his phone out to check both his messages and the activity log on the suite’s security systems. No clues th—no, there’d been a grocery delivery earlier, and Vincent had signed off on retrieving it from the lobby.

Vincent’s been absent for a few days, which isn’t uncommon, nor is the fact that he’s half a day off his expected return. Being early is rare—Sephiroth’s become used to a nervous Turk sneaking into his last meeting of the day with an apologetic update—but given the lobby log clearly indicates it was Vincent, that shouldn’t be worrying in and of itself. And yet Sephiroth feels a vague sense of unease.

He sets the security systems to keep the lights off as he edges the door open. The living room doesn’t have anything awry, and when he looks in the kitchen, it’s as neat as ever; the first time Zack had been over after Vincent showed up, he’d commented that now it looks like a morgue two people eat breakfast in, but Sephiroth appreciates Vincent’s tidiness. It makes it that much more apparent when something’s amiss.

The groceries are all put away, though Sephiroth is a little surprised when he sees the quantities: both fridge and freezer are almost full. Vincent will answer questions when asked, and of course Sephiroth could always simply storm into Tseng’s office, but Vincent’s actions are often more telling. When he returns, he always cooks the first night, and the amount of food he cooks lets Sephiroth gauge how long he intends to be around. They both need a high-calorie diet but this is more than enough for a week, and as far as Sephiroth knows, there’s no need for him to ferry leftovers to any of the other Firsts as bribes.

Sephiroth exits the kitchen and walks directly towards the laundry room, which is positioned to have access to two maintenance passages Vincent occasionally uses. But he’s only just passed the doorway to the bedroom when he smells blood.

“It’s not mine,” comes Vincent’s rough mutter.

The blood smells several hours old at this point, dry and stale. Sephiroth exhales, then resets the lighting system and takes off Masamune. He sets his sword on the wall rack and goes into the bathroom, where he finds Vincent curled up in the bottom of the bathtub, not the shower, with one bloody boot print on the floor in front of it and blood crusted all about the front edge of the tub. Vincent’s missing his coat, and when he hauls himself up, grunting tiredly, his suitcoat flaps open to show a gory mess smeared over his chest and side.

“Not most of it,” Vincent amends as Sephiroth bites back a sigh and takes a hazmat bag out from under the sink. He drags matted hair back from his face, then starts to pull at his shoes. “Tseng already has a team out. SOLDIER probably will get a post-mortem, but he knows what he’s doing and he’s not arguing with me about it.”

Sephiroth hands the man the bag and then goes back into the bedroom to call Lazard. He’ll still want the unredacted briefing, and also, he’ll want it to go directly to him rather than to be circulated among all the Firsts. Lazard briefly sounds perturbed about it and talking him down wastes two minutes, after which Sephiroth tosses the phone onto the kitchen table. He takes his coat and gloves off and then returns to help Vincent, who’s stripped himself and relocated to the shower, wash off.

Vincent generally doesn’t seek out medical treatment unless he’s sustained the kind of injury that renders him incapable of performing surgery on himself. His accelerated healing is on par with Sephiroth’s own, but even Sephiroth goes to SOLDIER medical to ensure things like ligaments and bones are properly aligned; Vincent has an impressive working knowledge of field surgery and a steady hand, and his anatomy is admittedly more unusual than Sephiroth’s, so he doesn’t seem to suffer from the lack of surgical attention. Sephiroth still feels better once he’s had a look himself, and decided no major joints were implicated.

“I’m going to put in an order with that Gongagan grill Zack dragged us to,” Sephiroth tells Vincent as he hands the man a towel. “Grilled liver or grilled heart?”

“There are steaks in the fridge,” Vincent observes.

Sephiroth snorts. “You can’t possibly cook tonight, and anyone could read your iron levels in your gums.”

“Liver,” Vincent says, with a faintly bemused air.

They move to the kitchen, where Sephiroth hands Vincent a pitcher of water as he logs into his work tablet and finishes off a few matters before the weekend. Vincent doesn’t ask what he’s frowning at, but gets up at one point to get Sephiroth a glass. Sephiroth’s in the middle of an email exchange with Genesis that needs to end before he just orders the man onto sewer duty, and he doesn’t notice till the glass is set down by him that Vincent’s sliced up a lime for it.

“Is proving your ability to totter around a kitchen regardless of health status part of Wutaian hospitality customs?” Sephiroth asks, taking the glass.

Vincent sits back down and drops a lime slice into his own glass. “As much as it seems to be SOLDIER’s custom to pretend Curaga overdoses are impossible. Is your mission for Corel still set for Tuesday? I haven’t caught up on my messages since eight this morning.”

Amusement and irritation both tug at Sephiroth. Either way, Genesis’ stupid proposals seem far less interesting, and Sephiroth almost wishes he could let the man walk into the political trap Heidegger’s laying for him. “Yes, it is, and I take it you’ll have some kind of herbal soup ready to clear up my overdose when I return.”

“Those soups are disgusting, and the only good I ever had out of them was a few sick days away from school,” Vincent says evenly. He drains a third of his glass, glances at the clock on his phone, and then sets the glass down. The pitcher beside him is nearly empty. “I told Rufus he can pay for someone else to cover next week. I don’t plan to go out again till next Sunday at earliest.”

Vincent will occasionally do that, draw a line in the sand, and so far Sephiroth has never seen anyone successfully make him cross one. He’s better at managing his health in that sense than any of the Firsts, however much they all take turns scolding each other for not asking for cover. “And how did he take that?”

“Are you planning to drop in on him right before you fly out?” Vincent says, and then he smiles at Sephiroth. “He’s not nearly as difficult to deal with as his father was. Tseng had already talked him half-around by the time I reported in. And if you do, you’re leaving yourself open to favoritism charges.”

“You’re not in my chain of command, Vincent, I can’t favor you by definition,” Sephiroth mutters, sending Genesis an email that should end it, along with Angeal on copy. Then the lobby pings, signaling that their food has arrived.

He goes down to retrieve it, and when he returns, Vincent is still sitting at the kitchen table, his glass now two-thirds empty and the pitcher entirely so. The man can be surprisingly talkative when he wants to be—he regularly indulges Angeal in discussions about gardening, of all things—but he’s perfectly at ease with silence even when he’s not exploiting his inhuman characteristics. It can still frustrate Sephiroth, but at the moment, coming off that debate with Genesis, a little quiet is soothing.

They eat together, and then Vincent retires to the bedroom without any prompting. Sephiroth has only seen him in this poor a condition once before, but if that forms a pattern with this time, he’ll do most of his healing while he’s asleep; he’s already changed into a loose black sleeping robe.

There are, unfortunately, a few more emails sitting in Sephiroth’s inbox. When he finally wraps them all up, it’s still early evening, but he’s not inclined to go out. He does consider taking Masamune down to the building’s training room, but in the end nixes that as well and instead readies himself for bed.

“Early,” Vincent murmurs, one eye cracking open as Sephiroth crawls up beside him. He moves his arm unnecessarily out of the way—but it’s a feint, and when Sephiroth pointedly pauses to shift the pillow, Vincent lazily flips his hand over and suddenly has his fingers lying across the side of Sephiroth’s throat. “It’s not as bad as it looked, I only didn’t have time to eat till I landed, and then sleeping seemed more appealing.”

“I’m not purely motivated by lust, Valentine,” Sephiroth says, though he can’t help half-closing his eyes as Vincent lightly strokes along his pulse. “I’m sure I’ll survive one night of you not taking me over the table on your return.”

Vincent snorts, and keeps petting Sephiroth. His fingers drift further and further, till they’re drawing along Sephiroth’s collarbone, pushing back his hair. “Good, because I was planning on that in the morning, when you aren’t going to be antagonizing Rufus over something he genuinely couldn’t control. And I don’t like him, I only like him better than his father.”

“Not a high bar,” Sephiroth mutters, but when Vincent’s thumb runs across the top of his shoulder, then loops back to press at the base of his skull, right where the muscles that cover his scalp converge—he sighs, sighs and tilts his head into the slow, warm tingling that spreads out from that point. “If you want.”

A low, lingering rumble stirs out of the other man. He moves his thumb in short slicing motions along the muscle, while his fingers flow up through Sephiroth’s hair, working along the tingling lines so that they sluice out tension Sephiroth had hadn’t even been aware of. Sephiroth tilts his head into it, then fully opens his eyes as he feels Vincent shift up along the bed.

Vincent’s hand slips back down and around, curling over his throat. Not pinning him, not yet, but it’s a hint in that direction. They aren’t going to have sex tonight, but Sephiroth shivers under his hand. Shivers, and lies still, and waits as Vincent pulls out a few things.

A collar, more decorative than restraining, the black leather band clinging to Sephiroth’s throat. He swallows to make the ring depending from its front tease up from the dip between the two wings of his clavicle, and Vincent flicks his tongue out to catch the ring, letting it tug at the collar as Sephiroth arches lazily against the bed. “As if it’s only what I want,” Vincent murmurs.

His tongue-tip tickles at the underside of Sephiroth’s jaw, then unthreads from the ring and back into his mouth. He clips a braided-leather leash to the ring and then loops the other end to the ring he pulls out of the wall above the pillows. Then he drops his hands to Sephiroth’s thighs, rounding over them and digging into their backs with his nails as Sephiroth kisses him.

Vincent allows it for a few seconds. Then he digs his nails in again, and this time he rakes his left hand up Sephiroth’s leg and then skates its nails off the buttock, making Sephiroth gasp. One nail leaves a stripe so raw that Sephiroth wonders for a moment if the man let it go to a claw—then Vincent’s hand returns, rubbing innocently over the abused flesh as if it has no idea the kind of stinging heat it’s drawing up.

“You want me to sleep like this,” Sephiroth can’t help saying in disbelief, as Vincent eels down his torso.

He pulls his arms up by his head, then grabs at the man’s abandoned pillow as Vincent’s long fingers drift up his cock. It’s only starting to be interested, but if Vincent keeps touching it like that—and then Sephiroth lets out a harsh, caught breath as a thick layer of rubber is squeezed down its length. The pressure is welcome only for the barest second, and then it’s uncompromising, not letting up even as Vincent plays with him, puffing at the steadily-sensitizing head and massaging his ball sac.

“Yes,” Vincent says as he slides back up. He takes hold of Sephiroth’s wrists just as one moves down the pillow. “Sleep like this, and I fuck you in the morning.”

Then he lets go. Sephiroth bites his lip and tries to still his hitching hips. He’s been teased far worse, and Vincent is probably thinking that, as he casually knees his thigh between Sephiroth’s legs, letting it press Sephiroth’s newly-sheathed cock back between Sephiroth’s own thighs, and then closes his eyes. Sephiroth stares at him for a minute or so, torn between frustration and yes, arousal, and then he snorts and tucks his head over Vincent’s.

It's actually easier to fall asleep than he was expecting. He generally sleeps better around the other man, something they don’t talk about but that occasionally sees Vincent showing up to SOLDIER barracks in outlying towns ‘for observation.’ Sephiroth hasn’t made up his mind who’s tipping the man off, Angeal or the Turks, but he doesn’t hold it against Vincent.

He does hold it a little against the man that Vincent always seems to wake up first. Sephiroth’s training is ingrained to the point of instinct now, and so how he routinely manages to miss being manhandled by the other man is—nagging. He wishes he knew how Vincent does it.

And the man fully exploits it, waking Sephiroth up with a long sucking kiss after he’s already braided Sephiroth’s hair. Two braids along the sides, merging into one thick one down the back, with little metal rings worked into it at regular intervals that ripple coolly against Sephiroth’s back. The light touches made Sephiroth shudder, less because of what they feel like than for what they mean, and as if sensing it, Vincent drapes one arm around and tugs at the lowest one, swinging it across the tops of Sephiroth’s buttocks.

Sephiroth moans into the other man’s mouth, then rolls over onto his back as Vincent sits up over him. He blinks away the remaining traces of sleep and studies the man’s face as Vincent reaches for something at the side: the lips are their usual color, and the whites of Vincent’s eyes aren’t clouded over anymore. Vincent glances at him, then smiles more widely than usual, letting Sephiroth see his gums.

“Well, then you’re fit to keep me busy,” Sephiroth observes, before stretching lazily under him.

Vincent retains his smile, although his lips relax so he’s not baring his teeth as much. He still looks hungry, sitting astride Sephiroth, his gaze enjoying every move Sephiroth makes as he resumes playing. He takes the leash off the ring and wraps it around Sephiroth’s wrists, then pulls Sephiroth’s hands up to his mouth and leisurely twines his tongue around each thumb and finger, a hot, tight coil that slowly pulls down each length. He never pulls hard enough to pop a knuckle, only enough to make that tug felt on the joint, a tug that plucks strings running all the way down into Sephiroth’s cock, doubly trapped in its sheath and under Vincent’s buttocks.

Sephiroth’s panting by the time he’s done, and Vincent has to pinch one nipple to draw Sephiroth’s attention to what he’s being told to do. “Open yourself up,” Vincent says as he crawls back to the far end of the bed.

Grunting, Sephiroth pushes himself up against the pillows, then pulls up his knees. He spreads them so Vincent has the view he likes, pushing his spit-slicked fingers against his hole till it yields to three of them. Vincent rarely lets out the wings when they’re in Midgar but when he rakes his eyes over Sephiroth like that, Sephiroth’s mind paints them behind him, huge predatory shadows arching inescapably over him. His hips start to jerk down onto his fingers.

Vincent slides back up and pulls his hands away, ignoring the needy whine that slips out of him, and his cock, rolling heavily in its rubbery prison. He wipes off Sephiroth’s hands on the sheets and then unties them, but only so that he can pull on black latex gloves that go a few inches above the elbow. When he puts something like that on after he’s sucked at Sephiroth’s fingers, it feels as if he’s trapping the sensation of his mouth against Sephiroth’s skin, that taunting swirl coming to life again and again when Sephiroth flexes against the gloves.

Sephiroth hikes his knees up against the wall. It’s a nice display, Vincent looks at it, but then he pulls Sephiroth down onto his belly, hauling Sephiroth’s arms behind him and then lining them up so that his hands are lying against the tops of his buttocks. He could just reach between them and finger himself—if Vincent didn’t slide on a leather binder, tightening it so that his forearms are pressed firmly together and losing him a key inch.

Then Vincent licks at his hole, tongue running over and not in, no matter how much Sephiroth twists his hips. “You said you’d fuck me,” Sephiroth mutters.

“Yes,” Vincent answers equably, as he shoves in a plug thick and long enough to stop the breath in Sephiroth’s throat for a moment.

When Sephiroth manages to jar it loose and exhale, Vincent’s already moved on, pulling him up by the leash and then walking him to the kitchen where he kneels by the table in front of one of the chairs. Vincent took along a handful of leather straps and wraps them around Sephiroth now, connecting the ends of each to a ring braided into Sephiroth’s hair. The three banding his chest and belly aren’t doing anything more than reminding him they’re there, but the last one is tied to straps running to each ankle so he can’t get up. And Vincent’s tucked the braid under his bound arms, ensuring that if he pulls at them, it’ll rub over the plug.

Sephiroth squirms anyway, rocking between the needling pain that constantly shifts across his scalp and the ache in his cock, the growing strain on his shoulders and elbows and the warm burn starting to flare up his thighs. Vincent doesn’t stop him until the man sits down with his breakfast, and then he does it by bypassing the leash slapping against Sephiroth’s inside thighs and wrapping his tail around Sephiroth’s throat just above the collar.

“Eat first,” Vincent says, holding a spoon out, and he smiles with his canines showing when Sephiroth hisses in frustration.

But Sephiroth opens his mouth. He and Vincent alternate spoonfuls, his taking longer because he has to find the space between pants to swallow, until nourishment aside, he’s swaying with dizziness on his knees. Vincent’s tail corrects the angle of his head, and then the man brushes his thumb across Sephiroth’s mouth, wiping away the traces.

Sephiroth licks at that thumb, then noses at Vincent’s hand as the man slides forward in the chair, pulling his knees apart to wall in Sephiroth between them. Vincent’s cock rises up towards Sephiroth’s mouth and Sephiroth parts his lips in a ragged moan for it.

One of their phones buzzes. Vincent’s tail-tip flicks up over Sephiroth’s mouth; Sephiroth startles, but then sucks that in, nursing it slowly as Vincent lets out a surprised, throaty noise. He looks down at Sephiroth as the phone stops buzzing, eyes molten—and the damn phone buzzes again.

Vincent tenses a little across the shoulders, then looks across the table. Then, for some reason, he reaches over and picks up the phone—Sephiroth’s phone, which he’d left by his work tablet. “Lucrecia,” Vincent says, looking at it.

Sephiroth releases the tip of Vincent’s tail to mutter a curse. Then, dragging his mind back to rationality, he jerks up his chin. “Put her on or she’ll keep calling.”

Vincent does so, holding the phone to Sephiroth’s ear as Sephiroth’s mother informs him that one of Hojo’s long-missing assistants has popped up in Corel and he needs to include finding them in his mission. He promises to do so, half-wondering why she can never just message through their private VPN—he understands why she’d bring this directly to him, but not the channel she habitually uses—and then tells her he’ll update her once he’s back.

His mother at least is completely uninterested in small talk, and once she’s assured she’s been paid attention to, she doesn’t hold him. Or she shouldn’t, but just as Vincent’s thumb moves to end the call, Lucrecia clears her throat. “Vincent, there’s something you should know as well.”

“What?” Vincent says, with only a slight pause.

“Dr. Kusakabe’s expected to attend the Genome Re-engineering conference next month,” Lucrecia says crisply.

A slight furrow appears between Vincent’s brows. “I’m aware,” he says.

“You should be more than that,” she says and then she thankfully hangs up.

Sephiroth lets out an aggravated noise, and then looks up as Vincent runs his hand down the side of his face. The other man leans over, phone clattering on the table, and strokes both hands down Sephiroth’s front, starting at the shoulders and then detouring to slide sideways along each leather band. His fingertips press at them so that the tension flows back through the strap to tug at Sephiroth’s hair. “Are you distracted?” he asks, coming to Sephiroth’s nipples. “Are you thinking about her?”

When Sephiroth opens his mouth, Vincent twists both nipples roughly. Sephiroth cries out, then shudders as his body clenches down around the plug, and Vincent strokes further down him, teasing at his abdominals and then wrapping one hand over his cock sheath tightly enough to be felt through it. “No,” Sephiroth gasps.

“Good,” Vincent murmurs, and then he stoops close enough to put his mouth by Sephiroth’s ear. “I’m not.”

Sephiroth sucks his breath, then turns his head to rub his cheek against Vincent. He noses fervently at the other man till Vincent sits back, and then he gratefully takes the man’s cock into his mouth.

When he starts to suck at it, the tail around his throat tightens. Sephiroth stops, jerking on his knees with the effort, and just holds Vincent’s cock in his mouth as Vincent lazily strokes his cock over the sheath. “I said I’d fuck you,” Vincent says. “I didn’t say you could come.”

Sephiroth moans around the prick in his mouth.

Vincent rumbles in his throat, amused, as his fingers torment the head of Sephiroth’s prick, rubbing over its swollen curve. “But I’ll let you choose. You can come, but either it’s dry on my cock, or wet in my hand.”

A haze washes over Sephiroth, heavy and soaking like the southern heat of Gongaga. He sweats under it, blinking blearily at the other man, until Vincent does him the favor of pulling the cock out of his mouth. Even then, he can’t clear his throat enough until Vincent gives his leash—the leather one—a tug.

“On your cock,” Sephiroth rasps.

Vincent doesn’t look surprised. He uncoils his tail from Sephiroth’s throat and then pulls the chair around to behind Sephiroth, where he unclips the ankle straps from Sephiroth’s hair and then pushes Sephiroth’s head down with one hand between the shoulderblades. His other hand reaches under Sephiroth’s trembling fingers and flicks at the end of the plug, which immediately vibrates at a speed that has Sephiroth hauling his legs apart, trying to bow himself low enough to rut against the floor. And then Vincent’s fingers push up against his perineum, milking him from the outside.

In short order he’s left a pool of come on the floor, and his cock and balls are so sore that just the trickles of sweat over them make Sephiroth shudder uncontrollably. He’s dead weight as Vincent pulls him up to bend over the table, removes the plug, and then slides into him in one motion.

Then he’s a living, crackling wire, writhing and gasping as the rubber’s finally peeled away from his cock. Vincent doesn’t use his hand to stroke over it, but his tail, its coils pulling relentlessly over the overtaxed length of it; Vincent does use his fingers to keep pressing up behind Sephiroth’s balls, working him till he’s flat against the table, not remotely in control of his own body. When he comes, dry, it’s Vincent working through him.

Vincent climaxes at some point as well, because Sephiroth’s buttocks and thighs are sticky with the man’s seed when the other man bundles them into the shower. Sephiroth gets his feet a little under him, holding onto Vincent’s shoulders as Vincent works the last of the rings out of his hair, letting it clink on the floor at their feet.

“I doubt I’ll have the time for Rufus anyway,” he says, and Vincent’s hands pause in the suds clinging to Sephiroth’s back. “My mother—that wasn’t a farewell, at the end.”

“I know,” Vincent says, and then shrugs as Sephiroth pushes back to look at him. There’s a slightly different quality to his amusement, less about his knowledge and more about his…sympathy. But still he doesn’t seem terribly concerned. “I know why she’d connect me and them, I don’t know why she’s bringing them up.”

Sephiroth considers the other man for a few minutes. Vincent will answer questions, but depending on his mood, they can range from a full, if succinct, explanation to redirection to classified files to distractions. On his side, he rarely asks questions of Sephiroth, and even if that’s because he has alternative methods of finding the answers he wants…most people don’t avail themselves of the alternatives. They’re not satisfied unless they have the word from Sephiroth himself, because they’re not actually looking for the explanation so much as a proof of something else.

Vincent doesn’t seem to require Sephiroth to prove himself in that way, and for that alone, Sephiroth would want to favor him. So Sephiroth always finds himself weighing this, when he wants to ask.

But he also is the person he is, with the role he has, and both of those demand certain questions be asked. “Dr. Kusakabe isn’t currently indexed in your file.”

“Because it’s not a work issue,” Vincent says, and from the way he structures it, Sephiroth assumes he'll end there. He does wipe at Sephiroth a few times before he looks up again. “It’s a family matter.”

As far as any official records Sephiroth has ever seen are concerned, Vincent has no family. He has dozens and dozens of assumed family histories, but every single one of them has ended up being a cover of some kind. So if Lucrecia is actually familiar with Vincent’s true lineage...but Vincent’s just given Sephiroth some of that knowledge as well. Which matters.

“My mother is a compulsive meddler,” Sephiroth finally says.

Vincent smiles, still unconcerned—it truly seems that Lucrecia irritates him but doesn’t intimidate him, and this matters too, even more so—and when Sephiroth kisses him, he runs one hand through Sephiroth’s unraveling braid before settling it on Sephiroth’s shoulder. “I know,” he says. “Better to deal with it and get it out of the way. I’ll find a time for after you’re back from Corel.”

Sephiroth sighs. “Thank you,” he says. He pauses, then dips down and kisses Vincent again.

Chapter 9: Interlude: Sephiroth in the Field

For an antisocial amoral mad scientist, Hojo had managed to have a fair number of other scientists cycling in and out of his lab teams before those had finally been dissolved, and while none of them inherited his research in full, enough was carried out into the world to periodically make explosive shitshows out of routine SOLDIER missions. Corel ends up being one of them, to the point that when the Turks show up, Genesis is actually grateful.

“And where in the advance briefing did it say that we had rogue human subject experimentation?” he demands as soon as the suits pile out of their chopper.

“Hey, nice to see you too, Rhapsodos, not like we didn’t just dodge surface-to-air missiles to get to you,” Reno drawls. He shoulders that silly little stick of his and then raises his other hand to wave at the little blonde girl who’s been nervously but determinedly shadowing all the tactical discussions. “Elena! Yo! How’s it going?”

“Not great, I mean, General Sephiroth’s gotten everyone entrenched away from the reactors so at least we can be sure those won’t offline, but these clones have extra limbs, and it’s like fighting giant spiders except without the venom and the webbing but the multiple arms are bad enough,” the girl babbles, and then she cringes as Genesis turns around. “Sorry, I just haven’t slept in three days and that’s what happens to me when that happens.”

“Where’s the General?” says a third voice, crisply neutral, and Genesis bites back his irritation.

Valentine always dresses so impeccably that Genesis can’t help feeling the sting of jealousy upon seeing it, and even now, with oily green smoke rising out of the old mine shafts around him, he looks fit for a state dinner. But also, he’s a range specialist, and that’s actually what they need. “This way, and try not to drop your ducklings down a waste chute,” Genesis mutters.

They find Sephiroth crouching near one of the shafts and studying those exceptionally outdated maps of the mines for the umpteenth time. When he sees who Genesis has brought, his pupils dilate in surprise for a brief moment. Then his professionalism takes over.

“They started up the back-up generator, and it appears it’s entirely self-contained,” he says. “We can’t cut it off.”

“Ventilation?” Valentine asks.

“The tunnels are too unstable. We might be able to keep it to just this area or we could create a sinkhole right up to the city,” Genesis sighs. “Also, we haven’t recovered all the wounded yet.”

“There is a small grate, and fifteen yards behind it is one of the recirculation pipes,” Sephiroth says as he swipes on his tablet. “If it was holed and leaked out, we could time it with storming the passage here and then lay explosives inside, which would have less of a footprint.”

It’d also be far more likely to result in many more casualties, and while they’ve only had a few deaths so far, the teams they’ve brought are all majority-wounded at the moment. More teams won’t arrive in time, which means when Sephiroth says ‘we,’ he means himself. Genesis fully plans on a front-row seat if he has to duel the other man for it, but he’s still not looking forward to it: hand-to-hand fighting is what he was born to do, but the thought of doing it in an unstable underground tunnel full of hazardous waste against a rabid genetically modified militia makes his lips curl with disgust.

“Uh, sir, the cooling water,” Elena says.

“Did you not bring your own rations with you?” Genesis says, exasperated.

“That’s not what she means,” Valentine says, looking at her. He also waves Reno back as the man slopes up like he’s going to try and attack Genesis with his little stick. “They left that out?”

“Not really, it’s more like I think the acid’s eaten through in a few places, but since that also lets the groundwater bubble up, they haven’t noticed the pipes are leaking. But I think if you shot at the right angle, the water pressure would do the rest and wreck it?” Elena says, as her eyes weave a little in her skull. She rubs at the side of her face, but they don’t focus any better. “It’s not on the original plans so I’ve been trying to draw it, but I’m, um, not a drafter.”

Sephiroth hands her the tablet, which shows an overlay on said original plans. “This is the corrected version so far. Point out what you mean.”

Elena studies it for a few seconds, then pokes tentatively at one spot. It’s in a not fully-mapped section, so Sephiroth grabs a radio and orders a drone recon. A few minutes later, Valentine is nodding over a grimy but adequate video feed.

“If it caves here and here, then this opens up,” he says, pulling the map back up and pointing at it.

Sephiroth thinks it over. “Rhapsodos, go get the charges and be back in ten minutes or I’m leaving without you.”

Valentine’s already handed the tablet back and has stepped away to assemble some sort of long-barreled gun. Then all of them blink and look up when there’s a startled exclamation.

“Whoa, I go away for one Curaga and everything happens,” Zack says, trotting up. His head turns as he circles around Valentine. “Also, seriously, where did that come from? You have magical pocket space or something?”

“Why?” Valentine asks blankly. An entirely reasonable response, in Genesis’ opinion.

“Zack goes and gets the charges, you and I go scout while he’s catching up,” Genesis says to Sephiroth as he tightens his sword-belt. Then he smirks at Sephiroth’s faint sigh. “Oh, come now, as if you aren’t as excited as I am to finally shut up that raving troll doll. I’ll see you at the bottom, war hero.”

Sephiroth’s response is to draw Masamune and step into the shaft. Cursing, Genesis hurries past Valentine and jumps in after him.

* * *

Two hours of stabbing genetically-modified militiamen later, Sephiroth kicks the last body over and then heads back to the surface. He’s caked in blood, to the point that his coat is dragging so much against his arms he shrugs it off and immediately feels as if he’s taken off a full pack of gear. He leaves that in the tunnel and then climbs out into the open air.

But not fresh, with the smell of ruptured fuel lines and burned flesh still saturating it. A weary-looking medic starts to offer him a mask, but he waves it away in favor of stumbling towards the ops tents, where they should have air filters going. “Send them all down for General Rhapsodos, he's overseeing clean-up,” he orders.

The medic salutes and then slips the mask back into a box. Sephiroth loops around him, issues a few more orders to passing soldiers, and then pauses as he catches sight of Reno. The man generally doesn’t show any signs of being intimidated even when he’d be better off, but when he looks over Sephiroth, his face freezes for a moment. Then he lifts his hand in a negative signal. “We’re good, I’m just waiting for Elena to get her lungs washed out,” he says.

Sephiroth doesn’t want to expand any energy he doesn’t need to at this point, so he simply nods and turns into the tent. He gets a shot of Curaga and a hydration pouch into himself, and is contemplating how few steps he needs to reach one of the showering stands when a horizontal surface in an empty corner presents itself. The Curaga truly hits him at that point, and his eyes are closed before his head finishes sinking into the cot.

When he wakes, he has company. Known company, so his hand doesn’t crawl for Masamune but instead goes blindly across the cot to grip around something small and rounded and metal, with a top that slides under his fingers to let out a delicious aroma.

Once he’s eaten the contents of the tin, Sephiroth looks up. Vincent’s sitting with his legs folded to prop a tablet across his knees, with two identical tins stacked beside him. He glances over the tablet as he picks up one and cracks its lid, revealing another homemade Wutaian dish inside.

Sephiroth’s stomach tries to rip up his throat before he swallows it back. “I should shower first, or I’ll be eating their blood with it,” he mutters, wiping his matted hair back with his free hand.

“You’d be bleeding into it anyway when the Curaga hits you and you hit your head on the ground,” Vincent says calmly, pushing the tin over to Sephiroth.

“That already happened,” Sephiroth admits. He looks at the tin for a second, then gives in and takes it. Any other time he’d be disgusted at the way he slurps and sucks it down, barely chewing, but right now he can’t bring himself to care. “Am I still bleeding?”

Vincent’s expression doesn’t change. “No,” he says.

He picks something from the side and puts it on the bed: two green Curaga pills. Slower-release than the shots, and for a moment Sephiroth debates whether to instead roll over and go find one. Then he picks a pill up, swallows it, and levers himself off the bed.

Someone’s reconfigured things while he slept, the rest of the medical tent sectioned off while a shower stand’s been set up in a plastic bubble just big enough, if Sephiroth squats and resigns himself to his hair picking up a little grit from the ground. Which is better than blood, so he twists up his hair as best he can and then scrapes at himself till the water’s running more or less clear.

The second Curaga pill is no longer on the cot when he comes out. Vincent is, but he must have moved at some point because the bedding’s been changed and he has a spare pair of trousers for Sephiroth and another three tins. “How many of these did you bring?” Sephiroth asks, managing to slow long enough to employ chopsticks with these tins. “Genesis hasn’t seen them yet, has he?”

“I think they’ll all be empty by the time he’s able to come back up,” Vincent says dryly, as he takes a finished one from Sephiroth and adds it to the stack on the ground by the bed. “Did you want me to bring some for him?”

“No,” Sephiroth says without thinking, much to Vincent’s amusement.

Then he pauses, but…still no. Genesis does deserve a reward for assisting with this mess, but he can have it when they’re back in Midgar, and preferably it’ll be Angeal getting it for him. Sephiroth finishes the rest of the tins without any sense of regret whatsoever, then rolls his tired shoulders as he listens to the noises from the rest of the tent. Nothing seems amiss, though as ranking general he should see for himself.

“Fair made it back up fifteen minutes ago, and he’s running above-ground ops,” Vincent says quietly.

Sephiroth twists around. The other man doesn’t move, aside from two fingers he occasionally passes over his tablet. But he does settle ever-so-slightly when Sephiroth grunts and swings his legs up onto the cot. And when Sephiroth drops his head on Vincent’s thigh, Vincent moves at that point, straightening his legs so Sephiroth can drape himself more comfortably over Vincent’s lap.

“Shoot anyone who tries to come in,” Sephiroth mutters.

Vincent makes an amused noise. “That would be extremely tactless of me.”

“Well, then handle it however you see fit. The General is resting,” Sephiroth says.

Something leans against the back of his head: the tablet. Then a finger slides between him and it, while more wrap over his shoulder. Vincent rubs his thumb along the side of Sephiroth’s throat, slowly stroking Sephiroth back to sleep.

* * *

“…already sent a report to Heidegger, of all people, so I don’t see why SOLDIER can’t provide me with a basic summary,” Lucrecia says, with great emphasis and absolutely no sense whatsoever. She’s brilliant at her work, which has absolutely nothing to do with crisis management, let alone military deployments. “Even I can’t work blind, Sephiroth.”

Or, for that matter, managing her own son. Flawed as Sephiroth is, in this area Genesis has to admit he can find no fault in the utter blankness of the expression Sephiroth turns to the screen. He certainly wouldn’t be able to keep himself so composed when they’re still pulling bodies out of the tunnels. “That isn’t the expectation, Mother,” Sephiroth says calmly. “When we’ve had the time to review the files we’ve recovered—”

“You have personnel running all over the place, I can see them. Why aren’t they reading those files first?” Lucrecia snaps. “Don’t you think understanding which botched genes they stole from Hojo is important?”

“They’re dead, Lucrecia. The genes are not going to be departing any time soon,” Valentine says as he comes in, and with enough irritation that even Lucrecia takes notice.

Although it only fazes her for a moment. “No, they’ll be degrading because they’re in corpses,” she retorts. “Do I have to refresh your memory on that?”

“Then send your own team,” Valentine says without so much as blinking. He shuts the door behind him and then hands Sephiroth, who cannot stop blinking at him, a fresh carafe of coffee. “If you want an on-site experimental genetics analysis, why would you ask SOLDIER to take on the work?”

Lucrecia actually falters. She frowns at Valentine long enough that no one can attribute it to the glitchy connection. “All right,” she finally says. “But Heidegger—”

“He only has an early report because he’s the nominal Head of Public Safety and we just made this area safe for the public,” Genesis mutters. “And it’s only a basic sitrep update.”

Thoughtless on his part, because it immediately enlivens Lucrecia with outrage, but in his defense, Sephiroth is holding that damn carafe so the aromas coming out of it are floating directly into his face and he’s just spent the better part of two days in Corel’s old mines. Sephiroth shoots him a reproving look and he sighs and drops his head as he takes the carafe, silently conceding the error.

“Mother,” Sephiroth starts, turning back to the screen.

“Why are you bothering to call anyway?” Valentine decides to go on, leaving Sephiroth blinking at him again. “If you wanted to know ahead of anyone else, you would have just come with us. You never sent in a request, and you can read whatever Heidegger was sent yourself rather than asking us about it.”

Lucrecia’s silent for a long moment. “I want to ensure the severity of this isn’t overlooked,” she finally says. “These people were not only viable but able to sustain themselves in a non-ideal setting. It’s by far the most extensive use of Hojo’s research outside of Shinra anyone’s ever found.”

“Why do you think I came?” Valentine asks dryly.

A paroxysm of rage crosses Lucrecia’s face. Her mouth does open, but surprisingly, she ends the videocall. It’s so sudden that both Sephiroth and Genesis reach for the screen, reflexively assuming it’s a dropped signal, but then Sephiroth’s phone buzzes with an incoming message and his hand detours to that. He glances at it and from the way his expression changes, Genesis knows it’s from Lucrecia.

“She set a briefing for first thing tomorrow,” he mutters. He presses his lips together, then sighs and pushes up from his seat. “Have the medical flights out before that.”

Genesis nods and refills his cup as Sephiroth walks out of the room. It’s only into the hall so that the man can shout down to the people milling around in the ops center next door, but it’s far enough that Genesis sees Valentine contemplate Sephiroth’s drained mug and then the carafe.

“He’ll come back in a moment. Besides, trotting after him with coffee would be an extravagantly wasteful misuse of your skills,” Genesis says, and then can’t help a snort when Valentine turns and gives him an assessing look. Valentine hasn’t been nearly as busy as the rest of them, but he still has had his hands deep enough into this bloody mess. He shouldn’t have the energy to contemplate hidden agendas, let alone look as if he’s considering how much noise he can make before Sephiroth’s exhausted ears pick it up. “I’m not flirting, merely observing that you’ve already secured yourself his attention. Do you have any idea what that woman has been like over the years?”

“Some,” Valentine says dryly.

They called each other, Genesis belatedly remembers. He’s too tired for this, and he shouldn’t be drinking coffee so much as drinking up a moment of peace and quiet. “The first time I met her, she was scolding Sephiroth for not properly preserving on-site evidence,” he says anyway, finishing his cup and then pouring a fresh one. “He’d just tracked myself and Angeal’s mother to the storeroom where the mob had thrown us and killed our guards. He wasn’t even supposed to be there, but when the head of the Turks at the time, what was his name—”

“Veld,” Valentine supplies.

“—asked her what a child was doing on an extraction mission, she told him Sephiroth knew better than he did what they needed to look for, and clearly could handle a sword better,” Genesis says. He pauses and drinks his coffee. “No, that was the last time I ever remember someone trying to tell her they knew her son’s abilities better than she did. He put in his resignation a few months later, I believe.”

Valentine is silent, although he has stopped eyeing the carafe. He’s not a coffee-drinker himself, something about how it interacts with his genetic modifications, but Genesis has seen the man enough now to recognize the traces of fatigue in him.

“I’m still curious how Heidegger survived that,” he finally says, and Genesis snorts again.

“Blackmail, probably. There’s no other way to explain why Rufus’ father kept him around,” Genesis says. “Although if Dr. Crescent wasn’t constantly distracted with finding new enemies for herself, she might have managed to drive him out before this. But people who tell her that have a tendency to take early retirements, too.”

“She was always like that,” Valentine mutters under his breath, as if merely recollecting an unpleasant childhood acquaintance. Ever since the man’s sudden appearance, Genesis has been wondering how on earth the rumor that he and Lucrecia were madly in love could ever have started, but now it occurs to him that Valentine may simply be the only person anyone’s ever seen her decline to conclude an argument with. And for her, that may very well be as close as she can come to an emotion besides utter contempt.

Sephiroth comes back into the room at that point. He pauses and takes them in, but when Genesis raises the carafe and swirls what’s left of the coffee in it, Sephiroth irritably takes it. And then, with considerably less exasperation, the mug that Valentine hands to him. Valentine certainly manages a greater range of expression than Sephiroth’s mother, although one has to watch him for a while to detect it. But once one has…

“We should talk about how to staff the post-mortems,” Sephiroth says. “She’s going to send a team now.”

“It’ll keep her out of the political side of the fallout,” Valentine says with a slight shrug, and from the slow way Sephiroth looks up, Genesis knows the man’s thoughts hadn’t even gotten that far. “It also would be better than trying to read in your teams on Hojo’s methods.”

“No, I don’t disagree,” Sephiroth says, still looking incongruously pleased to be having this discussion.

Well, if Angeal was here…Genesis would appreciate the company but he’d still resent having to stay awake for this. He does care for Sephiroth’s well-being, but since that appears to be well-looked-after, he sees no reason why his own should suffer. “Then since we’re in agreement, perhaps we can skip the glowing congratulations and settle on a plan? If I have to talk to your mother twice in twenty-four hours, Sephiroth, I need more than coffee to ensure a lack of homicide.”

Notes:

So this is what happened with Deepground. And the troll doll refers to Weiss.

Chapter 10: Interlude: Vincent’s Family Is (Not) a Problem

They all owe a lot to Sephiroth’s mother, and Angeal is thankful for her existence every single time he has to drag Genesis down to the medical center because some side-effect of their in vitro treatments is flaring up and he doesn’t have to worry someone on Heidegger’s team is going to jab one of them with a syringe when they aren’t looking. But that doesn’t mean he likes her, or likes the way that she treats her son. Or pretty much anyone else, including Valentine, and Angeal’s…cautiously okay with how Sephiroth is after meeting him but still a little weirded out by the man, to be honest.

“We need to deal with your family,” Lucrecia says before she’s even taken a seat. “Are they still trying to kill you?”

Sephiroth is always halfway to calling in an airstrike when his mother is involved, and Angeal spots the way his forearm twitches in his sleeve as he stares at her. “Glad we made this no-weapons only,” Zack mutters to Angeal, seeing that too.

Valentine has a slightly more muted reaction, and only pauses with his tea a third of the way down from his mouth. Then he sets the cup carefully on the table and reaches for the tablet in front of him; Sephiroth gives him a sharp look as well, then clearly decides Lucrecia’s the bigger problem and turns back to her. “Not actively.”

“Mother, I think we should start a little more topline,” Sephiroth says, picking his words as if they’re pressure-sensitive explosives. “Not everyone in this room is read in. That actually was the point of this meeting.”

“You still haven’t told him everything yet?” Lucrecia says, still looking at Valentine. “Even with what happened in the Kanto last month?”

Tseng had been looking interested, if in a very hands-back, let’s-wait-till-they’re-all-wounded Turk kind of way, but at this he visibly pricks alert. Angeal frowns at that, and then glances at Genesis, but Genesis is looking at Valentine and Lucrecia with unrepentant fascination. He likes Valentine a lot more than Angeal does, although deep down it's not really about needling Sephiroth and more about his love of other people’s drama.

And Valentine, for all his unshakeable calm, does seem to end up in the middle of a lot of that. “Lucrecia, I never told you. You happened to run into my father when he was weak and vulnerable,” Valentine says, as if this is on the same level as swiping his company-designated parking spot. “And I am aware of what’s going on, as it is my family. Why are you suddenly so concerned about it?”

Lucrecia directs a look at Valentine that has withered plenty of credible people, up to and including the man grimacing next to Valentine. If Sephiroth twitches any more, he’s going to rattle Masamune out of its sheath from wherever he’s hidden it—no-weapons only goes so far with Sephiroth—and into the middle of the table, which is how the last meeting Angeal had to go to where Lucrecia was running it ended.

“Because now you’re living with my son, and I admit that I have very few motherly instincts but I do value his sanity,” she says. “And from what I remember, you’re terrible at admitting when your family’s getting out of hand. I need to ensure you’re not going to leave him with some cryptic murder scene to obsess over so I can finally finish kicking Heidegger out of this company.”

“Close your mouth, Zack, this isn’t about you,” Angeal mutters, trying not to look too closely at the other man. If he does, he’s going to laugh, and that’s the wrong reaction. He knows that, but also, he just isn’t going to be able to help himself because this is just. It’s just a lot. And Zack’s expression is going to be that one piece too many.

Zack’s teeth click as he shuts his jaw. Sephiroth almost looks over, but then Valentine, who’d taken that little speech with an oddly thoughtful frown, pushes up in his seat. “Understood,” he says. “As for the Kanto, it’s destabilizing but I have no plans to go to that part of Wutai any time soon.”

“Are you going to do anything about any of it?” Lucrecia demands.

Now Valentine’s starting to look annoyed, and one of the things that weirds Angeal out about him is how he can make that so mundane-looking. Lucrecia drives everyone insane—she doesn’t make them look like they’re barely keeping back an eyeroll, and usually she’s working with a lot less. “What would you like me to do?” he asks. “Kill my way to peace? Then I’d be senior enough I’d have to take a seat on the Heike. That’s not going to keep me in Midgar.”

Tseng suddenly makes a wheezing noise, and when most of them look at him, he doesn’t even look embarrassed about it. He just stares at Valentine, wide-eyed, a stylus dangling limply from one hand, like he’s been frozen in the second right after getting brained.

“Oh, Heike, I think I saw a TV series about that once,” Zack says before Angeal can stop him. “Isn’t that the secret shadow group that secretly tries to manipulate who runs Wutai when they’re not secretly betraying each other all the time?”

Lucrecia swivels slowly to look at Zack, who already looks as if he’s regretting this idiotic attempt to change the mood. “What exactly do you bring to this?” she asks.

“Mother.” Sephiroth all but spits the word out, and then he takes a deep breath and leans forward until Lucrecia looks back at him. She leaves way too much up to other people, as if Sephiroth’s intelligence means all he needs is a logical explanation of a situation, but she does at least pay attention when he addresses her directly. “Can we please return to the meeting agenda?”

Her brows pull together, but before she can snap at him—because also, she apparently believes his intelligence means she doesn’t ever have to tone it down—Valentine sighs and raises his tablet. “I don’t think you need to know exactly which family my mother came from right now, and she started the process of obscuring our origins so I’d like to respect her wishes as long as I can,” he says. “It should be sufficient to know that it’s one of the primary families engaged in the Date revenge cycle.”

“How did you get away from that?” Tseng asks, and he’s sitting ramrod straight now, looking like he wants to write everything Vincent says down in triplicate and then stick it in his personal file to pet in private.

Vincent presses his lips together for a moment. “I went to work for Shinra, and then killed anyone who tried to bring me back until it started to cost them too much. And now I avoid certain parts of Wutai. We can add them to my file, but right now it seems like if any team is likely to go to those, it’d be SOLDIER.”

“I agree, I don’t think this needs to be recorded beyond the memories of the people in this room,” Sephiroth says pointedly. Then he braces himself and turns back to Lucrecia, who’s impatiently tapping her nails against the table. “Mother, did you have something to add?”

“I only wanted to point out that until recently, the major players were against most kinds of genetic modifications, and also didn’t want you because of that,” Lucrecia says. “Which is why I think it’s very concerning that now they’re letting their scientists go to the same conferences I do. Now it’s not simply your problem, Vincent, it’s a general genetics problem and so it’s a Shinra problem, and that’s why I wanted everyone here to hear it. You should do something about that.”

“About…their embrace of science?” Vincent asks, very neutrally.

Lucrecia irritably stabs her finger at her tablet, lighting up its screen. A second later, everyone’s tablet pings simultaneously as they receive files from her. “Yes, exactly. They’re still skittish about it, we should manufacture a lab disaster to scare them off again. We didn’t get rid of Hojo and I’m not starving Heidegger of funding just so your family can spin up a knock-off SOLDIER program with your cells or my son’s cells or some idiocy like that. I just sent you all a list of relevant and accessible researchers. Use it.”

Then she gets up and walks out of the room. As soon as the door closes, Angeal drops his head against the table, blowing out his breath and feeling as if he’s just hiked up a mountain with a full load of gear. Something lands on his knee, and he looks from the hand up the arm to an unusually concerned-looking Genesis. Angeal tries to offer the man a smile, but it comes out stiff enough that Genesis shifts his chair over and moves his hand up onto Angeal’s thigh.

“She always has to be right,” Valentine mutters, his tone making it abundantly clear he doesn’t mean it as a compliment. When Angeal raises his head, the man is flicking at his tablet, reading through something. “Tseng, wait—don’t assign this out, we need to redo this.”

“No, I won’t, because this doesn’t make sense,” Tseng mutters, still visibly twitchy as he peers at his own tablet.

“It isn’t just a list, it’s a strategic proposal,” Sephiroth tells Angeal’s apparently inquiring expression. He still looks pretty shaky himself, although he’s getting better as Valentine tilts the tablet for him. Then he frowns as he scans it. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“She’s usually right on threat assessment, but she never has any idea about how to deploy field teams. We’re ignoring all of this and you can tell me what SOLDIER would want here,” Valentine sighs. He even goes so far as to rub the side of his nose, which makes Sephiroth glance from the tablet to him. Then he drops his hand and notices Sephiroth looking at him.

His brows rise. Sephiroth’s expression doesn’t do anything that Angeal can see, but the corners of Valentine’s mouth move slightly as Sephiroth returns his eyes to the tablet.

“After we’ve fixed this travesty, gentlemen?” Genesis suggests, as he squeezes Angeal’s leg.

Angeal starts laughing and has to put his head back on the table.

* * *

“He could have been a scientist, if he’d wanted,” Sephiroth’s mother had said, without looking up from her work. This is how Sephiroth has always known her, deeply buried in other matters. He has understood from the beginning that while he is a success, success alone is a transitory state, and more than that is necessary to keep her attention. “But he insists that he prefers his chosen profession, despite his family.”

Sephiroth has seen plenty of people crippled and twisted by their insecurities, and has no desire to follow in their footsteps. He would rather start with success than have to strive to recover from failure. But sometimes in his mother’s presence, he will admit to thinking she would be simpler to understand if all she wanted out of people was for them to live up to her expectations of them. “His family is manageable, and I don’t believe either of us—or anyone who matters at Shinra—object to his profession.”

“I didn’t ask you here to understand why you want him to live with you,” Lucrecia had said, and then she’d looked up at him, frowning through the hair that always falls into her eyes. She’d studied him for a few seconds, and it’d been oddly free of her usual impatience. If anything, she’d looked faintly puzzled, as if he’d finally stumped her. “I raised you unconventionally, but with your intelligence it was far more important that you knew yourself without question. The rest you could always determine on your own.”

“You succeeded,” Sephiroth had told her, and he had meant it, despite the difficult relationship they have. She’s his mother and he can’t picture anyone else in her place, nor can he even begin to imagine how he would have turned out without her.

And he is a success. They both know that.

“I respect him,” Lucrecia had finally said. Her fingers were fidgeting, itching to turn back to the tablets scattered before her, but she’d looked at Sephiroth for a moment longer. “I trust he won’t change you, and that you understand you shouldn’t let him. But don’t expect me to ignore the risks he carries simply because of that. He should have dealt with his family ages ago—if Vincent’s sentimental about anything, it’s that, and to his detriment.”

“By her view of sentimental,” Vincent says, once Sephiroth’s finished. He’s thoughtful for a moment, and then he shifts himself against Sephiroth. Deliberately slow, the roll of his hips transmitting a wave of shivery arousal that washes all the way up Sephiroth’s torso as Vincent appears to continue to seriously consider her words.

Sephiroth’s hands drop to his chest, then twitch sharply as both motions stir bright, hot pain in his nipples. He’s lying on his back and Vincent’s been lazily rocking on his cock for the better part of an hour, in between torturing him. As the man does now, bending over till his mouth is only a couple inches over Sephiroth’s fingers and then letting his tongue twist down till it just grazes over one. He’s wetted every one of them, suckling each digit till bare air feels like the coarsest sandpaper against Sephiroth’s skin.

And he’s made Sephiroth hold his hands up for the privilege of it. Sephiroth’s wrists are cuffed across each other, with chains running to clamps on his nipples that twist little burning curls into his breast whenever he moves his arms the slightest bit. And yet when that tongue-tip teases at him, he flexes himself and hauls up his aching forearms—having the bed to brace his elbows has long since passed into exquisitely false hope—till his nipples are throbbing, drawn tautly out from his chest as he slides his fingers between Vincent’s lips.

Vincent smiles around them, taking two in to the hilt, and for a moment the slight tightening of his lips offers a little extra help. But then he simply opens his mouth and despite Sephiroth’s best efforts, despite the way Vincent’s tongue spirals around them, Sephiroth’s fingers slip free and flop back against Sephiroth as he moans.

“It’s true enough,” Vincent says. He looks at Sephiroth, then smiles again as Sephiroth looks blankly back at him. “What Lucrecia said about me.”

“Oh,” Sephiroth grunts after a moment of dragging his thoughts together. Why was he raising this now…oh. “Does it matter, now that you know?”

Which isn’t what Sephiroth had intended to ask. It’s far too—too sentimental, that phrasing, when all Sephiroth honestly planned was to let the man know his mother wasn’t going to forget the subject of Vincent’s family. Fair warning is the best he can do with his mother, he’s found over the course of his life, with enough people to understand he can’t guarantee their reaction afterward, no matter how they’ve behaved up till then. He can only ensure his own success, and he's long since stopped feeling regret over the ones who haven’t managed to follow him.

He thinks, and then, when that nonsense slips out of his mouth, Vincent merely smiles again. Unruffled, knowing, knowing and carrying that knowledge easily as his fingers work under Sephiroth’s limp hands, and for a moment the ache in Sephiroth’s breast as he breathes and watches the man isn’t from the clamps.

“She said something like that when we first met,” Vincent says as he unhooks the chains from the clamps. He unlocks the leather cuffs as well, but only pushes Sephiroth’s wrists a few inches apart before he relocks them, one cuff each to the bobbing end of a nipple clamp. And then he slides up between Sephiroth’s hands, teasing them apart as Sephiroth groans and scrabbles at his own shoulders to try and keep his hands’ weight from dragging at the clamps. “I expect her to keep complaining about it till we all depart this world. Is that all you wanted to know?”

In all truth—no. Sephiroth wants to know so much about the other man, so much that even double-edged swords like his mother’s commentary have value. But also, he thinks as Vincent resettles himself, languorously stretching down to taste at Sephiroth’s mouth, he does know much about the man already. He knows, when Vincent dismisses Lucrecia so easily, it isn’t a lie, or false bravado. He knows he would want this no matter what his mother had said…but it had been a small relief, in the end, that this is the way she’s taking it.

And even if Vincent is able to shrug off Lucrecia that simply, as if it’s little enough to him to do it—Sephiroth knows the true weight of something like that. So he lets his head fall back under the other man’s lips, lets his body sink at Vincent’s pleasure. “I want you,” he murmurs into Vincent’s kisses, and means nothing else.

Notes:

Heike is riffing off the Heike Monogatari, which is the epic about the rivalry between the Taira and Minamoto clans in early medieval Japan, while the Date reference is riffing off Date Masamune's rivalry/vendetta with the Ashina clan during the late Warring States period.

And okay, the idea of the Heike as a sort of interclan council rather than a single clan might be drawing a little from the John Wick films. Anyway, the idea is Vincent's technically linked back to a ton of high-level Wutaian politics via his mother's side, except she opted out of that a long time ago and he's not really enthused about rejoining it.

Chapter 11: Side Scenes: Why Sephiroth Was on Vacation in the First Place (Plus, Tseng’s Crush)

A Little Mutual Investigation

“Two weeks before, all the simulators had to be taken offline because of a bug in the latest software upgrade. Originally they were only supposed to be out for a few hours, but there were secondary issues—” Tseng pauses to see if Vincent’s interested in the post-mortem he’s just sent over, and when the other man doesn’t look at the notification lighting up his tablet, continues “—so it ended up being about thirty hours. Everything seemed normal until one of the Turks noticed Sephiroth in R&D’s restricted archives after-hours.”

“Reading?” Vincent says.

Tseng grimaces and doesn’t fail to notice the way that that, and not the initial facts, is what sparks curiosity in the man’s eyes. “No. Most of what’s in there is output from his mother’s teams, so I assume he’s already familiar with it. What struck my subordinate was that he’d been in there for hours and hours, and when she checked the logs, she realized he was recataloging everything.”

Vincent doesn’t move for several seconds. His ease with stillness is something Tseng can’t help but admire. “Lucrecia must have been incensed when she found out,” he finally says.

“Yes, it was…a noticeable dispute between them. Usually they’re both better at keeping it out of public view,” Tseng says, as a sharp pulse behind his eyes catches him off-guard. He pauses, but the pain isn’t repeated; it’s just a memory of the day-long migraine he’d had after that mess had been escalated to him, he thinks. How Vincent manages to talk to Dr. Crescent without even looking as if he wants to reach for a gun is also something that he marvels at, although not quite with the same flavor of admiration. “Once she threw him out, he stormed back to SOLDIER offices and apparently spent another five hours straightening out files there. Lazard and Hewley tried to intervene, which didn’t work. Rhapsodos went to Dr. Crescent—”

“Which stopped it, but Rufus decided that all parties would benefit from some temporary separation,” Vincent finishes.

“Sephiroth was the one who could actually be convinced to go on vacation,” Tseng sighs.

Vincent nods slowly. Then he glances at his tablet, tapping it to wake it and then skimming over the notifications. He dismisses all of those with another tap, then unlocks the tablet as he pulls it over to him. “I looked over the due diligence and I think it’s sufficient to work with, but if the goal is to make it a believable accident, I’d rather stage it outside.”

“As long as the retrieval team still has enough time—you can see how many assumptions we’re making about the panic room’s security measures,” Tseng says. He starts to reach for his own tablet, then simply rests his fingers against it. While he’s personally relieved to return to the current assignment, his role does demand that he consider the broader picture, and Vincent, because of his competence as well as Sephiroth’s obvious attachment to him, is a potential—

“I vacation in the Nibelheim area because I haven’t been asked to work there in over three decades, and that doesn’t seem likely to change. I ran into him during the storm. He kept trying to die of exposure,” Vincent says, and then raises his brows when Tseng blinks at him. “I don’t think that was his intent, only a combination of misjudgment and unfamiliarity with the area. Shinra doesn’t run training exercises nearly high enough in the mountains to give anyone good experience with the environment.”

Somehow Tseng has the feeling Vincent isn’t only referring to SOLDIER with that comment; there are rarely legitimate reasons for the Turks to be in the area, but they should be able to deal with anything they’re thrown into, and even more so than SOLDIER, since they usually aren’t in a position to call in back-up. “Noted.”

“If you have any other concerns, feel free to raise them,” Vincent says, continuing to look at Tseng. He’s relaxed about it, and Tseng understands perfectly well that any further questions will only tell Vincent more about what he and Shinra are worried about than Vincent will reveal to them. The man is superb and Tseng wishes he had the time and space to properly appreciate it. “Otherwise, I have some suggestions about the retrieval team.”

“I’m interested,” Tseng says after a moment, and tries not to think about the faint touch of heat that flutters along the pulse in his throat as he does.

Vincent’s amused smile tells him he’s wholly unsuccessful.

* * *

A Little Negotiation

“I’m on the verge of speaking to him about it, if only so Genesis stops with his ridiculous insinuations. We don’t need the one force for competence in the Turks tangled up in his nonsense,” Sephiroth says, entirely distracted by the oddly-colored smear on Vincent’s arm.

He catches Vincent’s shirt as it slides off the man’s shoulder, then turns it inside out to examine the corresponding stain inside of the sleeve. One whiff tells him the stain is oil-based, likely from some sort of fuel, which makes him relax and step away from the under-sink cabinet where they keep the biohazard disposal materials. It’s at that point, as he’s dropping the shirt in the regular waste and looking up, that he realizes the other man is studying him.

“You’re concerned about Tseng’s ability to stand up to Rhapsodos?” Vincent asks.

Dry, but with a slight depth to his usual amusement that gives Sephiroth pause. Vincent generally listens to Sephiroth’s complaints about the rest of Shinra with only a neutral murmur every so often; he’s not merely pretending, since Sephiroth’s seen the man adjust his own dealings to avoid political issues that would affect SOLDIER. But he never seems interested in wading into it either, and Sephiroth prefers that, given he has enough to do with keeping his fellow Firsts in line.

He has said on occasion that Tseng’s raised Turk standards in some areas, which from Vincent is unusual praise. And if Sephiroth were prone to irrational and self-damaging speculation like Genesis, he might take that in certain directions—but he isn’t, and for all his closed-mouth ways, Vincent is actually rather straightforward once you know him.

“I want Genesis to shut up,” Sephiroth says after a moment. “Are you interested in him? Or—”

“We can discuss that in more detail over dinner,” Vincent says, with a glance at the growing pile of soiled and tattered clothes. “Or…”

Of course, sometimes Vincent teases. “Or?” Sephiroth says, raising his brow.

“Or we could discuss it in a different setting,” Vincent says, as he twists his foot out of the wreck of his trousers and then somehow ends with the line of his hip sliding up between Sephiroth’s legs, as his encircling hands slide down Sephiroth’s wrists, pressing them back into the wall. “Competence attracts you, I’ve noticed this.”

Sephiroth blinks sharply, then inhales even more sharply as Vincent’s tongue flicks out to just dance over his lower lip, disappearing as soon as he moves his head. Vincent teases, he thinks, already feeling his mood slow, running thickly away from him like warmed honey. “Vincent, what—”

“How do you want to?” Vincent murmurs, nearly pressing his mouth down. Then his fingers tighten, a promise he deliberately undercuts when he leans back. “Discuss it, Sephiroth. How do you want to?”

For a moment Sephiroth isn’t certain how to answer. Part of him does wonder whether this is a trick, like one of those romcoms Zack’s ridiculously fond of, or like those betrayal scenarios Genesis so loves to posit—but that feels wrong even as the thought rises. If Vincent wanted to leave, the man simply would, and as quickly as lust is warming Sephiroth’s body, he can see the man has no intention of doing so.

But he’s not quite clear on what Vincent is doing. And part of him thinks he should find out first, but…that’s really not why Sephiroth bites his lip, slackens his body against the wall, bends down so that their breaths mingle. Or why Vincent smiles when he does that, smiles and then pulls Sephiroth into the shower.

Once they’ve washed, he fucks Sephiroth to prime him, then pushes in a plug to keep Sephiroth open as Vincent binds him. Arms twisted up behind him, wrists crossed high between the shoulderblades and held there in an intricate net braided out of his own hair, pieces of that coiling about his wrists and elbows and upper arms so the slightest movement tugs sharply at his scalp. Sephiroth’s erect again just from that when Vincent closes a silver cock ring around him, then pulls him into the bedroom where the plug is removed and he’s seated on the man’s cock, facing him, positioned so he can squirm and moan as Vincent leisurely strokes over his chest, belly, thighs.

A full set of claws cups over his left buttock, then sinks in till he can feel tiny, hot drops of blood welling up under their points. He hisses and Vincent lays a sliver of iced fruit between his parted lips, then presses down on it with the thumb, crushing out the sweet, cold juice as those claws deliberately scratch across the entire buttock before lifting. The cuts are still burning when Vincent rubs another slice of fruit across the head of his cock, seasoning it with his own precome before feeding it to him.

He eats it greedily, but almost lets some juice drip out when Vincent reaches over and gives him an identical set of scratches on his other buttock. Sephiroth chokes, then swallows the fruit quickly and messily so he can groan full-throated. Bound and filled and marked—and petted, Vincent licking at his jaw to help clean up the juice and then continuing on to lave down his throat as the man’s hands work up his belly and then linger at his nipples, one being plucked while the other’s lazily teased with a claw point. Vincent doesn’t do this merely because he can, but because they both want to.

He doesn’t have to prove himself, Sephiroth’s tempted to say. Sephiroth isn’t like Genesis, always demanding reassurances over the slightest hint of change—but he likes this, he has to admit. When the claw digs a little at his chest, drawing blood, then flicks out to just touch the nipple tip, he gasps and rises on Vincent’s cock—rises till the man’s mouth finds him and forces him back down. Vincent holds him for a few seconds, sucking at his tongue till he stops rocking and simply lets the man’s cock stretch him.

“Like this?” Sephiroth murmurs as Vincent’s mouth unseals from his. “This is what—” he lets out a sharp huff as fingers pinch sharply at his nipple “—no? Not how you’d like him?”

Vincent lifts his head, one of his hands drifting up to curl around the side of Sephiroth’s throat, thumb sliding softly back and forth against the underside of Sephiroth’s chin.

“I want to know how you’d like him,” he says, and then he wipes the blood from around Sephiroth’s nipple and raises his thumb to let Sephiroth lick that off. At the same time, his mouth searches out the soft part behind the point of the jaw, nursing the spot as Sephiroth arches into it. “You’ve thought about it. Tell me.”

“I—” Sephiroth starts, and a claw scratches sharply across his right pectoral.

It stops just short of the areola but Sephiroth’s already tensed himself for it, sucked in the breath against the rough sting and when he does, his words fall into a garbled mess in the back of his throat. He groans around them and Vincent makes an amused noise, rubbing his thumb back and forth over the flat of Sephiroth’s tongue, pinning it as he murmurs, “How do you want him?”

He’s cheating, Sephiroth wants to say, as the taste of blood thins out to only a trace of copper sweetness, only for Vincent to follow up with a fresh burst of sugar when he pulls Sephiroth’s mouth to his own, kissing a piece of fruit into it. His teeth scrape through the slice and when Sephiroth rolls his tongue away from them, the man drops his hand to Sephiroth’s cock, claw-tip just brushing over the head before poising its tip at the very edge of the cock slit.

Sephiroth goes very still, but Vincent doesn’t. He keeps teasing, his other fingers drifting up and down the top of Sephiroth’s cock, his mouth alternating between soft and demanding as he lavishes attention along Sephiroth’s jaw and throat. He’s putting the burden on Sephiroth to keep from turning, to hold perfectly in place so that his caresses don’t jar that claw. And the effort it takes is enough to make Sephiroth’s arms tremble in their netting, to steal the breath from him every time he tries to think of an answer.

But Vincent keeps asking. And it’s not a cheat, that’s what he forces Sephiroth to find the space to see. It’s how he wants it—no thinking, merely an answer to his question, and Sephiroth moans into Vincent’s mouth when he realizes it, moans and then falls into his shudder, so wholeheartedly that neither of them can say anything, even the threat of that sharp claw testing his cock head, is keeping him from being truthful.

“I want to watch you take him,” Sephiroth gasps. Vincent’s taken the claw away so he’s not cut, not even nicked—but the press of Vincent’s thumb across his cock slit sends strings of electricity down his cock and deep into his thighs, stabbing far deeper. He writhes and the pull of his arms against his hair rakes fingerfuls of pain across his scalp, but he can’t stop. “Take him like you do me, I want to see that—see what it looks like. And then—then—”

Vincent has paused, Sephiroth only then realizes. But as he does, the other man abruptly moves, his hand sliding down to the base of Sephiroth’s cock as his mouth closes over the top of Sephiroth’s shoulder. The moment his teeth sink in, the bite of the cock ring suddenly vanishes.

“—I want you to take me,” floods out of Sephiroth, along with his climax.

As things go, it’s a relatively short round, but once Sephiroth’s finished spilling over Vincent’s hand, he finds himself leaning his forehead on Vincent’s shoulder and not at all inclined to raise it. Vincent pulls at his hair a little and when he only grunts, the man lets his hand rest for a moment. Then he reaches further down, unlacing enough of the braids so that Sephiroth can pull his arms out of them.

His hands drop like lead weights to the bed, then drag loosely about as Vincent, unperturbed, pulls them over onto their sides and then fucks languidly up into Sephiroth till he’s come himself. He’s nowhere near as ruined, but he seems content to simply lie with his cock in Sephiroth for a while.

“You do like him,” Sephiroth eventually ventures.

Vincent makes an assenting noise. He’s slowly untwisting each braid in Sephiroth’s hair, his fingertips drawing soothing circles over Sephiroth’s sore scalp. “I like competence, the same as you. And he’s a colleague.”

“He’s not actually in your chain of command,” Sephiroth says, but from the way Vincent’s fingers still, he realizes that that wasn’t what the man was thinking. “I am not fragile, Vincent. If it’s not something you—if it’s only something you want to hear me say—”

“I didn’t realize that’s how we settled things between us,” Vincent says, amused, and then he rolls his hips precisely when irritation starts to spark within Sephiroth. His fingers plunge deeply into Sephiroth’s hair as Sephiroth shivers on his cock, then sift more slowly through the strands so he can dip his head and lap at the drying sweat along the hairline. “I may like him, but I try to be careful these days about whether it’s the person or the skills I want. Going in without being clear on that can lead to problems later.”

Sephiroth lets himself enjoy the soft press of lips for a moment, then shakes his head so that he can see Vincent’s face. The man’s expression rarely says much, but he’s fairly sure at this point that Vincent counts on reading him. “Is that why you refused to speak the entire time?”

Vincent knows he’s referring to the time in the cave. “No,” the man says, with enough of a pause that it’s a thoughtful reply. Then his eyes warm. “I don’t think you’d want your skills evaluated on the basis of that.”

“That storm set records in every—” Then Sephiroth catches himself. “Never mind, I wasn’t speaking of me. I was speaking about—”

“I was very clear on who I was dragging out of the snow the entire time. My not speaking had nothing to do with your identity,” Vincent says. His tone is even but firm. “If you want him, then ask him and I’ll wait on you. If you only want him because I like him, then leave it to me to ask when I want to ask. I think that’s fair.”

It is and yet Sephiroth can’t help but think he’s…not mis-stepped, but that he’s failed to notice something here. He doesn’t think it’s critical, given how relaxed Vincent still is, but he dislikes the feeling that he hasn’t understood everything. But now isn’t the time, he does understand that, so he only nods and then closes his eyes as Vincent resumes licking along his hairline.

* * *

A Little Cooperation

Unsurprisingly, Vincent’s already entering the conference room when Sephiroth comes down the hall, running late and still trying to end his call with Zack. The other man sees him and steps back from the half-open doorway. “Lazard’s not even here yet,” he says once Sephiroth’s lowered his phone. “He messaged to meet ten minutes later.”

As if either of them are going to find anything productive to do in a mere ten—Sephiroth pauses at the threshold and looks sharply into the empty conference room. Then he realizes that Vincent’s still speaking to him and turns.

“The coffee machine in there is broken,” Vincent says, obviously and patiently repeating himself. “If you need to finish your call, you can have the room. I’ll go find the breakroom on this floor.”

“Coffee would be ideal,” Sephiroth says immediately. “The nearest machine is two floors down by Zack.”

This doesn’t raise any alarms with Vincent, who by now understands that the Firsts have their own roaster and grinder not out of snobbery—although Genesis makes a convincing argument otherwise—but out of sheer need to ensure an uninterrupted supply. He nods and walks past Sephiroth to the elevator; Sephiroth turns and watches the man to ensure he gets on as he calls Zack back and orders him to make sure that the machine brews the espressos from scratch.

“I thought he was a tea guy—you sure you want that many cups?” Zack asks.

“Yes,” Sephiroth says, with enough sharpness that he can sense the man’s mood flipping. Zack’s still a little short of experience in some areas, but he’s been in enough battles with Sephiroth to know that tone.

“On it, sir, gonna make sure the package is safe and sound,” Zack says as a sign-off.

He does need to work on how careless he is about his smart one-liners, but Sephiroth doesn’t have time for anything but a mental note of it, as he ends the call and then texts Tseng to clear the floor. For some reason, Tseng immediately walks around the corner.

“I’ve been trying to catch Deusericus for two days on something else,” he says once he and Sephiroth have shut themselves in the conference room. “Why do you need the floor cleared? There’s nothing coming up on security—”

Sephiroth goes over to the sideboard where the catering supplies are kept and picks up the wooden box of tea packets. “These are poisoned,” he says. “I can smell it.”

Tseng stops arguing and pulls out his phone, tapping at it while watching Sephiroth pluck out packets and sniff at them. “Just the tea?”

“Vincent said the coffee machine was broken,” Sephiroth says. He pushes the ‘power’ button and an error message immediately pops up on the display panel. “It wasn’t two hours ago when Angeal had his team leads meeting in here, or I would have heard about it.”

“Someone would’ve been up to fix it,” Tseng agrees, still tapping at his phone. Then he pauses and looks at it as it chimes quietly. “No one’s been in here since…Vincent checked in but—”

“He’s on our floor with Zack. He only came in for a second, but came out when he saw me,” Sephiroth says. He sniffs at one of the packets again. “Neural, I think.”

“He didn’t smell it?” Tseng wonders aloud.

Vincent has enhanced senses, including smell, but based on what he’s allowed Sephiroth to learn and the little Sephiroth’s mother has added—Vincent apparently swiped her research files on him at some point, a sore point with her—his modifications are primarily geared towards enhancing his offensive abilities. Sephiroth and the rest of the enhanced SOLDIERs are optimized to fight, of course, but once Lucrecia took over the genetics R&D part of the program, she also focused on defensive capabilities such as detecting chemical and bioweapons. They’re engineered to go into situations where someone might be trying to poison them; Vincent’s supposed to be the one creating those types of situations. A keen sense of smell doesn’t guarantee one can detect poisons, and Vincent hadn’t mentioned anything before leaving.

And he prefers tea over coffee, not only because of his Wutaian heritage but also because coffee hampers his control over his transformations. This is something anyone who’s seen Vincent attend meetings could figure out, while very few people know which of the SOLDIERs can detect chemical weapons by smell. “Is the floor—”

“Doing it slowly so if they’re here, they won’t spook,” Tseng mutters, intent on his phone. “This is in the middle of the building, how would they realize he’d taken it—”

Sephiroth hears something in the ceiling and swings around while unsheathing Masamune. He slashes through the paneling, but what comes out amid the debris isn’t a body, but a small dark buzzing thing: a drone.

Tseng shoots it down, having pulled his gun at some point. Then he curses under his breath, pushing ahead of Sephiroth to grab it off the floor. He’s cradling his phone against his ear. “Cissnei, get one of the hacking groups online, I need someone to hijack the feed—” he starts to say as he yanks at the half-destroyed drone, and then he stops and stares into its smashed body “—wait, no, this isn’t built for range. General, the controller has to be on the floor somewhere—”

“Who else is here?” Sephiroth snaps, twisting around so he’s no longer directly in front of the doorway. “This is a restricted floor, how did they get through the screen—”

“There’s a two-person team watering all the office plants,” Tseng says abruptly. “They were in the office down the hall when I came over—they’re a day-only vendor, those don’t have to screen to the same standards—”

“Well, change that,” Sephiroth says as he steps up to the side of the door.

Tseng nods while hissing at his phone. Sephiroth gathers that all Turks in the vicinity are converging the office in question, but then the lights in the conference room go out.

It’s sunny and the room has generously-sized windows, so it’s barely noticeable in here, but in the main area of the floor, the lighting difference apparently is sufficient for the infiltration team to try making a run for it. Sephiroth tracks the sounds of the gunshots and shouts, biting down the urge to simply charge out, and when he has an opportunity, he stabs straight through the wall by the door. There’s a muffled scuffling sound and then a much louder series of crashes as he pulls Masamune free, kicks open the door, and stalks out.

Ten minutes later, Sephiroth is also questioning the metal detectors installed on the ground floor. “Yes, it’s very ingenious how they disassembled it, but they still managed to carry in an artillery gun,” he snarls. “By pretending these were gardening tools. How is this acceptable?”

“It’s not,” Tseng says baldly, as he wipes blood off his phone. “Turks are replacing the entry security personnel for this building effective immediately.”

“Already in progress, and we’ve gotten our first complaint from Heidegger about it,” says Cissnei as she tries to hand Tseng a tissue. “He wants to meet with you right away.”

That utter imbecile, Sephiroth thinks, trying not to resume destroying the floor. If they don’t fire the man this time, Sephiroth is going to personally put him on the long-term disability list. “Tell him Tseng’s meeting with me all afternoon and we’ll see if he shows up,” he says. “I hope he does.”

Tseng blinks sharply, then nods to Cissnei, condoning the idea. She’s gleefully transmitting the message when the elevator chimes open, delivering Zack and Vincent onto the floor.

“Okay, note to self, the new soundproofing works because holy Gaia, what the hell just happened?” Zack says as soon as he gets his flapping jaw under control. He isn’t quite so successful with his arms, almost tossing his tray of coffees at Cissnei before she catches them. “Seph! I thought you just wanted Vincent held up so you could duck Rufus or something like that! My sword’s in my office!”

“You don’t need it,” Vincent says, having immediately detoured to look at where they have the two infiltrators.

Something about his tone makes even Zack stop being distracting, and the few civilians on the floor are quickly removed as they recongregate in the conference room. Vincent takes the explanation about the tea packets with what Sephiroth thinks is exasperation but not surprise.

“They’re Heike, aren’t they?” Tseng asks quietly.

“No, but they wanted to be,” Vincent mutters. He presses his lips together for a moment, looking at the tentative identification profiles Tseng has on the tablet before them. “They’re too young and inexperienced, they wouldn’t be tapped for this. They probably were trying to make a splash, and I’m a little more easily located than I used to be.”

“That shouldn’t be a concern, given your current location is with us,” Sephiroth says acidly.

His ire isn’t directed towards anyone in the room—anyone still alive, at any rate—but nonetheless Tseng seems to take it personally and starts to run down all the remedial measures the Turks will be putting into place. Sephiroth points out a few places where he’d rather SOLDIER handle it and after a moment’s consideration, Tseng adjusts the plan.

“It’d be less trouble if I made a few calls,” Vincent says at that point. He appears calm enough, but there’s a trace of reluctance in his manner that makes Sephiroth send Zack to find Angeal and Genesis. Vincent waits for Zack to go before he continues. “It wasn’t sanctioned. The Heike will want that discouraged as much as we do.”

“I know you’d rather deal with this yourself, but we can’t count it as a personal matter when they’ve literally stormed the thirty-second floor,” Tseng says dryly, although he tenses ever-so-slightly until Vincent sighs and nods. “Rufus will want an explanation.”

“He deserves one, for this,” Vincent says, before Sephiroth can comment. For that very reason, going by the warning look he gives Sephiroth. Then he turns back to Tseng. “What else does he want?”

“An alternative channel to Godo, but he’d still prefer to work with the Kisaragi than any of the other clans,” Tseng says, keeping one eye on Sephiroth. He’s also making that apparent for Sephiroth’s benefit, which only slightly placates Sephiroth’s simmering temper. “Dr. Crescent has raised the matter with him separately, too—not the Kisaragi angle, only the risk that the Heike pose. I wasn’t able to persuade her to wait till one of us could talk to him—I was looking for Lazard earlier to make sure she hadn’t tried him too. Rufus heard her out but was going to talk privately with you before he did anything.”

“I’m surprised you even tried,” Sephiroth says after a moment, and he genuinely means it. Even Rufus prefers to handle his mother at a distance, and through passive mechanisms like budget approvals. That’s considerably more than Tseng needs to do, officially or politically, and it helps dampen Sephiroth’s anger at the security breach more than taking down the would-be assassins had.

Tseng sighs. “You’ll both be thinking about who’s saying this and I can’t say you’re wrong to, but to let the Heike determine whether someone under contract to us is really Shinra’s concern or not would grossly undermine our reputation. I can’t speak for Rufus, but I have said that to him.”

“To ask Kisaragi to intervene would also imply certain things about how we see them compared to the others,” Vincent says, and now he sounds less reluctant and more interested. The person or the skills, Sephiroth remembers the man saying—not only which is more interesting, but why, which Vincent hadn’t said but which he’s thinking of. Sephiroth knows that because he’s also thinking about it, looking at Tseng. “Have you spoken to Rufus about that? He should understand what he wants to meddle in.”

Looking at him, and thinking this is why Vincent laid out his conditions the way he did. He wanted Sephiroth to be clear on why, not just what and how. “I think,” Sephiroth says, and then he pauses so that the other two men can turn to him. “That this merits a longer discussion, and one when we’re not distracted with simple security measures. Tseng, perhaps you could join us later?”

Vincent looks at Sephiroth for a long moment without blinking, and somehow he still manages to change the entire mood in the room, to the point that Tseng sucks his breath sharply. The man looks at both of them—Vincent deliberately looks down at the tablet, dragging one finger idly over the screen, and Tseng watches that before raising his eyes to Sephiroth.

“I’ll see if I can find some time,” he says.

* * *

A Little Action

Sephiroth doesn’t speak to Tseng again between that and when the man comes to their quarters, except for some entirely professional meetings about destroying what remains of Heidegger’s reputation. It’s possible Vincent spoke separately to Tseng in the meantime; Sephiroth doesn’t ask on purpose because, since he’s gotten the man to come over, it’s now Vincent’s turn. As he told Vincent, he wants to watch.

And as Vincent generally does, he exacts a price from Sephiroth for it. He ties Sephiroth to the bed well ahead of time, so when Tseng finally is ushered into the room, there’s a fine film of sweat all over Sephiroth’s body. A binder straps his arms together behind him, running across his back and forcing his spine to curve over them; his legs are likewise bound, each thigh cuffed to its matching calf and then folded to either side of him so that he’s splayed wantonly against the pillows. Straps run from one thigh behind him to the other thigh, keeping the whole length of his torso open and vulnerable.

He can’t lower his head because his hair’s been braided and then laced about his neck to hold it back against the wall. His pinioned legs frame a cock that’s been tightly clamped about with metal rings and then strapped up against his belly, already sore from trying to swell itself in its cage—and lower down, the pillows behind him plumped to ensure it remains displayed, a hole straining around a thick metal plug that spent some time chilling in the refrigerator beforehand.

The last thing that Vincent did before stepping out to answer the door was press a metal bar between Sephiroth’s teeth and strap it into place. They don’t normally use gags; Sephiroth makes his mouth far too useful to the other man, and also, he suspects, Vincent enjoys him talking, even if the man chooses not to respond much of the time. But this is different—the gag points that up, reminds him with its unyielding crush against his tongue that he asked for this. And having asked, he can’t take it back.

He has to watch. Tseng’s still in his suit when Vincent pushes him down onto the bed, but not for very long as Vincent buries one hand in the man’s hair while stripping him with the other. Tseng briefly touches Vincent’s shoulders, right as their mouths first meet, but then presses his palms to the bed and keeps them there as his limbs emerge from his clothes.

He’s darker than either of them, the old-gold of his face and hands lightening to honey running fresh from the comb at his belly and thighs. Under Vincent’s mouth and hands, he marks up bronze at first, but the marks slowly redden as Vincent goes over them again and again, pushing Tseng up from the end of the bed till the top of Tseng’s head is nearly brushing up against the bottoms of Sephiroth’s buttocks. They end up looking as split-ripened as Sephiroth’s tongue feels, rolling endlessly up against the bar across it.

Vincent doesn’t tie Tseng up at first, merely lets him hold his palms against the mattress as Vincent fucks him on two fingers, then three. And then stops it, and when Tseng, panting, tries to move himself onto Vincent’s fingers, Vincent squeezes the bottom of his cock till Tseng gasps and presses himself flat against the bed. Vincent waits one agonizing second, then another. Tseng’s hips twitch and Vincent sighs, waiting three more seconds, before he starts again.

By the third time, Tseng can’t keep his hands on the bed anymore and Vincent straps them behind him, flipping him onto his belly and pressing his head to one of Sephiroth’s thighs so his breath dances fiendishly over the already overtaxed skin of Sephiroth’s tensed ball sac. Vincent edges Tseng a fourth time before sliding on a cock ring and then pushing Tseng further up onto Sephiroth, high enough so that the man’s hard cock is rubbing insistently over and against the end of Sephiroth’s plug, twisting and nudging it, making it pull against the stretching rim of Sephiroth’s hole. Sephiroth’s been relatively calm—relatively—up till now, too caught up in watching, but he can’t hold himself anymore and starts squirming against this, starts pushing against his bonds as Tseng’s cock keeps getting teased against him.

Vincent could have the other man fuck him and he wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. He didn’t ask—he didn’t think about it, didn’t think Vincent would think about it. Only assumed that Vincent would have certain ideas about what this was but he could be wrong. He could be and he can feel that edge, feel himself twisting and fraying against it, against the idea that Vincent could tie him up like this and do anything, could even put another man’s cock in him. And he’s shuddering, thinking this, shuddering and whining around his gag and now he understands why it’s there, why this time. Because he can’t ask for that. It’s only if Vincent decides to.

Tseng sounds even more wrecked at this point, mouthing mindlessly across Sephiroth’s chest and belly when he’s not pushing out small, throaty sounds like a trapped, desperate animal who nevertheless can’t help seeking comfort. Begging for it, mewling like that, begging but Vincent is leisurely toying with him, still only using his fingers on Tseng. And then Vincent drops his head and Tseng stiffens all over as if an electric current’s been run through him; Sephiroth feels no sympathy but only a jealous kind of craving, knowing exactly what the man’s feeling, with Vincent’s tongue curling in alongside the fingers.

Vincent milks Tseng at what seems like an even slower pace, somehow dragging it out as Tseng rubs his cock over every inch of Sephiroth’s thighs and groin and belly, dripping come everywhere. It feels like Sephiroth’s been basted with it, by the time Tseng finally goes limp and Vincent pulls him back down the bed.

He’s pushed to the side and Vincent kneels up between Sephiroth’s legs, careful not to touch any of the smears. Vincent instead brushes his fingers around the ends of the gag, tickling where the bar’s dug at the corners of Sephiroth’s mouth so Sephiroth flexes his lips and then groans at how that makes the bar bruise him. Then Vincent slides his hands further back, briefly cupping Sephiroth’s head before moving down to his neck.

The braids are unlaced, the little silver rings in them clinking freely as Vincent pulls his head off the wall. He swallows roughly, his throat feeling oddly swollen despite its new lack of binding, swollen and thick and slow, except it’s empty and he wishes it wasn’t. He leans against Vincent’s shoulder, sucking at his gag, as Vincent unties his arms and legs from the wall as well.

The straps running over his back from one thigh to the other keep him spread as Vincent pushes him down onto the bed. The other man crawls behind him, then puts a knee to either side of his head and leans over to pull Tseng back to them. Tseng’s still trembling badly, and when Vincent stops him from dropping his head onto Sephiroth’s belly, the man lets out a shaky whimper before settling back to watch.

Vincent pulls the plug out of Sephiroth first, then flicks out his tail. It doesn’t come anywhere near Tseng but Tseng still startles. And then startles again, as the end of the tail weaves under Sephiroth’s folded left leg and then nestles familiarly into the space the plug’s left; Sephiroth arches as much as he’s able, feeling the gag click against his teeth as his head falls back against the bed.

And then it lifts out. Sephiroth works his stiff jaw, sore lips, and feels Vincent’s thumb press against his left cheek. He inhales harshly, then stretches his mouth open as Vincent’s cock drops into it and down his throat. “Don’t,” Vincent says as he starts sucking.

He moans but stops. Pinned two ways, by the tail in his hole and the cock in his mouth, and then he’s butterflied as well, when Vincent’s fingers curl over his knees and push them down on either side of him.

“Clean him off,” Vincent says to Tseng.

Who’s dutiful about it, for all that Sephiroth can feel his mouth shivering as it laps and laps and laps. Or perhaps that’s Sephiroth’s own body, vibrating with unsatisfied lust as Tseng carefully licks between the rings clamped about his cock. He twitches up and gags on Vincent’s prick, twitches down and fucks himself on the man’s tail. Either side earns him a pinch to the inside thigh, while bucking in place only makes him scrape himself against Tseng’s teeth. Sephiroth tries, but in the end he has to suck, because he can’t move anything else.

Vincent snorts, but doesn’t stop him. Not immediately, not until Tseng’s finished, and then the man slides his prick out of Sephiroth’s mouth. The air rasps bone-dry and hot in its absence, and Sephiroth is slurring a protest when Vincent takes the cage off his cock. That is burning, the rush of blood into it, immediately stiffening and swelling it. Two firm strokes and by the time Vincent removes the tail from him and frees his arms, his cock feels as if it’s going to drag him through the mattress, it’s so weighty.

Tseng stops that. He’s between Sephiroth and the bed now, pulling at his hands—they’ve been bound to the wall, and now Vincent is twisting Sephiroth’s wrists under the other man’s neck and retying them there, wrapping Tseng’s long hair into the binding. Sephiroth’s allowed to fuck his cock into Tseng, one long, blissful drive, but then he’s held down as Tseng’s legs are twined so tightly over his back that they can barely move an inch against each other. They’re tied up with each other’s limbs, held motionless as Vincent’s hand splays over the small of Sephiroth’s back and yes, he remembers asking for this too.

Vincent takes him. Fucking him slowly as his cock sits inside Tseng, gripped in tight, clenching heat that nonetheless can’t move enough to bring him to climax. Tseng too is stuck—the ring’s not on the man’s cock now, Sephiroth can feel that, but he can also feel how hard the man still is. And the damning thing is they are moving—tiny, cut-off shifts against each other, just enough to torment without building properly. They’re both too wrung-out to move themselves so all they can do is rock along with Vincent’s movements, panting and whining and hoping.

And then Sephiroth feels Vincent’s cock spasm inside of him. The man is coming, and then he’s going to stop and Sephiroth is still going to be like this, taken but aching and incomplete, and he truly wonders if he’ll be able to bear this—

There’s another spasm, Vincent inhaling sharply above him, and then the sudden, bright blossom of pain under Vincent’s teeth in his shoulder, and finally, Sephiroth comes.

Exactly what he asked for.

* * *

A Little Conversation

Tseng has never been so deeply fucked in his life, he thinks. He almost wants to ask them to take him to medical so he can check if he’s dislocated a hip, his legs feel so prone to falling open.

“Do you want a Curaga pill?” Vincent says as Tseng resorts to crawling back onto the bed.

Sephiroth’s already there, sprawled beside Vincent with his head on Vincent’s knee; it’s a submissive position, and when he looks at the other man that is how he looks, but when his gaze flicks over to Tseng, there’s something of the reclined predator lurking in it. He still has evidence of their activities dappled over his body—Tseng admits to feeling selfishly pleased by that, that even Sephiroth’s healing needs time to catch up here—but he probably could launch himself over the bento box between them and break Tseng’s neck without even trying.

So could Vincent, for that matter, and if Tseng stopped thinking about how well-fucked he feels, he’d probably have to think about why he’s blatantly disregarding common sense in accepting this invitation. He could have just had a meeting in the office with them, after all.

“No, thank you,” Tseng says, taking the chopsticks Vincent offers instead. “I try not to overuse that. I need longer than you, but generally I just rest till it’s better.”

“Turks,” Sephiroth snorts, with another glance at Vincent. Then he tilts his head as Vincent picks up a piece of mackerel, following it with his eyes up to Vincent’s mouth. “Well, so do either of you actually believe Kisaragi has the ability to bring the others in line?”

“If he did, Rufus would be considerably more worried,” Tseng says. He samples one of the pickles as Vincent feeds Sephiroth another piece of mackerel. “It’s actually in Shinra’s interests to have them disorganized, but not to the point that it’s spilling over into our territory. And I’m never going to have anything like your standing, but I can’t imagine you want to have to owe more favors among them.”

“I don’t have standing. My mother renounced hers,” Vincent says, placidly enough, but he clearly is discouraging any further comments along that line. “I would rather not, but the favor I’d then owe to Rufus—”

Sephiroth shifts slightly against his knee.

“—you work for him,” Tseng points out. “It’s not a favor. It’s part of your job duties.”

Vincent raises his brow. “Tseng, you’ve been a Turk long enough to know Midgar and Wutai aren’t that different in some things. I know you favor Rufus but—”

“You have to persuade us,” Sephiroth mutters.

Someday, Tseng fears, the man really will break from Shinra. He’s less worried about that than he used to be, but even so, he’ll never be foolish enough to forget. He has been a Turk that long.

“Rufus doesn’t count favors like they do in Wutai,” Tseng says, because a large part of the reason why he thinks that day may have been pushed off is sitting in front of him, letting Sephiroth curl over his knee. “If you help him, you help Shinra, not his family. He has no family now that his father’s dead.”

“Lazard?” Sephiroth says, but his tone is idly curious; he’s seen enough to understand ‘brother’ isn’t an accurate term for what Rufus and Lazard are to each other.

“I’m not here to talk you into helping him. I’m only here to tell you if you do, what I think it’ll mean,” Tseng adds after a moment, once he’s sure Sephiroth doesn’t wish to pursue the subject. “And for what it’s worth, how I’ll look at it.”

“As a favor to you?” Vincent says, and this is not idle curiosity, with the way he’s looking at Tseng. They’ve both put Wutai behind them—the customs that Tseng keeps and that he’s seen Vincent keep are clearly for personal reasons, not patriotic ones—but like Tseng’s fears, Wutai never truly leaves one. They both have been away from the land long enough to know that. “Do you know what you’re meddling in, Tseng?”

“I know whose bed this is,” Tseng says after a long moment. “I know where I’m sleeping tonight.”

Sephiroth doesn’t entirely understand the undercurrents, but he can sense them, and his imperfect comprehension is making him wary. He presses his lips together, looking sharply at Tseng, but holds his tongue as Vincent simply gazes at Tseng.

“You do,” Vincent says, quietly, as he finally turns his head and takes a bit of stewed tuber from the box. He looks at it, then lifts it across the box and out towards Tseng; his free hand strays down to stroke into some strands of Sephiroth’s hair that are flowing over his leg. “Here.”

Sephiroth abruptly relaxes, smiling against Vincent’s knee very much like a tiger would when settling itself after a good meal. Tseng looks from him to the piece of food Vincent is still holding out, then leans forward with his mouth open.

* * *

A Little Consequence

“Vinny!” Yuffie says, visibly bouncing in her seat. She leans forward, then rocks back on the heels of her hands, so they drag a little on the table and leave visible shiny marks; the man next to her gives up on trying to keep his face solemn and grimaces. “Wow, you literally look just as hot as last time.”

“…is she even legal to ride a chocobo?” Reno mutters under his breath. “How the fuck old was this chick last time?”

Tseng had debated between Reno and Cissnei for this, but ultimately decided Reno was better deployed where he could be publicly distracting, while Cissnei is better on discreet monitoring. He still stands by that, but the looks Rufus and Sephiroth both give Reno briefly has him questioning this.

“Also, I gotta ask—so you and the Demon of Wutai here really shacked up?” Yuffie asks, all wide ingenue eyes as her companion appears to contemplate stabbing himself with his chopsticks.

Sephiroth’s face doesn’t move but his fingers tighten on Masamune’s hilt; Reno, for all his wisecracks, immediately spots this and rearranges his slouch for a better sightline, while Yuffie’s companion catches on second and does something under the table that has her stop bouncing and sit straight up. She does not, however, retract the question.

“Yes,” Vincent says equably.

Rufus gives Tseng a glance that outwardly looks irritated but at this point, Tseng can strip off the veneer and sense the genuine concern underneath. He remains as he is, silently telling the man this is in fact proceeding as intended.

“Can I watch?” Yuffie says.

Vincent actually blinks. Then recovers and shifts his arm just enough to preclude an increasingly stormy-looking Sephiroth from doing anything. “No.”

Yuffie’s companion waits till Sephiroth takes his hand off Masamune and then drops his face into his hand, muttering in Wutaian about how his ancestors are weeping right now. “Oh, fine,” Yuffie says, rolling her eyes. “Well, if I can’t get in on some of that, can I ask his mom out? Gotta say, whatever lab you two ran through, it did a nice job on both of you.”

“No,” Lucrecia snaps before anyone else can. She’s been scribbling furiously on her tablet this entire time, ignoring the conversation in favor of some kind of graph she’s editing, but now she slaps the tablet down and glowers about the room. “Now, if we’ve sufficiently established that you’re young and brainlessly powerful enough to demand whoever you like comes to this meeting so you can entertain yourself, I have actual work to do. Which is absolutely not going to fall to that hack job—and it is a hack job—your silly little team is trying to inject into my systems while you pretend as if you’re interested in anything but stealing corporate secrets from us. You deserve exactly what you’re getting from that.”

Now Yuffie blinks. Lucrecia gets up and stalks out of the room while Yuffie’s companion is still trying to deny everything to a very bemused Rufus, and when the door swings shut behind her, Yuffie finally clears her throat. “O…kay. Damn, Vinny, you really weren’t kidding about her.”

“Did you actually try to hack her?” Vincent asks, in a tone that declares this is not truly a live question.

“Well, I mean, she’s his mom, and I figured I should get to know who your in-laws are if we’re gonna have this kind of talk, and uh, Sonon, can you go check the, uh, the rental really quick?” Yuffie says, wincing a little. Then she winces again as she catches Rufus’ eye. “I mean, not that I’m admitting to, you know—”

“Cyberwarfare?” Rufus sighs. “Well, if I can ask, Miss Kisaragi, what are you admitting to?”

“A little curiosity and a little wanting to shove it to my dad. He’s been a real pain lately,” Yuffie says, her good cheer restored as she keeps waving Sonon out of the room when he tries to glower at her. She waits till the door’s shut behind him, then turns back to Rufus, her gaze suddenly sharp. “Although there are a couple others who are way worse, and I like Vinny better than them. I hear they dropped some baby morons on you recently and we might be able to do a little mutual admitting we’re pissed off about it—so hey, Vinny, good to see you, we should catch up when Sonon’s not tagging after me. You want to step out with the General here so we can all keep pretending you’re not doing this anymore?”

“It’s good to see you too,” Vincent says dryly, as he rises from his seat, with Sephiroth very quickly following him. “Don’t try to get into Sephiroth’s security cameras, Yuffie. I don’t want to have to come visit you.”

“Oh, hey, I joke but I respect you, Vinny!” Yuffie cries, putting her hand to her breast as if she’s been wounded there. Then she slews back around to face Rufus. “But speaking of, I could really use some chill time since I’m in town. Think you could arrange something while we’re talking? You look like a guy who knows where to find the fun.”

“We can certainly have someone look into it, Miss Kisaragi. You did take the trouble to come here and we’re nothing if not dedicated to being good hosts,” Rufus purrs, although the flip of his hand as he brushes the hair from his face tells Tseng that they’re going to be discussing in detail why he wasn’t briefed better on her.

For that matter, Tseng would like to discuss that with Vincent. And just as he’s thinking that, he feels Vincent glance at him from the doorway.

“Shit, boss, don’t tell me she’s making you blush,” Reno mutters.

“No,” Tseng says. He wills himself to not react when the door shuts behind Vincent and Sephiroth. Did he know what he was getting into, he remembers Vincent asking.

Well, it’s too late now.

Chapter 12: Second Vacation

The second time Sephiroth vacations in the cave, he doesn’t take the Shinra flight in. Vincent prefers to route certain supplies through Nibelheim, but he’s managed to stay off Shinra’s radar for so long because he usually pilots a private plane to a long-forgotten runway a surveying team had cleared off elsewhere on the mountain, then flies himself or hikes the rest of the way. Then he comes down to Nibelheim to pick up his orders.

They take his route, although Sephiroth has to make a showing at the helipad so his appearance doesn’t seem too irregular. Angeal’s keeping an eye on things back in Midgar so Zack’s come with the supply flight, having decided he’d like to give snow a second try. But he’s renting some chocobos and heading with Cloud and Tifa in the opposite direction as the cave, so once the paperwork is settled, they part ways and Sephiroth goes to find Vincent.

The first night there, they fuck by the pool, but it’s quick and fast, both of them tired from the increased workload leading up to their time off and carrying out all the little chores needed to make the cave fit for a week’s stay. Vincent usually spends nine or ten days here, giving him time to spread those out, but Sephiroth couldn’t get out of one last meeting with Rufus and Lazard. Next time he’ll clear his calendar earlier, and drag Genesis away from torturing the new recruits if he has to.

With two of them, it isn’t that strenuous, it’s more that they’re at it without a break up till their fuck and then their evening meal. They crawl under the furs after that, getting in a good night’s rest and ensuring they’ve both fully recovered by the morning.

Because in the morning, Sephiroth puts on a spare uniform and then goes down the mountainside just far enough so that he can no longer see the cave entrance.

The last major storm blew through about three days ago, so while the snow is still heaped high, it’s packed firmly enough that most of the landscape’s contours are fairly clear. Sephiroth’s still mindful of the mountain’s tricks and once he leaves the trail they carved out last night, he finds a large fallen trunk and takes a seat on it, waiting for Vincent to show up. He left Masamune in the cave but has a dagger with him, and he’s idly whetting it against a rock he’s found when a shadow glides over his head.

Sephiroth looks up, then turns to look behind himself, seeing nothing in either place—but then snow explodes over him as Vincent plows into him from behind. He tips off the trunk and lands face-down in the drifts on the other side, the cold searing across his face and into his open mouth, dragging claws down under his coat as sharp as the ones he can feel cutting through his sleeve.

He does put up a fight, and by the time Vincent has him pinned, panting with his arms twisted up behind him, Vincent’s blood is dripping into his hair. Vincent shreds off what’s left of his coat before tying his wrists together with a piece of drake leather, then flips him over. He watches the beast form melt till it’s Vincent’s face over his, the cuts he’s left on Vincent’s arms and shoulder sealing up as the skin around them turns white and hairless, and then parts his legs as Vincent presses over him, tongue delving deep into his mouth while a lean, firm thigh rubs insistently over the straining front of his trousers.

Vincent makes him come, and then pulls him up so he can walk back up to the cave, the wet warmth of his seed rapidly turning thick and gluey, so that his trousers stick so firmly to his skin that instead of sliding when he walks, they tug painfully at his cock. It’s a short walk, but it’s colder today, and by the time they reach the cave and Vincent shoves him down by the pool, the touch of the man’s hand feels like a hot coal pressed to him.

But better, a burn Sephiroth is craving as Vincent roughly strips off the rest of his clothes. The trousers won’t come off around his cock till Vincent flicks out a claw and uses it to shave between the cloth and Sephiroth’s skin. Sephiroth squirms despite the risk of being scratched, then leans over to lick at Vincent’s neck when the man settles between his legs.

“You’re supposed to still be fighting,” Vincent says, amused.

“It’s silly to use the tactics your opponents are expecting,” Sephiroth says after a moment. They did discuss the trip, but he hadn’t asked if Vincent was going to speak or not; he wasn’t certain, to be honest, what he would prefer.

But now that they’re here, he thinks it doesn’t matter. Thinking about it too much just gets in the way, and right now he doesn’t want anything between them.

He leans back against the wall, letting Vincent look him over. He took some scrapes and cuts as well, and though they’ve already healed over, there’s the occasional dirty smear to mark out where they were. Vincent pushes himself up and rubs his thumb over one on Sephiroth’s left pectoral, tracing it to within an inch of the nipple. Then he pinches and rolls that, working it to a stiff peak as Sephiroth twists at his bound wrists.

When it’s tender enough that a puff over it sends a shiver through Sephiroth, Vincent lets go of the nipple. He moves back to retrieve a small wooden box, then flips its halves open to show the metal implements inside. Sephiroth doesn’t flinch when the clamp initially touches him—it’s been warmed by sitting so close to the hot spring and almost feels like Vincent touching him. But then the needle stabs through, followed by the piercing, and before the pain’s even crested, Vincent is dipping his head to work his tongue through the silver ring.

He flips it up, then down, then worries it from side-to-side as Sephiroth groans. When he finally leaves it, the weight of it falling back against Sephiroth’s chest makes Sephiroth jerk. Vincent catches his other nipple and then simply holds onto it as Sephiroth starts to slump back, forcing Sephiroth to bow himself upward as the man proceeds to subject that nipple to the same treatment.

By the time Vincent moves lower, pushing Sephiroth’s legs even further apart, Sephiroth’s cock is fully erect again. Vincent brusquely pushes it aside with the back of one hand and takes up Sephiroth’s scrotum instead, running his thumb along one side till he finds a spot he likes. He drops to his hands and knees and cranes his head around so he can suck that spot against his teeth, scraping it with one fang as Sephiroth shudders against the wall. He’s bruised it, the spot verging on a deep wine-red, by the time he decides it’s ready for a piercing.

Vincent puts a matching ring on the other side of the ball sac, and then sits back. He looks at Sephiroth again, his tail curling lazily behind him, claws idly tapping against the ground. Then he reaches out and gives Sephiroth’s cock head a slap, barely enough to sting, but it’s enough to send Sephiroth over.

When Sephiroth’s gained back enough breath, Vincent unties his hands so he can join the other man in the pool. They comb the blood out of their hair and then go back into the main room to dry, Vincent closing his hand over the back of Sephiroth’s neck. He pushes Sephiroth to his knees by the fire and Sephiroth sits there unless Vincent gestures for him to do something. This includes opening his mouth to suck Vincent off whenever the man wants him to, but Vincent doesn’t touch him again till they’re crawling into bed for the night. Then he plays with Sephiroth’s piercings as Sephiroth moans and ruts against his thigh, finally spilling over. Vincent lets him rest for a few seconds, then pushes his head down to lick that up before they go to sleep.

That’s the second day.

* * *

On the third day, Sephiroth wakes up alone. He relieves himself and eats breakfast, and then walks down the main passage to look out at the sky. A few wispy clouds show whitely against it here and there, but nothing else.

He stands there for a few minutes anyway, but when he doesn’t see anything, he steps out of the passage, using boulders and fallen trees to try and keep from leaving footprints in the snow. He’s made it to a small grove a couple hundred yards away when he’s caught.

Vincent doesn’t come from the sky, but slinks up through the underbrush, wingless but otherwise beastlike. He rears up on his legs to wrestle Sephiroth against one of the trees, going human, and forces Sephiroth’s arms to hug the trunk. Once he’s tied them together, he drops back down into beast form, circling around Sephiroth a few times before stretching up to sniff high between Sephiroth’s legs, his hot breath drenching buttocks and thighs and hole with drops of moisture.

“I barely left,” Sephiroth mutters, instinctively hiking his knees against the tree. It has shaggy, rough bark that rubs painfully against him, pieces breaking off to rock raw spots down his torso before they fall to the dirt. “I wasn’t—”

It’s not teeth or claws that sink into him but a thin, whipping branch, lashing straight across the tops of his thighs. The mark it leaves behind stands out so clearly in his mind, white line scorching through skin that the cold makes feel dull and grey, that he can trace the slight bend in it where a twig’s been stripped away.

Sephiroth flattens himself against the tree, gasping against the pain, and another blow strikes him on the side of the ribs, curling around to leave the end of its sting close to his nipple. That swells around its piercing as if it had been included in the blow, making him arch to lift it off the bark and lifting his shoulderblades into the next strike. Each lashing burns hotly despite the icy air, white-hot fading to a pulsing, red kind of hurt just as the next one falls on him.

He tries to work his way around the trunk, but gives up as the branch turns his buttocks into two raw, throbbing masses, his knees sagging around the tree. The occasional cut to his inside thighs encourages him to straighten his legs and he does a few times, but eventually he’s too tired for that, even as sharp edges of bark clip and scrape at his skin. What he can do is slide down the tree till he’s on his knees, two nails bleeding from where the bark’s caught under and chipped them, his lips torn from where he’s been biting into the tree against the pain.

When the blows stop, Sephiroth’s grown so used to clenching against them that he continues to do so for a few minutes, and the welts are still so fresh that merely flexing jars them enough that it feels like a blow, or a series of them, a little lighter but making that up in their number as Sephiroth’s flesh splits and swells. And then, just as that fades enough for him to realizes they’re only phantoms of his imagination, Vincent presses his hands down.

Both at once, seizing and squeezing at his buttocks till his moans are frayed through and he’s clinging to the tree for support. Then one hand rises and pushes his hair over one shoulder, rubbing it off where the blood’s stuck it to him. Vincent feels human again, deceptively soft lips running over the bruising flesh before his tongue paints it with spit that draws the chill out of the air and deep into each sore as it dries.

He works his way down Sephiroth, and when he gets to the buttocks, his tongue runs this way and that, always seeming to end with a teasing flip or dip along the cleft between them but never quite grazing Sephiroth’s hole. “You want to fuck me,” Sephiroth can’t help but gasp. “Why don’t you?”

That low, amused rumble vibrates up Sephiroth’s spine as Vincent nuzzles the back of one thigh. Then Vincent gets up and goes around to the other side of the tree. He unties Sephiroth’s arms, but then reties the wrists in front of Sephiroth, leaving a short portion of the leather strip that he uses to haul Sephiroth back to the cave.

They go just behind the wattle barrier in the passage and then Vincent forces Sephiroth to kneel on a fur that looks as if it’s been carelessly thrown against the wall, but that hadn’t been there when Sephiroth had walked out. It’s still plush against Sephiroth’s scraped, stiff knees, and he doesn’t resist when Vincent takes the end of the strip and loops it about his neck, pinning his bound wrists against his collarbone. Nor when Vincent pushes his head down till he’s resting his cheek against the fur.

He lifts his hips on his own, enough welts on his thighs to make him want to keep the pressure off of them, and when Vincent floats his fingertips along the curve of one buttock, Sephiroth braces himself for a resumption of the whipping. But no, Vincent’s rubbing his fingers between the buttocks, then working them into Sephiroth, oiled and pleasantly warm after the chill of outside.

Sephiroth exhales a little more slowly, absently sliding his cheek against the fur. When Vincent pulls his fingers out and then presses in something smoother and metal, he thinks it’s only another tease—although it feels different from the plugs Vincent usually uses on him, only a little more than an inch long with an outside portion that feels at least twice as long where it’s bent up against Sephiroth. No, it’s flared—and hollow, not a plug but a funnel, which Vincent steadies with one hand as he pours oil down it with the other.

The oil’s been warmed too, enough so that what splashes and then dribbles down the funnel’s sides as Sephiroth spasms barely feels any different from skin heat. But inside of him it feels much hotter, gliding into flesh that’s still trying to shake off the cold, a shock treatment that sends hooks deep into Sephiroth’s thighs and gut and chest and then wrenches him mercilessly about as he cries out into the fur. It’s just oil but the flood of it opens him up more than a cock would, and then it aches when he tries to bear down on it, aches because really there’s nothing.

He's still trembling when Vincent grabs him by the shoulder and pulls him up to let the oil drain back out. A finger probes through the funnel’s nozzle, both holding it in place and also helping to sweep out the last of the oil, and Sephiroth shudders sharply, then moans as the nozzle keeps his hole from closing. “Please,” he pants. “Vincent, please.”

Vincent licks at his shoulderblade, tongue running over a welt that stings dully. It’s half-healed and that’s going to make this bearable, Sephiroth thinks dazedly. His buttocks are still throbbing, but his healing—

He’s pushed face-down again, knuckles digging into the backs of his thighs to force his hips higher, and then something else slides down the funnel into him. Snow. One icy drop races down ahead of the rest, carving a path into Sephiroth’s helpless body that he can trace like a needle scoring through him, and then Vincent prods the snow into the funnel so that it squeezes over that drop, eating it as it seems to be eating out his gut.

It's so cold. He bites at the fur, then spits it out and muffles ragged, broken cries into it as the snow slowly packs denser and denser, icing over in him instead of melting. His welts are burning all around it, outside of it, and the cold should feel like a relief against that but instead it’s only a different, deeper, more relentless kind of burn.

Sephiroth goes slack, bent over his knees with his thighs quivering uncontrollably, the only part of him that seems capable of moving. Only because ice-water is dribbling down them, flicking spasms here and there from the muscles. And then Vincent pulls the funnel out and the dribbles abruptly turn into rivulets, making Sephiroth go stiff. Then he tries to jerk his knees forward, suddenly energized again, only to find Vincent’s collared him with that tail. His head is kept pressed cheek-down to the fur as the water runs out of him, coming in freezing pulses as his body clenches and cramps and forces it out.

It's still trickling out when Vincent pulls him back by the hips and fucks into him. He’s stretched enough for it, still plenty of oil clinging inside of him despite the snow, but it’s the heat—he’s chilled inside, so deeply that he can feel his core closing up tightly against it, and he could use the warmth. But it’s like he’s being impaled on a piece of red-hot iron. He hisses once, whimpers once, and then shudders helplessly where he is, Vincent roughly fucking the heat back into him.

Afterward, Vincent carries him to the pool and eases him into it. His hands are still tied but not to his neck, and he wraps his fingers weakly over the ring set above the pool as Vincent massages the last remnants of cold out of him, picks out splinters from his scrapes. He feels as if the man’s pulled out every nerve in his body and replaced it with strings only Vincent can pull, his limbs not listening to him but to the other man.

Vincent drags him into the other room, then lays him by the fire. For a while he’s able to rest, the welts on his back and ass and thighs slowly healing while Vincent combs his hair out. That’s spread over a rolled-up fur to dry as the other man gets a meal ready, which he then feeds to Sephiroth as Sephiroth continues to curl up on the ground.

Sephiroth’s ready to slide into a blissful nap that way, not even craving the softness of the nearby nest under him, but a touch on his cock stirs his eyes open. He’s still too sore, he thinks, too sore to move or to harden again. Too sore to resist, as something cool and round closes around him, just behind the flare of the cock head. And then there are several more metal rings, each locking snugly about his cock so that the two vertical bars connecting them sink a little into his flesh. “Vincent,” he breathes, sucking the word in over his teeth. “I can’t.”

The other man wraps his hand over the cock cage, casually possessive as he leans up and kisses Sephiroth. His tongue runs over Sephiroth’s lower lip as a thin, rounded piece of metal teases over the head of his cock, dipping and then pulling out of the slit there several times before it finally presses into him. It’s oiled, the rod, but Sephiroth whines at the excruciatingly slow stretch of his flesh before its tip, whines and trembles and is as powerless as before to resist it.

The feeling of it bottoming out in him makes his hips jerk as if his body perversely wants to swallow even more of it. Then he slumps down, panting, as Vincent fixes the other end to his cock cage; there’s a part a little down from the tip that spreads his slit just enough that over the hours, it turns sore and over-sensitive. The rest of his cock aches too, inside and out, flesh fluttering uneasily against its prison, but he’s still too tired to resist. It takes a tremendous amount of stress to overcome his preternatural strength and stamina, his accelerated healing, but Vincent’s done enough to break him.

He still has bruises dappling him, clustering into great masses of sores on his buttocks and thighs, when he pushes himself up a few hours later and limps down the other passage to relieve himself. He has to do that through the rod, which is hollow: it keeps him constantly open even as its weight makes his cock feel stuffed throughout with lead, not just along that thin line. When he pisses, his prick wants to squeeze down but is stopped by the rod and it feels as if it takes longer that way, being forced to simply let the piss drain through the rod. It aches.

Sephiroth limps back to Vincent and folds himself against the other man’s legs, resting his head in Vincent’s lap. Vincent lifts him briefly, dragging him onto the furs, but then puts him back, fingers stroking slowly through Sephiroth’s damp hair as all the aches gradually settle into one low, persistent throb.

That’s day three.

* * *

Day four, when Sephiroth wakes, the strip around his wrists has been replaced with the stitched leather bands from his first trip. Their mates are encircling his ankles, and a long chain connects one ankle to a spike set at the edge of the nest. He’s by himself, but once he’s eaten and drunk, he returns to the furs.

Vincent’s left the comb, along with a leather thong. Sephiroth works the knots from his hair and then braids it halfway down his back before tying it off. A few minutes after that, Vincent emerges from the passage to the rock spur, a fresh-killed rabbit in one hand.

He spitroasts it and they eat it. The bruising is largely gone but Sephiroth still feels stiff in the legs and arms, tender over his back and buttocks, and it’s an effort to just ask Vincent to unchain him so he can relieve himself. Once that’s done, he drops back onto the nest and is prepared to nap the day away.

So he doesn’t think anything of it when Vincent tugs his ankle over to the spike and fastens it there. He does groan when Vincent flips his other leg wide, pulling it up to lock to the other spike, and when Vincent crawls up to push his arms over his head, Sephiroth can’t help but tug at them, too weakly to free himself. “I’m not leaving,” he says.

Vincent smiles and locks his wrists to the spikes anyway. Then wraps a thick band of leather around his eyes, which makes him hiss and arch his back against the furs.

“I’m not—I can’t,” Sephiroth says, chilly prickles of suspicion rising in him.

“I know,” Vincent says, the first thing he’s said since the second day. He sounds lazy, satisfied. Not at all as if he wants to tear Sephiroth to pieces, the way he takes Sephiroth by the chin and then takes Sephiroth’s mouth with his own. “So I can do what I want.”

Sephiroth shudders, but then Vincent leaves him lying there, untouched. He tests the spikes but they hold as well as they did the first trip. It’s only a few seconds of effort and then he gives up, but sweat starts to pearl out of his skin as he listens to Vincent padding quietly around the cave. Vincent goes down the passage to the rock spur, then returns and comes to the nest. Standing over Sephiroth, the sides of his feet grazing Sephiroth’s hips.

“Vincent, please,” Sephiroth starts, and an icy drop of water falls on him.

Anticipation has him so tensed up that that single drop makes him whip against his bonds. Then he falls back, gasping, and the heat of Vincent’s body draws over him, the man going to hands and knees. Another icy touch to his lower lip, and when it lingers instead of quickly sliding into his mouth, he realizes: an icicle.

Sephiroth lifts his head to suck at it and Vincent moves swiftly down his body, the icicle pulling away and then returning to circle over his right pectoral. It rises just as Sephiroth’s bracing for it to press against his nipple, and instead Vincent’s chilly hand suddenly wraps over Sephiroth’s cock, the cold in it flowing into the rings banding Sephiroth’s prick so his skin tries to jump all over.

“Please, please—I can’t,” Sephiroth moans, wrenching at his bonds, but Vincent doesn’t stop.

Ice traces up his inner thighs, dances across the tops of his shoulders, scratches roughly enough at his belly that for a moment, blind as he is, he thinks it draws blood. He’s not entirely sure how many icicles Vincent has—at least two, because sometimes Vincent has both hands teasing at him, but sometimes it feels like there’s half a dozen, each one making him jerk and squirm, his balls growing heavy with come that his caged cock isn’t permitted to expel. At one point he even thinks that Vincent’s curling one in his tail, rubbing it up behind Sephiroth’s ball sac, letting its point melt blunt as Sephiroth tries to arch away from it.

Vincent uses the piercings, pressing ice to them so that the metal stays chilly for minutes afterward, running the cold directly into Sephiroth’s flesh. It echoes yesterday and between that memory and this reality, Sephiroth’s quickly reduced to a shivering mess of pure, thwarted, need.

His nipples stiffen till Sephiroth can feel how they poke against Vincent’s lips, when the man first starts to nurse at them. Then they turn soft and too-tender, swelling around their piercings until the heat of their soreness splays over the rest of the pectoral like a claiming hand. Once they’re rendered so, Vincent moves down to Sephiroth’s balls, icing the piercings there until they leave ring-shaped bites when Vincent’s tongue flips them up against the sac. At least, that’s what it feels like to Sephiroth, trapped in the dark as Vincent rumbles pleasurably to himself.

And then Vincent plays with the cock cage. He traces ice along each ring till the cold suddenly seems to shoot around it, drawing sharp cries out of Sephiroth. His tongue comes after it, warming the bars back up, only for him to start over again. Sephiroth’s already whimpering by the time he mouths at the head of Sephiroth’s cock, sucking a little at the top of the rod spearing it. Then that wet warmth leaves and Sephiroth senses it, he’s trying to shape his throat around a ‘please’ when that first freezing drop slips down into the rod.

He cries out, dragging his head back into the furs. Vincent’s tail winds around his cock, fitting itself between the rings and pushing that up so Vincent can circle the rod’s tip with an icicle over and over again, each circuit spreading more cold down the rod’s length. Sephiroth’s cock contracts around the rod but has nowhere to go, squeezed tightly in the cage, and all Sephiroth can do is wait for the man to tire of the game.

When the last of the ice melts, Sephiroth’s so limp that Vincent only has to tilt him by the chin for his mouth to fall open. Vincent pushes the head of his cock in, his fingers brushing over the blindfold as he strokes himself, and once he’s come, he bends over to lick himself out of Sephiroth’s mouth.

He leaves Sephiroth lying there, splayed and trembling, for minutes or hours. Eventually he unlocks Sephiroth’s hands and feet, but he leaves the blindfold on as he pulls Sephiroth up against his chest. He feeds Sephiroth that way, then pulls Sephiroth higher, so he can work Sephiroth open again and then slide his half-hard cock in.

He doesn’t seem to be in any particular hurry this time, curling against Sephiroth’s back and doing little more than breathing as his cock slowly swells inside of Sephiroth. Who’s recovered a little, enough to stretch his head back and lip at Vincent’s jaw; when he moves one arm to Vincent’s hip, Vincent picks it up and then pulls both his wrists up to refasten them to the same spike.

“I want to come,” Sephiroth murmurs. “Tomorrow.”

Vincent mouths wetly behind Sephiroth’s ear. “On my cock or off it?”

Dry or wet, Sephiroth hears, and it takes a good minute for his shudder to subside enough for him to answer. “Both.”

Vincent laughs, and flexes his hips against Sephiroth so the head of his cock rubs a long, pulsing ache down into Sephiroth’s own cock. “Then I’m going to choose the order.”

Sephiroth lets his head fall back, murmuring a sigh, and that’s day four.

* * *

On day five, Vincent’s still there when Sephiroth wakes. Still in Sephiroth, the evidence of the multiple times he’s had Sephiroth over the past night pulling off in dried flakes from between them. Vincent reaches down and scrapes his claw at the streaks, letting Sephiroth feel the occasional graze of its tip, and then refreshes the stains with a quick fuck. Then he slides out, but pushes his fingers immediately in so Sephiroth only feels the beginnings of hollowness.

He milks Sephiroth, lapping the come till it no longer drips out of the rod, and then pulls the blindfold off and takes Sephiroth to the pool for a wash. Sephiroth’s limbs feel heavy and unwieldy, and he finds it’s easiest to simply lean against the side of the pool and sag into Vincent’s deft hands. Vincent combs out his braid, then pushes the hair away from his nape so the man can bite lightly at that, having Sephiroth a second time.

Sephiroth is only half-aware through breakfast, and still feels a little detached from things as Vincent guides him down the least-used passage. In the middle of it there is a long wooden plank with chains running from each corner to rings set high on the walls, and Sephiroth considers it without any particular thoughts about it until Vincent pushes him down and has him stretch out on his back over it. Each of his limbs is lifted and his cuffs are fastened to the chains. Then Vincent winds leather strips in and out of the links, lacing them around Sephiroth’s arms and legs. Sephiroth’s ass is pushed right to the edge of one end of the plank, while his head falls back to hang off the other, when Vincent steps back and then shortens the chains to lift the plank a few inches off the ground.

He’s blocking the passage, swinging slightly in the draft coming through the woven-branch wall at the other end. Vincent lifts his feet over Sephiroth to get back between Sephiroth’s legs, then squats down and reoils Sephiroth’s hole so he can push a stuffed-leather cock into it. The thing’s attached to some sort of wooden stand that’s heavy enough to resist when the chains sway, although it shifts enough so that Sephiroth can tell it’s not stapled to the floor.

Sephiroth already feels soft as a wrung-out rag, tied up to please a single set of eyes, his piercings chilling a little in the draft and reminding him how very close to a mere luxury he’s become. A toy Vincent uses as he pleases, and then Vincent comes back to bend down over his hand, fingers gently pulling the strands back from his face. He sighs and lets his head hang into the other man’s palms, only paying attention when he hears more wood slide across rock.

It's a little wooden stand with a leather cock attached to it, presumably the twin of the one spreading his buttocks. There’s a small, padded shelf a few inches below the cock, and when Vincent sees Sephiroth considering it, he laughs and runs his tongue over the front of Sephiroth’s bared throat. “Cloud’s a good carpenter,” he says, and smiles to show his fangs when Sephiroth blinks. “He didn’t make all of it, and I didn’t tell him what it was for. Although he’s very good at guessing, and isn’t as naïve as your friend seems to think.”

It takes a moment for the name to come to Sephiroth. “Zack can learn his own lessons,” he murmurs.

Vincent strokes his cheeks again, then runs thumbs over his eyes to close them. The blindfold’s wrapped over them again and the cock is pushed into his mouth, that little shelf below it supporting the crown of his head just enough so his arched neck teeters on the edge of strain. He sucks a little at the leather, listening to Vincent stand up and then walk down the passage.

Yesterday he’d wanted to come so badly that the need had knotted itself in his throat, never able to loosen enough to crawl out till the very end, and even then he’d only been able to rasp his request. Today he still wants to, but he wants it like he wants things in his dreams, a constant awareness of it but the sense that it’s always slightly out of reach, and that it’s not a true rush to get to it. He lazes on the plank, relaxed between the two cocks filling him, even as the chains twist and push one a little further in, pull the other one a little out.

The touch on his throat is what startles him. Vincent’s claws pause, and then, as he lets out a moan under them, they spread so that their points tickle along his windpipe. “I used to come up here to stop being human for a while,” Vincent says conversationally, pebbles bouncing down the passage as he seats himself by Sephiroth. “I kill and I’m very good at it. But with people all the real work is before and after the killing. It can get tiring—I’d want a break from it, from always thinking about what other people think about what I was doing.”

He is good at it. He meticulously researches and plans out all of his assignments, and he’s so comfortable with it that sometimes Sephiroth sees him on his tablet and assumes he’s only browsing the news. His work isn’t the same as Sephiroth’s, tucked into the shadows as it is, but it’s so precise and clean that Sephiroth wishes he could watch Vincent through an entire mission, the way Sephiroth enjoys watching the sweep of a blade through a perfect round in the training ring.

Vincent’s claws slide feather-light across Sephiroth’s throat, and then they lift and his soft fingertips run along the same spots before they curl up to cup Sephiroth’s jaw. “I think Lucrecia feels the same way about her research,” he says as he pets his thumb along Sephiroth’s jawline. “We recognized that in each other, the frustration. It was good for a few days of fucking, and then she walked in on me killing one of my family’s teams. When we had to dismember one of them, she picked up the head before I could even say anything.”

This is…not something Sephiroth can simply let float over him, but at the same time, he can’t tell where this is going. He can’t—well, he can’t see anyway, he thinks, and then Vincent brushes his thumb over Sephiroth’s mouth, circling along the cock stretching it, and Sephiroth is reminded that he’s only here for the man. Perhaps that’s the point.

“I knew who you were. I pulled you out of the snow because I knew how she’d be if you died—she’s how she is, but she does love you,” Vincent continues, still using the same conversational tone. “But that wasn’t why I kept you with me. It was…curiosity. You’re curious—I’m still curious, even now that I know you. What we do, it doesn’t tire me out. I still feel human, and I don’t mind, and that’s very curious. No one else makes me think this way. It’s why I went to see you, to see if you thought similarly.”

Then Vincent pulls the leather cock out of Sephiroth’s mouth. He holds Sephiroth’s head in his hand again, leaning closely enough that Sephiroth can feel the warm draft of his breathing. Sephiroth opens his mouth, then licks at his lips. Then simply leaves it open, pointed up at Vincent—after another moment, Vincent stoops and buries a warm chuckle between Sephiroth’s lips.

He takes the other cock out and then lowers the chains so the plank’s on the ground. Then he pulls the rod out of Sephiroth’s cock and removes the cage from around it. Sephiroth arches sluggishly against the blood rushing back into his prick, then drops heavily back as Vincent licks at him. Vincent licks a second time, then uses his hand to encourage Sephiroth’s erection the rest of the way.

When Sephiroth’s fully hard, Vincent climbs onto him and then sinks down onto his cock. The man has some kind of ability to self-lubricate, as well as to stretch easily—Sephiroth always thinks he’d like to play with that, and never focuses long enough to bring it up—and it makes it easy for Vincent to ride Sephiroth into coming. He’s barely out of breath, and he only rocks himself a little faster, arresting Sephiroth’s cock at half-softened before it starts to rise and flush again.

Wet. Sephiroth comes a second time, wet, and then a third. By then Vincent’s come once and has to raise himself half-off to pump at the base of Sephiroth’s cock, but he’s ruthless and no matter how Sephiroth gasps and twists, he works out that third climax. Only after that does he get off Sephiroth, ratcheting the leg chains back up and lifting Sephiroth’s hips off the floor so that his prick simply glides into Sephiroth.

“I—I do,” Sephiroth groans, as Vincent’s hand and tail both stroke over his cock. “I am curio—I want to know you, Vincent. I want—I want—”

He comes dry. Stuttering and harsh, every fiber in him drawn to snapping point. He should resent this, the way he so easily falls under the other man, but instead he’s still craving it. Mouthing slackly at Vincent when he unties Sephiroth and then pulls him off the plank to hang over one shoulder, still blindfolded and trailing strips of leather from his limbs. He nuzzles and nips till Vincent drags them back into the other room. They both slurp down water, and then Vincent rolls them onto the pile of furs and curls a wing over them.

“No one else—your family, there’s nothing they could do to interest you?” Sephiroth murmurs, as Vincent idly plucks at the blindfold. He feels those fingers slow. “Or am I earning the answer to that the next trip?”

The blindfold slides off, and then Vincent’s mouth slides over his own for a slow, deep kiss. “It’s been over thirty years, and I still think killing for contract makes more sense than killing for them ever did,” the man murmurs back. His hands rid Sephiroth of a few straps, then still again. “I settled my mind about them long before I ever met you. You don’t ask nearly as many questions as I expect.”

“I think you tell me enough, when you think it’s the time for it. I can tell timing’s important with you—I can tell you’re reading into when I choose to ask you,” Sephiroth says. Then he presses his lips to the side of Vincent’s jaw. “When we have the time. You should know I have over a decade of planning another invasion of Wutai in my files.”

Vincent snorts. “You can’t invade it only for my family. They’re not even the only ones driving the feud.”

“No, of course not, but I can think about it,” Sephiroth says. He mumbles into Vincent’s throat, feeling the man tease at a nipple ring. “My mother constantly would tell me to think about the logic, not the emotions. Any good swordsman will tell you you don’t fight best when you’ve gotten rid of all your emotions, you fight best when you’ve mastered them. She’s brilliant at what she does, but she’s a fool for not seeing that with you.”

“I think you enjoy puzzling me out. And puzzling me,” Vincent says after a moment.

Sephiroth lifts his head and searches out the other man’s mouth, then lets Vincent push him back into the furs. “I puzzle you? Well, I’ll take that as a compliment,” he breathes, rolling up against Vincent. “Now have me again. I’m sore and I still want to be sore in the morning, while we can.”

Vincent smiles against his throat, then runs one hand down Sephiroth to grip at his hip as the wing lifts.

* * *

They spend the sixth day cleaning up and securing things for their absence. Sephiroth is still a little stiff in places, but it clears up shortly after breakfast. Just as well, since while the ice is not anywhere as thick as on his last visit here, it’s still enough to make the climb along the cable tricky.

Vincent hovers near him but if he falls, the man can only push him back onto the mountain; their combined weight would be too much for Vincent to stay in the air. So he dresses for the climb and uses a harness to clip himself to the cable, like the Jenovans who first found and expanded this cave apparently did.

“When I first came here, there were still provisions rotting in the back,” Vincent says as he pulls Sephiroth the last few feet into the storage cave. It’s guarded by a thick metal door, and behind it Sephiroth finds a generator, electric lights, temperature controls. “I think this was one of the cult leaders’ personal retreats—there was a place for someone to sleep. Tifa tells me there are other caves where a slave would be chained in a little place like this and would send down whatever was needed in a basket on the cable.”

“Tells you?” Sephiroth says.

“Her family helped drive them out, and passed a few stories down,” Vincent explains. He runs his fingers over a rusty metal stud in the wall, just under the more recent-looking shelving. “I was blown into here first, actually. Caught in a storm I didn’t notice was brewing.”

That makes Sephiroth turn and look at him. Vincent shrugs. “Sometimes the mountain lets you live and learn, but I wouldn’t recommend relying on that.”

“I have no intention of wandering over it without a guide,” Sephiroth says, to which Vincent smiles. Then he looks out through the doorway at the sky, which is starting to fill with clouds. “I’ve never had somewhere like this. My mother believes in self-independence, but not in privacy, and when I joined SOLDIER, they owned all the space, even if I could make myself alone in it.”

“It’s useful for certain times,” Vincent says after a moment. Then he looks outside as well. His brows draw together, and then he gestures for them to finish quickly.

They drop back onto the rock spur just as snow starts to fall. Vincent closes the door in the wattle barrier, then startles a little as Sephiroth pulls up against him. But then he opens his mouth for the kiss, welcoming it without immediately dominating it as he has been these last few days.

“You could come up here on your own,” Vincent says when he draws back. He puts a slight emphasis on the ‘here.’

Sephiroth nods, but then wraps his hands over Vincent’s hips. “Yes, but why?”

Useful for some times, but the time when Sephiroth would have wanted something like this for just himself has passed. Vincent wonders that Sephiroth doesn’t ask so many questions; Sephiroth should wonder the same about Vincent, as the man looks at him, then smiles knowingly and pushes his hands up to play with the piercings still adorning Sephiroth’s nipples.

They’ll have to take those out before they go, both sets. Not practical, unfortunately, with the life Sephiroth leads outside of here, but for now…he doesn’t wonder. He only leans down and enjoys the company.

Chapter 13: Interlude: Sephiroth and Vincent Exchange Medical Histories

Vincent tightens his tail around Sephiroth’s throat just as Sephiroth noses down his perineum and Sephiroth stops but doesn’t withdraw, laying his cheek against the bed. He’s rather lightly bound for them—wrists cuffed together, collared by the tail—but waits till Vincent’s shifted off the headboard and swung his thigh out of the way so they can see each other. The movement of Vincent’s leg over him draws the cooler air over his face and Sephiroth briefly closes his eyes, then opens them as Vincent runs a finger along his jaw.

It gathers up drops of sweat, and then Vincent pushes the damp, salted tip between Sephiroth’s lips. He gladly sucks at it, curling his tongue around the digit as Vincent studies him. For a few seconds Vincent seems content with the treatment, rolling his finger around in Sephiroth’s mouth, but then he pulls it out and takes Sephiroth by the chin. “Did you want to ask something?” he says.

“I wanted to lick you out,” Sephiroth says, after a moment. Which Vincent notices, from the way the man’s lips quirk, but what Sephiroth says also affects him. His fingers stroke back along Sephiroth’s jaw and then close over Sephiroth’s throat, pulling along with the tail as he urges Sephiroth’s head back against his inner thigh. “Back there. You—”

“Lubricate myself, yes,” Vincent says. He doesn’t seem ashamed about it, but there’s a little reticence in his manner; he sometimes turns this way when there’s too much of an explanation necessary for the moment in time. He doesn’t like shorthanding something simply because of lack of time, or distractions.

And it’s been a pleasurable couple of hours that Sephiroth doesn’t wish to interrupt either. He’s been taken twice and nearly recovered from it, only a few stray scratches on his hips that still sting when he rubs them against the bed, plus the ache fading from inside of him that he’d like to renew before they’re done. So he’s willing to put the matter aside for now. He presses his cheek against Vincent’s leg and stretches his bound hands against the bed so their buckles and links click, drawing Vincent’s attention there, and then he’s about to slide his mouth over the tip of Vincent’s cock when the tail tightens over his throat again.

Sephiroth looks up, and Vincent is still considering him, head slightly tilted, that thoughtfulness intermixed with enough simmering heat that Sephiroth knows the man isn’t considering anything but him. Nothing to do with their work or familial ties or any other complication, and for a moment the unfiltered intensity of it is enough to still him.

Then Vincent stirs again. Smiling, as he pulls up now, urging Sephiroth off his belly and onto his knees. “You’re still trying to find a reason to not go to that workshop on Friday,” he says. “I can find one.”

It’s not a question. “Angeal and Genesis are already going, I’d be redundant,” Sephiroth murmurs, obligingly turning his head so Vincent can start nipping up the side. “I—I want—”

“You told me what you want,” Vincent says, as his other hand slides between Sephiroth’s legs and presses two fingers into his still-slick hole. “You’ll be busy with it on Friday so you’ll have your excuse. Now spread.”

Sephiroth shivers once, then moves his knees as he’s been directed.

That’s Sunday. Friday morning, in the shower, after his usual workout, with cold water sluicing down his front and his palms planted against the wall before him, he’s given the same direction. Vincent opens him up to three fingers, driving them slowly in and out of him till he’s rolling up onto the balls of his feet, rutting into the chilly stream from the showerhead as its icy fingers draw over the increasing heat in his cock. He’s not hard but it’s becoming a yet, and it’s—“I have morning meetings,” he groans.

“I know,” Vincent says. He removes his fingers and Sephiroth hisses a little but relaxes, anticipating the man’s cock next—only to groan in surprise and disappointment when instead it’s the hard rubber of a plug that finds its way into him.

Sephiroth reaches back and a crushing band of muscle immediately whips about his wrist. He stops, exhaling roughly, and for a moment they stand where they are.

Then he hears Vincent’s rumble, and Vincent’s hands slide slowly over his belly, briefly lacing together before parting to stroke down onto his thighs, soothing and teasing in equal measures. The tail uncoils from his wrist. “You’re still going to work,” Vincent promises, threatens, lips softly grazing over the back of his neck. “The last meeting’s with me. Two hours in your conference room, and all you need to do is be prepared for it.”

This is entirely inappropriate, and needlessly risky, and all the commonsense things Sephiroth discards when he inhales all the way from the belly and then drags his hand up to press against the wall. Vincent’s lips are smiling, where they’re resting against his nape, and the man runs his fingers into the creases between thigh and torso before he steps back.

“Now spread,” Vincent says again, barely audible over the sound of the shower.

Sephiroth spreads. Vincent twists the plug further into him, then rocks it a few times as if searching out the most vulnerable spots within Sephiroth’s body to seat it against. When he’s satisfied, he turns off the water and gives Sephiroth’s groin a quick toweling before taking Sephiroth’s cock in hand. A few exquisite seconds of warmth against his fingers, and then he’s fitted a rubber sheath over it, thick enough to keep Sephiroth limp as he finishes toweling off the rest of Sephiroth’s body.

“I want to suck your cock,” Sephiroth rasps when the towel finally falls to the floor, slapping wetly upon landing.

Vincent steps away from him, letting Sephiroth see how flushed and tall the man’s prick is. “Once you’re dressed,” he says, taking another towel down and starting to wrap it around himself.

Sephiroth has to shake himself like a dog as he gets out of the shower, so he can remember where things are, what to do with them. He has to work, he thinks, and then he can appreciate the double edge Vincent’s putting everything. He is going to work today.

He’s good enough. He combs out his hair and dries it, pulls on his uniform and joins Vincent in the kitchen. Vincent stays clear of him so that the little rituals of the morning smooth off some of the prickling need in him—some of it, but the man’s always there when he looks, always present. Always at the edge.

Once Sephiroth has eaten and had his usual coffee, Vincent finally pushes back from the table. Sephiroth drops between the man’s legs with a sigh of relief, taking the offered cock into his mouth, and the warm, familiar weight of it helps him focus. Again, it doesn’t really remove the need, but it pulls it from a scattered, tingling net into a few clearly-defined points that are easier to deal with. His cock head’s been made sensitive by the pressure of the rubber sheath, so he tries not to move sharply or quickly to avoid tugging it against his ball sac or against the front of his trousers. The plug moves with him so he maps out the shortest number of steps to everything.

“Call when you can’t help it,” Vincent says, kissing Sephiroth lightly on the mouth, as if it’s merely the way the man sends him off in the morning.

Not necessary, Sephiroth almost says back. He can accommodate this. They part ways, each of them to their day, and Sephiroth makes it to his office with increased strain but not an increased likelihood of giving himself away. If anything, he’ll be more efficient, all the usual likely distractions paling in comparison to what he’s already managing.

He tells himself this, and it lasts for the first two meetings. Then he ducks into his office’s attached bathroom to relieve himself in between calls, and once he’s taken his prick out of his trousers, he finds himself fondling it. Stupid, he knows, he’s only torturing himself, but pressing along the sheath is so intoxicating, the way that the rubber diffuses the pressure around his cock while simultaneously resisting it.

Precome starts to well out of his cock slit. He swipes at it and his nail catches at the end of the sheath. It slips under, briefly, and then he shudders as he pulls his hand back. He pulls both hands off and presses them to the top of the toilet for a few seconds, breathing in and out. Then he washes his fingers off, pulls his trousers back up without fastening them, and goes back into his office to message Vincent.

The man doesn’t look disappointed when he comes in, or really, any emotion in particular. He catches Sephiroth by the arm and pulls him back from the door, closing that, and then pushes him off a foot. One calm, assessing gaze taking Sephiroth in from head to toe, and then Vincent nods at the wall. Sephiroth flexes his hands, feeling how his gloves tighten over the backs, and then turns and puts up his palms.

“Spread,” Vincent says, and Sephiroth drops his forehead against the wall as his legs slide apart, slowing the fall of his trousers down his legs.

“Have you been lurking in the hall?” Sephiroth does have to mutter, given how fast the man arrived.

Vincent chuckles but doesn’t answer. He’s busy, taking up Sephiroth’s cock and rubbing his thumb across the weeping head. Sephiroth arches involuntarily, then jerks his hips a second before he would have lifted his cock out of Vincent’s fingers and made it slap against the wall.

That makes Vincent sigh. “Hold still,” he says, pressing his other hand against the small of Sephiroth’s back.

Sephiroth hisses between his teeth, then braces himself. Vincent waits another second, then pulls out some kind of latex garment. It’s black and thin, Y-shaped with two flat wings that Vincent fastens around Sephiroth’s waist. The third leg has a sleeve attached to its underside that Vincent slips Sephiroth’s cock into, almost in the same deft motion that he uses to remove the cock sheath. Then Vincent pulls the sheath back on over it—the latex is far too thin to keep Sephiroth limp on its own—and wraps his hand over that, holding Sephiroth as he bites off groan after groan at the additional constriction.

Eventually, he adjusts, and his breathing slows. Then speeds up again, as Vincent pulls his sleeved cock back between his legs and then plucks at the edges of the cocksleeve so that it covers Sephiroth’s balls as well. It’s a thong, really, shoving his bound genitals up against his perineum so that the plug in him jostles, squeezing his prostate between the two. Vincent fastens the strap to the waistband and then lays a palm over the spot, shockingly cool and dry against Sephiroth’s heated skin.

“Don’t take it off,” Vincent says as he removes his hand and then bends down to pull at Sephiroth’s trousers. “If you do, you can come but it’s not going to be from me fucking you, not tonight.”

Tonight. “You’re going to make me wait till we’re home?” Sephiroth mutters.

Vincent draws his trousers back up and does up the fly and belts for him, then smooths over the strangely empty front. He twists into it and Vincent chuckles again, moves his hand so that its fingers splay blatantly across Sephiroth’s desexed groin. “If you do as you’re told,” the man says, and then he leaves.

Sephiroth only tries to sit down once. The pressure on his tucked-away cock and balls is too much and he catches himself roughly against his desk, leaning hard on his forearms and gasping at the polished metal surface. He has one more call before the two-hour meeting with Vincent, but he can turn off the camera; he also has a certain amount of paperwork he needs to review or else he’ll have to take time out of the weekend to do it, time he’s quite sure at this point he’ll need allocated elsewhere.

So he kneels on the floor. By his own desk, using his own chair to prop up his tablet and keyboard as he works. He makes it through the call, then staggers to the bathroom to splash cold water over his face and across the back of his neck. His hair sticks to him and it’s irritating enough that he ties it back before returning to work.

His cock and balls are throbbing, at crossways to each other: the ache in his prick seems to sling up and down it as his weight shifts, forcing it to bend over the scrotum, while the one in his ball sac is a pulsing knot that doesn’t move but that seems to tug more and more of his attention into it, sinking his mind away from what he’s reading and into the strain on his body. He knocks the tablet off the chair, twice. He catches it well before it hits the floor each time, and when he pushes himself up to set it back, the movement of the plug in him makes him curl his fingers off the tablet and deep into the leather-cushioned seat.

“I need,” Sephiroth starts when he hears his door open, and his voice is cotton-thick in the middle, loose at the end. “Vincent.”

“Yes,” Vincent says as he walks around the desk, coming to stand behind Sephiroth. His fingers touch the top of Sephiroth’s head, then pet lightly down till they’re caressing the back of Sephiroth’s neck behind his coat-collar, deceptively gentle. “What is it you need?”

Sephiroth digs at the seat cushion, blinking sweat out of his eyes. He’s sweating all over, he realizes. He rests his trembling forearms against the edge of the seat. “I need you to—I can’t—I can’t keep from—if I let go I can’t keep from touching—”

“If you don’t, I can’t take off your coat,” Vincent says, low and soothing, the way you’d speak to a shellshocked bystander. He turns his hand so that he’s gripping the back of Sephiroth’s neck. “Put your left arm back—straight down behind you.”

Something settles in Sephiroth. Direction—he doesn’t have to think about it, only to follow. He pulls his hand off the seat and while his fingers keep pinching and twisting at the empty air, they catch nothing as he moves his arm as instructed. He feels the leather being tugged off his shoulder and then his shoulder jumps on its own as it’s freed of the hot, airless weight. Jumps and then settles.

“Your right arm,” Vincent says, and Sephiroth’s right arm joins his left.

His coat’s pulled down and away, then pushed back before him as a folded pad before his knees. He doesn’t move; he hasn’t been told to yet, and kneels quietly as Vincent pulls his uniform belts off, laying each to the side.

He does twitch when he feels more leather gliding over where the belts had crossed his chest and belly, but then Vincent tightens the straps sharply and Sephiroth lets them hold him, pulled tautly across his torso and then joining up to a thick strap that lies along most of his spine. From the front it’d look the same, he thinks, but from the back…

Vincent takes his gloves off. He flexes his bared hands, then makes wedges of his fingers as he feels leather sleeves being pulled over them. Surprisingly, his fingers come back into the open air—they’re not gloves but halves of a binder that covers his entire forearms and leaves his hands free. Although that means very little, once Vincent’s twisted his arms up between his shoulderblades and then carefully laced their binder to the backstrap, tying him in a strict reverse-prayer position. An extra strap buckles around his wrists and serves as the anchor for a short chain that leads up to the snug leather posture collar that Vincent fits about his neck. His hands stay free, to twist and scratch and flop helplessly against the bottom of the collar.

“You can’t,” Vincent murmurs, squatting behind Sephiroth, cupping over Sephiroth’s still-bare shoulders and rubbing circles with his thumb as he abruptly sucks at Sephiroth’s left middle finger. Hot and tight and Sephiroth cries out, a little, before Vincent’s other hand invades his mouth, giving him three fingers to gag and suck on instead. “You can’t touch. I can.”

He drags his hands down Sephiroth’s pectorals, lingering to flick at already stiff nipples. Then lower, sitting them on the tops of Sephiroth’s hips as those cant mindlessly forward, seeking out nonexistent relief from the pent-up need trying to swell into Sephiroth’s cock, to push away its bindings through sheer want.

“You can’t, but I’m going to put this on anyway, because I can,” Vincent says, licking at Sephiroth’s hands as he draws up more leather straps between Sephiroth’s legs. “Try not to be loud. I dealt with the security cameras but there are still people outside.”

“You closed the door,” Sephiroth pants. Something cinches over his waist and he starts. Then moans through his teeth—he’s trying to close his mouth even as his lips stretch against the moan, since he’s been told to—as Vincent slides one hand under him, cupping right over his bound cock, and pushes up.

His thighs turn weak. His chin, held up and out by the collar, hooks into the edge of the seat as he sways, but Vincent keeps pushing until he’s half-off his knees, muffling his whimpering into the leather cushion as a harness is buckled about his hips and thighs. He can’t touch, his arms are equally feeble in their unforgiving binder, but even so, he’s being further locked up, with straps dropping down over his groin and between his legs, one to either side of his trapped cock, and then pulling back up between his buttocks to rub and slide over the end of the plug in him. More straps encircle his legs just at the bottom of his buttocks, pushing those up around the plug.

“I did,” Vincent says, and then laughs when Sephiroth grunts in confusion, having already lost the conversation thread. “The door, Sephiroth. It’s shut and locked. So I have you for two hours and no one is going to come in. But they can hear you, if you scream.”

He tugs at the harness and it tightens all over, like possessive hands grasping at Sephiroth’s thighs, ass, cock. Sephiroth lets it rock him forward, feeling his prick press down against the latex, the rubber sheath, pushing just a little out between the leather straps running alongside it. When he inhales, the posture collar catches against his throat like another hand, holding him there.

“I don’t want you to make me scream,” he murmurs.

Vincent makes an amused noise, as his hands run along the waist strap and then dip over Sephiroth’s flattened groin. When Sephiroth shivers, he presses harder, working the heel of one hand inexorably down till it’s kneading at Sephiroth’s cock, kneading it into a thick aching mass slung underneath him as he squirms and tries to lift away from it. Vincent’s other hand catches his left shoulder, stopping him. Then it draws him back from the chair as the other man steps around him and sits in it.

“No, I know,” Vincent says. A lock of hair’s fallen out of its binding and he strokes it back behind Sephiroth’s ear, then cups his fingers over the collar and pulls. Sephiroth shuffles forward on his knees, panting openmouthed as he looks up at the other man. “You want to lick me out. On your knees, with your own cock sealed away so that you don’t have anything else to think about. You’d rather do that than go about your duties, General.”

Sephiroth shudders, roughly enough that he hears his leather bindings creak against it. “Please,” he rasps.

Vincent smiles. Pulls him a little closer, so that he’s kneeling on his own coat, and then the other man slides back in the chair and lifts his legs over the arms, sprawling them wide so that the outline of his own erection stretches the seam of his trousers. Sephiroth forgets about the collar and then jams his chin against it, trying to drop his head towards Vincent.

“Wait,” Vincent says.

He doesn’t reach out, only says that, but Sephiroth bites back his whine and holds where he is, twisting his fingers in his own hair as Vincent takes his time about undoing his trousers and then snaking them down over his legs. Long and pale and hairless—a side-effect of genetic treatments they have in common—muscles flexing temptingly as he rehangs his legs over each chair arm. Vincent drapes his trousers over Sephiroth’s desk, then grips the sides of the chair seat and levers his pelvis against its edge, his hard cock tipping up against his belly.

Vincent shows Sephiroth his hole, with the slightly reddened folds of skin tightly flattened about the rim, the hint of wetness already decorating those folds. Then, as Sephiroth’s groaning low in his throat, the man hikes himself a little and something slips out from behind him: his tail, coiling through the air to encircle Sephiroth over the collar.

That’s enough for Sephiroth to lean forward and press his mouth to the other man, rubbing his tongue over as much as he can reach. He slips into Vincent’s hole on the second lick and Vincent shivers, then makes a soft rumbling noise as his tail urges Sephiroth deeper. Sephiroth obliges, pushing his tongue as far as he can before drawing it back into his mouth. He takes a sticky film back with it, sticky and surprisingly—not sweet, not salty. It bites a little, like citrus juice, bites and then dissolves to neutral as he rubs it about the inside of his mouth.

He licks out some more as Vincent presses his buttocks against Sephiroth’s chin, and the bite softens as he tastes more of it. He does want to taste more, wedging his lips about the rim of Vincent’s hole and trying to make it widen for him. Vincent seems to enjoy it, keeping his tail closely wrapped about Sephiroth’s throat as Sephiroth applies his mouth. More of the sticky fluid comes out of the man, not quite a trickle but more than enough to start smearing out over Sephiroth’s face as he tries to keep up. He wriggles his head, wiping his cheeks against Vincent’s thighs so he doesn’t have to stop licking, and Vincent starts to gasp.

Sephiroth licks harder and faster, pushing off his knees for better leverage. The harness drags about his hips and against his groin, and his thigh muscles spasm so that he drops almost as fast as he’d risen, choking out a whimper from him against Vincent. His tongue slides out of the man and his mouth briefly lifts, until Vincent forces his head back, pushing it forward with one hand.

He whines again, unable to help himself, and Vincent deliberately rubs up against his chin and mouth till he starts licking again. He’s frenzied now, trying to lick as much as he can before Vincent crushes into his face again, and he can feel when the spasm starts to take root in the other man.

He tries to pull back, but Vincent twists fingers in his hair and he has to sit there, lapping away, as Vincent whips up against him. The chair starts to roll and he hears the high, sharp scrape of claws over metal as Vincent grabs the desk with his free hand; it stops the chair and Vincent finishes his orgasm riding Sephiroth’s tongue, pressed so closely that for several seconds Sephiroth can’t breathe.

When the man finally falls back, Sephiroth gasps and the sudden rush of air into his nose and mouth makes the world blindingly bright. He closes his eyes, instinctively ducks his head, and jars his jaw against the collar.

“Enough,” Vincent says. Harsh-sounding, but his fingers are soft where they slip between Sephiroth and the collar’s rim and rub at the bruised part. He breathes heavily for a couple minutes, slumped sideways in the chair, one leg dropping to the floor, before he pushes back and looks down at Sephiroth. “Have enough?”

Sephiroth’s breathing is slowing as well, although he hasn’t had physical relief yet. On the contrary, his need feels more acute than ever, and more tightly bound—secured. He feels secured, no room at all to come loose, and as badly as he wants to come, there’s something relaxing in that. “It hasn’t been two hours,” he breathes, and then sighs and opens his mouth as Vincent runs a thumb along his lips. “Has it?”

Vincent glances at something on the desk. “Well over an hour left,” he says, before turning back and reaching down to just close his fingers over Sephiroth’s nipples. “You wanted to lick me out.”

“I did,” Sephiroth says. He shifts on his knees, feeling a cramp taking root in his left leg, and then tugs more aches from his shoulders as that pulls the harness over his cock and twists the plug in him. Vincent pinches lightly at his nipples and he groans, knotting his fingers in his hair, before pushing his chest up into it; this doesn’t go unnoticed, of course, and Vincent teases harder at his nipples, taking each past stiff and into bright soreness. “I think you wanted—want something too. Having me like this, in my own office.”

“Like this?” Vincent says, and then nips sharply at the right nipple when Sephiroth starts to reply. He leans in so that his forelock brushes over Sephiroth’s forehead. “Dressed like a general, but tied up like a prize, and begging to be played with.”

“Am I begging?” Sephiroth says.

Vincent plucks his other nipple. Then, as Sephiroth jerks up towards him, he drops that hand down and rubs it slowly across Sephiroth’s groin, grabbing and fondling at Sephiroth’s cock through his trousers, the rubber sheath, the latex underwear. Sephiroth sags heavily onto his knees and Vincent’s tail—still wrapped over the collar—pulls him forward into a hard, claiming kiss.

“Please,” he says, when Vincent allows him his mouth again. He nuzzles at the man’s jaw, chin as Vincent’s hands return to toying with his nipples. “Please—yes, please, I’m begging—”

“For what?” Vincent asks, almost idly, as one thumb circles the areola before inching over the tender nipple itself.

Sephiroth lips at Vincent’s mouth, then groans as the man moves just enough to deny him a second kiss. “More,” he says without thinking. Then he shakes himself, even as Vincent catches his nipples so that they stretch against it. “What you—what do you—”

“You don’t want me to fuck you?” Vincent suggests. He turns one hand and strokes its back against Sephiroth, lightly running it down till the knuckles bump over the nipple, each one jarring a tiny starburst of pain from the abused flesh. “To take everything off and let you come?”

Sephiroth bites down his first, mindless reply. Over an hour, he thinks, with equal parts longing and anticipation. “You said at home. You’d fuck me at home.”

“Yes,” Vincent says after a moment, and he’s impressed, not only enjoying himself. He stops tormenting Sephiroth’s nipples and draws his hands up to cradle Sephiroth’s head. “You make it till then, you’ll come wet too, on my cock.”

“Then that, that’s what I want,” Sephiroth breathes, staring up at the man, at the red, hot eyes taking him in. “Please let me have that. Don’t make me—don’t make me—”

“—beg for something else?” Vincent says, petting along Sephiroth’s jaw where the collar’s dug in. He strokes his fingers down over the collar and out onto Sephiroth’s shoulders, where the skin jumps and crackles as if each touch carries an electric shock. “Then you do as I tell you, for the rest of this time. You’re not a general, this isn’t your office—”

A moan, ragged and deep and seemingly endless, rises out of Sephiroth.

“—and you finish what you were going to ask me,” Vincent says. And smiles, as he picks out something shining and silver from the pocket of his trousers, still hanging over the edge of Sephiroth’s desk.

He lets Sephiroth see the nipple clamps, then feel them tickling over each shoulder before he fastens them. The chain between the clamps is heavy enough that the weight of it falling from Vincent’s fingers makes Sephiroth jerk downwards; Vincent holds him up by the collar as he writhes. When he’s calmed a little, Vincent reaches down and hooks the chain with one finger, then lifts it between them so Sephiroth has to lean back to keep the chain from going taut.

“I wanted to know what you were—what you’re thinking, having me like this,” Sephiroth says, and then hisses and braces himself as he feels the chain move suddenly. But nothing happens, and he slowly unclenches as Vincent picks a strand of hair off his temple. “My uniform? Is that it?”

“Some think it’s a little provocative, without the shirt,” Vincent says, not quite answering as he moves the hand with the chain so he can swipe one finger along the straps running across Sephiroth’s chest. “You run that hot.”

Sephiroth nods. Even with air-conditioning, in any climate below the Nibelheim mountains, his resting body temperature makes it uncomfortably warm for him to wear the full SOLDIER uniform. The coat is a necessity since it carries his rank insignia, even without factoring in what’s socially acceptable, but if he could do without it, he would be tempted to. And despite his current situation, he can’t help but feel amused. “This is what you’re thinking, when you come in here and see me—”

“I generally think about work when I’m at work,” Vincent says, with a tweak at the chain to silence Sephiroth. He slides off the seat, untwining his tail from Sephiroth’s throat. “So I suppose that depends on whether I’m working, when I’m speaking to you here.”

“You—” Sephiroth starts.

He stops because the chain slides across the top of his chest as Vincent moves. Vincent stops halfway to his feet, looks down, and then pulls on it to make Sephiroth twist to the side. Sephiroth’s coat rumples up under his right knee, making it drag behind the other, and he has to heave himself up a few inches to lift and shake it free. He puts it down, panting, only to gasp when Vincent pulls on the chain again.

“Come,” Vincent says, and smiles when Sephiroth’s hips cant appealingly forward. “Into the conference room. It’s what I booked, not your office.”

Sephiroth starts to rise and Vincent puts his hand down, pushing him back. He looks sharply up, then twists against his bindings as Vincent gives his nipple chain a hard jerk. Vincent pushes at him for another moment, then straightens up and faces the door to Sephiroth’s private conference room.

He crawls on his knees after the other man. Every drag of his legs pulls and stretches the harness across his trousers, rocking his cock and his plug, while his bound arms keep him teetering off-balance. It isn’t that he doesn’t have the strength for it, because he does, but he doesn’t have the—the room for the ache, the way it blossoms up from his cock into the rest of his body, pushing up against his skin like countless tiny nails trying to scrape their way free. He only has to cross a few yards but by the time they’re standing in the doorway, Sephiroth is biting his lip to keep from begging the other man.

Vincent pushes the door open and turns so he’s in front of Sephiroth again, blocking the way. He raises the hand with the chain and caresses Sephiroth’s mouth and jaw, rubbing two fingers over Sephiroth’s lips to let him suck at them. Then he pulls them out. “You still have my slick all over your face,” he says, leaning down as Sephiroth chokes back a moan. “I don’t think about your uniform, not on its own—I have thought about what Wutai would have to do, to actually convince me they’re worth returning to. They’d have to prove to me I can still have this—they can’t give me what I already have. Keep this in your mouth.”

Sephiroth parts his lips and Vincent pushes the chain in between them. It’s pulled nearly to its limit, lifting his clamped nipples till they’re burning, but Vincent presses down on the chain till Sephiroth can hold it between his teeth. Then he takes out his fingers. Rubs them across Sephiroth’s cheeks, cleaning them, before he steps back into the conference room.

He takes a seat in the nearest chair, turning it around to face Sephiroth. His bare legs open, his cock starting to flush again between them, between the hands that he hangs casually over his knees before flipping one to beckon Sephiroth forward. Sephiroth can’t drop his head with the posture collar; he can’t dip and scoop the chain back up if it starts to slide from between his lips. He can’t beg this way, he can only do as he’s told.

He shudders, once, and then slowly makes his way to the other man. His knees want to slip apart and tip him forward into the floor; he yanks at his own hair, each pull drawing a fierce blush of pain out of his shoulder sockets, to keep himself moving in a straight line. Spit works between the links of the chain in his mouth and makes it slippery, but somehow, he doesn’t lose it, as he finally sags into Vincent’s hands.

Vincent rubs at his shoulders, then bends down and kisses him till the chain drops out of his mouth to fall against his chest, dripping wetly as he pants into the other man’s mouth. The kiss doesn’t end till the burn in his nipples has ebbed enough for him to catch his breath, and then Vincent sits back and threads his hands into Sephiroth’s trembling fingers, holding them against Sephiroth’s nape.

“I had the thought once…if I’d gone back earlier, and they’d won the war—not because of me,” Vincent says, dropping an amused look as he shifts the chair closer. “Just if they’d won, and I had been with them. And if I’d been in a position to ask—”

“You would be, if you went back. You’d only go back if—if that was guaranteed,” Sephiroth snorts. Even as distracted as he is, he doesn’t forget the kind of man Vincent is.

Vincent smiles again, slower, the sharp amusement fading to a smoother, deeper warmth. He pulls one hand free and runs it over the top of Sephiroth’s head, soothing, before circling it down to Sephiroth’s jaw. Sephiroth has his mouth open, already sensing the cock bobbing near it, and it takes only two lifted fingers for Vincent to steer that between his lips. He nurses needily at it till Vincent reaches down and flicks the hanging chain, then, after he’s finished his choked, hurt cry, merely cradles it in his mouth.

“But would I want this, just in Wutai,” Vincent says, as if musing to himself. He slides his hand up and down Sephiroth’s breastbone, just shy of the chain, as long as Sephiroth keeps his back arched. “My private conference room, my office…my toy sucking my cock. General Valentine and his war prize…I don’t know.”

Sephiroth swallows, carefully and slowly, and then again as Vincent’s hand continues its soft draw up to his right shoulder. He has to, if he’s not going to gag, and he doesn’t want to disturb the other man; Vincent rarely talks like this. But he can’t swallow too roughly either.

“I don’t think I’m general material. I never liked being the one people looked towards—too difficult to get anything done that way,” Vincent adds after a moment. His fingers drift across the top of the shoulder, then lift as he leans back in the seat, his other hand sliding free from Sephiroth’s fingers and along the side of the collar. His eyes drop to Sephiroth and he runs a curled finger along Sephiroth’s cheek, tracing where it’s pushed out by his cock. “You do make a very pretty prize.”

He strokes along Sephiroth’s cheek again and Sephiroth swallows in time with it. Then shifts up on his knees, no matter how that makes his body ache, and sucks harder, pushing himself forward as Vincent drops back in the chair, slides his hips down to the edge of the seat to meet him. Vincent’s knees press into his shoulders, then start to tremble as the man takes in a sharper, deeper breath than before.

“Getting slick like that—side-effect—came with the wings,” Vincent grunts. His hips are jerking along the chair now. “They do want role models over there, same as—want pure talent, no cheating with genes—they always thought I cheated, my mother and I—”

Sephiroth knows a few things about the man by now, and when Vincent’s hips next rise off the chair, he moves his tongue out of the way and lets his teeth run against the underside of Vincent’s cock. Vincent grabs at the chair arms, stiffening, and Sephiroth curls his tongue back into place, rubbing it hard behind the flared-out part of the cock head. There’s a hint of fang as Vincent stretches his mouth in a silent cry, his head riding up the back of the chair as his come drips down Sephiroth’s throat. He bucks up near the end, making Sephiroth grunt when his knee slaps Sephiroth’s left shoulder. Then slumps back in the chair, letting Sephiroth suck him clean.

When he recovers enough to raise his hand, Sephiroth stops sucking but waits till that hand actually presses at his jaw to let the man’s cock drop out of his mouth. Vincent pets at his cheek, then slouches back. He breathes in and out once, twice, and on the third breath, he flexes himself and lifts his legs up and over Sephiroth to hook them over the chair arms, pushing his hole out. It’s touched with slick again.

“Still over half an hour,” Vincent says.

Sephiroth swallows and his throat barely opens up, between its used state and the firm clasp of the collar around it. “This is what you’d do all day, if you were a general?” he says, looking at the gleaming slick on the rim of Vincent’s hole. “Have your slave lick you out?”

“Yes,” Vincent says. He languidly adjusts himself in the chair, making room for the tail to curl out; this time it goes not for Sephiroth’s neck but for the nipple chain, curling over it just enough to pull Sephiroth forward, gasping, so that he presses his mouth against the other man. “You wanted to. So lick.”

Sephiroth moans, shaking, and Vincent pulls the chain again. He starts licking, and he doesn’t stop till Vincent tells him to.

He’s not sure if that’s enough to eat up the remainder of the time—it might be more, might be less. It’s his last meeting so it doesn’t matter. All that matters is a gravelly, low voice telling him enough, and when he’s done and exhaustion makes his head weigh like a piece of lead against the collar rim, Vincent cradles the side of his face with one hand while taking off the collar with the other. He groans, feeling his throat bulge a little at the release, and Vincent lightly massages at the sides of his neck.

It feels good, but it also makes the nipple chain twitch, and more so as Sephiroth’s head droops. He struggles to keep it up and Vincent huffs in amusement, licking at the fresh and dried slick on his jaw while removing the clamps. Vincent does it quick, then presses his thumbs down over the nipples as the shock of release sears through Sephiroth; it still sends enough adrenaline into Sephiroth’s blood that when his arms are freed, he’s able to bring them around and push himself, albeit stiffly, to his feet.

He has to put one hand against the conference table to steady himself once he’s up, and by then Vincent’s moved to the doorway. “Yes, you’re keeping those on,” he tells Sephiroth, referring to the binders that, though unlaced, still cover his forearms—and the harness that’s still locked about Sephiroth’s hips and buttocks. “Put your coat on and button it.”

“I never do that,” Sephiroth points out as he follows the other man into his office.

“Everyone who’d notice is at the workshop,” Vincent says as he stoops and retrieves said coat from the floor. “Are you arguing?”

Sephiroth waits till Vincent is looking at him before shaking his head. He takes the coat from the other man and pulls it on, flexing his fingers when they shiver against the buckles. Vincent presses up against his front and he shivers all over, then groans into the man’s mouth as Vincent buttons and buckles his coat for him, puts his gloves back on. “Your toy you bring in and take home with you?” he murmurs.

Vincent leans against him. Then reaches behind him—there’s the sound of sloshing water, from the carafe Sephiroth keeps on his desk, and then Vincent puts a glass to his lips. “If I don’t think it’s more efficient to just keep you here, tied in the bathroom,” Vincent says, so that he almost whines the water back out. “No—it’s Friday, we’ll go home. I’ll fuck you.”

Sephiroth swallows hard, so that water sprays into the top of his windpipe, not far down enough to make him choke but far enough to burn. Even with the day he’s had, he can’t help himself. He wants it that badly.

He finishes the glass and then docilely follows the other man through the hall and into the elevator and then across walkways and other halls he’s crossed countless times, but today he doesn’t recognize them. He has to watch where Vincent goes to know where he should go, nothing else in his mind except that they’re going home. At least he lives so close; he’s thought about asking for more distant quarters, especially now that he’s sharing them with Vincent, but this is not the day to live an inch farther.

The moment the door shuts behind them, Sephiroth wants to drop to his knees. Vincent seems to sense this and clamps a hand over his shoulder, pushing him towards the middle of the living room. “Take off your coat and gloves. Kneel on them,” he says.

Sephiroth takes them off, letting it all fall into a haphazard puddle before he lowers himself. His hands jerk off the floor and he presses them back down, staring at them as Vincent moves behind him. “Tie my arms back,” he says, when Vincent’s hands touch the straps over his trousers. He clenches his fingers in his coat. “Please.”

“With the collar?” is all Vincent asks, as his hands move smoothly from Sephiroth’s hips to his elbows.

Sephiroth nods, and as his arms are folded back into place, he closes his eyes and shudders. He feels the lacing start to pull at the binder and shudders again, but this time, the shudder goes loose at the end, his body remembering the way it was bent. Strained and bound that way, yes, but familiarity warms the way his shoulders are wrenched back, his jaw is forced up. Vincent tucks his hair over his shoulder and he sighs, then rolls his hips up as the other man pets down his sides to them.

The harness is unbuckled and pulled away, and then Vincent undoes his trousers and tugs them off, making Sephiroth rise up and unfold his legs. He settles back into his kneeling position with a relieved grunt, only to find his breath stuttering when the latex bands about his waist and pulling up between his buttocks abruptly loosen. It’s worse than the nipple clamps, he thinks, squirming helplessly against the sudden rush of sensation—and his cock still can’t harden, strapped by the rubber sheath into the cocksleeve.

“Stay,” Vincent says, putting two fingers to Sephiroth’s left shoulder.

Then he walks away, into the kitchen. Sephiroth can’t spare the energy to turn and look after the man, so busy is he with sucking down breath after breath, trying to find enough air to cool the burning that’s coiling relentlessly through his groin and thighs. He barely can keep himself from tipping over and simply rutting his bound cock against the floor; the loose ends of the latex thong are flapping against his thighs, stinging a little, and he’s still trying to make himself go still when Vincent comes back.

The other man puts a glass down on the floor as he settles behind Sephiroth. It has ice in it, and Sephiroth has only time for a sharp, anticipatory breath before Vincent cups his buttocks. “You’re coming wet on my cock,” Vincent says. “Not before.”

Sephiroth sucks his breath. “Please,” he breathes, the end of the word dragging into a whine as he feels the plug slide out of him.

He’s pulled back and seated on Vincent’s cock, his legs sprawling to either side of the man’s hips. No longer kneeling, any leverage he has to keep himself from being fully impaled gone—although he doesn’t want that right now. He wants this, wants to be at the other man’s mercy, wants to be used and toyed with. He wants to be fucked.

And he is, for all that Vincent barely shifts within him. Vincent’s mouth closes around his thumb, then pops off it and wraps around the adjacent index finger, while Vincent’s tongue twists past that to lave at the next finger, bathing him with hot, wet heat that has him going boneless against the other man. Then there’s the shock of ice against his nipple, pressing hard so that the sore flesh sparks hotly before the burn of the ice works its way past the skin.

“Wet,” Vincent promises. He works steadily through Sephiroth’s fingers, served up so perfectly in the reverse-prayer position, sending streak after streak of electricity through Sephiroth to be cooled down by the pieces of ice he trails over Sephiroth’s chest. “I’m going to finish that glass, and then free your cock and you’re going to come. Wet, on my cock.”

Sephiroth moans, and doesn’t stop moaning as the man does exactly that. Sucking each finger till it’s curling feebly back on itself, melted trails of ice-water streaming down Sephiroth’s front from his stiffened nipples, and then, finally, he reaches down and pulls the sheath and cocksleeve off at the same time. Sephiroth’s hips jerk the moment Vincent’s fingernails work under the edge of the latex, and by the time his cock is free, he’s spilling over, untouched but completely, comprehensively fucked.

Vincent drops the thong and sheath to the side and then pulls him back as he slumps over, leaning them both against the bottom of their couch. The man pumps himself a few times into Sephiroth, then climaxes with a sharp gasp against Sephiroth’s right shoulder.

He needs a few minutes before he removes himself and then frees Sephiroth’s arms. Sephiroth needs a shower and the better part of an hour lying on their bed, letting Vincent feed him tidbits for dinner, before he can rouse himself enough for anything resembling human conversation.

“You chose the wings, didn’t you?” he asks, his head pillowed on Vincent’s thigh. Vincent’s tail is curled loosely around his neck, and when the other man shifts silently, Sephiroth reaches up and runs a fingertip along one round of the tail. “I mean generally—”

“I thought it’d be interesting to not have to rely on someone to come get me. I’ve been left hanging by the pick-up team too many times,” Vincent says. He doesn’t sound abrupt, although he’d paused before answering; it’s more that he sounds as if he has to drag his response out of a dusty attic somewhere, as if he’s looking at photos he barely remembers. “Lucrecia wasn’t sure how much would actually come through, since it was all experimental…but I did choose to be experimented on. It wasn’t only because I thought it’d put my family off recalling me—but I didn’t mind that, I’ll admit.”

Sephiroth hadn’t actually been planning to ask about that, though he’s hardly objecting to the additional information. He rolls over so that he can see the man’s face; he’s still sore enough that that makes him grimace, and Vincent smile, as Vincent draws one hand across his belly and then lightly rubs at his right nipple. He lets himself hitch under the touch, then resettles so his cheek is leaning against Vincent’s belly.

“Hojo did yours all at once, the same as with me, she told me,” Vincent says after another moment. “They figured out later how to piece it out—”

“Not that it’s saved Genesis and Angeal much trouble,” Sephiroth mutters, and then blinks when he sees interest in Vincent’s expression. He tends to assume the man already knows most of their experimentation history, if not all of it; at least, Vincent never seems to need details when something’s come up, even when Sephiroth has to check in with his mother. “Some things simply don’t translate well into human genetics.”

“But they could know, and think about that before they had it done,” Vincent says, with enough change in his tone to make Sephiroth keep watching him. “Do you think about that?”

And then he never wastes time, or pretends as if Sephiroth isn’t going to pick up on his quirks. So Sephiroth tries to return the favor, and credit the man with more than shallow considerations—like now, as he stares at Vincent and pushes aside his initial urge to tell the man no, he doesn’t dwell on whether Angeal and Genesis had better treatment than he did, and he thinks that that sort of question is meaningless given what they’ve all had to deal with as a result of those treatments. That might be his thought when someone asks him that question, but Vincent doesn’t think like other people, or like him.

“About…being able to choose?” he finally hazards.

“She told me she wanted to try it on an embryo, that it’d be so much easier at that stage than with adult cells. I didn’t like that idea, but I wasn’t staying to run her lab,” is Vincent’s answer, delivered with a wry twist of his lips. He pushes the mostly-empty bowl to the end table and then leans back into the pillows. “I told her at least when I was old enough and decided my mother was right about our family, I could leave—she wasn’t thrilled about my comparing her work to them. This was after—some of the side-effects were already cropping up, and I’d known the risks going in but the way she kept reminding me about it was—irritating. I had to stay longer than I wanted so she could help with that, and then I’ve had to ask her a few times over the years…”

“You never came here for that, did you?” Sephiroth can’t help asking.

Vincent guesses what he’s thinking and makes that amused rumble, as he puts his hand down and trails it through some of Sephiroth’s hair. “No, I called her, and if we had to meet in person, we did it on neutral ground. I think the one time I had to come onto Shinra property before this, you were out of town…she never wanted me near you anyway, because of my family. And probably because I kept reminding her of where her experiments with me hadn’t worked as planned.”

“I think that has more to do with how you don’t let her fix it once she’s given you what you need to know. She hates the idea that someone else can do what she can,” Sephiroth says, and after a moment’s consideration, Vincent nods in agreement. “I don’t think about it—about being able to choose. I was born as I am. Some parents choose to take drugs that mutate their genes, some choose to work where they’re exposed to radiation…Hojo and my mother made their choices. And those will always be their choices, not mine. I refuse to take their responsibility away from them.”

For a few seconds Vincent is silent. He doesn’t blink, and doesn’t show anything but close attention in his face. “You personally killed Hojo, when his mutations drove him insane.”

“And it was his choice to keep experimenting on himself after we banned him from any legitimate work. He knew what the consequences would be and he knew who’d enforce them. We made that clear to him,” Sephiroth says. His voice rises involuntarily and he catches it, pausing for a few seconds; it happened long enough ago that at this point, he feels very little about it. At least, he thought he did.

But before that sudden flash of feeling can do more than make him pause, Vincent’s fingers drift through his hair again. “I wanted to kill him before I left. We decided not to, because the aim wasn’t to destroy Shinra R&D, and I needed Lucrecia to help me leave quietly,” he says. He doesn’t sound regretful, but he’s watching Sephiroth intently. “It was the right choice at the time.”

“I was happy to kill him, and I’m still happy that I was the one who killed him,” Sephiroth says, raising his brows. “If you were wondering.”

“I thought I’d mention it before she did,” Vincent says, tone no more disturbed than before. He shifts lower in the pillows, tangling his hand more deeply in Sephiroth’s hair as he does. Then he raises his own brows as Sephiroth pushes himself up into a half-sitting position. “So you don’t resent her for making you—”

“Oh, I resent her for many things, as you’ve come to know. But I do like being alive, and I can’t imagine myself differently,” Sephiroth says. He tilts his head into Vincent’s hand as it continues to card through his hair, then stretches out his throat as Vincent raises his other hand and caresses it. “Even in your fantasy I was a general—”

“Yes, you were,” Vincent says, voice warming with amusement. He sinks further down as Sephiroth bends over to kiss him, making Sephiroth chase him into the pillows. Their mouths do finally meet, and he’s reluctant to let Sephiroth back up when they run short of breath, his tail tugging at Sephiroth’s neck so Sephiroth finally rearranges himself to lie on the other man. “You were, and then you were a very well-trained slave, so very eager to service your master—”

Sephiroth snorts, but kisses the man again. “Who says he doesn’t want to be a general.”

“I don’t regret that. Or what I am now—the side-effects are what they are, and I think I’ve found all of them at this point,” Vincent says, still calm but with enough firmness that Sephiroth pulls back from his mouth. “I’m used to them.”

“You should tell me about them, the rest of them,” Sephiroth says, because he knows there are more than what he’s seen. Then he has second thoughts—not about wanting to know, but saying that so directly—and twists his head to nuzzle at the tip of Vincent’s tail, which has been tickling at the side of his jaw. “I’m not going to run from it.”

“No, you’ve proved that,” Vincent says. He pulls Sephiroth’s head up and kisses Sephiroth, pushing aside his own tail for that. Then his tail unwinds from Sephiroth’s throat and his fingers replace it, tilting Sephiroth’s mouth as he tastes it more deeply. “Eventually. If you have more meetings to get out of.”

Sephiroth huffs, half-exasperated and half-amused. “You must have your own work at some point—”

“True. I could tie you up and take you along, couldn’t I? Leave you packed away in the safehouse with the spare supplies on my next assignment,” Vincent says, and then smiles as Sephiroth bites back a groan. He’s far better at this, Sephiroth should simply admit that to himself. “I need to remember to tell you—being used to it means I don’t, because I had no reason to.”

“Then I’ll remind you,” Sephiroth says after a moment. He leans in till Vincent’s lips are just warming his own. “I’ll calendar it if I have to.”

“Such excellent service. No wonder you’re the general,” Vincent says, and then licks across Sephiroth’s mouth before Sephiroth can reply to that. He pulls Sephiroth down, properly matching their mouths, and Sephiroth puts the matter aside for now. But doesn’t forget.

Chapter 14: Interlude: A Little More about Vincent’s Family

“Well, shit,” Angeal says once he, Elena, and their completely uninvited and unwanted but very diplomatically connected guest hole up in an empty dive bar on the outskirts of the Gold Saucer. “Is he still bleeding?”

“No, no thanks to you,” Sonon Kusakabe grunts as he yanks at a strap on his trousers. He drops a bloody wad of cotton onto the floor and then tries to snake back across the room to peer past the dive’s roll-down security fence.

If he’d still been bleeding, Angeal could’ve shoved a tranq in him and then tossed him in the back to stop doing that while they figured out who the hell is shooting at them. Instead, Angeal has to reach over and slap the idiot to the ground as a bullet threads through the metal grating. “Obviously they have our range, so would you mind staying down till we can get a pick-up?”

“I’m not going with you!” Kusakabe hisses. “I’d rather be dead than a hostage to Shinra!”

Angeal rolls his eyes and checks the reception on his phone. No bars. “Trust me, kid, we don’t want you.”

“I’ve got a signal,” Elena whispers.

She squints at her phone, then lets out a squeal as another bullet strikes the grating, goes cock-eyed and then bounces up into the ceiling. Then she hunches over as Kusakabe glares at her, not that he’s got a right to; Angeal slaps the man again and doesn’t feel a speck of guilt when Kusakabe whitens around the lips and puts one hand over his bad thigh.

“Great, okay, so tell them we’ll go for the roof next door—this one’s too low, the asshole across the street could just—” Angeal starts.

“No, that’s not going to work either, Heike always pair up their snipers so that’s where the other one will be,” Elena says as she frantically texts someone. She unfortunately misses the way Kusakabe blinks hard at her, like she’s not wearing a Turk suit and the Turks don’t specialize in intelligence. “Also, the gala’s still going on, it’s not like we can drop in a chopper. All the civvies will panic.”

Kusakabe snorts. “What, you care?”

“Yeah, kid, and stop sassing the people who actually don’t want to start up a war with you,” Angeal says, before looking at Elena again. If choppers aren’t an option, then SOLDIER’s out because nobody’s marching a column through the streets here. “Just tell me it’s not Reno.”

“No, Reno’s back in Midgar,” Elena says distractedly. Then her face sags in relief. “Oh, good. ETA ten, from the back, he’ll text when he’s here.”

“Who?” Angeal asks.

“Valentine,” Elena says, and Kusakabe flinches. And not like the flinch of someone who just doesn’t want to hear from Yuffie Kisaragi about how hot the guy is. Even Elena notices. “Isn’t he friends with your boss? He’ll get you back to her, don’t worry.”

“I’m not,” Kusakabe grits out, and then, thankfully, he shuts up.

They sit tight. The sniper outside has stopped shooting, although that’s not comforting so much as confirming Elena’s thoughts about them having the place encircled. Angeal tries not to dwell on that and busies himself with checking his arms—aside from his sword, he’s light because he’s supposed to be securing a perimeter for a fancy party, not untangling feuding ninjas—and the layout of the bar. He’s debating with himself about going to check whether that’s a load-bearing wall or not when Elena raises her hand, having put her phone on silent.

She gestures quickly and Angeal shifts around, then can’t help an alarmed noise when Vincent just walks in through the back door, in plain view of the dive’s front window. Vincent stares at him for a moment, then gestures for Angeal to lower his sword, which he’d hastily swung in front of the window. “They’re dead but the back-up is moving in. Come on,” Vincent says.

“Oh,” Angeal says, getting up. “Good. Didn’t want to be the one telling Seph to go find you in medical.”

Vincent doesn’t make a noise but gives off the strong impression he’s just tolerating all of this as he leads them up onto the roof and then across two buildings. They pass by a pair of legs sticking out from behind a water tank and Elena pauses to snap a photo, then looks mulish when Kusakabe glares at her. “I need it for the report, because we have to explain why a First nearly got shot,” she says.

“Nearly?” Vincent murmurs to Angeal, who wouldn’t maybe use that word—‘was in the vinicity’ is more accurate than that shot had been—but who would rather just get back to the barracks and his team.

“He walked in on a negotiation he shouldn’t have known about,” Kusakabe snaps back.

“I didn’t know about—”

“It wasn’t even remotely a negotiation, you were baited,” Vincent says. When Kusakabe glowers at his back, the man just continues sighting something across the street. “They blew up her ex-husband a day before she was going to kill him. Why would she forget that?”

Kusakabe opens his mouth, then grimaces. “I said that too, actual—”

He and Vincent both wave their hands downward at the same time; Vincent also flashes across the roof and then twists up behind a ventilation duct as he lines up his gun with something. Kusakabe reaches for something up his sleeve but then thinks the better of it, and just crouches with Angeal and Elena while Vincent shoots whoever it is.

“Oh, great,” Kusakabe says when they make it over to the body.

Vincent looks at him with mild surprise. “You were expecting them?”

“Well, no, but ever since the tea ceremony, they’ve been doing crazy things like this,” Kusakabe mutters.

“I thought tea ceremonies were supposed to be meditations about peace and building bridges,” Angeal says.

“Not that one,” Kusakabe says. He rubs at his face, then points over his shoulder. “We should backtrack and then swing around, they always bring threes.”

They backtrack, and that goes okay till they’re trying to get down from roof-level using a not-actually-unoccupied warehouse and a bunch of shadows suddenly jump out from above and below them in the stairwell. Angeal employs the flat of his sword, then notices that both Vincent and Kusakabe are outright killing their attackers. He feels slightly better when he sees Elena initially shot hers to injure only, but Kusakabe is finishing them off.

“They’re sworn to never leave a failed mission alive,” he explains.

“The tea was that bad?” Angeal says.

“No, this faction dates back to a stolen dinner reservation in my grandfather’s time,” Vincent says, and then raises his brow at Kusakabe. “Do you have a better description?”

Kusakabe…doesn’t answer. Just proceeds stiffly onward, while the rest of them make sure none of the apparently dozen Wutaian covert ops teams in town take him out. The next team that tries to get at them comes in so close to their rendezvous with the nearest SOLDIER unit that they just evade—or Angeal thinks they are, until he looks up from the towel someone’s trying to hand him and realizes that Vincent’s gone. Also, Sephiroth’s head has just showed up at the top of the street.

“Shit,” Angeal says, wheeling around.

“Wait,” someone hisses at him, and much to his surprise, it’s Kusakabe. Who looks genuine about it too, as he twists away from the field medic trying to get him to drop his trousers to grab at Angeal’s arm. “Wait, I know that team—”

“Great, then you can come with, and better me than him,” Angeal says with a nod in Sephiroth’s direction.

Kusakabe stiffens without looking over but doesn’t let go. “They’re not a match for him, and he’ll be back in a couple minutes. You should just let him do what he needs to do.”

That…is interesting phrasing. And also something Sephiroth’s overheard, judging from the expression on his face as he stops asking people to move out of the way and just starts pushing. Kusakabe looks over at that point, winces, and doesn’t quite slide himself behind Angeal, which admittedly puts the kid’s courage up somewhere near Zack’s.

“His vendetta’s a fair one, we all recognize it,” Kusakabe says more quietly.

Angeal catches the field medic’s eye and they back off, though like a good one, they look unhappy about it and are keeping a beady eye on Kusakabe’s bad leg. “Okay, I’ll bite—what the hell does fair mean with you all, given all the—”

There’s a black-and-pale blur up the side of a nearby building, with a delayed flurry of shouts in Sephiroth’s wake as he disappears over the edge of the roof. Angeal’s about two seconds behind, and gets up onto the roof in time to see Sephiroth flicking bits of flesh off Masamune, while Vincent bends over a dark-clothed body lying in way too much blood to still be alive. Angeal doesn’t remember hearing any shots.

“Is Kusakabe still there?” Sephiroth asks Angeal, with a faint hint of disapproval in his voice.

In plain sight of an entire unit plus Elena, who is one of Tseng’s elite even if her ditz act really gets on the nerves, Angeal doesn’t reply. He just sighs and steps back over to the side of the roof to check, and then jumps down after Sephiroth as the man promptly goes to tell Kusakabe, with Masamune still unsheathed, that he thinks the Kisaragi and Shinra would both very much appreciate it if any vengeance-seekers coming out of this were redirected since neither Shinra nor anyone under Shinra’s direction was responsible for this mess. Kusakabe just keeps nodding, tight-lipped, and seems very relieved when a combination of a returning Vincent with a bloody ungloved hand and two pushy medics finally pry him out from under Sephiroth’s glower.

“That’s so nice, isn’t it?” Elena says as she and Angeal split a thermos of coffee right outside of the triage tent. She’s tired, but not so tired that she can’t have a dreamy expression at whatever’s got her attention. “Really sweet.”

The only thing in sight is a growing stack of body bags—oh. Part of the tent isn’t completely laced up and the canvas has flapped out of the way so that a storefront window a few feet away’s reflecting the two men standing in that corner: Sephiroth and Vincent. Sephiroth’s back is mostly to the glass, but he’s turned enough so that Angeal can see he’s holding a plastic tub with blood dripping into it. Vincent’s facing the glass but his hair is loose and falling into his face, so mostly what’s visible are his bloody fingers over the tub, and the occasional silvery flash of some kind of surgical instrument he’s using on his hand. Then the rest of his hand drops out of the veiling hair, enough for Angeal to glimpse the red lips of a wound before Sephiroth sticks an iodine-soaked wad of gauze over them.

Basic field assistance, really, but Angeal feels a little tense in his shoulders, watching it. He can’t remember seeing Valentine injured before, and with Sephiroth, an injury either can wait till they can go to Midgar’s main medical ward where they can get a Lucrecia-trained doctor or Angeal’s carrying the man himself to the nearest field clinic. He’s about to tell Elena they should just leave that alone when she reaches down, grabs the end of the canvas lacing, and gives it a good yank to close it.

“Did you see how Masamune’s not even clean yet?” Elena says, still looking a little soft-eyed. She ties off the lacing and then takes the thermos to top herself off. “Oh, by the way, Valentine texted not to worry about the post-mortem, he’ll just report that himself since they’re going back to Midgar tonight. So nice. So come up with a reason to keep people away from that part of the plane because he ripped the head off the last person to try and sneak up on him sleeping.”

Angeal blinks into his cup, then gives Elena a good, hard look. Her fangirl face holds up pretty well, but her fingers skitter along the side of the thermos before she twists them out of sight. “You Turks made that up.”

“Yeah, but we don’t need the warning. Don’t see us trying to get candids of them together, do you? It’s all SOLDIER on their flight,” Elena says without missing a beat. She downs half a cup of coffee, then refills. The haze is out of her eyes now. “Anyway, it would be nice to just get everyone home and then debrief without more trouble, right?”

“Yeah,” Angeal concedes. He puts his hand out for the thermos, then nods a thanks when she hands it over. “Yeah, I’ll go figure out something.”

* * *

“You shoot people. You don’t rip off heads, and I thought we were trying to keep most of your modifications a secret,” Sephiroth says, although he doesn’t lift his head from Vincent’s shoulder.

Vincent doesn’t seem inclined to move either, stretched out on a gurney in the back of their plane and watching the rest of the plane through a sliver in the hastily-installed curtains with patently unhurried interest. “Faking illness probably attracts more interest than it dispels, in that case.”

Point. “Angeal meant well, I’ll speak to him when we land,” Sephiroth sighs, swiping at his tablet. Then something draws his gaze and he looks across Vincent’s chest. “Although you are actually—”

“Healed,” Vincent says, lifting his bandaged left hand.

Sephiroth resists the urge to grimace at him. The corner of Vincent’s mouth twitches but he doesn’t smile. He does shift then, maneuvering his other arm so that Sephiroth isn’t pushed off him as he pulls it out and then starts to pick off the bandage. The skin under it looks leathery and on the verge of cracking, although the scar has already vanished, and when Vincent flexes his fingers, the plates that always cover that hand and forearm are visibly sluggish in following the gesture. Vincent frowns but doesn’t seem surprised by it, and though he keeps the bandage off, he does sit up and reach for where there are electrolyte pouches tucked under the gurney.

In all honesty, Sephiroth dropping out of the gala and returning early probably is attracting more attention than whatever half-baked rumor their colleagues are spreading about the man. It was an attack in very close proximity to several high-ranking Shinra officials, even if they weren’t the target—even if Sephiroth finds it increasingly irritating to have to continue to pretend as if Vincent doesn’t fall into that category. He knows enough about the company and has advanced enough critical initiatives—

“I wasn’t the one volunteering himself for extra shifts tonight,” he says as Vincent offers him the remaining half of the pouch. Then he swallows back the rest of what he was going to say, as Vincent studies him like it’s all readable on his face anyway. “What’s the likelihood you have to leave—”

“Not very high, and I don’t think you need to overhaul all of your defense planning either,” Vincent says, with a nod towards Sephiroth’s tablet. He rests the pouch against his belly. “They were there for Kusakabe—what he was doing here is an interesting question, but it’ll be for internal reasons, not to spearhead something against Shinra. He’s not on that side of things.”

“That all makes sense except for the last three,” Sephiroth says after a moment, sliding the tablet into a pocket under the gurney. “They weren’t armed to attack, it was clear they were only surveilling. You sought them out.”

Vincent doesn’t blink. “Their squad leader killed a classmate of mine,” he says, and then pauses and tilts his head as if searching his memory. “We were…fourteen. He’d come early, to surprise me, and since my mother and I weren’t there, they took him instead and he had nothing to do with it. That was a transgression of the rules of conduct, even more so that long ago. They were trying to make a point to my mother, but we were not in a position to do anything about it back then.”

Angeal had told Sephiroth what Kusakabe had muttered, so he’d been expecting something to do with Vincent’s family…the facts aren’t surprising, but the way Vincent relates it, he could be debriefing on any mission of his. But Sephiroth had seen himself how Vincent had killed the one man, and it hadn’t been with a gun. It had been—intensely personal, Sephiroth would have said, if he’d come across the body in his own line of work.

He doesn’t pretend to understand the intricacies of Wutaian clan politics, but he trusts Vincent not to lie to him, and so if this is Vincent’s explanation, then he believes it. He still finds it a little difficult to let the air settle in the wake of Vincent’s words, pushing himself up against the wall as Vincent watches him. In the end, he doesn’t ask, and instead waits to see what else the man wants to say. It doesn’t feel like a lie, only…incomplete.

“It was a transgression, but we’d transgressed first, went their reasoning,” Vincent adds after a moment. “I don’t really care to argue about that—what matters for Shinra’s purposes is it won’t go any further than tonight. It’s not tied to the clan feuds, it was only between him and me.”

“Would you have hesitated if that wasn’t true?” Sephiroth asks.

Vincent runs his gaze over Sephiroth, then shrugs. “I’m sentimental about my family sometimes, as your mother rightly accused me of.”

“She has no conception of what that word means,” Sephiroth mutters, and then settles back down beside the other man. This fits. The picture the pieces make is still an unusual one, but it’s complete, and if it is the end of it, Sephiroth will raise no objection. If it is not…then he isn’t concerned about his own capabilities to deal with the Wutaians. “They’d be fools to try coming to Midgar.”

“Is that why you came with me?” Vincent asks.

Sephiroth glances at him, then frowns at the lack of bemusement in Vincent’s face. The man appears to be genuinely serious. “I know you can make your own plans, Vincent. But I’m the head of SOLDIER. If we’re going to play host to Wutaian wars of succession, then I also need to make plans, and I’m not going to do that from the top of a Ferris wheel.”

“I thought you might be worried about me,” Vincent says, and now there’s the glint of humor in his eye as Sephiroth frowns at him, unsure what to do with that. “I’ve heard you’re prone to stabbing random SOLDIERs who happen to walk in on us without properly announcing themselves. Just in case they’re trying to bother me.”

“Do I sleep with Masamune in hand?” Sephiroth snorts after a moment. “I’m more likely to end up ripping a head off than you—I do need to talk to Angeal. He needs to stop listening to Zack.”

Vincent tilts his head against the wall, a smile flicking over his face. He slides his arm between them, and when Sephiroth lifts out of its way, drops it behind so Sephiroth’s head rolls back onto his shoulder. Sephiroth pauses, then twists over and flattens the collar of Vincent’s coat out of the way so he can press his nose and mouth into the throat behind it. The pulse under his lips is warm, steady; he half-closes his eyes and then slides his mouth about an inch as Vincent’s hand curls around his hip.

“Am I more conducive to military planning than the Gold Saucer’s attractions?” Vincent asks.

“To my planning, yes,” Sephiroth mutters. “Perhaps not to yours, but…”

“I account for you,” Vincent says quietly, as his thumb slides under Sephiroth’s coat-belt. “There’s not much I need to factor in—you don’t make it any more complicated than it already is.”

Sephiroth doesn’t miss that, relaxed as he is now. He’s not worried about being a vulnerability to Vincent; the man has never treated him as one either. He’d come back with Vincent not because he thought the man needed coddling, but because Vincent still largely keeps his family issues to himself, and if there’s no direct aid he needs, Sephiroth at least can ensure Shinra stays out of them. And he’d do this in any case, but…Vincent noticing is something he appreciates knowing.

“I need a rest before I finish reversing all of Genesis’ changes,” he says, closing his eyes. “Do what you need to if someone comes in, I’ll sign off on any new casualty reports when I wake up.”

Vincent lets out a theatrical sigh as his hand fits itself firmly to the line of Sephiroth’s hip. “Shinra did not engage me to guard your bed, Sephiroth.”

“Consider it a personal charge, and I’ll be happy to settle the bill later,” Sephiroth murmurs, and then drifts off to the sound of Vincent snorting into his hair.

Chapter 15: Interlude: Lucrecia Isn’t the Woman at the Center of Vincent’s Life

“Oh, Gaia, you look just like your father,” Gast blurts out as Vincent steps into the conference room.

Sephiroth is already looking straight at the other man, so he has a complete view of the way Vincent’s face seems to drain of all life. In public he generally provides minimal emotional cues, but there’s a vast difference between that and now, where for a moment it’s almost shocking to see that Vincent’s form remains human.

“You must be—” Gast starts to go on, only to wince at the crisp crack of a tablet against the table. He glances over at Lucrecia, who is glaring at him while she swipes purposefully at the tablet she’s raked over to her. Then he flushes. “Oh—”

“Yes, Dr. Faremis, please do remember your confidentiality obligations,” Lucrecia says acidly. Then she looks at Vincent. “You’re early.”

Sephiroth had mentioned he had a hard stop for lunch and that Vincent would be coming by for that, and neither of the other two had reacted at the time, except for Gast’s affectionate joke about keeping up the romance with your partner. He hadn’t said Vincent’s last name, he recalls now, as Vincent nods and simply steps back out of the room.

“I’m sorry,” Gast says, watching Lucrecia nervously. “I just—I had no idea—”

“No one should, that was the point,” Lucrecia says. She puts the tablet down and then turns back to the graphs projected onto the wallscreen. “Now, if you could just finish? This proposal doesn’t merit an extension if it’s not submitted before quarter’s end.”

“It’s directly related to a SOLDIER priority one objective,” Sephiroth points out.

His mother gestures to Gast. “Which would greatly expedite approval if it is timely submitted. If it isn’t, then I have to recuse myself from the extension appeal, as you both know.”

“Of course, of course, and it’s really all there, I just wanted to be sure I consulted with you on the support data before I put it in,” Gast says, hastily picking up the clicker. He walks through the remaining slide at a slightly accelerated pace, but his nerves don’t prevent him from adequately answering Lucrecia’s questions.

They do see him leaving the room very quickly after she’s told him that will be all, though normally he stays for a few minutes whenever he and Sephiroth run across each other professionally. That’s much less often than it used to be, since Lucrecia appointed Gast to lead Shinra’s R&D teams in the south. “It put him closer to his research interests and saved us a considerable amount of money flying teams out of Midgar to his pet sites. Vincent wasn’t here at all so of course he wasn’t a factor,” she tells Sephiroth. “Although now that he is, you should hope Gast stays happy with that position. You can’t depend on him for a convincing lie.”

“And why would that be necessary?” Sephiroth asks.

“Well, if you’ve changed your mind about Vincent’s personal security,” Lucrecia starts, already ignoring him in favor of her tablet.

Sephiroth resists the urge to reach over and break it. Physical demonstrations have never impressed his mother, even in an experimental context. “I haven’t. On the contrary, if Dr. Faremis is such a poor liar and he does have knowledge of additional links between Vincent and Shinra R&D, that would make him an ideal target for the Wutaian clans who favor more genetic experimentation. Would you like SOLDIER to have to see to his security, Mother? Or the Turks?”

Lucrecia’s lips tighten, but then she lowers the tablet. “Vincent’s father worked on a few R&D projects for Shinra—this was before I joined Hojo’s lab. He was only a contractor and not very sociable, so when he died, it was simple to remove him from the records. Gast is one of the few still alive who knew him by sight. He never knew Vincent, as far as I know—you’ll want to confirm that yourself.”

“He worked on something you and Hojo used later,” Sephiroth guesses.

“He did, but also, Vincent didn’t want his connection to Shinra known,” Lucrecia says. She studies him for a moment. “I’m not your resource for Vincent’s motivations.”

“I wouldn’t dream of employing you that way, Mother,” Sephiroth says dryly. “I’ll sign the SOLDIER affidavit of support once you’ve funded the proposal.”

Lucrecia continues to frown at him as if expecting more. He turns to go and her brows push together, but she doesn’t attempt to stop him. By the time he reaches the door, she’s reseated herself and switched the wallscreen to a blown-up image of a gene sequence Sephiroth knows she’s reserved exclusively to the Midgar labs.

When Sephiroth steps out of the room, Vincent isn’t in sight, but Sephiroth spots Gast’s back in a nearby alcove housing a coffeemaker. Gast’s hands are still shaking a little as he offers Sephiroth an empty mug; when Sephiroth declines it, he ruefully wraps his fingers around his own, still half-full cup, and refills it. “Your mother is always a force of nature,” he says. “Not that I’m criticizing—for her to have kept her position so long, and still running R&D the way she wanted to when she first was promoted, is very impressive.”

“I’m her son, Gast, you don’t need to flatter her for my sake,” Sephiroth sighs.

“Oh, yes, I know, I…I’m just woolgathering, I suppose,” Gast says, although his expression is far too serious to make that believable. He seems to know it and gives Sephiroth an oddly wary glance before looking cautiously around them. “I’m sorry if I made your—that was your partner, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” Sephiroth says.

Gast bobs his head. He doesn’t make it seem any more unusual than he had when Sephiroth had first mentioned Vincent; he’s never made as much out of Sephiroth having personal interests as the rest of the world, as if the genetic engineering done on Sephiroth should have cut that out of him. “I’m sorry I said that,” Gast says after another moment, as his fingers finally settle about his mug. “Grimoire said his relationship with his son wasn’t very good and I should have remembered that. The likeness is quite striking, is my only excuse.”

“Grimoire?” Sephiroth can’t help repeating.

“His father—he was a scientist here, pulled on to help with the overflow work as Hojo started to staff up for the initial SOLDIER experiments,” Gast says, as he steps further back into the alcove. No one is near them and this space is within Lucrecia’s domain, so they have every expectation of private communication, but Gast is a long-time Shinra employee, no matter how much compassion he’s managed to retain. “He and I were in the same pod for a few months, and then he moved to Lucrecia’s.”

“Mother said he was a contractor,” Sephiroth says. “Hojo was that desperate for bodies?”

Gast nods. “Yes, he had an impressive CV but it was all…he’d worked in Wutai before he came here. He wasn’t Wutaian, as far as I knew, but he went to university there, and managed to work with the few genetics specialists they had before the Kisaragi decided to restrict that area. So he had very few contacts here and Hojo found that useful, as I think you can imagine.”

Hojo had had a knack for finding talented underlings who were personally dependent on him, and then keeping them isolated from anyone who could have helped them. The only detail that doesn’t fit is how anyone remotely similar to Vincent could have been so helpless.

“Anyway, I’m very sorry—I didn’t mean to bring up old wounds, if that’s the matter,” Gast adds. “I never actually met Grimoire’s son before, and Grimoire never wanted to say much about him, though you could tell he missed h—but I’m speaking out of turn again. I am sorry.”

“I’ll let him know it was unintentional,” Sephiroth says, to which Gast smiles gratefully.

They exchange a few other pleasantries, but Gast seems anxious to leave and Sephiroth does want to find Vincent. He excuses himself and thinks for a moment, then is on his way to his office when Zack’s text reaches him. Sephiroth reads it, grimaces, and then directs his feet to the adjoining private conference room, where Genesis has already managed to sample every single dish Vincent has brought.

“You’re scheduled to spend the entire day at the armory,” Sephiroth says.

“Except for our mandated lunch breaks, as you know, since that was your personal directive,” Genesis ripostes, while continuing a second round of selection.

Sephiroth glowers at him, then takes the seat by Vincent with enough irritation that he actually doesn’t think about Gast till after Angeal’s come and taken that parasite away with him. “He has better things to do than to bribe entry security to alert him about you,” Sephiroth mutters.

“It wasn’t them, he saw me,” Vincent says as he offers Sephiroth more of the rice. “I cut through the First lounge, since I assumed you’d walk Dr. Faremis out the main hallway.”

Sephiroth pauses, then takes the container from the other man. “Gast…would never want to cause any trouble,” he says, and then grimaces at how awkward that sounds. “He and I have known each other for a very long time.”

“Lucrecia thinks highly of his work, though personally she has very little respect for him,” Vincent says. He helps himself to some of the dumplings, then adds a dollop of chili paste to each. “She already told me years ago that she’d appreciate knowing any attempt to target him.”

“She did?” Sephiroth says, blinking. Then he shakes himself. “Noted.”

Vincent nods and they eat in silence for a couple minutes. Sephiroth doesn’t need to offer a further explanation, he can see he’s being given that option with Vincent’s comment. Which is tempting, but he remembers the way that Vincent’s expression had changed.

“He said he knew your father but not you,” Sephiroth says, which is not a better second start. He stares at his bowl for a moment, annoyed with himself. “We talk much less since he took over the southern labs, but I’ve known him since childhood. He didn’t work on me with my mother, but he’d come speak to me anyway. As a person—Mother’s always treated me as a peer, which is not as flattering as it sounds.”

“Always?” is what Vincent extracts from that. He lowers his chopsticks but keeps them idly stirring about his bowl, interested but not wary.

“If you’re a very intelligent five-year-old child, you may very well comprehend what’s being asked of you but that doesn’t render your answer informed consent. And the problem with intelligence is you only understand that better as you grow older,” Sephiroth says. He finds he has to take a breath before continuing, although his hand moves easily and steadily as he picks up his cup. “Once I learned I could say no, Mother would drop a matter, but she was always far more interested in understanding developmental progression than Hojo, who only wanted results. She studied my nos just as much as my yeses. Gast never studied me.”

“So he’s a friend.” Vincent puts his chopsticks down but only so he can sip at his tea. “I have no interest in him, and aside from the initial surprise, I expect he has no interest in me, if he had friendly feelings towards my father.”

“He said he didn’t know him that well, actually. I think it was mostly the physical likeness,” Sephiroth says.

Vincent considers that. “I’ll try not to cross his path again. I don’t expect there to be any reason for us to meet,” he says.

That sounds like a conclusory comment, and Sephiroth finds himself willing to let the topic drop, given his own irrational discomfort. He has enough of an assurance to think Gast’s personal safety will be undisturbed, which was his objective in raising the subject in the first place.

They talk about Vincent’s latest assignment instead, which has some implications for SOLDIER forces in Junon. Sephiroth’s aggravation soothes away with the familiarity of working through logistical planning, and then Vincent backs him into his own bathroom and fingers him into coming down the man’s throat, which further distances him from any lingering unpleasantness.

But he’s still curious. He puts it aside but not out of mind, and he shouldn’t be particularly surprised when his mother raises it again. Much as he dislikes her, they do tend to prioritize the same things.

“I wanted you to know there are no files on Grimoire Valentine before you started looking,” Lucrecia tells him, at a private meeting she’s scheduled apparently for only this purpose. “You have a habit of independently verifying what I’ve told you, and while that is rational in most cases, in this one it’d only send up unnecessary red flags to third parties. I can only imagine Vincent agrees, since he’s actually using his real last name here.”

She’s fishing to see how much Vincent’s told Sephiroth, which is a habit of hers and not specific to Vincent, and which has always annoyed Sephiroth. He nods noncommittally. “What else did you want me to know?”

“I was with his father when he died,” Lucrecia says, and her tone doesn’t waver as she says it, but she waits for him to provide a reaction. When he doesn’t, she continues. “It was an accident in the lab. Vincent was already in the Turks at that point, and even though they were barely speaking to each other, he did make it to the lab a few minutes after his father had died.”

“That’s not how you two met,” Sephiroth says.

Lucrecia frowns. “No, we already knew each other. He and his father—they weren’t alike at all. It’s a little shallow of Gast to just think about what they looked like.”

Something in the way she speaks tips Sephiroth off. “You liked his father better?” he says, raising his brows.

He’s proved right in how her brow creases with irritation. But one of her saving graces—however few—over Hojo is how she doesn’t flinch from the truth, once she’s forced to see it. “I liked Grimoire, but I didn’t respect him very much. He was a broken man, mourning his wife even though it’d been years at that point. Very kind, I suppose, and utterly unambitious outside of his research.”

Not a threat, Sephiroth interprets. Conversely, Vincent must appear to be one to her, and while Sephiroth can understand the logic behind that, he still can’t help an annoyed sigh. “If Vincent wanted to interfere with your work, you’d already know,” he points out.

“I’m not concerned about his and my relationship. We understand what we want from each other better than you,” Lucrecia says sharply. Then she draws back, an unusual trace of reticence in her manner. She looks oddly at Sephiroth as well, as if for a moment she wishes he would listen to her; she usually gives off the impression he’d be a fool to not do so. “I respect Vincent because he is good at what he does, he knows what that is, and he is unambiguous about most things. But his family’s always been the black box, Sephiroth. He distanced himself from his father but when the man died, he came immediately, and then he made removing his father from Shinra’s records a condition of helping me with Hojo. I know you’ve chosen to partner with him and he appears to genuinely want it—”

Sephiroth bites back a response at ‘appears.’

Lucrecia notices anyway. “I know what Vincent wants out of me, and it isn’t a partnership. I’ve never seen him partner with anyone except out of expedience, and everything else aside, I’m your mother. I have to wonder.”

“Did you have anything to do with his father’s death?” Sephiroth asks.

“Of course not. It was his own negligence,” Lucrecia snaps, with enough unfiltered outrage that he thinks she’s responding purely on instinct. Then she takes a second, but her outrage only focuses rather than modulates. “I was his father’s coworker, not his keeper. But Vincent clearly didn’t want to mind the man either, except once he was dead. I have never understood that. And with someone like him, you would want to.”

“I appreciate the observations, Mother,” Sephiroth says after a few seconds have passed in silence. “Is there anything else you’d like to share?”

“No,” Lucrecia says. “We’ve had this conversation and it was necessary to. I intend to leave it at that, as I don’t care to revisit the past. I know you think I’m too political, but let me be clear—I don’t need to understand him. I only want to know you do.”

“Then rest assured that I find him to be a satisfactory partner,” Sephiroth says as he rises from his seat. “I don’t think we’ll need to repeat this talk either.”

* * *

As much as Sephiroth fully intends to close the matter, his mother always makes a clean ending impossible. He does not pry into Shinra’s restricted files, but his behavior the day after their discussion apparently sends up enough warning flags that Zack and Angeal separately take him aside to ask what’s the matter.

Genesis merely throws himself into the chair before Sephiroth’s desk. “You’re letting your mother brainwash you again. Stop it. I finally have a dinner reservation at the one restaurant in this entire city that can do a proper soy sauce duck and if you ruin it for me, I’ll demand compensation from Vincent.”

“If you do that, I’ll reassign Angeal permanently to Costa del Sol and send Roche with him,” Sephiroth snaps without looking up.

“Not disputing the brainwashing, I see,” Genesis says as he rolls back up onto his feet. “You know, if you’re going to neglect him, I might drop by and see what he thinks of the duck. It’s very good but I’ve always had a suspicion they’re adding caramel to their soy.”

“Genesis,” Sephiroth starts, but the other man’s already disappearing out the door.

Sephiroth presses his lips together, then begins to sit back down. As he does, he glances over his desk and notices the time on his tablet—a good hour later than he usually leaves the office, and without any meetings as an excuse. When Vincent is in town, he generally waits till Sephiroth returns before he starts dinner, unless Sephiroth’s messaged him that there’ll be a delay or there’s an emergency.

Vincent has never asked Sephiroth to update him, but it’s a small courtesy to provide, and the man asks for very little generally. “I lost track of the time,” Sephiroth says when he arrives at his quarters.

Unprompted, as upon his entrance, Vincent had merely tapped at his phone, put it down, and then gotten up from the kitchen table to turn the stove burners on. Vincent nods at his comment and reaches for the various bowls and saucers of prepped ingredients sitting beside the stove.

“My mother called me in to talk about your father,” Sephiroth says, grimacing as he does. “I think she’s under the impression that you’re holding him against us in some way.”

Vincent turns around, a startling degree of surprise in his face. “She thinks that about my father?”

“I—don’t understand her,” Sephiroth says, feeling as if it’s more of a confession than an explanation. He presses his lips together, then turns and looks at the front door. “It’s not her concern and I’ll tell her—”

“If you tell her, she’ll only be more convinced she’s right. She’d have to hear it from me. I’ll see her tomorrow,” Vincent says. He’s calm again, and even nudges out one of the other chairs as he turns back to the stove. His hands start to dip into the ingredients with smooth, unhurried movements. “I honestly thought she’d made herself forget about that. She wasn’t very pleased with her reaction at the time.”

Sephiroth stands at the edge of the kitchen for a moment. Then he comes into the room, circling carefully around Vincent to the fridge, where he can get himself a glass of water but also where he can see the man’s profile. Vincent turns and looks directly at him, without ceasing to cook, and deliberately lets Sephiroth try to parse out his expression.

“You have to be the only person on this planet who dismisses her,” Sephiroth says, instead of filling up his glass. He pauses, then shakes his head. “Even my—Angeal and Genesis and Zack have to make themselves ignore her, or work around her, to deal with me. You truly don’t care about her.”

Vincent doesn’t dismiss what Sephiroth says but seems to mull over it, as he fries chopped ginger and garlic in oil. “I’ve kept up communications with Lucrecia but she’s relevant to relatively little in my life these days,” he finally says, tone even and composed as he turns back to the pan. “My father loved my mother and I, but she married him because she was spying on his research for our family. And then she stayed married to him because he was a useful way out of her obligations to them—I think she did love me, but she left us when I was sixteen.”

Generally Vincent doesn’t use euphemisms, but this is his family, and Lucrecia wouldn’t have gotten so under Sephiroth’s skin if it wasn’t clear that the exceptions in Vincent’s life all have to do with them. “She left and didn’t die,” Sephiroth says, and it’s half a question.

“I don’t know. But I have never heard that she did die, and knowing her, I have to assume she’s alive until I do,” Vincent says. He does pause at that point, his mouth moving slightly. It’s not to speak, and in profile it’s difficult to tell if he’s merely pursing his lips or trying to do something else with them. Then he gives the pan a sharp shake over the burner. “The only sensible thing my father ever did was to not look for her. I don’t know why she left, but that’s not a reason to lead others to her—he didn’t look, and didn’t do very much else. I made sure he had someone to keep him fed before I moved out. When he died, I made sure it couldn’t be used against my mother. It really had nothing to do with Lucrecia. He made his own death.”

“I’m hardly in a position to judge others on the basis of their parents,” Sephiroth says after a moment. He watches the corner of Vincent’s mouth tilt decidedly upward before he steps back and takes a seat at the kitchen table.

They follow their regular routine, where Sephiroth finishes up work at the table while Vincent cooks dinner. There’s much less than usual, since Sephiroth stayed at the office so late, and when he runs out, he puts his tablet down and watches the other man for a few minutes. He can feed himself when he has to, but cooking has always seemed like a necessity rather than an interest to him.

Vincent makes it interesting, although not in the sense that Sephiroth wants to imitate it. He admires instead, and he wouldn’t be ashamed to admit it, watching how the man never wastes a movement, yet improvises adaptations as the burner flames flare up or some other unexpected event happens. He pulls his gloves off, absently toying with them, and then drops them to push his coat off his shoulders. A few locks of his hair fall forward over his chest and he sweeps them back with the rest, pulling it all over his other shoulder as he slides off his chair.

Sephiroth goes onto his knees, looking up as Vincent reaches a lull in the recipe and steps back from the stove. Vincent’s already aware of where he is, and after swiping it over a dish towel, he drops his hand so its fingers thread into Sephiroth’s forelocks as he turns around. He combs those back over the top of Sephiroth’s head, looking down at Sephiroth; Sephiroth presses his open mouth over the fly of Vincent’s trousers, then lips that open and draws the man’s cock between his lips.

A low, soft sigh escapes from Vincent. His fingers periodically tighten in Sephiroth’s hair as Sephiroth nurses him erect and then through climax. When he’s done, he shakes his fingers loose and runs one across Sephiroth’s mouth before curling it under Sephiroth’s chin. “If my mother is still alive, and cares to come find me, I have some things I want to discuss with her,” he says. “What’s always been clear is that looking for her risks her life, and there are very few people who I ever have wanted to speak to for myself.”

And Sephiroth’s mother is not one of them. But he’d come to Shinra to speak to Sephiroth, and he doesn’t have to remind Sephiroth of that. Not when he regularly demonstrates that in his eyes, Sephiroth is entirely separate from and independent of the people who claim to have made him. “Understood,” Sephiroth says.

Vincent looks at him for another second, expressionless. Then the man tilts his head, the finger he has under Sephiroth’s jaw uncurling to press down the front of Sephiroth’s throat. “Do you actually want to eat?” he says, and though his face still doesn’t show much emotion, his voice is warming. “Or do I have to make you?”

“It’s very good, your cooking,” Sephiroth says, as he leans into the caress. He moves his chin out of the way so that he can brush his mouth against Vincent’s forearm. “But…what I want…”

Vincent doesn’t even let him finish before the man has him gripped by the throat. “Strip,” he says, as Sephiroth swallows hard against his fingers. “You know what you want, don’t pretend otherwise.”

“Yes,” Sephiroth breathes, as his hands move to his cross-belts. “I do.”

Chapter 16: Third Vacation: Couples Retreat Part 1

The day starts off pleasantly enough. Vincent’s two days back from his latest mission, long enough for him to have finished debriefing but before his next assignment has been set. Sephiroth’s mother has been fully occupied with the restructuring necessitated by Heidegger’s expulsion, Wutai has been quiet, SOLDIER doesn’t have any current reports of suspicious mutants to look into, and Sephiroth has the morning off.

For a few minutes he thinks he’s actually woken ahead of Vincent, rolling over to find the other man still lying quietly beside him, but as he pulls the sheet over his shoulder, something brushes up between his thighs. He startles, then lays his palms against Vincent’s belly as Vincent’s tail rubs up against his perineum, awakening deep-running streaks of soreness in his thighs and lower back. He spent most of last night with a vibrating plug in him, cock strapped to his belly and wrists tied to ankles, kneeling with Vincent’s cock in his mouth while Vincent watched a seemingly endless HR webinar that Shinra, in its infinite wisdom, requires even its black-books contractors to take.

Vincent teases briefly at his hole, but then the tail slides higher. Sephiroth ducks his head under the bedsheet, pulling his hair out of the way as the tail loops around his throat, and then lets it draw him down to Vincent’s cock. His jaw doesn’t ache anymore but the shape and weight of that on his tongue makes him groan with the memory.

He strokes at Vincent’s thighs as he sucks the cock erect; Vincent pulls the sheet away from them, then reaches down and rests one hand on top of his head. The man’s fingers work into his hair, moving in slow, massaging circles, then withdraw to push at his brow. Sephiroth slides off Vincent’s cock, glancing up, and Vincent swings his leg over Sephiroth, turning onto his belly. His tail tugs Sephiroth forward again and Sephiroth groans again, nosing between the man’s buttocks and lapping till the slick is running out of Vincent’s hole and down his jaw.

Once Vincent’s come, he uncoils the tail and pulls Sephiroth out of bed and into the shower, where he presses Sephiroth face-first against the wall and fingers him roughly, biting at Sephiroth’s shoulders just within the portions the SOLDIER uniform will cover. He bruises deeply enough that the marks still haven’t healed by the time they finish breakfast, and Sephiroth has their prickling under his coat seams to remind him as he arrives at his office, where his good mood starts to dissipate.

Tseng’s already standing outside and looks as if he’d rather be anywhere else, even when he sees Vincent—who doesn’t have his own office and who often uses Sephiroth’s conference room if he needs to take a meeting—which doesn’t bode well. “General, if I could speak to you for a moment,” Tseng says, with only the barest nod at Vincent. “There was an incident with Commander Fair…”

From there the day degenerates into an absurd conga line of people reporting Zack for various mishaps, a good half of them having nothing to do with his actual duties. Sephiroth has a pounding headache before lunch, which he’s due to have with Rufus and Reeve, and finally calls the man in for an explanation. “Why are you even handling trash disposal at that location?” Sephiroth asks. “That’s not your unit. That’s not our department.”

“Well, so…I could tell you the full, gory, unfortunate story,” Zack starts, wincing. “Or—”

“And where is Angeal?” Sephiroth adds. “He usually keeps it from getting this ridiculous.”

Zack twitches sharply. Then sighs, sagging forward to rub his hands over his face. “Well, for the last three days, on my couch. And hey, Seph—before you get all righteously indignant over what incompetent knuckleheads we are, which you’re totally entitled to do—let me just say Angeal’s really messed up right now. I’ve never seen him this bad, and the only reason I didn’t bring it up before is because we all know Valentine got stuck in Mideel and it seemed better to wait till that got cleared up.”

“Because we run SOLDIER based on my personal life,” Sephiroth snaps, more than a little nettled. The man should know him better than that.

“No, because Angeal’s personal life is fucking with him, and yeah, I know, incredibly unprofessional but first we fix him, then we tell him that. And you know and I know how much he does around here, so he deserves that much before we write him off. Right?” Zack says, looking at Sephiroth with firm confidence that Sephiroth is going to agree with him and only needs a reminder. He waits a few seconds, then nods as Sephiroth sighs. “So yeah, okay, I was going to wait till we were sure we didn’t have to deploy to Mideel. Which, nobody’s saying you’re gonna use company resources to save your partner, I’m just pointing out that since Vincent gets the missions Tseng doesn’t feel comfortable asking his teams to do, if one blows up we’re all probably halfway to fucked anyway so going after him fits the SOLDIER objectives of being—”

Sephiroth appreciates Zack’s good qualities. He’d find himself less annoyed about being so if the man could be more concise. “Zack, what happened to Angeal?”

“Genesis did something that made him walk out and crash at my place,” Zack says. Then he waves his hand irritably at the side, even though Sephiroth hasn’t moved or said anything. “I don’t know, okay? Angeal won’t even be in the same room as him, and he’s been trying to corner him—he’s been trying so hard that I have pissed off half this company, the actually good at their jobs half, trying to keep them from having a fight in front of witnesses. And then Angeal goes home with me and just cleans the mold off my bathroom grout every night instead of sleeping. It’s fucked-up.”

Damn it, Sephiroth thinks. Then he reaches for his tablet, a note to Genesis already forming in his head. And then he stops himself, and thinks about the last time that remotely sounded like this—subtracting Zack’s unique problem-solving methods—and comes to the reluctant realization that Genesis isn’t the key here. Which is a pity, because at the end of the day the man’s the poorest of them at sitting on a grudge. If it had been him, one good round in the simulator and telling Angeal to go to medical to pick him up usually did it.

“My mother?” Sephiroth mutters.

“I…think she still hasn’t noticed? But it’s getting dicey,” Zack admits.

“I see,” Sephiroth says. He picks his tablet up and considers his calendar, mentally reprioritizing it. “Stop running interference. Tell them both you’ve spoken to me, the next time you see them, and fold up your couch when you go home.”

Zack blinks. “So…I don’t want to say you’re not a strategic genius, because you are, but that seems optimistic.”

“It’s not going to be solved today, Zack. First we fix SOLDIER’s reputation so I don’t have a line of directors outside my door wanting to speak to me about you,” Sephiroth says, opening up his email and starting a note to Angeal. “Then we get Angeal out of your apartment. Then we fix whatever’s the matter with them.”

* * *

“I need to have Angeal stay with us for a…for probably a few days,” Sephiroth tells Vincent.

He’s not certain how much Vincent overheard—the conference room door had been shut, but Vincent has Turk access to all security systems and also knows what Sephiroth does to block those—but Vincent doesn’t seem surprised. The man merely nods as he turns his tablet face-down on the table and looks past Sephiroth. The projection screen on the wall has been pulled down and there’s an image of a nondescript storage building on it.

“Family,” Vincent says, nodding at that. Then he waves towards the tablet with one hand. “Work.”

Sephiroth can learn about the man’s work in as much detail as he wants, when he wants to. Most of the time he finds that he doesn’t want or need more than what Tseng and Vincent provide in their official reports; it’s far more helpful on many levels to let the Turks be responsible for their own objectives. Vincent’s family, on the other hand…he takes a second look at the image on the wall. “I thought your family was work these days, thanks to my mother’s intervention. At least, that’s her new favorite reminder for me.”

“Is it?” Vincent says, sounding both curious and sympathetic. Then he shakes his head when Sephiroth looks back at him. “This isn’t. It’s…something I inherited by default, unfortunately. I’ve been putting off divesting myself of it—that mattered less when I wasn’t consistently living in the same place.”

“Should you be looking it up on Shinra property, in that case?” Sephiroth asks.

Now Vincent’s amused. “Tseng knows about it,” he says as he taps at his phone. The screen goes black. “Generally speaking, and in terms of details, probably seventy percent of what I’m actually going to do. It’s nuisance-level and it’s not in a place I shouldn’t be going to.”

“But you do have to go,” Sephiroth says, now understanding where this is going. “When?”

“Tomorrow afternoon, overnight,” Vincent says after a moment. His amusement fades as his mouth twists, and his eyes briefly drop from Sephiroth to his tablet. Then he looks up again. “Timing’s entirely my fault. I forgot about it and then Yuffie messaged—Tseng doesn’t know about her and this.”

“I envy him,” Sephiroth mutters after a moment. So he’ll lose Vincent for roughly twenty-four hours, and then have him back for another thirty-six before the man had planned to head out again. It’s not terrible or uncommon; their work rarely lets the week go as planned. And probably for Sephiroth’s purposes it’ll streamline dealing with Angeal and Genesis…and yet he finds himself filled with aimless irritation for a moment.

“She’s not coming here again,” Vincent says, his humor briefly restored. He leans back in his seat, gazing at Sephiroth.

Waiting. There isn’t really anything useful to say, and the not-useful things Sephiroth wants to say are—not useful. Sephiroth nods and goes back into his office, and after refreshing his coffee, resumes tackling the actual disasters in his workload.

At the end of the workday, Vincent joins him and they walk back to their quarters together. Sephiroth’s been expecting Angeal ever since the stream of reports on Zack dried up in the early afternoon, but the man doesn’t appear till they’re at their door, a duffel bag at his feet and a sheepish hunch to his shoulders.

He greets Vincent politely. Vincent returns the greeting and they have an innocuous conversation about a dying office plant near Angeal’s favorite training room, because finding a replacement gardening maintenance company who won’t be infiltrated by rogue Wutaian elements is apparently dragging on. Then they talk about cooking, because Angeal has somewhat more than rudimentary skills in that area and is interested in what Vincent’s making for dinner. Once they’ve sat down to eat the results, the conversation shifts to work colleagues.

“Sorry about Zack,” Angeal mutters when Vincent’s briefly in the kitchen for something. He rubs at his face. “And—look, I’ll talk to him. I just need maybe another day?”

Sephiroth sighs. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow. Vincent’s leaving for an overnight after lunch.”

Angeal starts to glance over his shoulder, then stops himself and grimaces. “Fuck. Sorry. I—you know, I’m literally living what he was afraid of right now, and I don’t—”

“If he’s afraid of you eating dinner, then that’s his fault,” Sephiroth says sharply. “Enough, Angeal. We’re not dealing with it tonight, so leave it till tomorrow.”

The other man opens his mouth, then shuts it and gives Sephiroth a tight nod. There isn’t very much conversation after that, aside from the odd question from Angeal about where he can find something; Sephiroth didn’t think Vincent had rearranged anything of significance so apparently it’s simply been that long since he had Angeal in his quarters.

He came here mostly just to sleep before Vincent moved in, Sephiroth thinks as he rolls onto his bed. Everything of importance happened in the office or in the field—he took all his meals at the canteen, if one of the other Firsts wasn’t trying to get him to come out with them.

“My trip has nothing to do with him, or you,” Vincent says from the side of the bed. He waits till Sephiroth turns and looks at him before sliding under the blankets, shedding his sleeping robe as he does. “But I doubt that addresses what has him staring into the dark out there.”

“Is he?” Sephiroth says, and then puts his head back with another sigh. Angeal’s generally the least prone to dark moods of them, but when his mind is set for it, he can outdo them all. “This isn’t your problem. It shouldn’t affect you, and you have to prepare…”

“Then we don’t need to talk about it,” Vincent says evenly.

He puts his head down, facing Sephiroth. He’s closed the bedroom door behind him but there’s still a sliver of light appearing around the edges; if Angeal’s turned off the living room lights, the one in the hall must still be on. Sephiroth bites back a third sigh and starts to push himself over the other man, only for Vincent to slide one hand up his chest. He looks down and Vincent’s watching him with interest but not demand, not yet.

Sephiroth glances at the door again, then back at Vincent. It seems…inappropriate, where this might be going, with Angeal out in the living room brooding over his fractured relationship. The man is a close friend—so is Genesis, even if Sephiroth frequently wonders at the sanity of it—and Sephiroth wants to see him at peace. But also, Sephiroth genuinely isn’t looking forward to what they’ll have to do to get there.

Tomorrow is going to be painful however Sephiroth looks at it—whatever he does tonight. So it’s inappropriate, and selfish of him, but when Vincent’s hand moves in a soft half-circle over his right pectoral, he lets out a slow, appreciative exhale. “I don’t have the morning off,” he reminds Vincent.

“I know. You’re not going to have any marks,” Vincent says, the red of his eyes shrinking as his pupils dilate. He plucks at Sephiroth’s nipple, urging Sephiroth back down, and when Sephiroth’s lying beside him, he threads his hand into Sephiroth’s hair. “You’re going to have to be quiet, too.”

Sephiroth sucks his breath without thinking, and then feels warm arousal start to flush through him; Vincent clearly notes that. “If I am, am I coming wet or dry?”

The light gleams over Vincent’s teeth as he smiles, and then he shifts his head back into the shadows. “We’ll see how quiet you are. The lube’s on your side, get it and open yourself up.”

A moan wants to wrench itself out of Sephiroth’s throat already. He swallows it but it catches in his throat, burning, as he pushes himself to the other side of the bed. He has to turn to get out the lubricant and he feels Vincent pushing up behind and then curling over him to reach for something else. When he tries to look, Vincent pushes his head down; he strangles another moan and slides his hand between his legs.

Vincent takes out two—three things before shutting the drawer. One’s a black leather collar, which he straps snugly about Sephiroth’s throat while he’s still sitting up by the headboard. Sephiroth’s panting against his thigh, on two fingers, when he takes Sephiroth’s jaw in hand and pushes it back, holding it as his tail glides underneath and then wraps about Sephiroth above the collar. The tip ends up pushing at Sephiroth’s mouth and he promptly parts his lips.

He licks at the tip and Vincent lets out a rare low groan, but then goes silent as more of his tail crowds into Sephiroth’s mouth, coiling up against the insides of his cheeks and trapping his tongue flat under it so he can only suck. Gagging him, he realizes, and drives a third finger into himself, nursing the tail to keep back the urge to cry out.

“Stop at three,” Vincent says as he pushes off the headboard. He slides down till his knee is rubbing over Sephiroth’s side; his hand moves farther, petting along Sephiroth’s belly till it finds Sephiroth’s cock and draws it up between two firm buttocks.

Sephiroth sucks harder at Vincent’s tail, then gasps around it when he feels Vincent start to sink onto his cock. The man hitches himself down inch-by-inch, locking his legs around Sephiroth’s waist, the rocking motion fucking Sephiroth back on his own fingers. When he’s fully seated, he reaches between them and clips clamps to Sephiroth’s nipples; Sephiroth wheezes through his nose, careful not to bite down on the rounds of muscle in his mouth.

Vincent seems to appreciate that, pressing his mouth to the underside of Sephiroth’s jaw. But then something pulls at the clamps—there’s a chain between them, and Vincent stretches that taut before fastening it to the front of Sephiroth’s collar, ensuring that any movement will bite into his rapidly-swelling nipples. Sephiroth hisses in the back of his throat, then resumes his sucking as Vincent strokes his hands down Sephiroth’s arm, following it to the fingers buried between Sephiroth’s buttocks.

He pulls them out, then cuffs Sephiroth’s wrists behind him. Padded-leather, comfortable enough except for how the man’s twining himself around Sephiroth, deliberately jostling over the nipple clamps and clenching around Sephiroth’s cock, reinforcing how little say Sephiroth has in this. “Keep quiet,” Vincent whispers along his jaw.

The tail slides out of his mouth and then loops down his side and back. He senses where it’s going and cants his hips back, then pushes forward in spite of the pain in his nipples, kissing his groan into Vincent’s mouth as the spit-soaked tail tip presses into him. It’s more than enough of a replacement for his fingers as Vincent begins to languidly ride him.

He can muffle himself in Vincent’s lips, but after the first few minutes, Vincent stretches himself out of reach and Sephiroth ends up mouthing at Vincent’s throat and shoulder to keep his noises sufficiently soft. Vincent’s fingers slide into his hair again, pushing at the back of his head as Vincent increases the pace; Sephiroth rakes his teeth against Vincent’s shoulder, gasping. Then, when Vincent’s response is to press harder at his head, he bites down.

“Wet,” Vincent rasps over him. “Wet, come wet. Come.”

Sephiroth tastes Vincent’s blood in his mouth as he climaxes. By the time they’ve untangled from each other, the spot’s healed, but he laps it clean, and then does the same to where Vincent’s come has smeared up the man’s belly. Unbelievably, they’ve more or less kept it off the sheets, so after that he tucks his head into Vincent’s neck and falls asleep to Vincent massaging his unclamped nipples.

There are no marks in the morning, as promised, but Angeal still ends up giving Sephiroth a close look as the two of them sit at the kitchen table for breakfast; Vincent’s already left, since an afternoon departure time means he needs most of the morning to clear his work obligations. “You always have it this way, these days?” Angeal asks.

Sephiroth finds himself staring back at the other man, who looks a little wary but not as if he’s going to take back the question. “You’re referring to his cooking?”

“Well, that, yeah. I can see why you’re not terrifying the canteen workers for not opening earlier and closing later anymore,” Angeal says, putting his spoon back into his congee. He adds some more fried shallots and chili paste and stirs it in before taking a healthy bite. “Actually, why the hell do you even eat there anymore? This is much better.”

“He’s not my personal cook, Angeal. He has his own duties,” Sephiroth says dryly. “If I only ate what he cooks, he’d never be able to leave.”

“So you’re gonna keep eating canteen food with us commoners so you don’t fall out of practice, you mean,” Angeal says with a smile. He eats some more congee, making approving noises, and then lowers his spoon. He stares into his bowl for a moment. “But also…he really suits you, doesn’t he?”

“You still think he’s strange,” Sephiroth says, hearing the hesitation in the man’s voice.

“Yeah, I’m not…really going to get over that, but it doesn’t mean I can’t see how this is working for you, and be happy for you,” Angeal says. He looks up at Sephiroth, then smiles again, tense and wry, as he pushes back in his seat. “I don’t think he gives a damn whether I get over it either, which I can respect. Look, Seph, I’m sorry it’s been a shitshow. It was my problem with Gen and it’s not supposed to be everyone else’s.”

“‘Was’?” Sephiroth says, frowning. “What do you mean, was?”

Angeal’s mouth twists again. “You sure you want to talk about this?” he says. “I mean—I appreciate it. But you don’t have to, and—and it’s going to drag in Vincent, which is why I’ve been avoiding you. It shouldn’t, and I’m sorry, but it just—it’s like that.”

Throwing his bowl of congee would be a waste of both Vincent’s cooking and Angeal’s goodwill, Sephiroth thinks. Even if he walks it over to wherever Genesis is first. “Genesis is not in love with Vincent. Genesis is in love with being an overly dramatic—”

“He’s really damn interested in what Vincent’s doing to make you so much calmer these days,” Angeal mutters. He rubs his hand over his face. “He’s always thinking about it out loud, wondering how the man finally got you come around on—and I fucking told him, it wasn’t what we were doing, it was that we just didn’t work. If we did, we’d still be fucking, and we’re not, and if you’re getting what you want and need from him, then why the hell I—shit. Sorry. This is what I mean.”

They sit there for a few minutes. Angeal keeps looking as if he’s going to say more, so Sephiroth restrains himself, but the man never actually does. He grimaces and pushes his fingers in beside his nose, dragging the skin from his eyes so it highlights how bloodshot they are; last night’s change of setting doesn’t seem to have helped Angeal catch up on his sleep.

“Why?” Sephiroth finally asks. Then he lifts his hand as Angeal starts to answer. “Why does he want to bring me back into it? He doesn’t want me. He’s in love with you.”

“I don’t know about that these days,” Angeal mutters. And then shrugs helplessly when Sephiroth looks sharply at him. “He doesn’t want you. You’re right. But he’s so fucking stuck on whether I still want you, and I’m—I don’t actually think it matters to him what my opinion is on that. He just wants to think that.”

“He wants to think that you want me, so if he works out why I’m attracted to Vincent, that will help you win me over?” Sephiroth parses out.

“Well, it’s Gen, were you expecting logic?” Angeal says, voice rich with weary, familiar frustration. Then he shakes himself and starts to push back from the table. “I’ll deal with him. I just—I needed some space so I wouldn’t just blow up at him again, but—”

“Do you still want me?” Sephiroth asks.

Angeal shuts his mouth and stares at Sephiroth. Then he slowly sits back down, his brows drawing together over his nose.

“Some days I wonder if we have any idea how fucked-up we are,” Angeal says, almost conversationally.

“Ang—”

“Yeah, no, I know why you’re asking that. You’re not propositioning me, you’re just sorting all the facts out so you can solve this, because that’s what you do. That’s why you’re the head of SOLDIER,” Angeal mutters. He slumps back, his head tilting so that he briefly stares at the ceiling. Then he drops his chin with a sigh. “You’re beautiful, Sephiroth. I’d fuck you again. I don’t want to be with you. And you don’t want that again either. I just…maybe I wonder if it was me. It was early on and we still were trying to figure out what we were doing—trying. We didn’t know yet.”

“That’s what he’s picking up on,” Sephiroth says after a long moment. “Your wondering that. He doesn’t actually want it, he’s only going with what he thinks matters to you.”

Angeal tilts his head back again, then looks at Sephiroth for a while.

“You think?” he says skeptically. “I think he just wants to be the tragic one with the broken heart, and I’m fucking tired of getting stuck in that play. Fine, I fucked up too, letting him know I’m still think—”

“It didn’t work because I was bored, Angeal,” Sephiroth says sharply. He watches as the other man blinks and straightens up and then looks more closely at him. “You’re right. I know now what it’s like when I’m completely engaged, and you have to be for that to work. I was bored when we tried it. I…am not trying to insult you…”

“Oh,” Angeal says. His mouth twitches, and then he laughs but cuts that off.

It’s rough enough that Sephiroth starts to tell him—but before he can, Angeal shakes his head. He looks into the distance for a moment, rueful and tired in equal measures, and then lets out the rest of the laugh.

“No, it’s fine. I just…I was afraid I did something wrong, because we were so fucking young, and it’s not like anyone was really looking out for us and this healing we’ve got isn’t supposed to be an excuse to…but I’ll take bored, believe me,” he says, with a deep breath at the end as if he’s surfacing from underwater.

Then he subsides into a short silence. It’s far more comfortable than the preceding ones and Sephiroth’s considering leaving matters there, but Angeal stirs as he starts to pick up his bowl.

“I could tell him that, but I’m still not sure he’s going to buy it,” Angeal says, sounding morose again. “Same if you said that to him. He’s just stuck on this—obsessed with Vincent. I mean, I’m used to him obsessing over you at this point, but we grew up that way. Now he’s adding in Vincent and I just—I’m tired of it. I can’t anymore.”

He looks at Sephiroth and Sephiroth completely believes him. And yet…he knows both of them, and he can’t see them apart. Perhaps that’s his own biases getting in the way, but he’s not certain of that either.

More time. They need more time to work through this. “You can stay here tonight, but you both need to at least try to make it less obvious in the office,” Sephiroth says. “I sent him an email along those lines.”

Angeal blinks hard. “What’d he say?”

Even in this mood, Angeal can’t hide the interest in his eyes, and that’s part of why they need more time. Angeal clearly isn’t thinking about what he actually wants, only what he’d like to get away from, and Sephiroth needs time to think about how to bring the man back around. “He just sent me a read receipt, and then filed all of his overdue reports.”

“Fucking Gen,” Angeal mutters, shaking his head. “Well…look, I won’t make it harder for you than it already is. Just give me my orders and I’ll show up, General.”

Which is about as good as Sephiroth can leave it, at that point. He does see Genesis later that day, as part of scheduled meetings, and the man is tense but uncharacteristically lowkey about it. Angeal and Genesis have one meeting together and Genesis spends the entire time staring at Angeal, who ignores him; neither of them drop any leading comments and while the others in the meeting are uneasy, they seem happy enough to pretend they don’t notice it.

That night he and Angeal don’t eat dinner together; they pull what leftovers they want out of the fridge and Sephiroth eats in the kitchen, working on his tablet, while Angeal does the same in the living room. Sephiroth stays up late clearing out his inbox, then moves restlessly around in bed till he finally dozes off.

He’s much more comfortable upon waking, with a familiar body sitting up in bed next to him. “Angeal seems to think he owes me an apology,” Vincent says, reading something on his tablet. “He stopped me on my way in.”

Sephiroth grimaces and starts to push himself up on his arms. “I told him to w—”

Vincent glances at him, then at the bandage half-visible under the man’s sleeping robe that Sephiroth is staring at. Then Vincent reaches under the robe and pulls at the bandage, unraveling it from his shoulder. The first few rounds are dry and unstained, but then dark bluish-black spots turn the cloth brittle-looking. “Antiseptic,” he says. “It’s healed. It was my wing, and if it’s injured when it merges back into me, it’s…a different healing cycle.”

“I thought you said this was a nuisance matter,” Sephiroth says.

“It was.” Vincent isn’t exactly uncomfortable, his gaze steady enough as he looks at Sephiroth, but he is giving off a faint air of…wistfulness. As if he’d wished he’d thought more about this point before coming home. “I was very irritated with myself for forgetting to account for a few things.”

If Shinra could have mitigated that, Sephiroth’s tempted to start. But he doesn’t, because that way lies more internal horse-trading and Vincent might have forgotten a few details but he never forgets the cost something like that carries. Nor does Sephiroth.

He does sit up and look for himself, which Vincent was expecting, hence the bandage removal. All he sees is smooth, pale skin with the lightest of scars outlining what could have been a shrapnel wound, jagged and uneven. The muscle under it feels firm enough, and when he rotates the shoulder, the joint moves smoothly.

“Does he owe me an apology?” Vincent asks, and when Sephiroth blinks, he raises a brow. “You told him to wait.”

“I…didn’t mean that, I meant generally about the situation,” Sephiroth mutters. He’s still testing Vincent’s shoulder; he doesn’t need to keep doing that and he’s annoyed with himself when he realizes that. “He thinks you’re getting pulled into his fight with Rhapsodos.”

“Not due to his efforts, I take it,” Vincent says dryly.

Sephiroth starts to agree, then pauses. He could leave it here, he thinks; he knows Vincent well enough now to guess the man won’t push. But that doesn’t mean the man isn’t interested, and if he is—and if Sephiroth is reluctant to tell him, that feels as if Sephiroth is buying into all of this nonsense. He doesn’t like the situation, but that shouldn’t mean it bothers him, or that it affects how he behaves with others. He doesn’t think Vincent will be offended either.

“Genesis is so obsessed with our relationship that he’s driven Angeal away,” Sephiroth finds himself saying. He pauses, but Vincent looks exactly the same, attentive without displaying eagerness or disgust. “He wants to know what it is you do that has me so enthralled.”

The side of Vincent’s mouth quirks up. He rolls the used bandage into a tight ball, tucking the ends in with his thumb, and then flicks it across the bed and into a wastebin near the wall. “Does Angeal want tips?”

From anyone else it’d be a snide comment. From Vincent…Sephiroth cocks his head. “Angeal knows what he’s doing—how do you—”

“Rhapsodos occasionally shows marks. Flaunts them, to be accurate,” Vincent says, the same way he comments on satellite recon photos. “Are you worried they can’t work together anymore?”

“Yes,” Sephiroth says after a long moment. “But also I know them well enough to say this isn’t what either of them truly want. I’ve known them longer than anyone else at Shinra besides my mother—even Rufus wasn’t allowed to see us until we were all already Firsts. They’ve always gravitated towards each other—they’ve always had problems with each other. You’re only a smokescreen for all of that.”

“Does Angeal want to talk to me?” Vincent says.

Not quite the same question, Sephiroth realizes, and cuts off his initial reply. “Do you want to?” he asks.

“I rarely decide what to do based on what I want—it’s whether it’ll push things in the direction I wish, or it won’t,” Vincent says. “Do you think it will? Because I’ll help you.”

“Not Angeal,” Sephiroth interprets, and doesn’t take offense when Vincent inclines his head. The two men are civil to each other but they’re not natural confidants, nor does Sephiroth put much weight on that. They both keep their word once given and that matters more.

“He didn’t ask me for that,” Vincent adds after a moment. “In all fairness to him.”

Sephiroth nods and keeps studying the man. Sometimes, as much as he appreciates Vincent’s perpetual calm, he wishes he understood it better. He’s not particularly prone to heightened emotions himself, but looking at Vincent can feel like looking at a natural phenomenon, rather than a person. He might not think like normal people, but he’s been trained to analyze how they think. Which is why he can’t simply be relieved at how Vincent’s taking it. He’s not used to not understanding someone.

“Angeal’s always been kinder,” Sephiroth finds himself saying, unprompted. “Somehow it hasn’t been burnt out of him, despite what we’ve been through. That takes force of will. And even if he drives me to madness, Genesis has never pretended to see me for what I wasn’t. This is what I don’t understand—why can’t he see Angeal like that? Why does he make the man into things he knows Angeal will hate?”

“He’s not in love with you,” Vincent says.

Sephiroth snorts. “Is that what love does to people? I’ve been told so—I find that irrational. I have to agree with Mother there.”

“It depends on the person, from what I’ve seen,” Vincent says, still unruffled. “This isn’t answering my question. Sephiroth, if you want me to help him, I’ll help him. My job consists of drawing people out to where I need them to be, and this is no different.”

Something about how he says that makes Sephiroth look more closely at him, but Vincent is still the same. “All I have to do is ask,” Sephiroth says, sounding skeptical, even though he knows Vincent wouldn’t make a false offer.

“I believe in your judgment. If you tell me it matters, it doesn’t make sense to ignore it,” Vincent says.

That makes sense. It’s entirely rational, and somehow Sephiroth thinks he’d hesitate less if the man was less rational and more emotional. But he also makes decisions based on what will achieve the goal, not on his feelings. “Then yes, I’d be interested if you can get him to talk to you,” he finally says. “If it helps me understand this.”

“I’ll let you know,” Vincent says, and then he tugs his robe back over his shoulder. He pauses, hand still on the collar, and raises his brows at Sephiroth as Sephiroth catches the hem. “Not insisting I eat first?”

“Did you?” Sephiroth says, as he flicks at the robe’s folds, making it skip off part of Vincent’s chest. Then he lets his fingers drift across Vincent’s skin as Vincent’s gaze refocuses, turning entirely subjective as it lingers on Sephiroth’s mouth. This much about the man, he has worked out. “Do I need to start asking every time you come back injured?”

Vincent snorts, then lets his hand drop off his shoulder as Sephiroth leans over him, moving it to curl loosely over Sephiroth’s bicep instead. He doesn’t bother to reply, and Sephiroth doesn’t bother to check the door before he presses their mouths together.

* * *

It sounds pretty insane when Angeal first hears it, but the longer he sits with the idea, the more it grows on him. Which also worries him, and so he almost goes straight to Sephiroth to ask what the hell Valentine is thinking. Except he’s fucked with the man’s life enough lately, and anyway, Valentine didn’t suggest it. Angeal did, and the man just said he could see how that’d work, with that eerie flat calm of his, and that’s when it stopped being a shitty joke Angeal was making to cut the tension and started being an actual idea.

“I can’t,” Zack says when Angeal asks if he can just switch back to Zack’s couch for a night. “I—sorry, seriously, but Cloud and Tifa are—”

He’d told Angeal they were coming weeks ago. “Shit, I forgot. Sorry.”

“It’s fine, I know you’ve got stuff on your mind. Look, I don’t have a couch free now but—you want to talk about it?” Zack offers. “Whatever it is?”

Absolutely not. The kid’s coming along well, but one thing about surviving what Angeal’s survived with an intact sense of morality, Angeal’s never doing certain things that happened to him to anyone else. “Thanks, but you’re not getting this one, Fair.”

“I…can’t say I’m unhappy about that, from what I do know. But—but look, Ang, I think you need to talk to somebody. I don’t know if Seph’s too busy or mad at you for me or…but there’s got to be somebody you can talk to,” Zack presses. “You can’t just keep this in, it’s not healthy.”

Which he’s right about. Needing to talk to someone, not Sephiroth being unavailable. But Angeal is not going to Sephiroth, he’s not going back to Valentine, and the only other person who’d even begin to understand his mind right now without getting traumatized from it is…

“This is not why I thought you’d finally stopped avoiding me,” Genesis says flatly.

“Yeah, well, you think a lot of wrong things about me lately,” Angeal snaps, and then he bites his lip. He hates being like this; he doesn’t want to be this kind of person, lurking behind his friends and depending on them for favors, acting like an asshole. And yet he can’t seem to shake himself out of it. “Anyway, it fucking answers your question, doesn’t it? You wanted to know what the hell he does, he can fucking show you and then you can figure out whether it was just a fantasy or what you’re really after.”

Genesis draws in a sharp breath, but strangely, doesn’t follow it with sharp words. He’s been oddly reserved this time—sure, he’s stalked Angeal all over Shinra, but he hasn’t destroyed a single room or sent anyone to medical while trying to get Angeal’s attention. And now, of all things, he looks like he really wishes he hadn’t started all of this, when he never regrets a damn thing.

Angeal likes that about him—liked that. They start out from such a compromised position, with the experimental therapies and Shinra’s machinations and all the people they’ve lost along the way, that not giving a fuck makes a kind of sense Angeal has always wished he could emulate. But right now, with that look on Genesis’ face, it just touches him off.

“Or are you going to tell me you just made that up? Weeks and weeks of it, of me telling you to stop,” Angeal bites out.

“Please,” Genesis says, and then stops. He looks like he doesn’t know how to use that word, for a moment, and then he settles his shoulders behind it. “Angeal, please—if you are going to talk to me, just let me say—one thing first. One thing.”

“You’ve said that before,” Angeal mutters.

“I know,” Genesis says quietly, and then he waits. He actually waits.

Angeal wants to leave anyway, but he…jerks his chin for the man to go on. “I didn’t make it up,” Genesis says, stiff and unflinching, without his usual flourishes. “I did want to know. But if that really is an offer—it’s not that I want to see them. I—I left out that I wanted you to be there. I don’t want it without you. The entire reason I want it is for you.”

“Well, why? I don’t want him, damn it—neither of us want to restart anything, so why you’re always—”

“Because I didn’t think you’d even listen otherwise. You like him better, you always—” Genesis exhales harshly “—I wanted you to know what I wanted, and I did that poorly. I admit that. But you should know that’s why. It’s not because I want you with him.”

“Just, what do you want, exactly? Me fucking him to show you how much I don’t want you? What the hell is that, Gen?” Angeal says helplessly.

“No, I—I want you to want me. That’s always what it’s been, always. And if you have him when he actually wants you, but you still come back…” Genesis’ voice twists in on itself, rich with loathing “...but I’m a fool. You don’t need to tell me, Angeal, I know.”

But Angeal doesn’t want to tell him that. Which is the problem a lot of the time, Angeal thinks, looking at the other man. He doesn’t want to, so Genesis never admits it to himself, so they both keep making the same mistakes. Sometimes he thinks Sephiroth stepped back from the two of them because the man just couldn’t stand watching such idiocy.

He knows that’s not true—if Sephiroth thought they were that stupid, he wouldn’t fight alongside them—but he thinks that, and can’t immediately push it out of his head. “What exactly do I have to do to make you believe me?” he finally says. “Because I’ve tried. I’ve tried, and now I’m tired of trying.”

“It’s not your turn for that, Angeal. I can admit that too,” Genesis says, still very quiet. He’s looking very intently at Angeal, his hands in flexing fists at his hips. “It’s mine. When you left—I’ve been trying to ask you ever since. What do you want from me, Angeal? And don’t make this about your pride, because it’s already—whatever you want, it’s yours. I just haven’t known how to give it to you.”

“Still insulting me, even when you’re begging,” Angeal says after a moment. Genesis winces, and the defeated air the man has is what ultimately convinces him. Nothing ever beats the man, not Heidegger, not Shinra, not even Sephiroth’s effortless superiority. “I…want you to act like you’re mine for once. Act like I’m the only damn one in the room for you. I’m not a fucking selfish asshole, Gen, but you make me…you do that. Only you, and so for once, however good Valentine is at laying Sephiroth out, I want to know you believe I’ll come back to you. I want you to at least pretend like you do. Can you do that?”

Genesis’ head is already up but the way the man tenses, Angeal sees a phantom head-snap in him. If he just looked like that all the time, and Angeal could believe that…

“Yes,” Genesis says. “Yes. If you let me—if I can, I’ll prove it to you. It won’t just be an act.”

Angeal wants to believe it. He does, but he’s still feeling like a field of charred earth. “Fine. One more time. Now stop fucking chasing me around so we don’t have the entire company in on it.”

Genesis nods tightly. He pauses, then takes a step towards the door. Then another, turning with this one. He lets himself out and as soon as the door shuts behind him, Angeal blows his breath out and drops into the nearest seat. He stares at the wall for a while.

He’s going to have to go talk to Vincent again, he thinks. The man did just say he could see how that’d work, not that he’d agreed to it. And then Sephiroth, and even as Angeal’s cringing over it, he knows he’s going to. He can’t help himself that way. “Fuck.”

* * *

“Your annual off-site,” Vincent says. “It’s the only time the three of you are scheduled to be on vacation at the same time, and we should include padding for any issues that come up.”

“Where you’re going to fuck me in front of them, and Angeal is going to assist, so Genesis can overcome his insecurities,” Sephiroth summarizes, putting down his cup of coffee. Thankfully, he hadn’t started drinking it when Vincent had begun to update him on the talks with Angeal. “I’m starting to see why he went through you to ask me.”

Vincent doesn’t have any such qualms about his tea, and absently sips at it as he looks at Sephiroth. “He didn’t. He’s going to ask you himself, but he wanted to talk to me separately. I thought you might want advance notice.”

Sephiroth suppresses the urge to snort. He’s not amused at Angeal; he doesn’t even think he’s that amused at the general situation, but sometimes Vincent’s deadpan can’t be responded to in any other way. “Do you think it’d work?”

“I would have told him so if I did, and he wouldn’t have pushed it any further,” Vincent says. He lowers his cup to the table. “What he laid out makes sense in context of their issues, which is the context that matters.”

“Well, and us?” Sephiroth can’t help asking. He’s not insecure, but there is enough about Vincent he still doesn’t know that the words slip out.

“I think I can make you like it,” Vincent says without even blinking. His tone is as cool and smooth as the flat of Masamune’s blade, as he goes on. “You like Angeal better, but Genesis rubs you raw like few others do. I think you’d like seeing him put in his place, and you’d like it even better if Angeal was using you to do it. He was very clear about that, it’s not about trying to have you. It’s about using you as a tool to make his point to Genesis, and you’re going to be sitting on my cock the entire time, because I’m not giving you over to him in any case. You’ll be there because I’m allowing it.”

All the air in the room suddenly turns still and thick, as if it’s been replaced by cotton wadding that holds Sephiroth perfectly in place. When he finally shakes himself, he feels a bead of sweat rolling down his throat, even though the air conditioning is functioning. “If I’d known we were discussing it this way, I would have done this in my office instead of calling you over here.”

Vincent smiles as he picks up his tea again. “I can do that, but I haven’t committed yet. Before I do, I want to know: do you want it?”

“You are—” Sephiroth stops himself. He has another meeting in here in ten minutes; they’re in this damn room in an entirely different building from his office because otherwise he’d have to wait till the end of the day to speak to Vincent. “You talked him into this?”

“No, I only let him talk himself into it,” Vincent says between sips. “And then, apparently, talk Genesis into it. You said it yourself, they gravitate towards each other. They were always going to have to find the solution themselves, even if we help with it.”

“I want to,” Sephiroth says after a long moment of consideration. “I want them to work this out. And I want you to do this—and for you to have me afterward.”

Vincent gets up from his seat and leans forward. He’s still over a yard away, but it feels as if he’s breathing right in Sephiroth’s face, with how hot Sephiroth’s skin is flushing under the man’s gaze. “I wouldn’t agree to this if I didn’t think that would be the case,” he says. “I don’t need to prove what I already know, so I don’t mind helping you with them. I think Angeal’s going to raise this at dinner. Do you want me there?”

“Yes,” Sephiroth says. Then swallows roughly, and as Vincent nods and steps out, he tries to remember what this next damn meeting is about.

Chapter 17: Third Vacation: Couples Retreat Part 2

They agree on the off-site as a setting, and so the night before, Vincent walks Sephiroth backwards onto the balcony of their rented quarters, slipping his fingers under Sephiroth’s coat so that Sephiroth has to step carefully over the belts he’s shedding. Then the man teases his hands into Sephiroth’s loosened trousers, curling those long fingers back till they just brush into the cleft between Sephiroth’s buttocks. They tighten as Sephiroth sucks at Vincent’s lower lip, shrugging his coat from his shoulders, but then slide out as the trousers sag down Sephiroth’s thighs, removing themselves from the newly-bared flesh.

Sephiroth straightens up and the other man gives him a slight push, just enough to back him into the balcony’s metal railing. The view behind Sephiroth is superb, a sweeping vista of thick, lush woods and rivers meandering into the mountains, and Vincent looks past Sephiroth for a moment at it. “I’ll bring dinner out,” he says, and then moves his eyes back to Sephiroth. “Leave them. Down.”

The boots on Sephiroth’s feet have caught up his trousers, but he does as he’s told, breathing deeply as the air cools his back and arms and buttocks. He twists his hair out of the way, then slowly sinks down against the railing. When Vincent motions, he puts his hands to either side of himself, with his legs also parted, and then looks on as Vincent pulls something out of his coat.

“Something from my last assignment,” Vincent says, taking his coat off. He folds it first, then swipes his finger along the top of a nearby chair to see if there’s any dust before slinging his coat over that. “Experimental. They told me you can hang a chopper from this.”

Sephiroth glances at the roll of tape. It’s plain and black, with a matte finish that doesn’t show any stress marks when Vincent pulls up a few inches of it. “R&D said that?”

“No, the targets did,” Vincent says as he kneels down in front of Sephiroth. He smiles close-lipped as Sephiroth snorts. Smiles and then puts his hand on Sephiroth’s right shoulder, flicking its fingers out so that claw-tips just tickle over the side of Sephiroth’s neck. “If it works, I might let Angeal try it tomorrow.”

Try it on Genesis or on Sephiroth—the uncertainty is entirely one-sided, Sephiroth knows that. Vincent knows how that tape is going to be used and he’s merely letting the thought out to twist in Sephiroth’s mind as Sephiroth shivers against the chilly railing. Shivers and then exhales, letting his head fall back against the bars as Vincent strokes his shoulder again. He doesn’t know and he doesn’t want to know, not yet.

Vincent’s smile widens a little, just enough for a flicker of tongue to be seen. He smooths the end of the tape around the bar behind Sephiroth’s shoulder, then pulls the roll down under Sephiroth’s armpit and back up. After making several loops, he cuts the tape with his claw and then repeats the process on the other arm. Then he pushes Sephiroth’s lower arms through the bars and bends them, crossing the wrists on the other side.

To tape them in place, he chooses to straddle Sephiroth and then reach around, putting his throat up against Sephiroth’s mouth. Sephiroth can’t ignore that and starts to kiss and lick at it, nosing along the tendons when they vibrate against Vincent’s rumble. He sucks a little harder, using the point of his jaw to wedge aside Vincent’s shirt-collar, and Vincent pushes himself into it.

Then away, using one hand to grab Sephiroth’s jaw and hold him against the bars as the man sits back. Sephiroth rolls his shoulders—the tape stretches very little, and when he relaxes, it cinches him back against the railing. His wrists don’t turn in their bonds either. “It might,” he says as Vincent looks on. “If I’m distracted.”

“If you are, tomorrow isn’t going to go very well,” Vincent says, and then tips Sephiroth’s chin up for a claiming kiss when Sephiroth frowns at him. “Spread.”

Sephiroth forgets his thoughts as his knees jerk apart; by now that word, in that tone from that mouth, barely needs his mind to translate it to his body. His legs tilt Vincent’s weight so that it presses his hardening cock back against his stomach and he twists uncomfortably, only to have Vincent clamp both hands on his shoulders and deliberately grind down against him.

“Pay attention,” Vincent murmurs as he eases his mouth away, gentle there as he isn’t being elsewhere. His left hand drops down Sephiroth’s chest, claws skittering dangerously near a nipple; when Sephiroth bucks to avoid that, the claw backs slide diagonally across his belly. “I’ll tell you once, and then tomorrow we’ll see how you’ve done.”

Sephiroth sucks his breath over his teeth, feeling his skin tighten all over his body. His boots scrape against the balcony floor as he pulls them further apart, watching Vincent hike himself up to make room. Enough so that the man can pull open his trousers and snake himself out of them, pale white hips paired with a flushed cock that drags its rosy head down Sephiroth’s chest as Vincent unceremoniously takes in Sephiroth’s own prick.

Vincent’s pupils bloom wide, but that and a slight quickening of breath are the only signs that the man’s affected by this. Sephiroth’s less controlled, jerking against the bars as Vincent rocks roughly on his cock. Sweat’s already running over him and he feels dribbles of it falling into his twisting hands, running over the tape wrapped about his shoulders and wrists—the tape is holding, pulling him back when he’d like to buck forward into the other man. He’s frustrated enough to snarl and Vincent laughs at him without even pausing. Laughs and then encircles his throat with both hands, pressing him back into the railing as come splashes over his belly.

“So it’ll hold. You should want it to, it’ll make this easier for you,” Vincent says, voice low and gravelly as he leans over Sephiroth. His fingers ripple along the sides of Sephiroth’s throat. “I’m going to go get dinner and then I’ll feed you out here, while I enjoy the sunset. Shinra paid for it, after all.”

Sephiroth is still hard inside of him. He knows that, taking his time about it as he arches himself free. “Easier?” Sephiroth grunts.

“Don’t come. I’m putting the cage on you tonight and you’ll wear it till tomorrow,” Vincent says, and then laughs again, even lower, as Sephiroth can’t help a sudden whine. “Get your cock down yourself and tomorrow will be easier.”

He gets up and then walks away, stepping out of his trousers so that they’re left as a dark puddle half-draped over the swing of Sephiroth’s own trousers, still tangled around his boots. Sephiroth pants and slumps against the railing, watching Vincent’s form disappear into the penthouse—he can see the smears of his own come on the man’s buttocks and when he realizes that, a tight coil of fire winches up inside of him. He can’t see how his erection is coming down by itself.

But he sits out there, tied to the railing, and it’s cooling as the sun goes down. His back and arms can still feel the warm rays, but his front is in the shadows and it’s starting to chill. He moves his legs a few times, enough to work his trousers nearly out of the boots—but then he remembers and reluctantly settles back down.

Vincent comes back out, without food but with chains and leather ankle cuffs. “No?” he says, eyes resting on Sephiroth’s still-stiff cock.

“Dinner?” Sephiroth says. And then he lifts one boot as Vincent raises a brow. “I’m not arguing, only asking for my time window.”

“I’m finishing a few things,” Vincent says as he squats by Sephiroth’s right side. He’s still naked from the waist-down, uncaring about modesty. “Fifteen minutes. Do you want tomorrow to be difficult?”

“I—” Sephiroth starts and then he catches himself, looking at the other man. He’s falling into it, he thinks. They’ve already talked about this, and Vincent does only say things once as a general rule, in or out of the bedroom. But he likes tempting—he likes seeing Sephiroth spot the temptation. They’re well-matched there.

Vincent hooks the end of one chain to the railing, then pulls it taut as he trails it back to Sephiroth’s right ankle. He lifts Sephiroth’s foot and sets it on his knee, unwinding the trouser-leg from it and then unpicking the bootlaces. He keeps his head down as he’s doing it, like a deferential servant, which he is not, even in play; Sephiroth lets his foot turn slightly and Vincent’s fingers snap tightly around it as he looks up.

Matched well, but they aren’t here to test each other, not now. Sephiroth has long since put that aside as far as Vincent is concerned. He wants to know the man, not to fight him. “I wasn’t thinking about it as easy or difficult—it’s not for me, after all. I thought all I had to do was be—” he tilts his head against the rails, watching for the movement of Vincent’s tongue behind the slightly parted lips “—of use.”

Vincent studies him. The man’s face doesn’t change expression but his grip does, still firm but moving a little, caressing as it restrains. “That’s true,” he says, as he locks the leather cuff at the end of the chain around Sephiroth’s ankle. “So tonight, I’m going to make you into something useful. That’s all you need to think about.”

All he has to pay attention to, Sephiroth translates as his other ankle’s similarly chained. His legs aren’t pulled completely up to his body but they’re held so he can’t straighten them more than a few inches from his shoulder, and he can’t close them either. Splayed out against their expensive balcony with its expensive view, his cock desperately hard as he thinks about that.

Not what he needs to think about. Sephiroth pulls at his bonds a few times as Vincent walks back into the penthouse, then lets himself sag into them. The tape is holding, he thinks with idle surprise. So he’ll let it hold him.

It takes him several minutes of trying. He’s used to being the one who holds and it’s difficult to shake off, even with several months of Vincent’s creative arguments for otherwise behind them. And while he’s used to being tied up and put on display, the tape is difficult, yielding more than leather would. He has to realize that even as his weight drops against it, that yield won’t become tearing.

Once he feels that for himself, it’s a little easier. The chains creak as the weight of his legs hangs into them, creak and then whistle slightly as a breeze stirs up from the woods. It’s cool enough to make his skin tingle, a soothing feeling against the beginning burn in his joints, and he can feel the sweat drying up across his body. The bars at his back soak away heat as well, as does the concrete under his buttocks and feet, and he realizes he just has to not fight that, to not try and keep the heat with him.

His cock is mostly down by the time Vincent comes back out, wearing a sleeping robe and carrying two trays that he sets down on either side of Sephiroth. One has little dishes of this and that delicacy from Vincent’s wide repertoire of cooking skills, while the other…

The other has the cock cage, with the hollow sounding rod that pairs with it, and a small bowl of lubricant sitting on a larger bowl of ice. On the other side of the bowl is a piercing kit, and two silver rings. Sephiroth shudders once, looking at the items. Then settles back, groaning, as Vincent takes him by the chin and turns his head to face forward.

“Hold there, like that,” Vincent says softly, as if he’s speaking in a church or museum. His fingers stroke lightly along Sephiroth’s jaw as he reaches for something. “You’re going to be used the way I want you to be. You don’t have to think about how.”

Sephiroth bites his lip, but then a gasp bursts out of him as something pulls taut across his throat: tape, not leather or chains or even Vincent’s tail. It’s tape Vincent wraps around his throat, pinioning it to two bars. Just as snug, flexing when he swallows, not impeding but reminding him whenever he does to hold his head still.

He does that as Vincent slides on the cage, then works the rod into his cock. The lube slicked over the rod spreads an icy spike deep into his groin and his hips are trembling from the effort of not moving away from it, trembling enough that there’s a corresponding burn in his thighs and calves by the time Vincent finally lets his cock drop. The cage’s rings are heavy enough to drag it down against his balls and the tip of the rod jars against the balcony floor; Sephiroth can’t help himself then and hikes his hips up into the air.

He holds that for a straining second, then slumps back with a moan. His buttocks abruptly blossom with pain, more from the sudden shift in position than the landing, and his cock is already trying to swell against its prison. Vincent encourages that, running his lube-daubed fingers in between the rings, his chilly touch nevertheless drawing pulse after pulse of heat into Sephiroth’s prick.

When he stops, it’s to pierce Sephiroth’s nipples. He doesn’t toy with them first as he usually does, merely applies the clamps and waits till Sephiroth’s exhaled against the pain before he moves on. He checks that they’ve healed, then pushes that tray aside and reaches for the chopsticks on the food tray.

By then Sephiroth is dazed and slack in his bonds, only grateful for them so that he doesn’t have to hold his own head up. He opens his mouth for Vincent and takes in tidbits; the first few he barely tastes, only chews and swallows, but as the hot pain in his nipples settles and the icy stab of the rod in his cock slowly fades, he starts becoming aware again. He lifts his head when Vincent picks up a second piece of something he likes, and Vincent notices, rubbing his free hand slowly along Sephiroth’s inner thigh as Sephiroth chews.

Vincent starts feeding himself at that point, alternating between them as he works through the dishes. His hand wanders from Sephiroth’s thigh up the belly and ribs to a shoulder, fingers dipping back to trace along the top of the shoulderblade. Then back to the belly, fingertips petting along each abdominal as Sephiroth catches one chopstick between his teeth, then laps off some sauce that hadn’t come with the piece of meat he’s just been fed.

“Are you going to use me?” Sephiroth says, once Vincent’s tugged the chopsticks free. “First?”

“Drink,” Vincent says, and instead of picking up the cup they’ve been sharing, he picks up the carafe. He sees Sephiroth gauging how much water is left in it and leans forward so his tongue can slip out and curl its length across the inch between their faces and into Sephiroth’s welcoming mouth. “The last thing you’re going to taste tonight is my cock.”

Sephiroth shivers, then tips his head back as Vincent raises the carafe to his lips. “Are you going to tell me, after I’m gagged?” he murmurs.

“Tell you?” Vincent repeats.

He’s still tilting the carafe. Sephiroth drinks the water, then licks at his mouth as Vincent puts the carafe down. “Why you really agreed to this.”

“Were you going to ask me earlier?” Vincent says as he gets up. He puts his feet to either side of Sephiroth’s hips, the edge of his robe fluttering into Sephiroth’s face; when Sephiroth tries to nuzzle it out of the way, he finds himself with two of Vincent’s fingers curving into his mouth. Vincent lets out an amused noise, pushing them across Sephiroth’s tongue as Sephiroth startles, then sucks at them. “No, I think—no, you wanted to ask this way, so…”

His cock slides out from his robe, wedging aside his fingers. Sephiroth can’t move his mouth to meet it because of the tape around his throat so he has to wait for Vincent to feed it into him, inch by inch. He sucks harder, hoping the man will hurry it up, but Vincent perversely stops for a moment, only a third of his cock in Sephiroth’s mouth. And then, as Sephiroth’s making a frustrated noise, he forces the rest in.

Sephiroth chokes and swallows roughly to dampen it. Vincent only leans forward, pressing mercilessly till he can adjust—using him. He moans around the man’s cock, his own shudder interrupting him this time, and then sets about demonstrating his use.

When he’s done, Vincent uses a handful of his robe to wipe off Sephiroth’s jaw and cheeks. Then he squats down with a piece of tape in hand that he presses across Sephiroth’s mouth; the tape clings firmly to Sephiroth’s skin once he lifts his fingers. “I take that back,” he says, looking at Sephiroth, his hands dropping to flick at the nipple rings, then at Sephiroth’s caged cock. “Not like this. Not yet.”

Sephiroth twists helplessly under the man’s ministrations, whimpering and only half-listening. Vincent reaches over and frees his ankles and his legs jerk nearly straight of their own accord, not minding the way that rattles the edge of the cock cage against the floor, sending bolts of lightning up through his torso to burn white behind his eyes.

When his vision clears, Vincent’s cut him free from the railing. His arms are clumsy as he brings them around and Vincent has to catch one before he knocks it into some of the dishes. Vincent pushes his hand against the floor; he presses his other palm next to it and then kneels as the other man kneads a few times at his shoulders. That works enough control back into him that he can get up on his own, but he trails behind Vincent as the other man takes the trays and goes inside.

The trays are left in the penthouse’s kitchenette and then Vincent takes Sephiroth by the arm to the bathroom, where he’s pushed down on his hands and knees in the walk-in shower. He’s sticky with sweat, and there are long dark streaks in his hair where dirt came off the railing. He cards his fingers through them till Vincent turns on the water, and then he simply puts his arms and legs where the man tells him, as he’s washed off.

Vincent doesn’t spare his nipples or cock, but doesn’t linger over them either. They’re still aching when the water’s turned off, and it’s a relief when Vincent cuffs his hands together before him. He rests the leather bands against the toilet as Vincent rubs one hand over the tape across his mouth.

“Waterproof,” Vincent notes. “Did it sting when it came off?”

Not enough for Sephiroth to notice. He shakes his head and Vincent catches a handful of his hair, then uses that to pull his head back over the other man’s shoulder. Vincent’s come to kneel behind him, and leans down to run his mouth up the curve of Sephiroth’s throat as his slicked fingers—the lube is warm this time—probe between Sephiroth’s buttocks. Sephiroth’s legs tremble as he presses his knees together.

“They’re your best officers as well as your friends, and if they’re not working well together, then that’s more work for you, less stability for Shinra. Which is my employer, nothing else, but I try not to work for ones who will collapse on me,” Vincent says in between biting licks. One of his fingers is in Sephiroth now, while his thumb strokes along Sephiroth’s perineum, just a little too light to be trying to milk him. “It makes sense to help them. But I wasn’t going to if you didn’t ask. You asked. Now, since you are paying attention, spread.”

Sephiroth lets out a long whine as his legs yank apart and let Vincent press three fingers into him, pressing his face into his cuffed wrists. He can feel it ripple against the tape but the tape still holds.

“And you asked because you wanted to. Just like with Tseng,” Vincent says, pumping his fingers at an excruciatingly languid pace in and out of Sephiroth. “Though with him, I did think about it before. I didn’t want it till you brought it up—because then I was considering what you wanted out of it, how you wanted it. It’s what I do, Sephiroth, I learn what and how people want. It’s only with you, when I do that, I end up wanting it too.”

Vincent’s mouth runs over the tape, so fleeting that Sephiroth almost mistakes it for a finger. Then it comes back, pressing down so he can’t mistake the shape of lips and he tries to press back against it, twisting up against the other man till Vincent pulls at his hair again.

“You wanted to ask like this,” Vincent says, amused, as he pushes Sephiroth away from the toilet. He twists his fingers out of Sephiroth as he does, letting them drag in a near-slap across Sephiroth’s left buttock. “Get up and piss, then get on the bed. If I put my cock in you, I don’t want to have to take it out before tomorrow morning.”

Sephiroth rubs his fingers against the floor and tracks them through a puddle of water from his wet hair. Then he raises himself, groaning, and does as he’s told. He pisses through the rod in his cock, feeling how his flesh tries to flex around that so it bruises up against the encircling rings, and then lets Vincent wipe his cock and hands with a damp towel. Then he goes into the other room, lying down on his side and trying not to knead too roughly at the bed until Vincent climbs in beside him.

They both sigh when Vincent’s cock slides into him. Vincent wraps one arm over his waist, then shifts it between his arms so that the man can reach his nipple piercings, hooking a finger through one. “You wanted to because you wanted me to do it,” Vincent says, sounding almost near sleep, even though his cock is swollen and stiff inside of Sephiroth. “So I’m not worried about why you wanted to, if you were thinking about that. I’m going to take you and show you to them, and let them touch you and use you, and it’s still going to be what you wanted me to do, Sephiroth. It’s still only because I want what you want. So if you were, stop thinking about it.”

Sephiroth can’t move. He breathes, and feels the weight of the man against his back, the press of him inside. He doesn’t want to move, but it’s only—he thinks he should, for a moment. He thinks he should do something.

“Stop,” Vincent tells him, that finger tugging steadily at his piercing as the man starts to slowly roll his hips up against Sephiroth. “You don’t need to do anything now.”

And he’s listening. He’s paying attention, and since Vincent tells him that—he stops. He stops, and he lets himself be.

Vincent fucks him once, then pets Sephiroth with long, firm, soothing strokes down his belly and onto his thighs till he falls asleep. With the man still in him, with his hands tied and his cock bound, his mouth sealed up. He sleeps, relaxed and deep, until Vincent pushes him off and over onto his belly, and then he wakes as the man fucks him again.

It’s morning. The light’s coming through the windows as he leans on his bound arms and groans behind the tape, his empty hole twitching in the air as fresh come slides back down his buttocks to teeter on its rim. Then Vincent pulls him up and into the bathroom for another shower; this time the man works his fingers in and out of Sephiroth while they’re still under the water, cleaning him out till he’s clinging to the wall to keep from dropping onto his knees. Vincent pulls the tape from his mouth and it doesn’t hurt, but his lips still feel dry and he’s sucking the shower water like a dog to wet them.

The water turns sharply colder, and when Sephiroth jerks himself backward, Vincent turns the spray to arrow across his groin for nearly a minute. “Relieve yourself,” Vincent says when the water’s finally off.

Sephiroth gets out of the shower and does, and then Vincent pulls the rod from his cock. It feels like he’s being pulled inside-out and he staggers once it’s free, grabbing at the top of the toilet tank so that the chain between his wrists clanks and chips off some of the porcelain finish. He stares at the chip as Vincent takes the cage off as well, only to give his cock a quick rub with a towel before pulling a thin black latex tube over it.

The tube completely covers his cock, with only a small opening at the head to match his cock slit. It’s attached to another tube that squeezes over his ball sac, and there are straps coming off it that Vincent lets dangle as he pulls a rubber version of the cock cage over Sephiroth’s prick, banding it just as tightly as before. The last rubber ring has an attachment that slides over the cock head and spreads a wedge-like tongue into the slit, plugging it. Then Vincent takes the straps and pulls one set up around Sephiroth’s waist. The second set go between Sephiroth’s legs, bending his cock backwards with it and pushing his balls up against his body.

Sephiroth grunts and watches the wrist-chain jitter across the toilet tank as Vincent lubes up his hole, then presses a ridged plug into it. Once the plug is seated, Vincent pulls the latex straps over it and fastens them to the first set at the small of Sephiroth’s back.

His groin is smooth and desexed, and Vincent takes a moment to run his hands over it, rolling his fingertips up against the latex as Sephiroth groans. The man chuckles against Sephiroth’s nape, nosing away the wet strands. Then he pushes Sephiroth a few feet to the side, the wrist-chain dipping into the sink while Sephiroth stares at himself in the mirror as Vincent finishes dressing him.

Tight leather trousers go over the latex cocksleeve. The black leather clings to Sephiroth’s damp skin and makes him feel as if he’s being encased in its weight, even though it’s thinner than the leather of his SOLDIER coat. There’s no opening in the front; the trousers lace up the sides, with metal-reinforced holes that wink in the mirror as Vincent pulls the lacings so tightly that Sephiroth can feel the back of the trousers pulling up between his buttocks, moving the end of the plug in him. He drops his hands from the rim of the sink into its bowl, panting already.

Then there’s a harness to go over the trousers, more black leather with silver rings and buckles that cinch around his waist and the tops of his thighs. Connecting straps draw a torturous vee down his groin and join together into one thick strap that rubs insistently along his crotch and up between his buttocks. They lock, and the locks are all in the back; this isn’t intended for him to manage on his own.

Another harness goes around his shoulders and chest, crisscrossing in the front like his uniform belts do and framing his nipple piercings as they flutter with every breath he heaves out of himself. There’s a long strap up his spine, with rings hanging off it. Some of the rings are used to hold his hair down once Vincent’s braided it, but Vincent doesn’t use all of them, and also works rings into the braid that fit between the ones on the strap.

He thinks he knows what they are for, but when Vincent uncuffs him and then pulls his arms behind him, he’s surprised to have his forearms bound pointing down. His hands are uncovered and he twists them against his buttocks, trying not to press down on the end of the plug; his efforts are futile, because Vincent steps up behind him and forces his hands to rock against that, to fuck himself through the trousers and the latex.

“I know what you want, but not yet,” Vincent says, fitting a black leather posture collar around Sephiroth’s neck. He moves his chin over Sephiroth’s shoulder, looking at their reflections as he clips two short chains to Sephiroth’s nipple rings, then lifts the bundled leather leash they’re attached to. “Come.”

Sephiroth jerks himself against the edge of the counter, then lets out an airless gasp as Vincent lightly bites his left shoulder, a chuckle vibrating behind the man’s teeth. He hasn’t come; he can’t, locked up as he is, and he can’t even resent Vincent for the tease. Can’t think about that, can only think about the sharp tug on his nipples as the man steps back from him, the way that sets swirls of heat in his pecs as his back cools from the absence of Vincent’s body.

Vincent leads him into the kitchenette where he kneels. They have a light breakfast, some fruit that Vincent feeds him by hand, and then Vincent fucks his mouth before gagging him again. Not with tape, with a rubber cock strapped into his mouth that he can’t help sucking as the other man walks him out of their suite and down the hall, not to the meeting room where he and the other Firsts—Zack attending remotely, as he’d stayed in Midgar—had spent all day yesterday on annual planning, but to the practice room on the other side.

It's spacious, with warm blond wooden floors beneath the thick mats that are scattered here and there. Most of the training equipment’s been pushed up against the walls, but there are a few that are too large or that are fixed in place. Vincent takes Sephiroth over to one, a padded bench that’s been bolted to the floor, and has Sephiroth straddle one end of it; the leash is tossed carelessly down, its weight yanking roughly at Sephiroth’s nipples. He cuffs Sephiroth’s ankles to the bench’s legs, then takes his phone out of his pocket. One tap and the plug in Sephiroth suddenly comes to life.

Sephiroth jolts in place, then digs his fingers into the bench as he squirms himself to a shaky equilibrium. He can’t move entirely off the plug because of his chained feet, but he can lean back on his hands and the plug is set to a fairly low vibration. Of course that will grow worse over time, but right now the worst of it is how his leash sways torturously between his nipples. And then Vincent strips out of his pants and swings his leg over the bench as if he means to sit on Sephiroth.

He does—but he’s not just sitting. He takes out a vibrating dildo, attaches it to Sephiroth’s hip harness at the front, right where the base of Sephiroth’s cock is crushed down, and then proceeds to fuck himself on it as Sephiroth’s arms slowly turn to limp rags in their binder.

By the time the others come in, Sephiroth’s been forced nearly onto his back, sweat running off his shoulders to drip onto the bench under him. Vincent doesn’t turn his head at the sound of the door, merely shoves himself down on to the vibrator a last time and then strokes his cock so that he’s wiping the come off it and onto Sephiroth’s belly as he climaxes.

“Fuck,” Angeal says.

Sephiroth hadn’t looked over either. He twitches a little as he recognizes the voice, but then Vincent reaches back and does something that makes both vibrators turn off, and in the sudden wash of relief that crumples him backward over the bench, he entirely forgets why it matters that it’s Angeal. All he can think about as he lies there is how hot and tight and sore everything is, how desperately he wants to come. He lies there, and wants, and waits for Vincent to turn back to him.

Chapter 18: Third Vacation: Couples Retreat Part 3

Angeal had had more than an idea of what he’d be walking into—he’s careful with this, because their healing’s as much of a weakness as it is a strength sometimes, and he wouldn’t have done this if Vincent hadn’t demonstrated he could be just as meticulous. But it’s one thing to know, and Vincent is so damn detailed about planning that it actually kind of got a little boring, and another thing to see. Especially with Sephiroth.

The man never gives an inch. He might deign to humor you for a little while, but he doesn’t give. Which is a lot of what Angeal worries about with him, because everything needs to give and if you don’t, you break—but here he is, chained over a bench looking like someone turned SOLDIER into a professional whorehouse. And he wants to be there, Angeal can tell just from the way that his belly arches into the hand Vincent is rubbing over it, twisting and turning to keep the palm flat against it. No humoring, no playing around, this is utter, unvarnished commitment.

Then again, he has that in him too. “When did you start?” Angeal find himself asking.

“Not that long,” Vincent says. He unhooks the dildo from Sephiroth’s groin with his other hand, then grabs the front of Sephiroth’s chest harness and pulls the other man back up into a sitting position. Sephiroth is making small, low, needy noises that Angeal has never heard before from the man, even during their worst trips to medical, and Vincent spares a moment to push a few strands of hair out of Sephiroth’s glazed eyes before he looks into them. “You’re a little late.”

Angeal sighs, and then ignores the muffled huff from beside him. “Yeah. I can’t get this out of bed in anything less than half an hour, and that’s when I’m not trying to make him look pretty.”

Vincent keeps looking Sephiroth over. He puts the dildo behind him and then bends down, unchaining Sephiroth’s feet from the bench. Then he gets up and twists around the other man, sitting back down behind Sephiroth and wrapping his arms around Sephiroth’s waist as Sephiroth slumps back into him with a speed that suggests a fair bit tucked under that hip harness. And then Vincent looks at Genesis.

Who’s resentful already, even on his knees. He is pretty, and he knows it, stretching himself against his bonds even as he simmers. Strapped into his red leather, corset buckled tight over the back lacing with more straps leading to the matching posture collar and thigh-high boots. His cock’s laced into its own miniature red leather corset and hooked against the bottom of the actual corset, while his balls are left to hang freely. Which means Angeal only needs to swing the man’s leash a few inches to get it to whip between Genesis’ legs and slap up against the back of the scrotum.

Genesis jumps sharply and then tries to look at Angeal, only to hiss around his ball-gag as the posture collar stops him. He doesn’t usually slip up like that, and when his eyes meet Angeal’s, he looks uncertain for a moment. “Stop preening,” Angeal says. “This isn’t supposed to be your reward, and you know why.”

“Where do you want to put him?” Vincent asks. He did take a good look, but he’s already back tending to Sephiroth, with an ease to it that speaks of practice and familiarity and not at all to posturing.

He’s pulled the other man up against his chest, twisting Sephiroth slightly to the side so that he can unlock the hip harness. A few straps are already hanging loose, although Vincent slows as Angeal slaps Genesis with the leash again, over the left buttock. Vincent flicks at a buckle as Genesis gets smoothly to his feet, not so much as flexing the arms strapped together across his back.

“Where there’s a good view. Are we staying on that bench?” Angeal says, coming closer. He thinks it’d probably hold up, but it’s a little short for three of them, especially with Sephiroth’s legs.

Vincent seems to come to the same conclusion and reaches around to pick up Sephiroth’s leash. He leaves plenty of slack, letting its weight drag at Sephiroth’s nipple rings as Sephiroth squirms and whines and then stands up. Sephiroth’s shaky and doesn’t even try not to be, leaning into Vincent as Vincent guides his leg over the bench and then walks him to where there are oversize beanbags.

Well, foam-bags, once Angeal’s given one a kick. He waits for Vincent to find a good spot and then turns away as the other man's settling Sephiroth on the edge of one. There’s a set of chin-up bars a few yards away; Angeal leads Genesis over to it and has him kneel in front, facing the others as he ties the leash off to one bar. Genesis lands slightly off-center, already turned towards Angeal, but his shoulders draw up a little when Angeal bends down to his ear.

“I’m not touching you till I think you see what I mean,” Angeal says, and watches as the man presses the side of his jaw against his collar, eyes trying to slide over to Angeal’s face. He shifts so that he’s further out of view. “Look at him, not me. I don’t want to hear you didn’t get to see something, not after what you’ve put me through.”

A small, reluctant noise slips from Genesis, but he looks forward and then he can’t stop looking. It is very eye-catching, the way Sephiroth teeters into each little twitch of his lead. His nipples are reddening, their color visible from where Angeal’s standing against the acres of smooth white chest the man has. Sephiroth’s tilting his head up, his eyes half-closed, equally reddened lips working around his gag as Vincent slides one palm up his back between the shoulderblades—and it’s that odd left hand of his, the enhanced one with its darker fleshy plates and the long curving claws that glint in the light.

“Look at that,” Angeal says, moving so that he’s leaning over Genesis’ shoulder from behind. He lets his mouth almost touch the curve of the man’s ear, and senses a tremble run through Genesis. “Look. You were wondering, weren’t you, what they do with that?”

Vincent hears him, and draws that hand back down Sephiroth’s back, crooked so its heel follows a strap lying along the spine and its claws skitter to either side. Sephiroth squirms under it, trying half-heartedly to hike his leg up from where it’s trailing down the side of their seat, his chest bowing forward as Vincent plays out the leash to keep it hanging from his nipples rather than pulling them up.

“Well, you can see now. See how perfect that is—he doesn’t even need someone to break him into it,” Angeal says. He drops his hand to Genesis’ buttocks, letting it run across the tops before squeezing each as Genesis jerks and hisses, unable to not bear down on the plug in him. “My fucking point, Gen—it’s not about what you do, it’s who you want. But if you can’t get that, I’m going to go play with someone who does.”

Genesis tries to look at him again as he gets up, but he doesn’t look back. He opens and closes his hand, feeling the other man’s warmth fading from the palm, as he walks back over to the other two. Then shakes himself, and looks down into hazy green eyes.

“He looks like you’ve had him under a while,” Angeal can’t help saying. When he lifts his hand, Sephiroth’s pupils delay in following it and even then, they don’t quite focus; Sephiroth’s lashes do flutter as Angeal brushes his knuckles against the man’s cheek, as Vincent leans over one shoulder, leash hand dropping so that the leather is nearly straight against Sephiroth’s front. “Take a lot to get him there?”

“Help me get him bare,” Vincent says. He pulls his head back up and presses it against the side of Sephiroth’s head, considering Angeal; he’s not wary, either, but he always seems to be calmer than the situation demands. Even now, even when a little sweat wetting his own temples, he’s like that. “He could do with a little less now.”

And he answers like he feels like. He’ll show Angeal rather than tell him, although for a moment Angeal considers asking the man to just tell him anyway. Then he shakes himself again. “Yeah,” he says, sinking down to sit across from Sephiroth as Vincent tilts the man back against him. “He could—he’s very good for you. He deserves something for that.”

Vincent smiles, and his hand on Sephiroth’s belly extends its fingers downwards. Two of them slide behind a loosened strap, pushing it out to where Angeal can grab it. He pulls till the harness catches on its still-buckled parts, making Sephiroth buck his hips—not in protest but chasing the motion, lifting into it—and then pauses for Vincent to reach around and undo that side. Then he pulls the harness away.

The leather of Sephiroth’s trousers stretches impossibly flat across his groin and Vincent makes a throaty, amused noise when he notices. “Touch,” he says.

Angeal isn’t delicate about it. He pushes the whole flat of his palm against it, applying enough pressure so that he can start to feel through the leather what’s happened to the cock that should be there. Sephiroth whimpers around his gag again, rocking side-to-side up against Angeal’s fingers, and then those whimpers devolve to breathy mewls as Vincent offers up the bundled leash to Angeal, holding it high enough to pull at the tender-looking nipples.

Sephiroth’s voice rises slightly in a raw cry as Angeal gives the leash a hard tug, then lowers it, still rubbing at the man’s groin. “Likes that?” he asks Vincent.

Who’s working at the sides of the trousers, unlacing them and peeling the top down to show more pale flesh. Not as pale as Angeal remembers from communal showers and shared time in labs; there’s a wash of red just under the translucent white skin, a flush that only deepens as the restrictions of clothing are removed. “Yes,” Vincent says. “Harder than that. He likes them so red you can hold your finger above them and feel how hot they are.”

“Well, he deserves it,” Angeal says and Sephiroth’s head shifts in its cradling collar a second before Angeal’s fingers close over his nipples. Angeal rubs the nubs between finger and thumb, slow and dragging, and then absently loosens his grip as he sees what’s under the trousers. “Fuck. That’s what it takes with him?”

Vincent looks at Angeal as if Angeal’s just shown how much of the briefing he didn’t pay attention to. “That’s what he likes,” the man says patiently, pulling the trousers down so Angeal’s fingers slide from leather onto latex. “I’m going to retie his arms first. He likes it better when I’m sucking on his fingers and playing with his nipples at the same time.”

Sephiroth can hear them, mindless as he looks. His shoulders flutter like the wings of a trapped bird, then drop back as Angeal rolls his nipples against their piercings, making them turn from dark pink to deep red. He does like it, his breath breaking into little hitches whenever Angeal lets a nipple go, only to suck back into a moan when he’s pinched again.

Vincent busies himself with the man’s arms, pulling the binder off them and then tugging it back on as he refolds Sephiroth’s arms up between the shoulderblades. He does something with Sephiroth’s hair as well, making its braids ripple against Sephiroth’s neck a few times before they pull taut and out of sight behind the collar. Sephiroth’s eyes rise over Angeal, drifting upwards not because of the collar but because the man’s so eager for what Vincent’s promised.

When Vincent’s done, he pulls Sephiroth back by the shoulders. Angeal takes up the slack in the leash, then pays it out again as they turn Sephiroth around to kneel facing Vincent. Sephiroth’s cock twitches through its latex and rubber binding as Angeal gives his crotch one last squeeze, and then Vincent puts his arm around and snaps apart the latex straps.

“Hell, that’s pretty,” Angeal says as they pull away to show Sephiroth’s hole, stretched around a plug.

He glances at Vincent—the man spares a moment from licking at Sephiroth’s temple to nod—and then runs his fingertip around the plug’s end, feeling how the straining flesh tries to flex against it. Then he looks up and sees how Vincent’s laced up Sephiroth’s arms, tight over the main braid with smaller ones coiling off around Sephiroth’s wrists to pull his hands up towards the collar. Sephiroth’s fingers rise and turn in the air like little baby birds seeking their mother—then snap tightly down as Angeal twists the plug in him.

“Very pretty,” Angeal says, still looking at the arm bindings. He pushes his fingertip harder along the end of the plug, testing the yield of Sephiroth’s hole. “But he wants something else, doesn’t he?”

“He wants to come,” Vincent says, as something drops to the floor with a soft slap—the latex cocksleeve, wrapped about a rubber cock cage—and Sephiroth’s hips suddenly surge up.

Sephiroth’s been moving slow and at less than half-power up till now, like someone just coming back from rehab, but that one move has nearly all the elemental force Angeal’s used to seeing in him. Angeal grabs his hips, then thinks about it and pulls at the leash he’s still holding; Vincent’s ahead of him and has his mouth pressed to the corner of Sephiroth’s gagged mouth, kissing it as he slides his hands back and forth along Sephiroth’s thighs to urge him back down. His claws are out—Angeal doesn’t see but guesses, from how Sephiroth’s leg on that side stills first.

“He gets to,” Angeal says when Sephiroth finally slumps back on his knees. Then he tries to look around the man’s shoulder. “Did he?”

“No, but he’s close.” Vincent puts his hand out and Angeal gives him back the leash. He tugs it as he pulls it around, spurring another mewl from Sephiroth, a mewl and a shiver through the shoulders. Then nods at Angeal to turn the man back around. “I told him, wet on my cock. He likes that best.”

“Does he,” Angeal says as Sephiroth’s glazed eyes needily flick over him. The man’s head is lolling as much as the posture collar will let him, and he clumsily lifts one knee as if to help Vincent pull him back by the buttocks. Angeal grabs that and pushes it down, folding Sephiroth’s legs to either side of Vincent’s hips as they slide Sephiroth onto Vincent’s cock. Then he flicks his fingers at the weeping, fully-erect cock standing against Sephiroth’s belly; it’s been maybe a couple minutes at most since the bindings came off. “For the first one?”

“He’s going to come as often as he likes now,” Vincent says casually, as if his mind is on something else. Maybe on the body sitting in his lap, although when he raises his head from settling Sephiroth, he’s still inhumanly put-together. He reaches over and pulls at his trousers, tugging out a wrinkle from under Sephiroth’s thigh, and then looks at Angeal. “In your hand, if you like.”

Angeal starts to wrap his fingers over it, then remembers and pulls a tube of lubricant from his pocket. He glances up as Sephiroth shudders—Vincent’s head has disappeared behind the man, and he can hear soft sucking noises—then hastily slicks up his palm before curling it around Sephiroth’s cock. He’s surprised when the man doesn’t come then and there, given how desperately his body is squirming up against Vincent: hips riding back, nipple rings bouncing even as the swing of them makes the flesh around them swell even more. But Sephiroth manages to wait till Angeal’s pumped him twice before he arches up and then holds there, quivering violently as his seed dribbles down over Angeal’s fingers.

Vincent’s a little delayed in stopping his ministrations to Sephiroth’s fingers. On purpose, Angeal thinks, feeling how Sephiroth’s cock jumps even as it softens. Then Vincent lifts his head. He also lifts his hand with the leash, pressing it against Sephiroth’s breast as it heaves, and then he comes to a decision, reaching around with his other hand to unstrap the gag from Sephiroth’s mouth.

Sephiroth grunts as the gag bounces to the floor, the marks of the straps vivid across his cheeks as he stiffly works his jaw. His lips are bruised from it, wet and red, and then they stretch themselves around a gasp as Vincent bends down towards his hands; Angeal glimpses a tongue trailing farther than a human one should and then looks sharply away, a little unease going through him. Although Sephiroth seems fine with it, shuddering and moaning full-throated as his cock slips through Angeal’s fingers.

Angeal tightens his grip without thinking. Then loosens it, even as Sephiroth hitches to attention. He raises his hand and Sephiroth’s eyes follow it, not Angeal’s face, as Angeal puts a finger just in front of Sephiroth’s mouth. Vincent nuzzles into Sephiroth’s own fingers and Sephiroth shifts a little on Vincent’s cock, half-distracted, so Angeal pokes his finger into the man’s mouth for him.

Once it’s there, Sephiroth sucks enthusiastically at it, tongue working into every wrinkle to scour off his own come. Angeal runs his other fingers through the man’s mouth one at a time; when Sephiroth is on the second, he starts plucking and teasing at the man’s nipples again and Sephiroth suckles harder. “How red?” Angeal has to ask, because right now they’re almost as red as Genesis’ hair.

Vincent lets a finger pop obscenely out of his mouth. He doesn’t crane around, but drops his lips to press against Sephiroth’s left shoulder as he reaches with his hand instead, pushing Angeal’s fingers off Sephiroth’s left nipple. “He can come from this,” Vincent says, and then lifts his hand out so that the shortened leash lifts the rings off the man’s chest. “We’ll have him come from this.”

Sephiroth moans wordlessly. Even without the gag he doesn’t seem to want to talk, swaying between them. He hisses when Angeal reaches under the lifted rings and pushes at them, hisses and then bows his chest into Angeal’s fingers when Vincent slackens the leash, till Angeal takes up torturing his nipples. “He is getting hard,” Angeal says, looking down between his hands, and then back up at Sephiroth’s face. “Just from this, in that case. Not helping you out again—you’re coming on your own.”

Vincent glances at Angeal as he moves back behind Sephiroth’s head. It’s too fast to be read, but whatever that was, it doesn’t seem that much of a problem, since he goes back to laving and nibbling at Sephiroth’s hands. Sephiroth himself doesn’t seem to hear Angeal at first, his eyes sightlessly wide as he rubs his nipples into Angeal’s pinching fingers, but then a long, hard shudder takes him. “Vincent,” he rasps, his hips trying to rise again.

“You heard him,” Vincent says around a finger. The leash slaps lightly against Sephiroth’s chest; Angeal’s temporarily released the nipples so the rings flip up against his finger pads. “Come from this.”

Sephiroth makes a needy, urgent noise, but pushes his hips back down. His head tips back as Angeal grinds his thumbs over those swollen nipples and his eyes actually focus a little. “Please—more—”

“Only touching you here,” Angeal says, and gives one nipple a hard twist as Sephiroth cries out, eyes closing. “Fuck, they are burning my fingers—”

Vincent’s head comes up again, and he presses his mouth to Sephiroth’s ear. “Come,” he says, voice suddenly firmed up.

Sephiroth does, with a sharp, thick gasp and a shiver that seems to go on forever, his cock flicking drops of come around as it jerks untouched. When it finally starts to flag, Vincent curls the hand holding the leash against his breast and pulls him back, other hand coming around to drag its heel slow and hard down the inside of Sephiroth’s right thigh. Grounding him, Angeal thinks.

“They really look…” he starts, pointing at Sephiroth’s nipples with his eyes when Vincent glances at him.

“Get some ice,” Vincent says, and then nuzzles at Sephiroth’s ear when the man lets out a tired whimper. “He’s not dry yet—he can still come. But it’ll cool him down.”

“Please,” Sephiroth murmurs, head falling against Vincent’s mouth.

“You wanted to come,” Vincent is saying to him, low and unhurried. “You can come as often as you can, now.”

“Since you were good,” Angeal can’t help saying. He gets up, grimacing as that stirs his own erection—he has to stand still for a moment to adjust—and then deliberately ignores the slight noise coming from Genesis.

Sephiroth’s eyes roll in his direction, but then roll back as Vincent reaches down and cups his balls. Then Angeal’s far enough away to not see them anymore, heading for the corner where there’s a watering area. It comes with a small ice-making unit, barely enough to get himself two cups of cubes. One cup he fills with water, but the other he leaves as-is as he comes back over.

He does go to Genesis first. Genesis’ eyes widen in surprise and he draws himself up in his bindings. Sweat is trickling out of his hair and down his shoulders to pool along the top of his corset, a glimmering line that spills over to roll beads down his front every time he breathes. His cock head shows a deep scarlet, darker but no less vivid than the latex strapped behind it, and when Angeal slides his boot under it and taps at it, Genesis’ lashes flutter.

Flutter, but then they slit open and the man’s still trying to gauge Angeal. His eyes go up to Angeal’s face and then deliberately drop to Angeal’s crotch; he rolls the gag around in his mouth, turning it with his tongue so that a freshly-slicked side shows to Angeal.

“Still not getting it,” Angeal mutters as he fishes out a piece of ice from the waterless cup. “Well, you can sit tight and keep watching in that case.”

Genesis makes a frustrated noise as Angeal makes to swing around, then exhales roughly. Angeal pauses and in the moment before the other man realizes, his shoulders have dropped. Then he notices and he’s tilting his head up out of the collar, trying to crane around it as Angeal lifts the ice chip and rubs it at the corner of his lip. He pushes heavily into Angeal’s fingers, moaning quietly around the gag, and part of him really does want it. Angeal can see that in the way his eyelids want to fall shut, the stretch of his shoulders forward as the ice chip melts a little and starts to slip between his lips and the ball-gag.

But part of him is still thinking about other things. Sephiroth lets out a sudden gasp and Genesis’ eyes snap over, then come back to Angeal to check his reaction. “This is what I mean,” Angeal says, giving the ice a poke into Genesis’ mouth. “If what you really want is to watch the show, you’re gonna watch. This is what this is for. But you want me to fuck you—”

Genesis goes still. Finally focused, and for a second Angeal almost falls for it. But he’s done this one too many times, he thinks, twisting his wrist sharply to wake himself as he steps back.

“Then fucking act like it,” he says, and turns on his heel.

There’s a noise, a muffled word. He ignores it and goes over to Vincent, who’s idly flipping a loop in the leash against the nipple chains as Sephiroth trembles against him. Vincent takes the cup with the water, then lowers the leash as Angeal puts the other cup down on the foam-bag, pressing it in so the stuffing will cradle it. “Do you want his mouth?” Vincent asks, as he tilts the cup up against said mouth in question.

Angeal pauses, then grimaces sheepishly as he lifts the hand he hadn’t realized he was rubbing over his erection. He’s not going to fucking sit through much more of this if he doesn’t deal with that; he’d been hoping Genesis would come around faster, but as usual, they have to do things the hard way.

“While you’re icing him?” Angeal says.

Sephiroth’s taking the water in short sucks, surprisingly noisy. His lips don’t quite close when Vincent hands Angeal back the half-empty cup, a glistening film decorating them as he pants. Angeal puts the cup on the floor and then straightens up and reaches out to take Sephiroth’s jaw, making the other man look at him; the intensity of his gaze makes Angeal pause for a second. He’d thought he’d gotten used to that, but Sephiroth in the grips of battle-rage or contempt is a very different look than Sephiroth in the grips of arousal.

Not really for him, he thinks as he lets his fingers run down to the front of Sephiroth’s collar. Vincent’s watching over Sephiroth’s shoulder, both hands settled on Sephiroth’s hips. “Try a finger first,” he says, lifting one hand and dipping it into the ice cup. “Open your mouth for him, Sephiroth.”

Who does so, and as intense as his gaze is, it’s also a little dreamy, slow to change direction as Angeal leaves his hand on the collar and raises his other one to slide his middle finger between Sephiroth’s lips. He pushes it down as far as he can—Sephiroth rises a little, swallowing roughly, but doesn’t gag—down till he can just feel the ripple of the throat muscles past the root of the tongue. Then he takes it out. “The collar makes it tight in there, even if they get sloppy. Useful, right?”

Vincent makes an agreeing noise. He’s temporarily turned away, pulling out pieces of ice from the cup, but he turns back as Angeal undoes his fly and takes his cock out. His hands skate the ice along Sephiroth’s abdominals, then drop lower; Angeal can’t help following and then he snorts as Sephiroth squirms in place, his cock already erect again as Vincent teases ice under it and around the crown.

“Thought we were going to make his nipples feel better,” Angeal mutters, cupping his cock in one hand as he steps closer.

“After,” Vincent says, before he buries his face in Sephiroth’s hair, doing something that makes Sephiroth just about lunge forward to swallow half of Angeal’s cock.

The other half goes in as Angeal puts his hand on top of Sephiroth’s head, feeling sweat crush out from the silver strands to dampen his palm. He pushes himself up against Sephiroth, letting the man turn his head to keep his nose from being crushed but otherwise not sparing him any. He can feel the damned collar already, can feel how Sephiroth’s throat gets squeezed by it at the end of each swallow. “Fuck, that feels good,” he grunts. “Fuck.”

Sephiroth’s head bobs under his palm, occasionally pushing up harder when Vincent does something to him. Angeal isn’t going to pretend he’s going to last long this way and he just lets himself ride it to the finish, using most of his concentration to keep from losing his balance when he comes.

That, and not looking over at Genesis. He deliberately turns the other way as he pulls his softened cock out of Sephiroth’s mouth, then uses the back of his hand to wipe that and Sephiroth’s lips off. Sephiroth sucks a little at his knuckles, but then jerks in place, mouth lifting to cry out; Angeal looks down and sees Vincent’s got an ice chip pressed firmly to the left nipple.

He tucks his cock back into his pants with one hand and uses the other to get a chip for himself, circling it around the areola before sliding it through the nipple ring on the right side. The chip’s just big enough for the ring to hold it in place for a couple seconds, before it melts enough and Sephiroth squirms enough to make it fall out; Angeal catches it on the way down and uses a fingertip to trace it along Sephiroth’s thigh and right up to the base of the cock where it completely melts away.

“Looks less angry,” Angeal says, assessing Sephiroth’s nipples. He holds his finger, an uniced one, over the right one, then gives it the lightest brush he can. Then smiles when Sephiroth shudders as if they’ve clamped him. “A little.”

“He likes waking up that way, with them still sore,” Vincent says.

Angeal stoops down to look at them, then takes a seat on the bag again. He gives the chains a tap to make them swing while Vincent keeps icing around the piercings, alternating between them as the chest they’re attached to pants heavily. “Sore and fucked full of cock, huh. Can I see how his hole’s doing?”

Sephiroth works his mouth a little more coherently, though his body’s trembling all over at this point, his leg almost kicking into Angeal’s knee when Vincent lays his hand on the thigh. “Vincent,” he murmurs.

“You do like being fucked,” Vincent says, more a tease than a reprimand.

He raises that leg and Angeal raises the other, folding them up to Sephiroth’s shoulders, they’re so long. Sephiroth lets out little jolted whines as his weight shifts onto his ass, tilted back against Vincent so Angeal can look at how his hole’s wrapped about Vincent’s cock. Aching pink against the white inner thighs and the black of Vincent’s trousers, it’s something Angeal touches before he can help himself.

“See if you can slide it in,” Vincent says when Angeal’s mind catches up and he stills his finger. The man’s relaxed about it, not issuing a dare but a suggestion.

Sephiroth shudders down the whole length of his torso as Angeal nudges about the rim of his hole. “Vincent, please,” he groans. He tries to shift himself and only twists a little on Vincent’s cock, with both his feet held up and no effective leverage. “Please, I want to—I want to c—”

“You can come whenever you want,” Vincent says, and now he sounds mildly disappointed to have to remind Sephiroth. The leash slithers across Sephiroth’s chest, chains clinking against the piercings, as Sephiroth tries to heave himself up again. Vincent glances at Angeal.

Who gets it, and who’s just trying to remember where he put the lube. He finds it and slathers it over his finger before he resumes pushing at Sephiroth’s hole, working it till he can just slip his fingertip in alongside Vincent’s cock. “We’ll fuck him into it, I can see that’s what he needs,” he says as Sephiroth whimpers. “Well, look at that, look how he’s taking it up. Needy little hole.”

Sephiroth hitches uselessly, the motion doing nothing to work Angeal’s finger into him. If anything it slows things, making him sway so Angeal and Vincent have to keep rebalancing him on Vincent’s lap. But that hole of his stretches, stretches and laps up Angeal’s finger till he can push it in to the last knuckle.

Once it’s there, he just lets it be for a few seconds, letting Sephiroth feel it. “Arm’s starting to hurt,” he says, hefting at Sephiroth’s foot, and then, as Sephiroth groans, he crooks his finger. “Ever get tired of slinging his legs around?”

Vincent’s cock twitches against that finger, but the man’s voice stays steady. “No,” he says, moving his free hand so that he’s palming Sephiroth’s buttock from beneath. “Don’t pull it out yet. I’m going to put my tail in.”

Angeal blinks a few times, though he’d heard the man. He’d talked to Vincent about it, because if they were going to do this, then he was going to make sure Genesis got enough to shut up about it—but he still needs a second. Vincent sees that, and waits till he nods.

It’s still weird, seeing that length of dark muscle coil out from behind Sephiroth, sliding up along one inside thigh and then lifting its tip as if the thing has a mind of its own. Angeal bends his wrist to keep from touching it, then realizes he’s doing that. He’s not actually revolted, he thinks as Vincent glances at him again. He’s just…

This feels a little more intimate. Which is hypocritical through and through, given where they are, but something about this feels way more personal to the two of them. Sephiroth’s head had dropped back the moment the word ‘tail’ came up, and he’s now as slack as he can be, given how they’re holding him, what they’re doing to him. His hole even relaxes as Angeal slides his finger out, moving it to the side so that the end of Vincent’s tail can slip into the gap before it fully leaves.

Relaxes and then tightens sharply, a fresh flush of color painting out from the rim as more of the tail pushes itself into the man. Sephiroth arches as if they’d only just started with him, as if it hasn’t already been a pretty exhausting session, arches and gasps and then drops heavily back against Vincent, come sluggishly flipping off his cock as it slowly wilts against his belly.

“Number three,” Angeal says, giving said cock a light stroke that makes Sephiroth shiver in place. “He’s not done, is he?”

Vincent loops his arms around Sephiroth, cupping his hands under either thigh so the man’s legs are still folded up as he pants. “I don’t think so,” Vincent says, before pressing his mouth behind the point of Sephiroth’s jaw. “Are you? Are you dry?”

Sephiroth’s toes flex weakly in the air as he takes in a ragged inhale. “Vincent—”

That tail’s still tucked into him, rippling slowly around the small sliver of Vincent’s cock that isn’t inside of Sephiroth. Angeal looks away from it, unable to shake his discomfort, and happens to glance over at Genesis.

He has to pause. He always has to, no matter how infuriating the man is: he’d pause even if Genesis was covered in rotting boils, he thinks. Which he isn’t—he’s beautiful, planted on his knees and wrapped over with red latex that just makes the white of his skin look that much more tempting, a pretty canvas Angeal wants to take hold of and mark up just as much as he and Vincent have just done to Sephiroth. Beautiful and willful and so damn close to making Angeal kill him all the time.

Which Angeal doesn’t actually want to change. Genesis is how he is, but it’s just…why the man does it. It should be fucking worth it if he’s going to, with everything they’ve already gone through.

Genesis is staring at him. A fine tremor’s going all through the man, occasionally flinging drops of sweat off him to the floor; the mat in front of him has a large damp spot, enough drops falling to have merged together. It’s darkest just under his cock head, where precome has dripped, and when he sees Angeal’s looking there he shivers in place and the longing coming off him is so thick Angeal’s jaw aches in sympathy. He wants to bite in, to take up the man and just—

“No, no, I’m not,” Sephiroth is rasping, over the sound of flesh straining against leather. “Please, Vincent, please—”

It’s pretty, Angeal thinks absently, and he watches as Genesis doesn’t look away from him. The man’s affected by the low, rough tones of Sephiroth begging, his own cock twitching in its bindings, but he doesn’t look over. He just stares harder at Angeal, and as fierce as that stare is, it’s all want. No pride.

No hesitation either, when Angeal gets up and walks over to him. Genesis bends himself up into the hand Angeal pushes into his hair, eyes half-closing. Angeal’s leg is only a couple inches from his front but he holds in place till Angeal slides it forward. Then he slumps, a soft groan dragging out around his gag as he tries to nestle himself up against Angeal’s shin and thigh. Angeal runs his fingers through the man’s hair and out onto his nape, then brings them back up and pets Genesis again.

Then he stoops down, clamping his hand over the back of the collar. “You’re going to help him come,” Angeal says, and then waits for Genesis’ eyes to focus on him. “You’re going to put your mouth on him, where I tell you, and he can come from it whenever he wants, but you can’t. Because you’re going to look so fucking pretty like that, Gen, helping to fuck him, and I like it when you look pretty.”

Genesis jerks a little against Angeal’s hand. Mostly lust, but there’s an edge to his gaze, a carefulness about it that, however muted, still is there. Angeal considers it, starting to feel disappointment creep up on him, and Genesis lets out a sudden, needy whine, straining forward in the collar as if he wants to press his gagged mouth against Angeal’s.

“I like looking at you. I don’t know why you can’t fucking—I know you know that, you like it, and that’s fine. But then you have to make it a fucking game and I just—don’t fucking care, Gen,” Angeal says. He runs his fingers through Genesis’ hair again and the man rubs his head into it but keeps his eyes on Angeal. “I don’t fucking care if he can take more or likes getting fucked with a tail—I’m fucking you. Or at least, I’d like to fuck you. But not if you’re going to constantly bring him up. So we’re getting it out of your system. Your system, not mine. Understand?”

Genesis starts to make a noise behind the gag, but then sees something in Angeal’s face that makes him pause. Good, Angeal thinks, and unstraps the gag. He rubs his fingers over the strap marks and under the jaw where he knows it’ll be aching, like he always does, and Genesis goes still for a moment, looking up at him with a strangely fragile shine to his eyes, like the thinnest crust of frost over the lust in them.

Because the man is still very much aroused, whatever the hell he’s thinking. He arches so jerkily Angeal knows that it’s not voluntary, when Angeal sticks his fingers into the man’s mouth. Genesis sucks at them, deep and hard, but then tries to say something around them. Angeal thinks about it, then takes his fingers out.

“Please,” Genesis mutters. His brows draw down and he digs his chin into Angeal’s hand, trying to tip his head farther than the collar will let him. “Please—let me have you. Please, Angeal, I want you. I swear.”

“I know,” Angeal says, although a small part of him can’t help going soft at the man’s words. He runs his thumb along Genesis’ jaw, just above the collar. “But you keep acting like—”

“I want you to fuck me, please,” Genesis goes on. He shifts on his knees, just enough so that he can rest his head against Angeal’s thigh. “Please let me earn it, please. Whatever you want, that’s all—all I want.”

“Well, what if I don’t want to fuck you?” Angeal says.

A flicker of irritation goes through Genesis’ eyes, and for a second Angeal wonders if this is going to—but then Genesis pushes his mouth against Angeal’s palm, lipping at it as he speaks. “I’ll make you want it,” he whispers. “Let me, let me. Please let me, you’ll want me, just let me—”

“I may have to bring him off without you,” Vincent says from behind them, and Genesis starts and needs the effort, but he does avoid trying to look. “He’s close.”

“Yeah, well, Genesis can always just lie on top and use him as a pillow. Only way he’s going to get there,” Angeal says. He curls his thumb into Genesis’ mouth, watching the man’s eyes as it’s licked.

Then he makes up his mind—honestly, it was already made up. If there’s still a chance with the man, Angeal’s going to take it; he’s pretty fucked that way, and been like that for a while. He doesn’t need to pretend.

He takes the leash off the pull-up bars and pulls Genesis to his feet. The other man rises stiffly, rolling his hips as he follows Angeal over to the others. Sephiroth’s still more or less as he was, except that Vincent’s unchained the leash from his nipple piercings. He does look close, almost limp against Vincent, only his breathing and the occasional quiver in his thighs showing.

Vincent hands Angeal the leash. Angeal drops the one he’s holding to take it, letting a few feet of it unravel so that it grazes at the top part of Genesis’ back as Genesis kneels in front of Sephiroth; Vincent works himself and the other man back on the foam bag to better position Sephiroth’s cock near Genesis’ face. Genesis looks at it but doesn’t move, not till Angeal threads his fingers back into the man’s hair, and even then it’s just to shudder.

“Wait,” Vincent says. He fiddles behind Sephiroth, then strips off the posture collar. Sephiroth’s exposed throat convulses a little with a groan, but then settles down as Vincent starts mouthing along it.

“You have a preference on where to start?” Angeal asks.

“Nipples last,” Vincent says.

Sephiroth twitches. Angeal snorts and bends over Genesis, reaching out for Sephiroth’s cock. He pushes it out of the way so that Genesis can slide in and get at the man’s belly. “Lick around,” he says.

Genesis obediently does so. His balance sways alarmingly as he works his way around Sephiroth’s cock, plumping his ass up against Angeal’s shin. Angeal steps back to give it room and get a better look, letting his fingers glide out of Genesis’ hair; Genesis makes a little longing noise but keeps licking, cleaning up the accumulated streaks of come on Sephiroth’s skin.

When Angeal slaps his right buttock with the leash, Genesis twists violently in place, his head jerking away from Sephiroth as he gasps. Angeal grabs his shoulder and pushes him back down, then splays his hand across the top of the man’s back till Genesis’ head drops behind Sephiroth’s legs again. This time when he hits the man, he keeps his hand there and Genesis does better, riding up against the blow and then letting himself drop back onto his knees as the welt blossoms to life.

“Up,” Angeal says, delivering a lighter slap across both buttocks.

Genesis hisses, but hauls his knees up onto the edge of the foam bag. He can’t quite squeeze himself on, even after forcing his legs under Sephiroth’s thighs, and has to lean awkwardly forward as he laves up Sephiroth’s stomach. Angeal takes him by the hair again and glances at Vincent.

“All right,” Vincent says, his hand disappearing between Sephiroth and Genesis. It goes to Sephiroth’s cock, judging by how Sephiroth abruptly seizes.

“Lick,” Angeal says, pushing Genesis towards Sephiroth’s left nipple.

Genesis has the flat of his tongue just touching it when Angeal lashes him. He’s knocked off-balance and more sucks than licks, tugging at the nipple’s piercing as Sephiroth makes that mewling noise. Angeal pulls him up by the hair and then lets go.

“Lick,” Angeal says.

Moaning, Genesis leans forward again. This time he licks, even though Angeal strikes him just as hard as before. He manages to repeat the effort before Angeal moves him to the other nipple, where he fails twice in a row before he licks instead of sucks or rakes with his teeth.

“Angeal,” Vincent warns.

The spasm is building in Sephiroth, but he doesn’t come till Angeal’s pulled Genesis off him by the waist. Genesis’ hair crushes into Angeal’s nose and mouth, steaming-hot, slightly crisp with salt from sweat, and Genesis’ ass rounds up around Angeal’s restored erection as the man whines and twists like Sephiroth isn’t, even though Sephiroth’s the one in the throes of an orgasm.

The last one, clearly, even before Vincent pulls the man fully onto the foam bag and turns them onto their sides. He’s not trying to pull out, but he is untying Sephiroth’s arms when Angeal swings Genesis off his feet and down onto the unoccupied end of the foam bag. Ass up, face down, and after a light kick at one wobbling boot, legs wide open. “Fine, we’ll try this again.”

“Angeal,” Genesis moans. “Make me, please, I deserve it, I—”

“Twenty,” Angeal says. He leans over Genesis for a moment, catching his breath. Then he pulls his shirt up over his head and off, mopping it across his chest before dropping it. Thank fuck they blocked out the rest of the week, he thinks before he pushes up. “Not counting the ones before, you start fresh. You keep count and I’ll fuck you.”

Genesis hitches once. Then hikes his knees into the foam, lifting his ass like he’s supposed to. “One,” he says, in a wrecked, low voice, like this is the only, only thing on his mind. “Please, one.”

Angeal exhales, and for a moment, he wants to sit down and rest, it feels like so much has lifted off his back. Then he looks at the man under him, shakes himself, and raises the leash.

* * *

Sephiroth hurts all over. His nipples feel as if they’re going to split open every time he breathes, and when he glances down at himself, he’s surprised to find that the piercings haven’t torn out. They’re actually healing over already, he can tell from the color, but when Vincent shifts behind him he grabs the man’s wrists, keeping them on his hips, and the brush of his right nipple against the bag they’re lying on sends a sharp shiver through him. It bunches up the foam sack they’re lying on, pushing a ridge up between him and the view he has of Genesis’ brightly-welted buttocks, and despite the aches it stirs up, he digs at the foam with his chin to try and flatten it.

A good-humored rumble stirs through his hair, floating past his ear. Vincent lifts himself, running a hand up Sephiroth’s side as he hisses and rocks with the shifting foam, and then pats the ridge down. Then the man stays propped on his arm, looking down at Sephiroth. “You can’t come again,” he says.

Genesis buries his face in the sack till it’s rising up nearly to his ears. The harsh gasps he’s making signal that he can still breathe, but Angeal pauses, bending forward and looking the man over. Whatever he sees satisfies him, because then he pushes his fingers between Genesis’ buttocks, corkscrewing them so roughly that Sephiroth instinctively bears down on his own hips. Then groans, and when Vincent cocks a brow at him, he does it again. “You’re still hard,” he murmurs.

“I came,” Vincent says. He’s starting to move against Sephiroth again, his half-opened shirt flapping against Sephiroth’s back.

Then he pulls that away, and when he lies back down, his bare chest presses unencumbered up against Sephiroth, who shivers, then lets out a pointed, pleased noise as Vincent’s arm drops around his waist. He did come, while Angeal was apparently making up with Genesis, and the smears from that are sticking Sephiroth’s buttocks against his groin for the first few hip-rolls. Then he pauses, sighing, and pulls Sephiroth’s hands from where they’re reaching back.

“You can’t even lift your head,” he tells Sephiroth, who shrugs and then watches as Vincent tugs his forearms forward and up by his head.

They’re still sleeved in leather and Vincent catches the lacing hanging off one, then rethreads it to bind Sephiroth’s wrists. It’s not very tight and Sephiroth could twist free if he wanted to, which he doesn’t. Vincent clicks his tongue as Sephiroth rubs his buttocks back into the other man, panting lightly as the ache spreads up through his body. But Sephiroth is also right and he is hard right now, again, and he’s not going to finish without fucking Sephiroth one last time. They both know that.

Sephiroth settles back as Vincent pins his bound hands in place, letting himself go soft and easy against the other man. Vincent draws his cock halfway out, holding himself aloof for a few seconds; the hollow he leaves hurts more than the slow burn of fullness, but Sephiroth can’t work up more than a needy inhale. Then the bag bounces, making Sephiroth’s hips jerk forward and—but Vincent only lets his cock slide out another inch before he drives back into Sephiroth, pressed so tightly that Sephiroth feels the man’s ball sac wedging open his buttocks.

Vincent regrips Sephiroth, wrapping one arm around Sephiroth’s waist, and then fucks into Sephiroth in earnest, no longer teasing. It hurts, long strings of fire twining down into his soft, sore cock as it rolls across the foam. It hurts and there’s not going to be any kind of climax to bring temporary relief either, but Sephiroth still arches himself like he’s expecting it. His head falls back and then rocks each time Vincent drives into him.

Just beyond he can see Angeal hunched over Genesis’ weakly-writhing form, hands clamped over the man’s hips, the darkly-tanned fingers cross-barring the bright scarlet stripes on Genesis’ skin. It’s a lovely contrast, drifts through Sephiroth’s mind, and then Vincent plows so deep into him that the man rolls them over, half-on Sephiroth as Sephiroth mouths the foam sack’s covering for a few seconds, feeling Vincent shake over and in him.

By the time Vincent pulls them back onto their sides, Sephiroth’s actually forgotten they have company. He startles as Genesis lets out a wild, hoarse cry and Vincent’s hand clamps around his wrists, doing more to hold him in place than the lacing. Then he remembers, and slumps back.

Vincent lies with him for a few minutes, while they listen to the other two. Genesis’ noises rapidly diminish to the odd ragged sob. Then he lets out a long moan, throaty enough that Sephiroth’s curiosity stirs and he twists his head around. Angeal’s pulled out of the other man and Sephiroth is looking at his clearly-hard cock; he’s still bent over Genesis, flipping the man over and then hauling up his legs as he plows back into the man.

“He did only come once so far, in your mouth,” Vincent says, and then, as Sephiroth’s craning back to look at him, he pulls out.

Sephiroth hisses and twists in place—Vincent’s still holding his wrists—before subsiding into a slightly discontented heap. He’d been very comfortable a moment ago, despite the soreness, he thinks. “I’m not objecting. Angeal should get his day’s worth out of this.”

“No, only wondering if I could fuck you again. I’m not going to,” Vincent says, and then chuckles as Sephiroth lets out an irritated noise. “You were thinking that.”

The man is right, and Sephiroth doesn’t have the energy to resent him properly. Or to really keep an eye on him, half-distracted by Genesis’ renewed moaning; Vincent runs his hands down Sephiroth’s back and hips and thighs and Sephiroth registers the touch, likes it very much, but doesn’t really think anything of it till something tightens around the middle of his thighs. A discarded lacing, wrapped a few times to hold his legs together as Vincent’s mouth suddenly presses between his buttocks.

Sephiroth twitches, then gasps as his overtaxed body breaks out into a spasm that has him lying helplessly in place. He can’t so much as shift his hips as Vincent’s tongue snakes into him, far too much, too hot, too wet, too much pressure and shifting, constantly. “Vincent,” he says in a shaky whisper. “Vincent, I can’t. I can’t come again.”

Vincent’s tongue flicks back out, whipping a little against the rim of Sephiroth’s hole and it’s not that hard but the flesh there is still so sore from stretching, so tight and hot, that Sephiroth whimpers. “I know,” Vincent says, patting gently at Sephiroth’s hip. “I know you can’t. So you’re going to lie still for me, and let me do this while we’re waiting for them.”

He licks back into Sephiroth, then flicks his tongue out again. Lapping his come out of Sephiroth and fresh bursts of tingling break out all over Sephiroth’s body, making his skin jump against the sacking under him, the air over him—he rubs his wrists against each other, his knees together, not even thinking to try and strain their bindings as Vincent’s tongue burrows into him at will. Fucking him again would be a mercy compared to this.

Sephiroth doesn’t look to Vincent for mercy. He shudders under the man’s ministrations, overstimulated, even his trembling feeling like his bones are shaking loose, until Genesis finally stops moaning again. There’s a few seconds of just the sounds of moving bodies, and then Genesis whines—Sephiroth thinks irrationally about reaching over and slapping a hand over the man’s mouth, though that’s never worked even outside of sex—before Angeal abruptly lets out a series of gravelly grunts.

“Fuck,” Angeal ends on. He gasps a few times. “Fuck. I fucking needed that.”

“Done?” Vincent says, lifting his mouth from Sephiroth. The cord loosens from around Sephiroth’s thighs, and then he’s pulled up against the other man, Vincent untying his wrists now.

Vincent isn’t looking at Angeal. Angeal looks at him, then down at Genesis, who’s thrown against the foam sack like a limp rag, his eyes shut. “Yeah,” Angeal says. He gasps a couple more times. “Need to eat.”

“Things should be warmed up by the time you’ve showered yourselves,” Vincent says.

Angeal blinks hard. Then looks down at Genesis, who immediately opened his eyes at that. “Typical,” Sephiroth grunts as Vincent helps him off the bag. “Next he’ll say—this was only about sex, it didn’t address your—your cooking—”

“You wanted him to shut up,” Vincent says, voice warm with suppressed laughter as he hefts Sephiroth’s arm over his shoulders. “He can’t speak if he’s eating and there’s nothing to criticize.”

Angeal laughs. He gives them a half-hearted glance before he slides his arms under Genesis’ shoulders, and Genesis at least has the sense to curl up against him, rather than try and respond to Sephiroth.

The man’s surprisingly well-behaved for the rest of the night. Sephiroth’s been assigned the larger of the suites, so they have dinner there. Around the coffee table in the living room, where they can throw pillows and blankets on the floor, rather than in the dining area off the kitchenette with its stylish but—under current circumstances—painful-looking metal and laminated-wood chairs. Genesis settles himself at Angeal’s right side, letting Angeal feed him but murmuring about which piece he’d like. He does participate in the conversation but he’s much more subdued than usual, and when Angeal’s had enough, he seems eager to get back to their suite.

“A week. Possibly longer if Lazard doesn’t ask him to do anything that would ruin his clothing,” Sephiroth speculates, head pillowed on Vincent’s thigh as Vincent tears up a sweet steamed bun.

“Long enough to be worth it?” Vincent asks, holding out a piece.

Sephiroth pushes up on his arm to take it, then pulls at his sleeping robe when it falls off his shoulder. “Yes,” he admits after he’s chewed and swallowed the piece. “But we can’t do this every single time they fight.”

“The idea was to put Angeal back where he could manage that,” Vincent says, and then tilts his head. “Wasn’t it?”

“He looks much better,” Sephiroth says after a moment’s thought. Then he pushes himself up onto his hip—he’s still too sore to put much pressure directly on his hole—and accepts another piece of bun, sucking a little at Vincent’s fingertips before the man takes them away. “I’ll check again when we’re back in Midgar. But he’s always…taken it seriously, when he takes on something. He doesn’t drop it after a few days.”

Vincent nods and holds out a third piece. He saves the fourth for himself, nibbling it as Sephiroth helps him clear the dishes. Then he drops into the chair in the bedroom, doing something on his tablet as Sephiroth crawls into bed. Usually it’s the reverse—Sephiroth probably should check in on Zack, and Midgar, and make sure nothing’s gone south, but he’s still only thinking about it when Vincent sets the tablet down and then slides into bed next to him.

“The idea was,” Sephiroth finds himself saying.

Then he pauses, thinking this is an unnecessary conversation. Vincent looks at him and doesn’t ask or even look like he’s going to ask; he rarely presses Sephiroth on anything, although he always remembers and has reraised things months afterward, when he finds Sephiroth in the right mood. He’s usually right.

He agreed to this because Sephiroth asked him to. Sephiroth remembers that. “Genesis would be miserable without him. He’s infuriating because he’s always thought Angeal likes me better.”

“He does,” Vincent observes, and then smiles as Sephiroth blinks at him. “I can see that. It doesn’t mean I’m worried. He’s not pining for you, and you’re certainly not pining for him.”

“Yes, but Genesis wants Angeal to like him best,” Sephiroth says slowly, and not because of what he’s just said—which is obvious to anyone with eyes—but what he’s thinking of saying next. “It made…sleeping with them very unappealing. Especially when they started experimenting—it’s as if that gave Genesis an excuse to be more unpleasant, if he only had to submit to Angeal afterward to make up for it.”

He pauses. Vincent’s watching him with the same even look as always. Which is irritating, not soothing this time—and as Sephiroth thinks that, Vincent reaches out and lays one finger against the ring in Sephiroth’s right nipple, which they haven’t removed yet. “Angeal mentioned that, when he and I talked before this. He needed me to know that, apparently, so he could be comfortable about this. I didn’t say because that’s not the same as you wanting me to know—”

“You’re impossibly used to everything,” Sephiroth can’t help saying.

Vincent’s lips curve in an amused smile, but there’s a different quality to this one. He doesn’t look as if he’s smiling from a place of detachment; it’s a little weary at the edges, its amusement coming from experience. “Do you want to know who I’ve fucked before you?”

Sephiroth starts to reply, then stops himself. He doesn’t read provocation in Vincent’s face, although the man certainly is prepared for him to take it that way. He can tell in the way Vincent’s shoulders shift once he takes a breath instead.

“No,” he finally says. “You didn’t stay with them, so they don’t matter to you, clearly.”

“So why would I care who taught you to fuck? They’re your friends and they matter to you because of that, not because of whatever you played around with,” Vincent says with a shrug. He watches Sephiroth for a few seconds, then directs his gaze down to where his finger’s slowly circling over the ring. “I’ve buried too many bodies to waste my time with people who don’t know what they want. You want me, and you want—” his fingertip slips through the ring, though Sephiroth’s leaning forward to kiss him even before that “—what I do. You were very pretty, showing yourself off for Angeal like that, and if it helped him see what he wants with Genesis, then I don’t mind. But you don’t want him to see you. You want me.”

He's right. And knowing that, having that clear between them—this is the most productive off-site Sephiroth’s ever had, he thinks, as he sinks into Vincent’s mouth.

Chapter 19: Side Story: Zack Can See Ghosts!

Zack has a sinking feeling that he’s going to need to talk to somebody about this. But he knows his limits, and he’s not going to fix this one on his own. Also, Cloud and Tifa are coming to visit now that what passes for tourist season in Nibelheim—about three weeks in the spring when tatzelwurms have their babies, which are so cute you kind of forget their parents want to strangle you and then bite off your head—is over, and he’s not going to entertain them while he’s being haunted.

“Which, yeah, basically sums it up,” he says as Reno warily peers through the doorway. “Started with hearing weird noises at night when it’s a brand-new building and Tuesti personally signed off on its architectural plans. Then I started seeing stuff out of the corner of my eye—shadows where the light’s wrong for them, dancing orbs…”

“So, you checked your coffee already, right?” Reno mutters. Normally when presented with an opportunity to stroll into SOLDIER quarters, he’ll swagger straight in before he’s even invited, but he’s being weirdly cautious now. Staying in the hall, keeping his stick tucked under his arm as he pulls his phone out. “And the ventilation?”

Zack sighs. “Kind of why I’m asking you?”

“Fair, Turks aren’t chemists, we’re just the messenger. You want to know what somebody’s dosing you with, hell, I don’t ask that question, because I’m not qualified. I’m just gonna make sure you get to our good ol’ medical folks in a big enough sample size,” Reno says. He taps at his phone, frowns at it, and then cranes his head around in the doorway some more. “Although I’m very flattered you’ll go to a filthy little shit like me before your own doctors.”

SOLDIER-Turk relations are definitely better these days now that Sephiroth and Tseng aren’t having it out every single quarterly budget meeting about whose slush fund is getting eaten up by the other’s antics, and Zack really, truly appreciates that. But also, it’s literally still in the Turk mission statement to ‘monitor all Company departments for deviations from stated objectives,’ so Zack can get not getting too comfortable with each other. He’s not exactly looking to have Reno be his canteen lunch buddy here…but on the other hand, his lunch break’s only got twenty minutes left and Reno hasn’t even stepped inside.

“Well, I’m gonna trust myself before I trust that you didn’t strongarm Reeve into installing some infrasound craziness because we SOLDIERS have better medical than you so you think we’re better test subjects,” he says, before giving Reno a sharp kick on the back of the ankle. He dodges the resulting burst of electricity, then walks them inside. “Come on already, just do the damn scan and then I’ll get you the hangover pills. I have a meeting with Lazard right after this.”

“Ow, fuck, you know, for a guy who’s asking for help you’re being an asshole about it,” Reno says distractedly. He hunches over and duckwalks into the room, rubbing at his ankle while also continuing to frown at his phone. “Besides, if we put ‘em in, I wouldn’t need to do a scan, and…well, guess nobody else put any in either. It’s showing up clean.”

Zack looks at him. “You’ve been in here for what, five seconds? You haven’t even made it to the couch.”

“Yeah, well, I know how you like to spend your Thursday nights, so I’m gonna pass on that,” Reno says, with one of those punch-me grins of his. But then he straightens up and waves his phone around. “Listen, Zack, this isn’t like it needs a Geiger counter. I don’t need to check every single one of your sex drawers to check for unauthorized electronics, and I’m not picking up any. You’re clean, so you better just make that appointment with the eye doctor.”

“Bullshit,” Zack says.

Reno rolls his eyes. “What, you want me to get Tseng to personally certify this?”

Well, Zack has that meeting with Lazard first, but…two hours later Tseng turns from his desk monitor and shakes his head. “Short of having someone go into the building and dismantle your suite, we don’t have any reason to believe you’re under third-party surveillance.”

“‘Third-party’?” Zack repeats, because you don’t get to be a First without learning to pick up on those itty bitty important adjectives.

Tseng’s face doesn’t actually move, but Zack can tell he’s calculating how much more of this he has to put up with before he can submit a valid complaint about excessive resource monopolization to Sephiroth. “I’m excluding standard security systems that are all disclosed in the tenants’ manual, of course. But we are incentivized to ensure that your quarters are free of outside monitoring, Commander Fair. You have visibility into the other Firsts’ calendars, and we are currently operating under a heightened state of alert, per General Sephiroth’s order. With that in mind, no, there’s nothing monitoring your apartment that I don’t know about.”

“Yeah, okay, I just—wanted to get someone besides Reno to say that,” Zack says slowly. Not because he doesn’t believe Tseng, because he actually does, but…shit, he is going to have to go to the doctor now. “Well, thanks, appreciate it. Could you just—”

“This was never an operation, and you and Reno are both entitled to supervision-free lunch breaks,” Tseng says dryly. He pushes back behind his monitor as Zack starts to get up, then pauses. Then he looks around it again. “We haven’t had any reports from any other tenants in that building that remotely resemble yours.”

Zack sighs. “Yeah, yeah, it’s probably just some weird gene thing acting up, I’ll go down to medical and get my head recalibrated and it’s not your prob—”

“You’re actually the most recent move-in, too,” Tseng goes on. “And you haven’t been in it very long, correct? Weren’t you on vacation?”

Technically, it’d been for work, because Zack got his transfer to a bigger suite on the condition that he use the ‘Nibelheim’ connections he was now going to be regularly hosting to come up with better high-altitude training exercises. But yeah, he’d basically moved his stuff in, then gone to let Tifa thoughtfully drag him all over the mountains looking for a good training campsite for a week and a half. He keeps in shape, obviously, but he’d come back so tired that it’d taken him nearly a week to convince himself that what he was experiencing was actually external to him and not just fatigue hallucinations.

And now he’s probably going to have to go back to that explanation, unless…Tseng looks like he might have thought of something. “Yeah, in Nibelheim. Why? Did something happen while I was out? I thought it was quiet.”

“It was, but…you are listed as critical personnel, Commander Fair. Let’s stay close on this one,” Tseng says, keeping all his cards folded under that stoneface of his.

So Zack isn’t buying that at all, but also, he doesn’t have any reason to hang around in Tseng’s office and Sephiroth does still like Zack to give him some kind of plausible deniability when Turks come to complain. So he heads out of there, sucks it up for now, and makes an appointment with SOLDIER medical.

That comes out totally clean too, everything testing at one hundred percent and topline genetically-engineered supersoldier, thank you, Commander. Which is incredibly annoying even before Zack walks out of the doctor’s office to find Genesis waiting for him. “Why do you think you’re losing your mind, Fair?” Genesis says.

“You want to repeat that so the cheap seats can hear it?” Zack hisses, as he drags the other man down the hall and into a spare room.

Well, not really, since Angeal’s there, and as he gets up Genesis shuts the door, closing the pincer. “Zack, you’re a First. If you put in for an annual exam before you’re due for one, we all know,” Angeal reminds him. “You’re just lucky that Seph’s busy with Corel again and hasn’t had time to catch up on his email.”

“Which won’t last past today, since Vincent was called out to Costa del Sol last night,” Genesis says.

Zack winces. Sephiroth’s workaholic tendencies have gotten a lot better, but he always slips a little when Vincent’s supposed to be in and ends up not. “Okay, look, I’m sorry, I just didn’t want to—bug you because I think my new suite’s haunted.”

Angeal and Genesis look at him for a moment. They’ve gotten a lot better lately too, way less arguing, but Zack’s kind of wishing for that back because when they’re that in tune with each other, with the same facial expression and body posture, he’s pretty sure this is exactly what their enemies see, right before they get wiped out.

“So you decided to have a psych evaluation,” Genesis says flatly.

“Well, it was more for the eye- and brain activity scans, because I just saw this documentary—Angeal, you gotta watch it, they included that haunted dumbapple orchard in Banora where the tree bark looks like the faces of dead people—and it talked about how infrasound and other stuff like that can disrupt your brainwaves and make you see—”

“You checked for bugs, right?” Angeal interrupts.

Zack sighs. “Yes. And not just with Reno, I also talked to Tseng—”

“Drugs?” Genesis barks.

“Would’ve shown up on the annual, even if I haven’t been getting takeout from the canteen every day since I got back because I’m afraid to touch anything in the kitchen?” Zack says, and then has to put his hands up when Angeal swears and starts muttering about Dr. Crescent. “Whoa, hey, because it’s shiny and new and I didn’t feel bad when my old place got another chip in the counter but…and is this a freakout about maybe having to talk to Sephiroth’s mom?”

“It’s not a ‘freakout,’ Fair, it’s a very real possibility. If you’re suffering from any kind of neurodegenerative issue, we’ll have to determine whether it can be traced back to an enhancement and it’s impossible to do that without her involvement,” Genesis snaps. He drops back against the wall, one hand rising towards the side of his face like he’s readying for one of those dramatic hair tosses. But then it drops abruptly to his shoulder and for a couple seconds he just squeezes it and stares at the far wall.

Angeal presses his lips together and watches Genesis like he’d like to go over and touch the man, but like he’s not sure yet if he might have to fight his way to that. That is the shoulder that usually acts up when Genesis is having some kind of problem with his enhancements, and as much as the two of them—and Sephiroth—try to keep that under wraps, Zack’s seen enough to get why Genesis would be freaking out at the idea of yet another potential side-effect.

On the other hand, he actually has been around for some of those, and he’s not a complete flake. “I was more thinking untreated concussion, or some physical issue, but that’s why I went for an early annual. If I just walked in and said I thought I had brain trauma, I’m pretty sure that sends up a flag to Dr. Crescent too,” Zack says.

“Zack, it’s not like we think anybody’s going to keep anything from her, it’s more that we would’ve liked a heads-up—” Angeal starts.

Genesis jerks his eyes off the wall and over to Zack, frowning. “Why physical trauma? Have you been more of an uncoordinated nitwit than usual?”

“Well, because I discovered if I hit myself, they go away,” Zack says. And then gestures when Angeal and Genesis both look as if mere words aren’t going to make sense of this for them. “The ghosts. If I—”

“No, I got that, I just—you hit yourself and you stop seeing them? You actually decided this was the way to fix it?” Angeal says, looking pained.

Zack tries to resist the urge to hit himself right now, because unlike his haunted apartment, these two aren’t going away any time soon. “No, it was an accident, one of them kind of flitted around the corner and I forgot the door was there when I was chasing it and—and okay, okay, sorry I didn’t read anybody else in but now that we all know, do either of you have any ideas here? Because I don’t actually want to have to slap myself all the time.”

Angeal looks like he wants to go back to this whole self-harm thing for a second, possibly because he thinks he should’ve noticed, because he’s a nice guy like that and never mind how they have accelerated healing that pretty much wipes off bruises overnight. Genesis, on the other hand, appears to have shaken off his own trauma and is deep in thought. Which actually is a sign of how bad that trauma must have been, for him to turn down a chance to needle Zack about his inability to look after anything properly.

“Nothing genetic ever gets better out of sheer physical abuse, but on the other hand, hallucinations of any kind would implicate the brain,” Genesis mutters, rubbing at his chin. He purses his lips, grimaces, and then pulls his phone out. “Out of an abundance of caution, we should tell Sephiroth. He needs to know before his mother ever gets wind of it.”

Zack knew that was coming at some point, and it’s not that he’s actually that worried about Sephiroth’s reaction. Sephiroth consistently stands up for SOLDIER personnel against R&D’s excited grabby hands and tendency to forget things like ethical codes, so it’s not like Zack’s going to lose his job or disappear unnoticed into a lab somewhere. But it’s just…“Okay, cool, but when you call him, can we just call it something more, uh, formal? Like ‘suspected non-traumatic transient hallucinations’?”

“Do you want him to think you’ve gotten concussed?” Angeal says, now sounding and looking exasperated. “We’re already going to have to explain how you’ve been hitting yourself instead of talking to us.”

“No, I don’t, but he’s not big on paranormal stuff, you know this, and I don’t want him to go into this thinking I’ve just been fooling around with EVP stuff again—”

“Sephiroth, Zack thinks his new quarters are haunted, and both the Turks and SOLDIER medical say there’s nothing they can find wrong with the unit or him, respectively,” Genesis says briskly into his phone, while looking directly at Zack, with absolutely no shame in his eyes. He pauses to listen, tells Sephiroth where they are, and then pauses again. Then he hangs up. “Vincent’s just come home so he’ll be delayed an hour or so, but we’re to meet at your place after that.”

Zack grimaces. “No, call him back, we can totally do this Monday, I’ll just crash with Angeal—”

“Absolutely not,” Genesis says.

Angeal blinks. “Gen, it’s fine with me.”

“It is not fine. Fair doesn’t feel comfortable staying in his own quarters to the point of resorting to self-harm, and any good officer would look into that immediately rather than delay the matter in favor of his own gratification,” Genesis snaps, with enough forcefulness that Angeal briefly looks ashamed of himself.

Briefly. The best thing about Angeal, in Zack’s opinion, is how the guy never loses sight of reality even when the world is going apeshit all around him. “Okay, so us all getting a late start on Friday’s better than you going it alone over the weekend and picking a fight with him first thing next week because I’m not there to do the laundry,” Angeal says, and then shrugs when Genesis gives him an annoyed but not denying-it look. “Also fine with me. Let’s get dinner, Zack, might as well catch up on things while we’re waiting.”

“Or, I don’t know, I could just…hang out in the lounge. No need to ruin your evening plans for me,” Zack says, eyeing Genesis’ expression.

“Don’t be ridiculous, you already have,” Genesis says, justifying that concern. But then, weirdly, he stops and sort of forcibly resets his expression, right after Angeal coughs sharply into one fist. “Zack. Sephiroth would be far more upset if we left this till Monday. You’re a First, and any potential issues with your enhancements could have implications for all of us. So stop worrying about interrupting whatever homecoming plans you think he has with Vincent because I assure you, he’ll enjoy them much more if you aren’t on his mind. Unless you’d like to have Valentine resenting you for distracting him?”

Given what Valentine’s brought back as ‘proof of mission completion,’ Zack’s going to answer no to that and just give up on protesting. Which is how, after a quick meal in the canteen and Angeal getting fully updated on Cloud’s various motorcycle preferences and why they’re the reason Zack is blowing his next two paychecks on upgrades, he ends up standing with all three other Firsts and Valentine in the middle of his living room.

“No, I think Tseng’s analysis would be complete, even for any Wutaian devices,” Valentine is saying as he stands with the rest of them and they all watch Sephiroth prowl around the room like sheer force of will is going to send any unauthorized bugs flying out of the ceiling vents. “You said the apparitions only come on after dark?”

“Well, I think. I mean, I’m not in that much during the day, but I did start keeping track of timestamps,” Zack says, trying not to twitch as Sephiroth comes within a hair of knocking Masamune through one of his bookshelves. Granted, it’s just standard-issue and he can always get a new one from Sourcing, but he’s kind of fond of the limited-edition Banoran Chibi Monster Zoo figurines living on it. “Hey, Seph, it’s actually not this room where they tend to show up…”

“Are you seeing them in your dreams at all?” Valentine asks, as Sephiroth pivots around, silently eyes Zack till Zack points him in the right direction, and then walks across the room. “Or only in waking state?”

“Waking state,” Zack says, trying to answer the man while also trailing after Sephiroth as he opens Zack’s hall closet and then watches impassively as several boxes, a handful of takeout menus, and one of those lawn wind spinner-on-stick things fall out. “Which I figured pointed towards infrasound, which is why I went to the Turks first, but even if that was the case, why are the ghosts always around my closet? I don’t keep anything important in there.”

“And yet you’ve managed to find enough unimportant trash to completely fill it,” Genesis murmurs, craning his head around to peer past Sephiroth.

“Hey! Just because it’s not going to save the world as we know it doesn’t mean it doesn’t have meaning, okay?” Zack says as he stoops and scoops up the spinner stick. “Like this? This is a souvenir of a very fun long weekend in Mideel, and these menus are my record of managing to visit every single location of the absolute best chili dog chain on the Planet, and—”

“You keep things from your trips in here,” Valentine says, peering past Sephiroth’s shoulder at the closet. “Where was the last place you went?”

“Nibelheim,” Zack says, and then gets a sinking feeling when Valentine’s non-expression suddenly gets extremely intent on staying blank. Usually Valentine does that only when Sephiroth’s mom walks in. “I mean, I’ve been there a couple times now, no ghosts—”

“Have you told Cloud and Tifa about them?” Valentine asks.

“No, I’m trying to fix this before they come,” Zack says, a little annoyed.

Valentine slowly turns and looks at him, and then Sephiroth turns and looks between them, as if this is actually more concerning than the possibility of Wutaian surveillance. “I think we should call them,” Valentine says.

“I was kind of hoping—”

“Zack,” Sephiroth says, his tone starting to go that way.

“I mean, yeah, okay, ship has sailed, I just…was really hoping this wasn’t going to turn into a raincheck on their trip,” Zack says, sighing and stuffing his things back into the closet.

So they call the tavern Tifa works at in Nibelheim. She’s on shift and Cloud happens to be around the corner, so they actually manage to get both of them at once without Zack having to schedule in advance. Zack explains that he’s on speaker and who’s with him, and then explains why he’s calling them with the audience. There are a couple sharp inhales, from both Tifa and Cloud, but mostly they stay quiet till he finishes.

“I thought you didn’t go that far in,” Cloud says.

“Go that far in what?” Zack says, genuinely confused.

“You took him into one of those caves?” Valentine asks, looking surprised for once.

Tifa lets out a long sigh. “No, of course not—he managed to stick his foot through the ceiling of a new one nobody knew about, but I thought we pulled him out before he—”

“Oh, wait, that?” Zack says, and then makes an ‘actually still confused’ face when Genesis starts glaring at him. “Okay, look, yes, I did crash into an undiscovered cave with some really weird-looking carvings, but it was a complete accident and believe me, I didn’t want to stay in it—”

“Jenovan cave,” Valentine says, no longer looking surprised. “Occasionally they still find one with active traces.”

“Zack, did you take anything out of there?” Cloud says. “Anything. Even if it was just a little piece.”

Angeal already has his hand over his face. “Damn it, you fucking puppy. Do you have to fucking bring something home every single time?”

“What, it was just a stone that got stuck in my boot! It didn’t even have any carvings on it, it was just a really cool color and…wait, what, active traces of what?” Zack says.

“Shit,” Cloud says, sounding so worried that Zack forgets about being defensive. Normally the guy’s right up there with Sephiroth and Valentine on lack of emoting. “Tifa, I’m gonna go book us the next flight out.”

“Cloud, wait, I’m not certain that’s necessary,” Valentine says, and Zack has never been so grateful to a guy for telling somebody hanging out with Zack is not a good idea. “He’s not hearing actual voices yet. We may be able to just try disposing of it properly and seeing if the effects fade.”

“Yeah, look, I’m not actually that attached to it, if you want me to just throw it out, I’ll—” Zack says, as he starts digging in the closet.

He finishes flat on the floor, thanks to the combined efforts of Valentine and Angeal yanking him away. Then Angeal actually sits on him while Valentine calmly explains, with frequent ‘yeahs’ from Cloud and Tifa, how the Jenovan cult way back in the day had actually had access to some pretty potent hallucinogens and how said hallucinogens can be impregnated into rocks and how first of all, touching the rock again is a bad idea. Which, okay, this makes sense and Zack will be the first to admit that science is not his strong point.

But then Valentine goes on to tell him that some of the genetic enhancements that have come out of Hojo’s lab actually result in people being more susceptible to the hallucinogens than normal, and so there might be some detoxing required as part of the disposal process, and…somehow this then translates into him and Sephiroth going off in the corner for a quick chat. They don’t go so far off that Zack can’t see Sephiroth’s expression and it does some weird things during the talk—it’s not that Sephiroth isn’t buying what Valentine’s selling, but more like Sephiroth is just…both very not surprised and very irritated at people not Valentine about that.

“I’m going to call Gast,” Sephiroth says when they come back. “It appears that his wife has looked into this, and may be able to provide some assistance here. Zack, we’ll put you in visitors’ housing till she can come up.”

That seems to settle it for him, and he makes it clear to Genesis and Angeal that they need to just be happy with that, but Cloud and Tifa have a ton of questions about this woman. Also, they still want to come up.

“It’s pretty rare these days to see a really bad case but we both remember one from when we were kids,” Tifa says, once Zack’s settled into his temporary quarters and called them back. “She was snowed into a Jenovan cave for a couple days, and when she came out, she wasn’t all there. She kept saying voices were telling her to do things like set fire to buildings and summon reunion, whatever that means. She did get better, but I think it took a couple years for her to shake it.”

“Not a lot of people even know about this. They tried really hard to clean away all the traces when they fought the Jenovans,” Cloud adds. “I think Vincent learned about most of it from people here. How’d this woman find out? I don’t think we’ve ever heard of her.”

“Ifalna’s an…ethnobiologist, I think that’s what it’s called. She studies a lot of weird stuff—I didn’t think she did anything in your area, but Sephiroth has dinner with her and Gast when they’re in town and he had me come once. Little spacy, but she seemed nice,” Zack says, trying to remember. That had been in the early days of him getting to know Sephiroth, and most of the conversation had been completely over his head but he’d been so awed at seeing Sephiroth actually be social he’d actively suppressed any questions that’d interrupt the conversation flow. “The way she tells it, her job consists of asking people to tell her the same stories they use to scare their kids into being good, and then she goes out to see if any of them might based on a real animal.”

“That…isn’t really what the Jenovans were up to,” Cloud mutters. “I think we should still come. Even if it’s not a bad case, it’s still going to take a while for you to get over it. Tatzelwurm season’s pretty much over anyway.”

“Yeah, I already told everyone I don’t know when I’ll be back, so my calendar’s clear,” Tifa says.

Getting Tifa and Cloud to come to Midgar isn’t…painful, it’s just they have their own lives in their town that were going on before they pulled Zack out of multiple snowdrifts and Zack tries to respect that, even if he really, really prefers his bed with them in it. So he’s not unhappy to hear this, but also he feels guilty. Because yeah, they’re going to reschedule everything around the fact that he managed to take home a cursed rock.

So he tries to be proactive about it. After R&D send in a team to retrieve the stone, Zack sucks it up and lets them take the whole contents of that closet as well, with only an inventory list and a promise to keep him posted on decontamination timelines. He talks up Tifa to the building manager while the closet’s being scrubbed and gets a significantly firmer promise to let her come interview for a position in the building’s café, and makes some inquiries about having Cloud trial for some SOLDIER support positions. And when the two of them arrive in town, he shows up with anti-nausea and allergy medication, takes them to a Genesis-approved restaurant for dinner and makes sure they get in a full day of sightseeing the next day, before Gast’s wife shows up.

Which is a good call, because when she does, it turns out it’s Gast’s daughter instead, and Aerith is—objectively, because Zack is very content in his current relationship but not blind—very hot.

Also, a little kooky, seeing as she shows up to a business meeting in a pink sundress with a basket of flowerpots. “Oh, these? Well, old Cetra lore has all kinds of tips about appropriate plants to have for all situations. They were very big on botany, and actually, we’ve managed to demonstrate that some of these have positive effects on air quality,” she gushes as she hands out plants. “Admittedly they’re super localized and you kind of have to hold them under your nose—”

“Pass,” Tifa says, and then pulls out the nose spray Zack got her. “They’re pretty but I have allergies.”

“Oh, no worries, try these non-flowering ones instead!” Aerith says brightly, swapping that flower for a succulent. And then she…puts her hands around Tifa’s hands and folds them around the pot, and then helps Tifa snuggle that pot up against her chest. She mutters a little about maximizing the clearance radius, but it looks handsy, but…Tifa seems okay with the amount of cleavage adjustment going on. “Now, anyway, Mom said you might have a tiny contamination problem? I’m doing my doctorate in empirical archaeology and we recently translated this amazing set of wall carvings about how you can use flowers to counteract hallucinogenic pollutants!”

“It’s actually Zack who has the problem,” Tifa says, as Aerith continues looking earnestly up at her.

Aerith blinks, then resets her smile as she turns to Zack. To her credit, it’s not any less bright and friendly. “Sorry! Would you like to show me the affected area?”

“Right, yeah, this way,” Zack says, letting them into his place. And then he pulls Cloud aside as Aerith immediately starts to inspect his walls like a smaller, pinker, more flower-happy version of Sephiroth. “Okay, so…did that just happen?”

“What?” Cloud says.

Zack mimes Aerith’s hands in front of his chest. Cloud stares at him for a moment, then sighs and turns to Tifa.

“You okay?” Cloud asks. “Didn’t want to step in if you were.”

Which, right, affected party right there. Luckily, Tifa seems more amused than anything and just shrugs off Zack’s ‘oops’ look. “Yeah, I’m okay. I’m just…we really think plants are gonna work here?” she says, watching as Aerith pulls out her phone and starts talking aloud to herself about windowboxing and climate zones. “I guess there aren’t really a ton of flowers up in the mountains…we were figuring we’d just stick around till we could help you move out.”

“Oh, that’s—well, really nice of you, but even with Sephiroth pushing, they can’t find me another unit that fast,” Zack says apologetically. “I’m a First, there are security clearances and stuff like that and basically it’s like an eight-week process to approve a same-for-same unit for me.”

“Well, nothing happened last night,” Cloud says. He’s watching Aerith again. When Aerith bends over, Cloud glances at Tifa. She shrugs, Cloud shrugs back, and then they both stare contemplatively at Aerith. “Flowers probably aren’t going to hurt, and I guess she’s just trying to help.”

Then Tifa looks back and catches Zack looking at her. When he flushes, she just smiles and reaches out to sling her arm over his shoulder. “This one she gave me actually smells nice, even without flowers,” she says, tilting the pot his way. Mostly with her breasts. “It does still look like you just moved in—your stuff’s barely taking up any space in this, it’s so much bigger. We could try it for a week, see how it goes?”

“The…flowers, or the…um…” Thing Tifa and Cloud appear to be plotting, in their lowkey, ridiculously attractively confident way, like they do every time Zack ends up in some insanely sexy situation. He’s not even trying these days, and sometimes he feels like he might have lost control and that’s a little worrying.

Or it should be, except well. Sex. He’s pretty fond of it, and also, Tifa and Cloud are really good at planning for it and then maneuvering him into it. They don’t even run out of towels, even with the extra guest, because those two brought extras.

“I mean, I don’t think they actually anticipated it was going to end with hands-on lessons on massaging plants out of pots, but those towels were very necessary, believe me,” Zack says. “Repotting is so much more complicated than you’d think, Ang.”

Who pokes at his half-eaten lunch with his spoon, then pushes back from the table. “Okay, kid, I think you’re officially back in the saddle now. I’m gonna go find someone who actually needs help, let me know when you get stuck with another curse.”

“Angeal! Hey, I was hallucinating! Genesis was genuinely concerned about my well-being! He even let it override his Seph bitchery!” Zack yelps.

“That was nearly three weeks ago, Fair. The world moves on, and I, for one, am not going to fight my fate,” Genesis pronounces loftily, like he and Angeal aren’t about to just sweep into the nearest of their offices for tablet-breaking midday sex.

Honestly, Zack doesn’t know why he puts up with all these assholes.

Chapter 20: Interlude: Vincent Gives Angeal Cooking Lessons (Sephiroth and Genesis Are Decorative)

“I like how creative you get with his hair,” Angeal says, as his fingers run over the braid wrapped about Sephiroth’s throat. The rounds of it are pressed so snugly together that that small bit of additional pressure ripples down through them, drawing up a gasp from deep within Sephiroth’s gut.

Then another hand, Vincent’s, smooths them back as Sephiroth resettles himself. He’s kneeling with his back against the wall in their kitchen, arms stretched above and slightly behind his head. A leather wrist-to-forearm binder keeps them lined straight up, chained to a hook that his fingers scrabble uselessly at when Vincent leans over and sucks at them. More leather binds his legs in place and keeps them spread just enough for Angeal’s hand to slip easily between them as he fondles Sephiroth between the metal rings that keep his cock soft and his balls pushed achingly down towards the floor. And there’s the leather blindfold, a thick, tight mask that grips Sephiroth’s head like an extra hand, extending from the top of his forehead to halfway down his cheeks, much further than necessary to merely blind him. It covers his ears and while it doesn’t entirely shut out all noise, it does muffle everything so it feels a little distant, a little slower than natural.

“Never thought of that, just kind of…a pain, how it’d get in the way. I mean, even with how pretty it looked, you know,” Angeal goes on in a self-deprecating tone, even as his fingers ruthlessly massage Sephiroth’s already-sore cock into trying to rise against its prison. “Then again, it was hard to get him to just stay in it for more than a couple minutes.”

“He doesn’t have a problem with that now,” Vincent observes. His tone not smug, only justifiably confident, as his tongue laps a last time against Sephiroth’s half-curled palm. Then he withdraws, leaving Sephiroth’s hand to twitch feebly, a silent and disregarded plea, as his fingers trail over its back and down over the binder to swirl lightly along the sensitive, neglected underarm skin. “He’ll sit for hours so long as I feed him a cock every so often.”

Something flicks at Sephiroth’s balls, twisting them against their caging rings, and as the resulting ache floods up into his groin to smooth out into tortured pleasure, Angeal’s other nails make the same gesture against his cock. Sephiroth shudders and moans, dragging his head back into the cradle of his arms. He could have been kneeling here for hours already; he has no idea. He’s merely a decorative element, serving absolutely no purpose at the moment except to entertain Vincent’s guest.

“You want something in there now?” Angeal asks.

A quiet noise drops from Vincent, thoughtful in an unhurried, amused way. His hand travels across Sephiroth’s shoulder, then draws over the pectoral, circling teasingly close to—and then lifting just short of the nipple as Sephiroth bows himself against his leg-cuffs in anticipation. Vincent’s left his nipples unusually free of attention so far, which is not so much a relief as a torment, as in the muted dark Sephiroth’s left to imagine what could be done, phantom pinches flashing so vividly through him that he shakes in his bonds, shakes and then is left without the usual slow, aching release to bring him back down.

“No,” Vincent says. His hand suddenly appears at Sephiroth’s jaw, gripping it for a moment. Hard enough to ground, not bruise, with two fingers sliding across Sephiroth’s tongue as Sephiroth moans again. “The fish will spoil. It has to be very fresh for this dish, and this one will keep.”

Sephiroth sucks his breath, then tries to close his mouth about Vincent’s fingers. But he’s already too late, only catching their tips for a fleeting moment. His needy whine makes Angeal laugh as the other man stands up, patting his thigh, and then both of them ignore him.

They’re still in the kitchen but it’s difficult even with his preternatural hearing to determine what they’re doing. The leather blocks his ears enough that the softer sounds fall away, leaving confusing gaps—and then there’ll be something perfectly audible and understandable, bringing his attention back into focus. A wild flurry of splashing, abruptly cut-off, the periodic rhythm of a knife against the cutting board. Angeal swearing, once, as he gives himself some minor injury.

But the gaps…they leave Sephiroth straining at first for any hint, trying to follow their progress. Smell briefly becomes overwhelmingly important: the sharp bite of various herbs under the knife, the relatively smoother tang of salt-kissed flesh as the fish is gutted. But by the time the various scents start to blossom under the stove’s heat, Sephiroth’s already let them go, too seduced by the lulls in between. He doesn’t really need to understand. He’s going to wait anyway, and it becomes easier to simply lean against the wall, into the overall wash of it.

So when footsteps return to him, he’s sluggish to stretch up towards him, half-dreaming at this point and unsure if it’s only his wish or if it’s reality.

Twin bites at his nipples, sharply hot, bring him back. Sephiroth’s chains rattle and Vincent presses his hand against Sephiroth’s left pectoral, thumb rubbing very gently at the very edge of the burning, drawing it out into the muscle as Sephiroth gasps and gasps.

“Gen never can wear that type for that long,” Angeal says from a little further back. “He likes them, but they’re so intense—I think it sends the healing into overdrive, and he just gets numb and forgets about it.”

“True,” Vincent says, before taking the clamps off. When Sephiroth jerks back against the wall, whimpering, he drifts fingertips over the still-burning nipples, the light strokes exquisitely callous. He lets Sephiroth twist in agony for a few seconds, just until it starts to fade, and then applies a different set of clamps. “I find these keep his attention for longer.”

Pressure rings, tightening as Vincent rotates them. Sephiroth returns to gasping, his own breath betraying him as his chest pushes up into the slow tension, until his nipples are held stiff and swollen in an unyielding grip. “Please…” he groans.

“Talking now,” Angeal says. He’s closer, his hand now running up and down Sephiroth’s right thigh as Vincent’s clothes brush against Sephiroth’s front.

“When he’s desperate. He’ll forget about that in a moment,” Vincent says, with the same sure tone as before.

He’s kneeling now, his voice almost level with Sephiroth. He takes up Sephiroth’s cock in one hand, letting its rings roll it against his palm. When Sephiroth tries to buck into the touch, Vincent lifts his hand so that he keeps hold of the cock without allowing an increase in pressure. Then, as exhaustion drops Sephiroth back, his thumb slides firmly across the head; it feels like being run straight through into the wall, that touch, that much on flesh trapped and marinating in untended need.

Then he does it again. Angeal and he are talking but Sephiroth lets the blindfold close out most of it, too much taken up with the movement of that thumb. He’s so focused on its sweep that he almost misses the cool slickness under it—lube being rubbed onto him, into the cock slit as he squirms. But then Vincent’s thumb stops just at the edge of the slit, pushing its lips open, and a chilly metal tip works at him.

It's narrower than the hollow rod that usually pairs with the cage. Sephiroth shudders once in expectation, then again in surprise as this rod slips quickly into him. He still feels it but the thinness makes it easier to bear and—deeper, much deeper than the other one and he’s both pinned to the wall and frantic to jerk up against it as realization dawns. Frantic but he can’t—the rod’s so deep in him now that it seems to have caught on the very center of his self, hooking and playing with his strings so that he can’t control his own reactions. He’s shaking uncontrollably, and the noises he makes seem to come from an entirely different person, with how seamlessly the rough, raw cries fall from his mouth.

And then the rod is pulled out as swiftly as it’d been inserted. He’s left trembling, panting, the tension of the rings on his nipples seeming like the only things keeping him from simply splitting open down the breast.

“Not that one,” Vincent murmurs. “Give me the…yes, thank you.”

“Tried this once, he wasn’t that—” Angeal laughs again, as Sephiroth mewls and arches at the mere graze of the new rod against him “—but he likes it from you.”

“Yes,” Vincent says as he works this one into Sephiroth’s cock.

Thicker, with uneven sides that seem to pull Sephiroth up through the crown of his head and then drop him heavily back onto the floor, even though his legs are now flattened as far as they can go. When Vincent twirls it in him, he discovers an entirely new way to go limp; he prides himself on his muscular control but all his training, all his abilities, they all fall away before this. He has no power here, can only accept the treatment they give him and hope to bear up under it.

They try a third rod, one with a tip that’s thicker than the rest so that Sephiroth can feel his urethra try to close back up against the intrusion. It’s a futile effort, only heightening the sense of pressure traveling down his cock and into his groin, as if Vincent’s reaching into him and putting a thumb on a single point that unravels everything. At some point Sephiroth realizes Vincent’s reached up with his free hand and is holding his chin up so he doesn’t strangle himself against his hair, and instead of trying to straighten up, only slumps more deeply into the man’s hold.

“…the rest,” Angeal’s saying. “But I think we need to get back to the stove.”

“Yes,” Vincent says, his thumb rubbing along the underside of Sephiroth’s cock as he inches the current rod out. When it’s finally free, Sephiroth sags back against the wall and then feels his lips flutter weakly against the other man’s mouth. “But he’ll have your cock first, he needs it now.”

Angeal pauses and even through the blindfold, even enveloped in everything Vincent’s subjected him to, Sephiroth can dimly sense the man’s hesitation. That was part of the problem, Angeal never quite being able to shake—but he’s here now because of Vincent. Who stays, his hand propping up Sephiroth’s jaw as Angeal’s cock finally slides between Sephiroth’s slack lips. Constant, assured, and firmly the one directing, until warm come runs down Sephiroth’s throat and Angeal’s satisfied sigh floats down from above.

When Angeal steps back, Vincent lingers a little longer, his finger circling Sephiroth’s mouth and then rolling inside of it, pushing about traces of come till Sephiroth rouses enough to suck at it. He unwraps the braid from Sephiroth’s throat and lets its weight drop down Sephiroth’s chest—the heavy brush of it against a clamped nipple almost pulls Sephiroth together—before turning away.

They do something at the stove. Something about adding something at the last minute, and Angeal asking about substitutions. Vincent answers and then there’s the sound of a plate on the counter, spurring a slow groan from Sephiroth as he thinks they’re now going to sit and eat, leaving him even longer.

But Angeal leaves the kitchen at that point. There are noises in the living room, which rapidly lose Sephiroth’s interest because Vincent is still here and is cradling Sephiroth’s head in his hands as he strips off the blindfold.

It takes several seconds to focus. The kitchen lights are dimmed, which makes it easier to slip from soft dark dream to reality, but what helps most is the caress of Vincent’s fingers along his jaw. Vincent doesn’t say anything, only studies him as he tilts his head back and lets his eyes close again, not because what’s before him is disappointing but because it is not, and so he feels entirely comfortable trusting it’ll remain where it is.

He opens them again when Vincent unchains his hands and legs from the wall. His arms fall like stones into the other man’s cradling hold, and he’s half-doubled-over as Vincent kneels down and then pulls him up against the man’s chest, draped across Vincent’s legs as Vincent slides fingers between his buttocks. Sephiroth wants that but can’t even muster the energy to plead for it, can only moan and nuzzle at Vincent’s throat.

Vincent is amused, as always, nuzzling back as his fingers leave and then reappear with enough lube to press easily into Sephiroth. Who’s so relaxed that two fingers barely tax him, and three cause a ragged inhale and a moment or two of twitching, but only that, before his body opens for the other man. “I could plug you and hang you back up,” Vincent murmurs as Sephiroth hitches weakly into his hand. “You don’t even want to come now, do you. You’d rather I keep using you.”

That’s…Sephiroth can’t figure out if he disagrees or not, his thoughts are so scattered. He keeps mouthing at Vincent’s collarbone, skin and clothing receiving equal treatment, until Vincent sighs and tilts him up. They sit against the wall again, Sephiroth levered onto the man’s lap and cock; when he’s fully seated on the man he does groan and stretch and grope clumsily at his own cock, but Vincent easily brushes his hands away. Then folds his arms up against his breast and holds them out of the way—not really in place, not with how limp they are—as his cock is freed from its cage. He’s massaged hard, then soft, and then Vincent takes his nipple clamps off with come-dappled fingers. When he gasps, Vincent kisses his throat and slowly rubs his come into his nipples till he settles.

“You haven’t,” he mutters, when he’s finally able to remember language. When Vincent makes an inquiring noise, he drops his head against the man’s shoulder and lips at the side of Vincent’s jaw. “Haven’t come.”

“Perhaps I like it better this way,” Vincent says, but he’s not serious, only musing, and when Sephiroth manages to rock his hips, the man lets out a long, slightly tight exhale. “I was expecting to show him two recipes, but you took the sounds so well we never made it to the vibrators.”

Sephiroth shivers involuntarily, then goes slack again as Vincent nuzzles at his temple. He can still hear things in the living room, he realizes, and for a moment he’s amused as well, albeit with more than a touch of annoyance; Genesis is always the first to complain about being overworked in any other situation but when he wants to, he can easily outlast Angeal.

“I do see why Angeal has so many of those,” Vincent says, guessing Sephiroth’s thoughts. It doesn’t even surprise Sephiroth anymore when the man does that. “He needs the breaks they allow.”

“Not that he was ever very good at taking advantage,” Sephiroth says, only half-thinking about it. He’s comfortably exhausted, even with Vincent’s cock still hard in him; the idea that the man could tip him over at any time to satisfy himself, no matter Sephiroth’s state, is a constant, delicious tingle in the back of his thoughts that leaves his hands open-palmed and relaxed against his own softened cock. “When we were younger he’d always spend our training breaks reminding us to rehydrate, or checking injuries. My mother ended up setting up a protocol that the medics needed to check him first, because they always assumed he was fine because of that behavior.”

Vincent’s hands drift down Sephiroth till they’re curling about his inner thighs. Just curling, not forcing them wider, a casual possession that doesn’t need to rely on brute violence. “And then she’d ask him about you and Genesis?”

Sephiroth snorts. “You know her so well…yes, exactly. That was the point of them for her—she wasn’t going to get rid of them, of course, but she didn’t think much of…of ‘Heidegger’s work’ until she realized how useful they were as additional stimulation for me. Better for spurring emotional development than adults trying to test me—there are endless files—”

“Then I can read them later,” Vincent says, before slowly but relentlessly rolling his hips up behind Sephiroth, capping off the tension Sephiroth only now realizes has been building in him. His hands close a little tighter on Sephiroth’s thighs, stilling the tremor that runs through them, and then he leans over and stops up Sephiroth’s mouth mid-gasp. “Right now I’m going to have you.”

Sephiroth moans, turning into him, and then lets Vincent pull him flat again, pressed back-to-chest as Vincent fucks him. He’s not spread against the floor or turned against the wall, but sprawled lazily out, his body periodically bowed up towards the ceiling until Vincent finishes in him. Unshowy but no less a claim that way, Vincent knowing perfectly well Sephiroth can’t offer any resistance and so not wasting the energy to pin him, only taking what he needs out of Sephiroth.

They settle against the wall again, Vincent’s head tucked against Sephiroth’s throat. Things in the living room seem quieter, Sephiroth thinks. He would like that room back at some point this evening, but not yet to the point that he wants to rise and see to it. “He’d better not expect you to teach Angeal every recipe you have.”

“Perhaps I’ll look for a cookbook, the next time I’m in Wutai,” Vincent says, his fingertips stroking softly down Sephiroth’s inner thighs. They settle on the cuffs, then unbuckle them and knead into the resulting cramps that awaken. “Angeal can read it to him while we eat.”

Sephiroth laughs. He feels the other man’s smile against his throat and twists his head around for a kiss; that almost does more to soothe the stiffness in his legs than the massage. Then, groaning, he helps Vincent push him off.

“Come eat,” Vincent says. He takes Sephiroth’s braid up in one hand and loops it back over Sephiroth’s throat, then tugs at the makeshift leash. “You’ll have first taste.”

Chapter 21: Interlude: Vincent's Shopping Tips

“I don’t make most of them,” Vincent says after a brief silence. His tone is languid enough that Sephiroth doesn’t lift his head from the man’s thigh, but he sounds distinctly puzzled. “As flattered as I am that you think my skill set is that broad, I can’t claim those honors.”

They’re both laying over in Junon, their flights grounded by bad weather. Delays tend to make Sephiroth restless, with all the scheduling contingencies and other work that immediately begins to pile up in his inbox, but Vincent has already managed to fuck that out of him with one round in the office he’d been borrowing and another in the shower of their guest quarters. Neither of them had been elaborate, only Vincent’s hands and mouth and his own will holding him still, but the uncomplicated roughness of it had turned out to be the perfect remedy for Sephiroth’s mood. Now he’s lying contentedly next to Vincent as the other man idly browses on a tablet, naked but for a collar and a few still-healing scrapes and bruises.

It'd been the collar that had spurred Sephiroth’s comment: a new one, black drake leather like the rest but of a quality that is usually reserved for high fashion. It spans Sephiroth’s neck from chin to shoulders, with a back that laces together with silk cord ending in tassels that slide and flick ticklishly across Sephiroth’s shoulder blades. Far too thin to force his head up, entirely ornamental, but at the same time its tautness across the front of his throat seems to police every breath and swallow he takes, an extension of the hands he’s watching cradle that tablet.

Vincent had put it on him after they’d showered, with watered-down dribbles of the man’s come still slipping out of Sephiroth. It’s clearly custom-made, the laces not there to allow much adjustment, and for some reason the man had had it with him even though he had been returning from a mission. “You repair your own weapons,” Sephiroth says.

“I make field adjustments,” Vincent says, looking up from his tablet. As he does, his left hand drops from it to Sephiroth’s hair, claw-tips brushing teasingly along the curve of Sephiroth’s ear before his fingers curl down along Sephiroth’s jaw. He pushes that up so that they’re looking at each other. “I’m not a gunsmith, and if and when I find an expert in that, I’m more than happy to pay their rate to have their services. I think you’d say the same about swords.”

He still sounds bemused, as if he can’t quite fathom how this idea came to Sephiroth. Who doesn’t feel insulted, but who is a little surprised, considering how Vincent usually manages to stay well ahead of him. “True,” he says, mulling that over.

Vincent continues to gaze at him, expecting more but not demanding. The man’s fingers caress the underside of Sephiroth’s jaw, stroking close to the top of the collar. Then they still for a second. The interest in Vincent’s eyes was always there but it briefly intensifies, and then the man smiles. “I finished early, and did have a chance to transact some personal business. I’m not usually in the area and there’s…an expert I know, who does do very good work.”

His thumb rubs down over the front of the collar. Sephiroth drops his shoulders into his arch, rolling his head a little to facilitate the petting. Then lets its weight rock it back so that he can mouth lightly at Vincent’s wrist; the bony plates covering Vincent’s left arm are much more sensitive than they look, especially the slight grooving between them. He senses more than hears Vincent’s breath slowing and lets his teeth rasp at one groove.

That earns him a low chuckle and fingers wrapped close over his throat, just tight enough that he gasps to feel Vincent’s palm resisting him. “You know an expert in collars?” Sephiroth murmurs.

“No, in other kinds of items,” Vincent says, amused. His eyes move to the side—their coats are draped over a chair next to the bed—then return to travel appreciatively down Sephiroth’s body as Sephiroth pushes himself up onto his arms. “But he’s broadminded about commissions and I’m a very old client of his. Get up.”

Sephiroth lets Vincent’s fingers tug at him before tucking his knees under himself and rolling his weight back onto them. “I was being quiet, as you asked.”

“Yes, so you’ll be rewarded,” Vincent says. He keeps hold of Sephiroth’s throat for a few more seconds, pulling the chair with their coats over and then digging something out of his coat’s pockets. “Keep your hands on the bed.”

It’s a set of silver pressure rings, which Vincent fits over Sephiroth’s nipples and then adjusts till each nub starts to stiffen against the metal. The rings have small eyelets and Vincent dips into the coat again to come out with a bundle of silk cord, the same color and weight as that fastening Sephiroth’s collar. The bundle comes apart to reveal it actually contains several cords, each ending in a metal clasp.

“Now I have to wonder what this expert enables for you,” Sephiroth says as Vincent clips the end of one cord to an eyelet on the right pressure ring.

“Weapons, mostly,” Vincent says. Then he gives the cord a tug, smiling as Sephiroth hisses. “I said mostly.”

Sephiroth snorts, but he’s distracted; Vincent’s quick with his hands and already has Sephiroth by the wrists, bending his arms behind him. The silk cord is wrapped about his upper arm, then his forearms to keep them folded across his back. Then the free end is passed around his other side and attached to his left nipple ring. If he keeps his arms still, the cord won’t pull at his nipples, but even the slightest tremble transmits through the silk; it doesn’t grip at his skin like leather but slides over it.

Vincent binds his other arm the same way with a second cord. It doesn’t help at all, and he’s already starting to pant when Vincent takes him by the shoulders and forcefully twists him; he feels the silk stretch more on one side, dragging heavily at his left nipple, and clumsily fumbles himself into a straddling position across the man’s lap to relieve the strain. Then shudders heavily as Vincent takes advantage and gives the aching nipple a lick that roughly pulls it up against the cords.

“Rewarding me,” Sephiroth mutters, and then groans as Vincent sucks the tip of the nipple against his teeth, crushing it between those and the ring. “With—with more—”

“Punishing you would be ignoring you. You’d rather I play with you,” Vincent says. He releases that nipple but works at the other one with his thumb as he kisses up Sephiroth’s chest, then bites down at the collarbone. “I think you’re hoping I picked up a few more things on this trip to use on you.”

That’s hardly a unique insight, and yet Sephiroth can’t find it in him to protest. He lets his head loll further back instead, pressing his forearms into his back even as the rings squeeze his nipples. “Did you?” he murmurs. “What else—what else does this expert of yours—”

“He doesn’t make everything,” Vincent says, mouth nipping along the bottom of the collar. Then he raises his head. Meets Sephiroth’s eyes for a moment, as he teases both nipples with his fingers, and then dips in for a lazy taste at Sephiroth’s mouth. “Not the cock cage or the sounds—those come from the one who makes my knives.”

Sephiroth chases his lips and is brought up short when Vincent hooks fingertips under the cords and pulls steadily downwards. He jerks back, then jerks again when Vincent releases the cords and the rings briefly, falsely seem to slacken their grip, only to settle back into a merciless pinching.

Vincent ducks under his chin, nuzzling at its soft underside as he moans, and then moves up to kiss him again. “Not all of the binders either—he’s hard to get hold of, and there’s another one who I like better for the ones that I expect you to struggle in,” the man’s saying as he laps at Sephiroth’s mouth. “And…oh, the plugs. Do you want to know who I use for those?”

It’s only been a few minutes but Sephiroth’s already been rendered speechless, twisting and whimpering in Vincent’s hold as he pauses, laughs, and then pushes them over onto the bed. He has Sephiroth on his belly, shaking on Vincent’s fingers and then cock as the damned silk cords constantly yank at his nipples. Even after they’ve both come, Vincent doesn’t stop, licking his way down Sephiroth’s spine and dipping between the buttocks to clean out his hole as Sephiroth tries futilely to keep still.

“Maybe you only want to know if I brought one,” Vincent says when he finally lifts his head. He moves it only as far as Sephiroth’s right buttock, resting his cheek against that as he slowly presses two fingers into Sephiroth. It aches again, aches inside and despite the man’s enthusiastic licking, the friction of his fingers is raw and hot, sending small explosive spasms into Sephiroth’s hips and groin and softening cock. “If you were good enough, would I put it in now, and make you keep it till we’re home? I could tie it in with another cord, and tie up your cock to match your nipples.”

Sephiroth flattens his knees against the bed, shuddering, as if he hasn’t just come, as if he’s somehow coming again. He’s not; even his body can’t recover that quickly. But Vincent is so damnably good at this he wants to, so badly he’s laid low and trembling by it.

Vincent makes a quiet, low noise. It’s smooth and long and jarring against the raggedness of Sephiroth’s breathing and a sharp cry drops out of him as he twists on Vincent’s fingers. He’s not fighting the other man. On the contrary, he—he wants—he wants so much that he can’t even think—

The fingers don’t move, even though he does, and he tires. Vincent makes the noise again, and this time it runs over Sephiroth like a calming hand. He gasps a last time, then lets the tension wash out of him. As he does, Vincent lifts his head. The other man leans over him and then puts his other hand over the back of Sephiroth’s neck, the light press of his fingers through the leather further helping to steady him.

Vincent stays like that for a few minutes, something like that—time always seems strange in such moments, as if it doesn’t even belong—before removing the hand from Sephiroth’s neck. He reaches under Sephiroth’s arms and unfastens the cords from the nipple rings, but leaves them wrapped around the arms; his fingers in Sephiroth rock once, slow and deep, before withdrawing so that he can roll Sephiroth over.

It'd be easy enough for Sephiroth to pull his arms free, but he doesn’t want to move yet and merely looks on as Vincent moves to sit on him, then to bend over his chest. Vincent’s fingers brush at his left nipple and Sephiroth sucks his breath, feeling an echo of that intense need bite at him…but only an echo. Echoes fade, and in another moment Vincent’s flicked the ring off and has his mouth over the nipple, nursing at it to soothe the pain as Sephiroth arches over his arms. He suckles it down to a glowing ache before giving Sephiroth’s right nipple the same treatment.

When he sits up, he waits for Sephiroth to focus again, and then he looks a little curious. “Did you think I made all of them?” he says.

“I can’t picture you browsing any of the sites Zack uses, or walking into that store he loves in Sector Three,” Sephiroth says after catching his breath. His shoulders are starting to cramp more than he can ignore and he slides his arms out from behind him, grimacing. Then swings a hand up when it looks like Vincent’s going to climb off him, only to let it drop to the man’s thigh as Vincent merely shifts down his belly. “They were all custom-made. Angeal—”

He pauses. He’s not entirely certain why at this point, considering there’s no reason to think Vincent will find the information unwelcome. Old habits, which are the unwelcome ones, he thinks, and then startles as Vincent reaches over and hooks a finger through the cord still loosely wrapped over his forearm. Vincent doesn’t unwind it, but instead uses it to maneuver the arm up over Sephiroth’s head; Sephiroth pulls his other arm up to join it and Vincent pins his wrists to the bed as he leans down to lap some sweat from Sephiroth’s jaw.

“Angeal,” Vincent prompts.

“He makes some of his—but he relaxes that way, with his hobbies. The gardening, and the leather working, and a few other things,” Sephiroth says. He lets Vincent’s tongue push his head over, then groans quietly as the man bites him behind the ear. The marks should fade before they have to catch their flights, if Vincent stops soon. He finds he doesn’t want to remind the man. “But I think he started the leather working because…Genesis didn’t like what he was buying with Zack, even the high-end ones…”

“Didn’t like them, or didn’t like him using Fair’s recommendations?” Vincent asks. Then makes one of those rumbling amused sounds of his, too deep and throaty to be properly called a chuckle, when the memory of that rant alone makes Sephiroth sigh in irritation. “Did he teach himself corset-making?”

“Oh, no, Genesis found his own supplier—even he’s not so foolish as to think himself an expert in that,” Sephiroth says.

Vincent rumbles in his throat again, then slides off Sephiroth. He keeps hold of Sephiroth’s wrists, using them to pull Sephiroth away from the sticky patches on the sheets and to a relatively clean area near the headboard. He does take the cords off now, rolling them up and storing them away with the pressure rings in his coat as Sephiroth tucks himself between the man’s legs.

He leaves the collar on. Sephiroth lays his head against Vincent’s thigh, the same one as when they’d started but on the opposite side, and once Vincent’s settled back against the headboard, he brushes away Sephiroth’s hair and runs his thumb across the collar in interlocking spirals; the leather’s fine enough for Sephiroth to feel how the digit rolls as it moves. “I never found much appeal in hobbies,” Vincent says. “I’ve learned some…unusual skills, but generally for work. My contacts will take an…off-brand…commission from me, but they all came in through work as well.”

“I might ask you for the name of your knife-maker, at some point,” Sephiroth says, and then, as Vincent raises his brows, he cranes his head forward just enough to lick at the side of Vincent’s cock. “If you’ll let me?”

Vincent’s surprised but once he sits with the thought, he relaxes, moving his hand to trace along the side of Sephiroth’s face. “If you’re good enough, perhaps.”

Sephiroth snorts, then takes a second, longer lick at Vincent’s cock. “Let me be good?” he murmurs, as Vincent’s fingers slide under his chin and steer it back to the head of the man’s prick. “Let me show you?”

Vincent smiles. Smiles, and then pushes Sephiroth’s lips open with his thumb. “Keep yourself quiet for an hour,” he says as Sephiroth starts to work his mouth over the man’s cock. “Then we’ll see.”

Chapter 22: Fourth Vacation: Safe House

The Turk safe house looks like any other unit on the street, with surprisingly poor sightlines and large windows. Of course, once Sephiroth’s inside he can see how the window curtains are backed with bulletproof synthetics, but the sightlines…

“Generally we’re not going in and out of the front door,” Vincent says dryly, as Sephiroth walks down after him into the basement.

This is much more expansive than the upstairs. Sephiroth crosses the room and opens the door, then does some quick mental calculations. “This must reach across the street to—”

“Yes, that’s the true front door,” Vincent says, as he steps into another room. “The back door would be this way.”

Sephiroth closes his door and goes to join the other man. He sees what Vincent indicates, but only spares it a brief glance before turning to take in the current room. It obviously once had more fixtures than it now contains, with wall mountings and other signs still visible, but it’s been stripped down to a bed, a desk and a chair, and a TV screen on the far wall.

And…mountings. Two of them on the bare concrete floor, thick metal staples spaced a little more than a foot apart, with heavy leather cuffs attached to them. Sephiroth flexes his hands in his gloves, feeling how their leather stretches over his knuckles; anticipation has been prickling through him since they’d arrived, but he’s been pushing it down, mindful that there was a fair amount of set-up even for only a few days’ stay.

Now he can’t. It’s not overwhelming but it’s unignorable, a constant sluice of restless energy just under the skin as he steps over to a wall and knocks his hand against it. The resulting sound is oddly dull. “Soundproofing,” he says.

Vincent doesn’t answer, but when Sephiroth hears the grate of metal, he turns and finds the man pulling a series of metal bars across the “back” door. Sealing it off, he thinks, and when he swallows he can feel it dragging at his throat.

“This isn’t set up for interrogation,” he says and Vincent glances at him, a flick of a look that almost makes Sephiroth feel dismissed.

“No, logistics,” Vincent says as he steps away from the now-barred door. He wanders over to the third and final door in the room, pushing it open to show a small bathroom. “You’re thinking.”

“I’m—” Sephiroth starts, and then dips his head in reluctant acknowledgement. “You know what I’ve been dealing with.”

“I do,” Vincent says. He leans in the doorway and looks at Sephiroth, long and steady and Sephiroth realizes now that the prior look hadn’t been dismissive at all. No sniper aims right away: they take bearings first, assess the environmental conditions, account for them. “But you’re not dealing with anything here. This isn’t your ground, and you’re not here to work. Come here.”

A sharp shiver runs through Sephiroth. When it’s cover, he can still feel the stresses of work pulling at him, keeping too much of his body knotted up, but crossing the room and then kneeling at Vincent’s feet feels like brushing mounds of snow off his shoulders. He can feel them dropping away as his weight settles on the floor.

Vincent studies him for a few seconds. Long enough that the temporary lift in tension starts to subside and Sephiroth finds his fingers twitching against his thighs. He flattens his hand against his leg, irritated with himself; he’s been looking forward to this but now that he’s here, all he can think about is how short a time they have before he has to pick up matters at work again. And they’re not that far away either—this isn’t a remote cave with no reception to speak of, he can’t pretend he’s fully left everything—

“You’re thinking,” Vincent says, and when Sephiroth draws a breath to answer, Vincent’s hand comes out to hold his jaw. Not to crush it but to hold it, keeping him from speaking. “You’re not here to think. Strip.”

Sephiroth pushes his breath between his teeth, irrationally feeling as if he needs to respond to that when—he shakes himself. Vincent lets him, but keeps that hand wrapped under his jaw as he reaches up and shrugs off his coat, pulls away his belts, peels off the gloves. When he drops his hands to his trousers, Vincent’s thumb pushes across his mouth and he can’t help a sigh, even as he rolls his shoulders against that damnable lingering tension in them.

“Suck,” Vincent says, and Sephiroth pulls the man’s thumb into his mouth.

He sucks at it as he slides out of his trousers, then rids himself of his boots. His cock’s rising already, and twitches sharply when Vincent gives it a deliberate, emotionless glance before crooking his thumb. It hooks over Sephiroth’s lower teeth, then pulls slightly before popping out from between Sephiroth’s lips.

“Clean yourself,” Vincent says. “Don’t come.”

Sephiroth nods and then pushes himself to his feet, slipping past the other man into the bathroom. It’s small, and he has to stoop to fit under the showerhead. The soap that’s provided is a hard, suds-free bar that seems to do very little and he ends up mostly using his nails to scrape down his body. The roughness of that helps with the tension, he thinks.

But when he steps out and then folds onto his knees where Vincent indicates, Vincent stays back and floats his eyes over the pink lines fading from Sephiroth’s thighs. Vincent doesn’t so much as say he didn’t want that, but Sephiroth feels it as the man steps forward, slides his fingers into Sephiroth’s hair and then twists it up to pull Sephiroth’s head sharply back.

“Vincent,” Sephiroth grunts, staring up at the other man.

He’s half-minded to explain, but Vincent presses two fingers from his free hand into Sephiroth’s mouth. They go down deep, almost stretching to the back of the throat, but before Sephiroth can so much as press his tongue up against them, the man’s removed them. But the message is clear enough, and Sephiroth keeps silent as Vincent steps behind him.

He squeezes the water out of Sephiroth’s hair, wringing it sharply enough that Sephiroth feels his scalp lifting against his skull. Then he takes the hair and winds it tightly up into a compact knot against Sephiroth’s nape; Sephiroth’s still being surprised at the lack of braiding when Vincent produces a small black cloth bag and stuffs the knot into it.

The weight of his hair feels more concentrated this way, a leaden mass that drags at his neck and shoulders, spurring him to roll the latter again. Vincent cups his hands over them and Sephiroth shivers more sharply, then can’t help a groan as Vincent slides his hands down Sephiroth’s arms and then bends them across his back, forearm to forearm. “Please,” Sephiroth says.

“I’m not in a hurry,” Vincent says, and Sephiroth bites back an irritated noise. He knows Vincent picks up on it anyway from how the man chuckles, as he straps a leather binder over Sephiroth’s arms. “Are you under the impression you can make requests?”

The pull of the binder is pushing out all the thoughts crowding Sephiroth’s head, but not fast enough, and he doesn’t want to make Vincent stop. “I could be begging,” he says when Vincent leans forward, expression making it clear he expects an answer. “I want—”

Vincent gives an already-buckled strap a hard yank. “Are you under the impression I’ll do it if you beg me?”

Sephiroth lets the yank jerk him backwards, so the heels of his feet dig into his buttocks. He starts to turn his head, only to have it hike sharply upwards as four lines of fire suddenly score over his left shoulderblade. The moisture in his mouth vanishes, leaving it dry and aching as he swallows, and feels Vincent’s fingers curl around either side of his throat from behind.

“Vincent,” Sephiroth whispers, tilting his head up, letting the man’s gaze run molten fingers down his face as leather drapes around the front of his throat. “Please.”

“You can beg,” Vincent says as he fastens the collar. “But it’ll be just something you do, because it doesn’t really matter to me. Get up.”

Sephiroth rises to his feet and Vincent steers him out of the bathroom by a finger hooked through the ring at the front of the collar. It’s one of the decorative ones, a leather band that would tear if any real force was applied to it, and Sephiroth has to concentrate to not let it as Vincent walks him to the two cuffs on the floor and then has him kneel again.

His ankles are locked into the cuffs and then he feels Vincent’s fingers pushing between his buttocks, chilly with lubricant. He’d stretched himself in the shower, but Vincent wets him with more lube, pushing dollops of it deep into him as he starts to twist on the man’s fingers. Teasing him, he thinks as he tries and fails to chase their too-brief strokes across his prostate. He shifts on his knees, pushing himself back till the ankle cuffs clink, and Vincent abruptly slams three fingers roughly into him. He gasps as white sparks dance over his vision, streaks of liquid heat streaming up his spine and down into his cock.

And then Vincent takes them out just as abruptly. Sephiroth hisses, feeling lubricant sliding out of him, and he's about to rise up and turn to look at the man when Vincent’s tongue flicks against his ear.

“Spread,” Vincent says, and Sephiroth’s body knows that word now, no matter what’s on his mind.

His knees swing open a few inches before the ankle cuffs catch him, hard enough to unsettle him, although it’s not so much that he loses his balance. But he’s still steadying himself when Vincent slides the long, thick rubber cock into him. Sephiroth jerks forward, then pushes himself back, helping to drive it in as he curls his fingers against his ribs.

“Please,” he says when the cock stops in him, and much to his surprise, it starts moving.

Back out, and he’s sucking his breath in frustration when the cock drives back into him. The air comes out in a hard gasp and he hikes up a little, feeling the cock tip rock across his prostate, only to sink heavily back as it withdraws much more slowly. And then he blinks hard, because Vincent has walked around him and is standing to the side, both hands busy wiping themselves on a towel.

The cock keeps moving in him, deep enough but far too slow. He’s panting now, his own cock fully hard, but still far from overwhelmed, and as Vincent walks back behind him, he shifts experimentally against the cock. It’s obviously fastened to some piston, and from what he can tell, the apparatus is anchored firmly to the floor, directly between his legs and shallow enough that he can’t feel it even when he’s pressed all the way down onto the cock. He wonders if it’s actually set into the floor and he’d missed it on the first inspection—

It speeds up. “You’re still thinking,” Vincent remarks from near the bathroom.

Sephiroth opens his mouth to answer and then stutters as the cock in him suddenly goes completely still, buried to the hilt in him. He would’ve been better able to deal with an even faster rate, but nothing at all—he wrenches at himself, burning at the lack of friction, and then stutters again as the cock resumes its pumping.

Vincent clucks his tongue softly, and then Sephiroth hears him moving about in the bathroom. The cock machine speeds up, almost fast enough to put Sephiroth over—so close that he’s rolling his hips as roughly as he can into it when Vincent comes back out. Something’s dropped on the floor behind Sephiroth, a cloth bag with multiple items inside that clink and roll and flap enough to distract him so he loses rhythm, and then the cock stops again.

He lets out a long, pleading whine and Vincent laughs quietly as he comes up behind Sephiroth, running his fingers lightly over the top of Sephiroth’s right shoulder. “If you stopped fighting, it would be easier,” Vincent murmurs, cupping the side of Sephiroth’s throat and tilting his head back into the man. “You’re here to be used. Accept that.”

“I need—I need to come, please,” Sephiroth groans.

His head’s playfully nudged away and then Vincent kneels beside him, mouth tasting Sephiroth’s shoulder as the rubber cock mercifully starts driving into Sephiroth again. “I’m going to make you come,” Vincent says as he runs his hand around Sephiroth’s waist and down the belly to circle Sephiroth’s cock. “But not because you’re begging. Come.”

He drags his hand up Sephiroth’s cock once but that once is firm and perfect and with his command still coiling in Sephiroth’s ear, Sephiroth shudders up into it and climaxes. And—

—and the cock machine is still going, even as the stars fade from Sephiroth’s eyes and the flush of orgasm dies away, no longer able to eat away the growing ache around his hole, the sharp, jittering burn that follows every push of the cock in and out of him. Sephiroth jerks half to the side, still disoriented, and then realigns himself and rises up on his knees—only to have Vincent’s fingers squeeze sharply around his cock. He drops back, biting down on a cry, and Vincent begins stroking him in time to the machine, relentless and steady and too much on a cock not even half-softened.

“Vincent,” he grunts, twisting the other way. That earns him a scratch over his buttocks, which keeps burning as he gasps and shakes his own sweat off his back onto it. “Vincent, please—”

“Please what?” Vincent says, as he bends down and licks across one of Sephiroth’s clenched hands. Then he straightens up again and clamps his free hand down on the back of Sephiroth’s neck, pinning him as the cock machine speeds up. “Do you think I’m going to stop? I want you to come, Sephiroth. So come.”

The second orgasm blindsides Sephiroth. He thought he was only building towards it, struggling between the cock in him and Vincent’s hand, increasingly sore but not ready, not—but he comes. He comes, seed dripping down Vincent’s fingers as he lets out a ragged moan, with his body only half-coiled behind it and pure momentum continuing to push at him even as he tries to slump back. His thighs and his cock spasm together and it hurts, it hurts and he can’t even think on how it hurts, he only has the air knocked out of him as he sags on his knees, barely able to keep from toppling forward.

And the cock machine is still going. It has slowed down, slowed almost to a pace that lets him catch his breath. He tries to straighten himself and Vincent seems to help, pulling him by the back of his neck as he pants. But the rubber cock’s still driving as deep as before, even if it’s slow, and Sephiroth finds himself spasming again when it bottoms out in him. And then it’ll hold there, hold him there, as the spasms rack all the way through him. Faster would push them through quicker.

“Still,” Vincent sighs, when Sephiroth attempts to hike himself off the cock.

His hand leaves Sephiroth’s cock. Sephiroth turns his head, tracking Vincent as the man moves away, only to abandon that when the cock machine accelerates again. It’s too soon, much too soon, and Vincent isn’t holding him back now and he’s still strong enough to push off his knees—the cock machine stops completely, and for a moment Sephiroth is nearly empty, feeling as if his body is caving in around that emptiness.

He drops back onto the cock, whining in relief as he’s filled, and then chokes on his own whine when the machine immediately starts up again. Then he chokes again, pulling uselessly at his arms when the strap he feels is slithering between his legs.

“You’re here to be fucked,” Vincent says, hooking the strap to Sephiroth’s left ankle cuff. It’s thick leather, nearly two inches wide, and runs up over his thigh before swinging back to the cuff. The edge is pulling right into the crease between thigh and torso, cutting into him so that when Vincent tightens the matching strap over his other leg, the flesh pulling out from under the first strap is already reddening. “You’re going to sit here and be fucked till I think you’ve had enough, and you can come if you want, because it’s not going to stop me.”

A desperate ‘please’ is clawing at Sephiroth’s throat, hard enough that he bucks his head trying to shake it out. The thigh straps hold him firmly down on the moving cock, every stroke of it now running squarely across his prostate as if a rail’s been set under the cock, and instead all that comes out are pitiful little noises. If he leans forward, the straps pull him back; if he sits back, he’s letting the cock machine do whatever it wants to him. Not even Vincent, but a machine.

He comes a third time, without even an order from Vincent. He’s shaking so badly from it that Vincent seems to teleport across the room, from behind him to seated in front of him, pressing knees up against Sephiroth’s shoulders with faux-gentleness as the man strokes the sweat out of Sephiroth’s face. Sephiroth pants uncontrollably as Vincent urges him back, fingers toying along the soaked collar, then lets out a keen of relief as the cock machine goes still.

Vincent cradles his head in one hand, thumb petting along his jaw as cool, wonderful water is tipped into his mouth. He sucks greedily at it, then at Vincent’s fingers as the man wipes off his lips.

And then the machine starts again.

A harsh, broken noise escapes from Sephiroth. That first push of the cock in him is like being spitted with a red-hot poker and he surges up against the straps binding his legs. But just as quickly he folds, because the burning continues but his strength doesn’t, even as his hole aches and aches around the cock.

Vincent kisses him and it’s like the way the cock machine is taking him right now, not very forceful but very deep, and it doesn’t need to be forceful. He falls open under it, lets his body be fucked open as his mouth is being licked out, and when Vincent lifts his head, he’s smiling.

“I’ll let you go longer this time,” he tells Sephiroth, tracing a fingertip around Sephiroth’s lips as they flutter against a series of helpless whimpers. “Three times isn’t too much—you want this. You don’t want to fight, you want to be used. You want to not have to think, to just have to be taken.”

“Please,” Sephiroth manages, as Vincent continues to caress his jaw. “Vincent, please—” the cock machine jars loose a shiver and he feels his shoulders bounce against Vincent’s knees “—it hurts…”

“You like it when it hurts,” Vincent reminds him, and then pushes him up so that he has to hold his torso up on his own.

The effort makes him tremble and when, a moment later, Vincent’s hands cup over his shoulders, he nearly collapses. Vincent squeezes sharply, claws stabbing in on the right side, so Sephiroth jerks his head up to stare blearily at the other man.

“I want you fucked till you can’t feel the hurt, because it’s all sore and you can’t tell the difference. I want you used,” Vincent tells him in an even, low, unhurried voice. “That’s how I like you, and that’s how I’m going to keep you here.”

Sephiroth closes his eyes and moans. Fingers draw up his throat, plucking the collar so the leather peels off his sweat-slicked skin, and then circle behind his ears. They massage at the points of his jaw, soothing in a terrible, intoxicating way as the cock machine slowly fucks his lower half apart. “Please—anything,” he groans. “Anything you want.”

“Beg if you like,” Vincent says, voice warm with amusement, as he lets go of Sephiroth.

He goes behind Sephiroth to retrieve something, then comes back to set it up as Sephiroth sways on his knees. Two poles, one end going into a socket in the ground by Sephiroth’s hip so that the pole runs close by Sephiroth’s side, its cool metal shocking almost to the point of burning against Sephiroth’s skin. Then a crossbar that runs just behind Sephiroth’s neck, the underside grazing at Sephiroth’s shoulders and making them jump a little; it’s impossibly slick compared to his skin, which feels like it’s raw and splitting all over. The cock machine drills across Sephiroth’s prostate and he cries out, his fingers catching and then seizing at the poles for support.

Vincent lets him hold onto them for a few seconds, giving him the illusion of steadiness, and then turns the cock machine off. Sephiroth slumps and his fingers, wetted with sweat and trembling, slip off the poles, making it easy for Vincent to pull a leather cuff over the bare inch of wrist Sephiroth’s managed to push out of the arm binder. Each cuff is fastened to the poles so that Sephiroth can’t bend his fingers back to them.

His cock is hard again. The longer he’s still, the more the need to come pulses through it, making him clench down on the rubber cock in him even as his raw, rasped hole flinches. Then icy wetness touches his rim and he cries out but can’t move, too nailed down with stimulation to struggle as Vincent rubs a generous amount of chilled lube about his hole and then down over the part of the cock not in him. It helps a little, when the machine inevitably starts up again.

Sephiroth whimpers and rocks in place, but doesn’t try to push himself off the cock. Vincent makes an approving sound, resuming his seat before Sephiroth, and as the machine gradually fucks Sephiroth to climax, the man lavishes loving caresses on him. Stroking his belly, kneading the heel of the hand up his sore thighs to unknot the muscles, tracing his abdominals as they jerk against the press of the cock machine. When Vincent’s fingers brush over his nipples, he starts and the effort of starting has him slumping in his bonds, panting.

“I know,” Vincent says, amused, and after a quick circle of the pectorals, he brings his fingers back to pinch and pull at Sephiroth’s nipples as if he’s trying to draw the burn away from Sephiroth’s hole and into them.

When Sephiroth comes the fifth time, Vincent teases his nipples all through it, so as the ache in his cock recedes, the twin points on his chest grow hotter. He moans and whimpers, but he’s learned at this point, and doesn’t try to pull away from it. Vincent rewards him with a last wring at both, his resulting shudder flipping a final drop of come from his cock that feels as if it’s made of acid, and then turns the cock machine off again.

Sephiroth breathes raggedly, leaning on his bonds. He lets them hold him up rather than straining against him; Vincent’s right, he doesn’t want to fight. He sits quietly, swimming in a world of ever-shifting waves of pain to pleasure to pain, shoulders and hips and knees aching, body wrapped about a rubber cock so tightly at this point that he thinks it would stay in even if the machine wasn’t holding it there. He’d stay here even if he wasn’t bound.

But he is, and it’s easier, being bound. When Vincent pulls away his collar and then replaces it with the firm hold of the posture collar, Sephiroth lets his chin drop into its cradle and then sinks back on his knees as the new collar is fixed to the crossbar. He does shudder, when the cock machine resumes pumping into him, but the collar and the cuffs and the thigh straps all pull at him till he lets out a breathless moan and settles into their grip.

“Like this,” Vincent says, his fingers, sweetly cool, running over Sephiroth’s fevered brow. He comes around to stand in front of Sephiroth this time, and as Sephiroth warms the fly of his trousers with raspy pants, he undoes it and takes his cock out. “Like this.”

Sephiroth opens his mouth and then the world flickers in and out because his eyes are fluttering shut, as Vincent slides his cock across Sephiroth’s tongue. Then it goes dark and he relaxes, letting the cock round out his cheeks and dip into his throat. He starts to suck but Vincent taps the side of his jaw and he stops, not complaining, only holding the man’s cock; the cock in him is still working away but he’s reached a weary equilibrium with it, accepting that all he can do is be fucked.

He's not sure how long Vincent stands there, but when the man finally taps his jaw again, Sephiroth startles in place, feeling as if he’s been dreaming for decades. The cock machine burrows roughly against his prostate and he pulls off Vincent a little, then suckles urgently as all his aches suddenly come back to life. Vincent grunts, one hand coming down to grab at his right shoulder, and then leans down. “Come,” he says.

Sephiroth comes and as he does, the cock machine falls still again and this time, he somehow feels, it’s not going to restart. So he sags against the bonds and simply keeps his jaw relaxed, letting Vincent fuck into his mouth till he tastes the man spilling down his throat. Vincent hangs over him for a few seconds, then pulls out and wipes a few drops of come off his cheek and onto his tongue for him to lap up.

He's given a little water, and then Vincent cradles his head in both hands, studying him. Vincent’s thumbs rub absently at the skin just before his ears, just along the edges of his hairline. “Such a natural slave,” Vincent finally says, his lips curling up as Sephiroth licks his lips, shivering. “You want to be used to this point, where even your abilities can’t hold up.”

Sephiroth licks his lips again, slowing his tongue when he sees Vincent’s eyes tracking it. “Please,” he rasps. “Please—you said—”

“I said I’d take you along, and keep you here with my tools—what I actually use for work,” Vincent says, one brow arching as he rubs his thumbs up over Sephiroth’s temples. “Used and marked—if I mark you now, it’s going to last till morning, even with your healing. That’s why you’re a natural. I’m not punishing you, I’m doing it because I like you like this, how you’re going to look, and you want that, don’t you?”

A shudder, and then Sephiroth nods as if it’s even necessary. “Please.”

Vincent smiles again, then steps back. When he returns, he has a short whip with him. Sephiroth is still trembling from his climax, exhausted and weak, his fingers hanging limply from their cuffs, but Vincent doesn’t spare him: the whip cracks deeply into his left shoulderblade, its force and not his reaction what sets him swaying in his bonds. The pain of the blow scores deeply into him, digging through unresisting muscle to settle into a hot simmer against his bones...and then Vincent strikes him again, one inch lower.

Three over each shoulder blade, and then another three angling down each pectoral, stopping just short of his nipples. Then Vincent walks behind him, skipping his lower back and lashing him down each buttock, finishing one before moving to the other. The stripes feel as if they’re tilting in a swirl and when Vincent’s done, Sephiroth realizes the center is his hole as it spasms around the rubber cock still buried in it. He’s squirming as Vincent comes in front of him again, but the strikes to his inner thighs stop that, leaving him shivering in place when the whip is finally dropped.

“I think you’ve come enough,” Vincent says as he squats down.

Sephiroth sees what’s in his hand now and whines helplessly, because there’s no need for the cock cage. He’s wrung out and he couldn’t come if—but Vincent doesn’t want to make him now. Vincent wants to fit him with the metal rings, bitingly cold against his overwarm, sore flesh, and then to thread his cock with the hollow rod. More rings are settled about his ball sac, stretching it out from his body; Vincent spends a few minutes playing with him, rubbing and flicking at the sensitizing balls as one of the few untouched spots on his body is rapidly tortured to match the rest of him. Then the man stands up and gets the piercing kit.

“Please,” Sephiroth gasps, as Vincent ruthlessly flicks his nipples till they go from sore to agonizingly hot.

“I’m going to make you look like a slave,” Vincent says as he opens the kit. “You’ve been used and now I need to work. So I’m going to put you away, till I want to use you again.”

Sephiroth closes his eyes again, moaning as each nipple is clamped. He opens them when a sharp weight tugs at both, to find that not only are they pierced but that Vincent’s clipped a leash to them. The leash pools on the floor, its swing an ever-present torment as Vincent unties Sephiroth from the frame and then pulls the cock out of him.

He’s hollow. Vincent holds him back by the waist as he slumps against the man, his unbound arms jerking down to his sides as the blood races back into them. His body twists painfully against the emptiness in him but Vincent holds him down, one hand rubbing at his thigh, till the edge of it has softened.

And then the man pulls on the leash. Sephiroth stumbles after him into the bathroom, never quite straightening, and then sinks with relief onto the floor again. Vincent doesn’t force him into the shower but runs a wet and then a dry towel over him. When he catches Sephiroth trying to suck at the towel, he stops and gets Sephiroth some water.

Then he wipes Sephiroth’s face dry. Once he’s dropped the towel, he reaches behind and pulls the cloth bag off Sephiroth’s hair, letting it unravel down Sephiroth’s back. The sudden wash of it over his welted skin makes Sephiroth twitch and then groan, pressing his face against Vincent’s leg; he feels oddly—naked, as if his unfurling hair has somehow stripped one final layer away from him. Irrational, but…he doesn’t want to think about it. He shrugs his hair off his shoulders and kneels till Vincent tugs the leash again.

Vincent has him climb onto the bed, and then ties the leash to the bedframe. There’s enough slack for him to move freely about the bed and he pushes after Vincent a few inches as the man starts to move away. Vincent pauses, then chuckles and reaches over to cup Sephiroth’s jaw. He kisses Sephiroth, pressing Sephiroth’s head back into the mattress as he buckles another leather collar around Sephiroth’s throat. Not a posture collar, but a thicker one than the first, strong enough to feel as if it could close off Sephiroth’s windpipe if the man only buckled a little tighter.

“It hurts,” Sephiroth murmurs. “Inside.”

“When it stops, I’ll fuck you,” Vincent promises. He slides his hand down Sephiroth’s neck and shoulder, then pulls Sephiroth’s arm up. Then he holds his hand there till Sephiroth rolls the other one up alongside it. “Don’t touch yourself. If I have to tie you up to do it, I’m going to do it like I just did, and it’s going to be even longer before you get my cock in you.”

Sephiroth makes a protesting noise, but he’s already falling asleep, his head drooping into the bed as a hand runs softly through his hair.

When he wakes, he aches. It’s deep-rooted, rough fingers spreading out from a heavy knot up at the base of his spine that seems to drop towards the earth every time he moves, keeping him from lifting more than his head and one limb at a time from the bed.

Vincent’s sitting at the desk, one leg crooked to brace its foot against the desk leg as he frowns at a tablet. There’s a pitcher of water and a single, half-drunk glass on the desk, but otherwise nothing else new; Sephiroth’s clothes are gone and the floor is clean. The metal frame is still there, as well as the empty ankle cuffs and thigh straps.

Sephiroth lies there for a while, watching the other man. When he’d first started to move, Vincent’s hand had stilled on the tablet, but then it’d begun to flick over the screen again as fatigue had pulled Sephiroth back down to the mattress. Vincent occasionally takes sips from the glass, but otherwise seems preoccupied with whatever he’s working on. It’s not till the tablet itself chimes quietly that Vincent grunts, turns it off, and pushes back from the desk. He twists a little at the waist, shaking out a cramp, and then rises and comes over to the side of the bed.

He doesn’t say, only looks, but Sephiroth slides up onto his forearms and crawls to him, dipping down under the hand Vincent runs through his hair. The strands tickle and loop across his back, brushing up the occasional sting as they fall across the still-live welts that decorate his body. His nipples are very tender but he doesn’t try to pick up the leash from where it’s dragging at them; when Vincent does, Sephiroth presses his head into the man’s other hand and moans even before the leash tautens, tweaking at the piercings.

“Let’s see where it hurts,” Vincent says softly, as his hand leaves Sephiroth’s hair and then tests the welts.

He presses his knuckles into the ones striping Sephiroth’s shoulders and ass, making Sephiroth pant, mouth now braced against his hip. When he finds one not sore enough, he pulls the hair away and then refreshes it with a sharp slap from the leash. Sephiroth’s shaking by the time he tugs down on the leash, urging Sephiroth back down onto the bed and then over onto now-throbbing welts.

Vincent runs his fingers along the raw pink marks ornamenting Sephiroth’s pectorals and inner thighs. He seems to find these still sensitive enough, but flicks his claw tips over Sephiroth’s bound scrotum, grazing them between the metal rings as Sephiroth twists against the bed. Sephiroth’s mouth falls open on its own, so when Vincent reaches back and frees his cock, he only has to cant his hips a little to have it drop between Sephiroth’s lips.

“Good,” Vincent says once Sephiroth’s brought him off, and the low rumble of his voice sends a long, deliciously aching shiver through Sephiroth.

He rubs his thumb across Sephiroth’s mouth, then pulls Sephiroth’s arms up off the bed. After lining up the forearms, he laces a binder around them, wrist to elbow, before letting Sephiroth’s arms drop back against his body. The impact of them is not very hard, but it’s still enough to make Sephiroth writhe in place, feeling it ricochet through him and stir up fresh waves of soreness.

“Vincent,” he murmurs as Vincent starts to turn. He rolls onto his side, then pushes himself up on his arms, rubbing his head against Vincent’s hip again as Vincent plays with his hair. “It hurts, please—at least put something in me.”

The fingers in his hair abruptly tighten, pulling his head back against the bed. Vincent gazes down at him, not angry; on the contrary, the man’s lips are lifted in languid pleasure as he watches Sephiroth twist against his grip.

“I might let you earn that,” Vincent finally says, and then turns his hand a little, pulling Sephiroth’s head the other way as Sephiroth bobs towards the man’s crotch. “No, not that way—get off the bed.”

Sephiroth sucks his breath, then pushes himself up. His limbs are sluggish and want to press against the floor, but when Vincent takes up the leash, he clearly expects Sephiroth to walk. They go into the bathroom and Vincent has Sephiroth piss, breath shuddering through teeth as that dribbles out through the sounding rod. Then he leads Sephiroth back out and between the ankle cuffs.

He ties Sephiroth’s legs in place, then slips his hand between Sephiroth’s legs and teases where the thigh straps are chafing, working the flesh from pink to deep red. Sephiroth digs his nails into his belly, and when Vincent finally stops, he notices that and rebinds Sephiroth’s arms behind him, then takes them by the wrists and brushes them against Sephiroth’s buttocks till the welts there are stinging hotly from being rasped over. Then he finally stops, instead straightening Sephiroth’s hands so they fold flat against each other and wedging them between the buttocks, right up against Sephiroth’s hole. He attaches a chain to the binder and then to the floor to keep them there, pressed tight over the hole.

It's a tease and a declaration of intent, and has Sephiroth squirming, his recovering cock now trying to swell against its remorseless metal prison as Vincent ducks back into the bathroom. When the man comes out, he has a small container of a lightly oily salve with him, which scents the air strongly with menthol as soon as it’s opened. Sephiroth jerks against his bonds, realizing what’s going to happen—uselessly, as the little he can shift doesn’t stop Vincent from generously daubing the salve over him.

Thick coats of it, along the line of each welt, pleasingly cool at first but rapidly escalating into an icy burning as the menthol absorbs into his skin. It’s as close to the bite of Nibelheim ice as is possible here, and it leaves Sephiroth twisting and turning on his knees, rocking this way and that as Vincent merely works around his struggles.

He runs out of energy and slumps between the metal frame, trembling, as Vincent walks around him. Vincent’s kind enough to gather up his hair and sling it over the crossbar, pulling it away from his twitching skin—only to then knock it off as the man passes behind him. Sephiroth cries out as the strands flop and slide against his still-smarting marks, then subsides into a daze as Vincent strokes the side of his face.

He's given a few caresses before Vincent returns to the desk. Vincent refills the glass and then comes over to give Sephiroth a few gulps, but then goes back to his work, sitting down and studying the tablet as Sephiroth, neglected and put aside, tilts his head back against the crossbar and pants.

Eventually the menthol wears off. The sweat on Sephiroth’s skin dries, leaving it a little tight with salt crusts, tight and dry, while the tip of his cock grows sticky with the precome welling out of it. A small pool of it forms on the floor and when he sees it, he finds himself licking his lips hungrily, a sudden, desperate craving knotting up his belly.

“Vincent,” he says, and as intent as the man seems, he immediately turns. “Please—I need to—I need to eat.”

He’s half-expecting Vincent to smile and turns away, but instead Vincent gets up and comes over. A mewling noise slips out of Sephiroth’s mouth and Vincent reaches out, sliding two fingers between Sephiroth’s lips and then pulling them out as Sephiroth tries to suck at them.

Then he walks out of the room. Sephiroth groans helplessly, but hasn’t even mustered up the energy to flex against his bonds when Vincent comes back in with a small stack of familiar metal tins. The man pulls his chair around, produces chopsticks, and proceeds to feed Sephiroth from one tin after another. He keeps the bites small even as Sephiroth initially snatches them off the chopsticks, hunger making him messy and wolfish. When the edge fades and Sephiroth slows, he wipes Sephiroth’s mouth off and then continues to tidbit Sephiroth till Sephiroth stops leaning forward for each mouthful.

“Drink,” he says, putting a glass of water to Sephiroth’s lips.

Sephiroth drains it, letting the water swirl about his mouth before swallowing it. When his mouth is cleansed, Vincent stands up and then takes his cock out again, feeding it between Sephiroth’s lips as delicately as he had the bits of food.

“Slower,” he says as Sephiroth starts to suckle at him.

The food’s starting to digest and a comfortable haze is taking Sephiroth over again. He settles back on his knees, never minding how they’re bruising against the hard floor, and works his mouth and throat lazily around Vincent’s prick. Something brushes against his right leg and he doesn’t even stir, noting it but accepting it.

The touch comes again, not any harder but lasting longer, weaving up over the top of his thigh and then flicking teasingly at the welted inner side. That makes him shift, chin tilting up as he stifles a moan. Vincent curls a hand under his jaw, helping, and continues to touch him—not with his other hand but with his tail, its loops rubbing and snaking around Sephiroth’s body in lightly possessive caresses. Over and between each leg, then around his waist before uncoiling to bump past his bound cock and balls; he squirms at that, whining about Vincent’s cock, and the tail glides up his perineum to nudge tauntingly at his fingertips.

Then it withdraws, and for a moment Sephiroth is untouched. It returns to his front, slithering up his chest to tangle in his nipple chains, pulling at them as he sucks harder at Vincent’s cock, finally bringing the man over. The tail hangs in the chains, an almost unbearable weight, before abruptly pulling free and leaving Sephiroth to gasp as Vincent rakes a hand through his hair and pulls him off the man’s prick.

Vincent looks at him for a moment. Then lets go of his hair and steps behind him. The chain on his arms is loosened and Vincent’s finger works between his buttocks, slicked up with—Sephiroth hitches when he smells the menthol. But it’s too late, Vincent’s already spreading the stuff deep into him, and as he whimpers against the freezing bite of it, the man pushes a plug in.

His arms are rechained, his own hands holding the plug in place, with too little slack to bend up his fingers and pluck at it. He strains against the ankle cuffs and thigh straps for a few minutes before giving up, the fresh prickle of his chafed inner thighs fighting with the ice of the salve for the honor of making him sway. The emptiness is done away with but he’s suffering for it.

By the time Vincent finally relents, Sephiroth has bent over his knees, folding himself as close to the floor as he can. Vincent has to haul him up by the waist to take him to the bathroom, where the man steps into the tiny stall with him. The lack of space means Sephiroth has to drape over the man but he doesn’t mind it, needing the support even with his limbs fully unbound—especially that way, his arms doing little more than shaking under the spray as Vincent washes him.

Eventually Vincent lets him slide to his knees, bowing his head as handfuls of foam are massaged through his hair. He nuzzles blindly between Vincent’s legs, grateful for the feeling of filth being stripped away, but Vincent pushes his jaw back. So he lets the man do what he wants.

He’s still plugged, his cock and balls still locked with metal. When he’s told to relieve himself after the shower, the rod in his cock and the plug between his buttocks make him feel full even as he sees the water in the toilet bowl yellow and it’s disorienting, the disconnect. It keeps him quiet and dazed as Vincent puts the collar back on him—taken off for the shower—and then leashes him back to the bed.

Vincent keeps him that way for an unclear amount of time. If he’s in the bed, he’s sleeping. If he’s not in the bed, he’s kneeling and strapped to the frame, his mouth on offer and the rest of his body there only to be tormented. His cock’s kept soft and speared through with the rod, his hole stretched, his nipples stiff and sore around their piercings. Sometimes Vincent pulls up the chair and lavishes him with attention, but sometimes Vincent’s ignoring him entirely as he shivers and gasps softly in his bonds.

At one point Vincent blindfolds him so he doesn’t even know if the man is working or not, or even in the room—Vincent can be quiet enough so that he could have slipped away and left Sephiroth alone, tied up and helpless, with blindingly casual confidence that no one is going to find him here and he’s not going to free himself. The thought of that has Sephiroth so drunk with arousal that he doesn’t realize Vincent’s returned till a second after the man’s filled his mouth with cock.

He eats tied to the frame. Vincent milks him twice, his body shaking violently as come streams out of him, but even then he feels stretched and stuffed, unable to fully relieve himself and aching all over with it. He almost forgets what it’s like to exist any other way.

When the outside world finally intrudes again, he’s sprawled across the bed, turned half-onto one hip to keep from rolling onto his caged cock as Vincent has him service the man. His hands are cuffed together in front of him, and his leash is threaded through the joining links so that any struggles will pull on the nipple chains. He’s been licking Vincent’s prick for a while, waiting for the fingers slowly dragging through his hair to speed up or clench, but, as freely as said cock is dripping precome, Vincent seems in no rush. Those fingers are just sliding over the back of his head when Vincent speaks.

“You’re going to have to get on with Lazard and Zack for a few minutes,” Vincent says. His fingers continue through Sephiroth’s hair, running down onto the nape where they curl to scratch lightly along the hairline. “Rhapsodos was detained in Banora—legitimately. Tseng already sent a team down.”

Sephiroth stops licking and rests his cheek against Vincent’s leg. He feels for a moment as if he’s pushed his head through a thick sheet—as if he’s been deep underwater and then has had to force his head up, and now the contrasting air is thin and weak and nevertheless a slap in the face.

Vincent’s nails dig a little into his neck and he glances up at the other man. His frustration must be showing because Vincent’s fingers shift to cover the back of his neck, gripping him firmly over his collar.

“Tseng’s going to be by after that for a couple hours, to go over a few things,” Vincent says, as he calmly starts to wind the leash up around his hand. He lets Sephiroth hiss and arch, and then draw up after the taut piece of leather, till Sephiroth is leaning his hands against Vincent’s belly, elbows on the man’s thighs, piercings pulled out to just hang on the edge of pain by their chains. “You knew about Tseng.”

“I remember,” Sephiroth mutters. He swallows reluctantly upon hearing how gravelly he sounds. “Lazard should be able—he’s been dealing with damned politicians his entire life, he should know by now—”

Vincent takes the leash in a little more, barely enough to make a breathless whine slip from Sephiroth’s lips. Then he bends down and presses his mouth to Sephiroth’s temple. “I’ll make you like it,” he promises. “Be useful, so I’ll fuck you.”

Sephiroth shudders under the man’s lips, his fingers folding down against Vincent’s shirt. “You’ve kept me waiting.”

“You’re still going to wait,” Vincent says as he lifts his head. “We have another day and a half.”

That throws Sephiroth, knowing the time again, and he’s slow to follow the man off the bed so Vincent slaps the leash across his buttocks. He shudders again, then lets Vincent seat him in the room’s only chair, the leash draped over his lap as the other man straps back his arms. Not to the chair—he won’t have the burden of trying not to break it—but to each other across his back. His collar is removed and his uniform coat is tucked over his shoulders, pulled carefully to hide the nipple piercings and the still-fading welts above them. Vincent puts the ankle cuffs on him and then positions the chair to face a tablet set up on the table to film him only from the shoulders up.

And then Vincent settles between his legs. Sephiroth manages one gasp before the video feed stabilizes, allowing himself that as Vincent’s tongue wraps about his cock, wiggling warm and wet between the rings binding it. To Lazard and Zack Sephiroth looks himself—to anyone merely walking by, he looks like the general and the man between his feet the slave, but every teasing flick of Vincent’s tongue reminds him otherwise.

He gets through the damned call without letting his voice break, but it takes all of his concentration to do so. Vincent laves him over unceasingly, tracing between each ring of the cage and then drawing back to winkle his tongue-tip about Sephiroth’s cock slit, probing where the sounding rod has it stretched, sore and too-sensitive, each little lick feeling like a scorching lash of the whip. Sephiroth presses his shoulders back against the chair to keep them still, but below his thighs are shaking so hard that Vincent eventually grips his ankle cuffs to keep them from rattling.

When the call’s finally over, he slumps heavily forward, his ass sliding to nearly come off the seat. This jostles the plug in him and he cries out but can’t hold himself, merely riding the white-hot bursts in his body until Vincent catches his shins. The other man pulls him out of the chair, leaving his coat to flop over its seat, and onto his knees where he sways till Vincent stands and puts his prick in Sephiroth’s mouth to steady him.

“You liked that,” Vincent says, petting his hair as he sucks the man off. “Liked being used—for sex, for work, for anything. You just like being used.”

Sephiroth groans and rests his head against the man’s thigh. Vincent lets him for a few minutes, till the taste of the man’s come is starting to fade off Sephiroth’s tongue, and then pulls him up. He’s taken to the bathroom, made to relieve himself, and then fed some iced juice before they return to the bed.

He’s curled up against Vincent, his coat slung over him so that only his head and feet are showing, when footsteps start down the staircase. A small part of Sephiroth thinks that these are deliberately loud and paced, and then Vincent reaches under the coat and takes his cock in hand and he stops thinking.

His arms have been re-bound, wrists cuffed before him and the leash threaded through the links again, but this time Vincent’s put his collar back on and pulled the leash up through the ring at its front. Sephiroth has to press his hands against his chest or torture his own nipples; he ends up doing both as Vincent presses a thumb over his cock head, twisting his head into the man’s shoulder to hide his panting.

“Pretend you’re asleep,” Vincent murmurs, and then, as the steps approach the room, he starts to tease the rod out of Sephiroth’s cock.

Sephiroth has absolutely no memory of what Vincent and Tseng say to each other. He hears them talk, and he’s quite sure Tseng knows what’s really happening, but his world narrows to the length of metal inching out of him, and the sudden, steeply unbearable increase of pressure behind it. It’s all he can do to not buck into Vincent’s hand, and he can feel his toes trembling as they try to curl up—Tseng has to be able to see that, he thinks as he muffles his gasping in Vincent’s chest.

The last part of the rod tips out of him and Sephiroth feels a spasm starting in his cock, bruising up against the enclosing cage. He shifts his hips once—not very much, but he thinks he feels the coat start to slide and he bites down on his lip.

Vincent’s voice changes. The coat’s pinned to Sephiroth’s shoulder by his hand, and then his other hand moves to work about the base of the cage, loosening it. Sephiroth can’t stop himself now and jerks sharply up against the other man, whining desperately as he feels the bars pull off of his flesh. His balls are pushed free, immediately clenching up tightly against his body, and then his cock rolls away from Vincent’s fingers. He feels the leather of his coat enveloping it, too rough, and his hips stutter in a violent climax. He only just keeps himself from pulling out the nipple piercings.

As it is, they’re agonizingly tender when Vincent lowers him to the bed. His coat brushes over them as well and he gasps, then curls forward over his arms and presses his face into the mattress. Vincent’s hand rubs across the back of his neck, slow and soothing, before the coat’s tucked down around his head.

The bed dips and then rises slowly as Vincent leaves it. Sephiroth’s cocooned in his own coat, leather sticking up against his leg where his come has streaked it. He can smell it mixing with the musk-thick scent of the leather, but he doesn’t try to push his head out. It’s strangely peaceful in the dark, close space, even with the throbbing in his nipples and the nagging, sore press of the plug in him.

He's lying there for a while, dozing, and then he stirs as someone comes back into the room. It’s like resting under Vincent’s wings in the mountains, and that thought occurs to them just as the man himself pushes the coat off of his head.

Sephiroth continues to lie in place, in a light daze, as Vincent brushes his fingers across Sephiroth’s cheek and then along his jaw. They gather up some sweat that Sephiroth tastes when Vincent strokes his lips; he pushes his head out a little then, nursing the man’s fingertips.

“Do you want to come upstairs?” Vincent asks.

“…Tseng?” Sephiroth dredges out of his memory.

Vincent chuckles as his hand runs under Sephiroth’s chin and then comes to the collar. He loosely hooks one finger around the leash, stirring a sharp inhale out of Sephiroth, and then unclips it from the collar. “Leaving after dinner. Do you want him this time?”

Sephiroth thinks about it, and then shakes his head. “I want you to fuck me,” he says, as Vincent rolls up the leash and draws him out from under the coat, across the bed. “It still hurts, but…”

“Well, I can still fuck you,” Vincent says, and laughs again when Sephiroth blinks at him. “I can change my mind. But I want you to tell me now, how you want me to fuck you. I want to hear it.”

This is too much, Sephiroth almost says, as he struggles to even rise up on his forearms. He’s panting and when Vincent puts his hand back under Sephiroth’s chin, he’s grateful for the support. He leans against the other man, chin propped on Vincent’s shoulder, as Vincent drops his arm around Sephiroth’s waist so its hand cups casually but deliberately over the end of the plug.

“Upstairs or downstairs,” Vincent murmurs in Sephiroth’s ear. “You’ll have to dress a little, for upstairs.”

The idea of clothing feels entirely too burdensome at the moment, and Sephiroth almost says ‘downstairs’ simply for that. But then his eyes wander over his coat, and where it’s flipped over so the light catches the come stains. His coat—if he didn’t know better, he’d think Vincent resented SOLDIER, always finding ways to ruin his uniform that highlight how much he’s really not a powerful, decorated general to the man.

Not a general. A slave and a plaything, Sephiroth thinks, and shivers even before Vincent nips lightly at his earlobe. “Are you going to make me like it upstairs?”

Vincent nips him again, harder, so he remembers the fangs the man can wear when it suits Vincent. “We still have a day. I’m not letting you forget what you are, or why I brought you here, Sephiroth. But it’s easy down here, isn’t it—pretending where it’s not likely for anyone to see you.”

“I don’t want you to make it easy. I want you to make me like it,” Sephiroth says after a moment, and then rubs his mouth against Vincent’s throat as Vincent twists his hand, one finger at a time, in Sephiroth’s hair. “Dress me like you want, let Tseng watch. I want him to watch you make me like it. Make me follow around after you on a leash, wishing your cock was in me…and fuck me when he’s gone. Down here or up there, it doesn’t matter, but when you fuck me, I want you to do it like I am the kind of slave you just keep to use up.”

There’s a small pause in Vincent’s breathing, not quite sharp enough to be a catch, but noticeable. Sephiroth’s pleased with himself, given how absurdly composed Vincent always is—Vincent pulls away and sees and then smiles so that the satisfaction fades out of Sephiroth, to be replaced with tingling anticipation.

“Then come,” Vincent says, pulling Sephiroth off the bed by the leash. He doesn’t wait for Sephiroth, hips jerking at that word, that tone, to steady himself, but keeps Sephiroth stumbling all the way to the bathroom.

This time Sephiroth’s not allowed to wash himself. He goes on his hands and knees as Vincent scrubs him down, his gasps and moans drowning in the water. Vincent gives his nipples and his cock and balls—both still bearing marks from the cages—extra attention, so when he’s finally pushed out to drip onto a towel, the trickles running down his thighs are a little cloudy from fresh come.

Once the water’s squeezed from his hair, Vincent braids it back into a single thick plait that slithers over his back as Vincent dresses him. The collar goes back on, and then a chest harness that Sephiroth hasn’t worn before, with straps that loop under his arms and then cross his upper back like a sidearm harness. Another strap links them in the front, stretching across the tops of his pectorals, and then connecting straps down his breastbone and spine link to a strap that bands him just below the nipples. The lower strap carries rings across Sephiroth’s back, for lacing to a binder, but Vincent ties his forearms in front of him.

He leans on the sink counter, gripping its rim, as Vincent tugs a leather sleeve over Sephiroth’s cock, then attaches it to straps that run around Sephiroth’s waist. The sleeve completely covers his prick and has additional flaps that cup over his balls, pulling everything neatly between his legs when Vincent buckles a strap just behind the cock head, over the sleeve, and then pulls it back between his thighs. Usually Vincent uses a latex sleeve for this; the leather is thicker and compresses Sephiroth more tightly, as Vincent draws the strap up snugly between his buttocks, sealing the plug away as well. Two thigh cuffs are locked on and then connected with a chain just long enough for Sephiroth to take half-strides.

Vincent pulls Sephiroth away from the counter and then circles Sephiroth’s nipples a few times with his thumbs, sensitizing them before he clips the leash back onto them. He kisses Sephiroth through it, swallowing the mewling noises Sephiroth makes, and then pulls the leash so taut that Sephiroth’s pressing into the man and the piercings are still aching.

“I’m not going to gag you,” Vincent tells him. “You’re used to this, you know what I want.”

Sephiroth swallows, then nuzzles down the side of Vincent’s face. For a moment Vincent permits it, and then he pushes Sephiroth back by the chest and turns away.

He walks Sephiroth upstairs, into the kitchen. Tseng is tied to one of the chairs, his suit carelessly pulled open but left on him, sweat-stained patches of it wrinkling out from the ropes wrapped about his body. He’s blindfolded and gagged but Vincent pulls the blindfold off as he pushes Sephiroth to kneel before him.

Tseng blinks heavily, and then stops blinking as he takes them in. He doesn’t move an inch as Vincent loops Sephiroth’s leash around the flushed, weeping cock standing out from his open trousers, although his breath goes thin and wheezing at times. There’s already a cockring on him and Vincent doesn’t pull the leash tight; it’s almost as if he’s using Tseng as a coathook. He doesn’t push Sephiroth’s head towards Tseng’s cock either, but instead positions Sephiroth at an angle so he can look at Tseng if he wants, but he’s more naturally looking at the kitchen counter to the side.

Then Vincent steps back. He unbuttons his cuffs and rolls his sleeves to the elbow, then starts to prepare dinner. Sephiroth has done this before, waiting on him, and settles back on his heels, preferring to watch Vincent rather than the man now starting to rock and twist next to him. It is a little surprising, that Tseng is fidgeting, but then Vincent pauses in the middle of stripping leaves off a cabbage head and takes out his phone. When he swipes at it, Tseng bucks roughly enough to make Sephiroth’s leash jitter, stirring a moan out of Sephiroth.

Vincent glances over his shoulder, then sighs and puts both phone and cabbage down. He leaves whatever’s in Tseng on a setting that makes the man increasingly vocal as he picks up Sephiroth’s leash and tugs Sephiroth—who never gets off his knees—over to the counter. Once the leash is looped through a cabinet handle, Vincent resumes his work.

Unusually, he has Sephiroth help with a few parts. The kitchen here is smaller than the one in their quarters, and when Vincent runs out of space, he hands Sephiroth a bowl of soaking mushrooms to hold for a few minutes. He dips a finger into a sauce he’s mixing and then lets Sephiroth suck it clean and murmur that there isn’t enough salt.

Once he’s shifted over to the stove, this ceases and Sephiroth merely kneels for him. Vincent finishes two dishes and slides them onto the table, then puts a lid on the last pan on the stove and walks back to Sephiroth. He takes the leash off the cabinet and pulls Sephiroth to Tseng, who’s gasping wordlessly, knees sprawled against the ropes. Then he leans over, takes off the cock ring, and holds Tseng’s cock to the man’s belly with two fingers as the man comes in a flurry of jerking limbs.

Tseng finally subsides and Vincent straightens back up. His hand swings down to his side and Sephiroth dips his head to meet it, with two fingers half-sucked into his mouth when Vincent glances down. The side of Vincent’s mouth rises and he pushes his fingers further into Sephiroth’s mouth, letting Sephiroth lap off the come. He drops the leash on the floor and pulls Tseng’s chair up to the table, then sits down across from Tseng and directs Sephiroth between his legs.

Sephiroth opens his mouth and holds Vincent’s cock in it as Vincent starts to feed Tseng. The two men talk in low tones, Tseng’s voice gradually losing its scratchy edge. They’re discussing an odd ballistics analysis Tseng received on an apparent gangland scuffle from a few weeks ago; Sephiroth’s aware of the matter but it didn’t have any signs that merited SOLDIER involvement. It’s somewhat interesting anyway, and he listens the same way he keeps half an ear on canteen chatter among the rank-and-file SOLDIERs.

Vincent taps his jaw. He blinks, then pulls off Vincent’s cock, expecting the man to get up. Instead Vincent takes up a loop of the leash, forcing Sephiroth to straighten on his knees, and then points it at the pan on the stove. “Bring that,” he says.

He plays out the leash so Sephiroth can rise and find an appropriate dish, and then decant the pan into it, although he keeps it taut enough so that Sephiroth’s nipples are constantly tugged. Sephiroth returns with the dish and Vincent takes it from him to set on the table. This one, he feeds only to Sephiroth; he continues to talk with Tseng for a few minutes but they appear to be winding down their business.

Eventually Vincent reaches over and cuts Tseng free with a few slashes of his claws. Tseng grunts and moves about on the chair behind Sephiroth, then asks if he can shower and change. “It’s your house,” Vincent says, clearly amused, as he pulls a glass of water away from Sephiroth’s mouth.

Tseng doesn’t reply but Sephiroth senses both embarrassment and lingering arousal as the man steps out of the room. Vincent’s already turned away, bending over Sephiroth as he reaches for Sephiroth’s arms. Sephiroth lifts them so Vincent can undo their binder, then folds over to let the man rebind his arms behind him, lacing them tightly to the chest harness’ lower back strap.

Vincent pulls him up by his hair again, then has him drink more water before letting him take the man’s cock into his mouth again. He’s still holding it when Tseng comes back out, bidding Vincent—and only Vincent, although there’s an uncertain pause where Sephiroth is certain the man is looking at him—farewell. Then Tseng leaves.

“So well-trained,” Vincent says, petting Sephiroth’s cheek.

Then he slides his hand across the back of Sephiroth’s neck. He pulls Sephiroth off his cock and then squeezes his hand, holding Sephiroth by the collar, as his foot slides between Sephiroth’s knees and then pushes roughly up against the leather cocksleeve. Sephiroth whimpers and rocks roughly across the man’s shoe, then drops his head to mouth at Vincent’s knee when Vincent gives the leash a sharp snap, whipping up the nipple chains.

“Get up,” Vincent says.

Sephiroth gets up, then turns and bends over the kitchen table.

“Spread,” Vincent says.

Sephiroth’s feet slide far apart, flattening him against the table. He cants his ass up as Vincent unhooks the strap between his buttocks, then shudders as he feels the plug pulling out of him. It’s been in so long it feels a little like it’s being uprooted, his flesh trying to cling to it. A finger swabs some lube into him, and then Vincent fucks him.

Hard and rough and fast, his cock still tightly sheathed in leather. He’s barely started to shake from its needy throbbing when Vincent finishes. A hand presses down on his back and he grunts but stays put.

Vincent moves around him, picking up dishes and pushing chairs. Then the sink water runs as the man cleans up the kitchen. Taking his time about it, while come leaks slowly out of Sephiroth’s hole, while precome starts to well up about Sephiroth’s cock head in the leather sleeve. Sephiroth humps himself a few times against the edge of the table, but that only smears the dampness around inside of the sleeve, making it pull against his skin in a way that twists his arms futilely in their binder.

When Vincent’s finally done, he pulls Sephiroth off the table by the hair, then switches to the leash to lead Sephiroth back downstairs. They stop outside of the room and Vincent pushes Sephiroth up against the wall by the back of the neck, then tests his hole with two fingers, wetted with spit rather than lube. Sephiroth gasps and arches, the constant ache in him spiking as Vincent rubs half-dried come out of the way.

Vincent pulls him off the wall, then pushes him into the room. He goes on his knees by the ankle cuffs, but Vincent tugs on the leash and he crawls to the bed, hauling himself up to fold over it as the other man slides two fingers back into him. This time with lube, but Vincent’s rough about stretching him back out and he’s chafing his sleeved cock against the edge of the bed by the time Vincent puts both hands on his hips. His nipples feel so swollen from being rubbed over the bed that he tries to hold his chest up.

That lasts only as long as Vincent’s first push into him, forcing him down into the mattress so that the sheet is swabbing the spit out of his mouth. He squirms, nipples burning, sore hole clutching mindlessly at Vincent’s cock, but Vincent ignores all that and steadily fucks into him, deep stroke after stroke. It’s like the cock machine again, he thinks, and then the comparison is entirely broken as Vincent rams into him, fucking him not just with a cock but with an entire body, pinning his hips and biting his shoulders and crushing down his back. The machine was using him, this is fucking him.

Sephiroth goes weak under the other man, despite the needy throb of his sleeved cock, the burning in his wrenched shoulders and knees. Vincent mouths at his throat and shoulders, little sparks of pain dancing up from the bite marks they’re being littered with, sparks that then wash away in the flood of pleasure that overtakes him every time the man bottoms out. He doesn’t even remember to beg—Vincent eventually reaches around, unprompted, and pulls off the cocksleeve. Not that it matters, since Vincent doesn’t come when he does, and so he’s still being fucked.

He's fucked from weak to lolling, small pained mewls dripping from his lips as Vincent’s cock rakes in and out of him. The feeling of Vincent’s come finally pushing up around the man’s cock isn’t a relief but just another overwhelming sensation on top of everything already shorting his overstimulated body, and he only can lie there and hope it fades. Gasp till it fades.

It’s a little better when Vincent pulls out. Better, but worse, less for him to feel but that ache in him, where the man used to fill him up. His knees twitch up, and then he lets out a long, thankful sigh as Vincent pulls him onto the soft bed and then alongside him. Even if he’s empty, the familiar press of the man’s body, the puff of warm breath stroking his jaw, it all starts to pull his shattered pieces back together.

He noses at the smooth skin under him, only half-aware, and then lets out a ragged moan as he feels himself turned on his side. It hurts inside, he wants to say, except before he can remember language, a cock pushes into him and spreads that out so it’s not hurting, only aching, and ache he wants.

“Needy,” Vincent murmurs, curling up behind him as Sephiroth pushes his buttocks back into the man.

He untied Sephiroth’s arms at some point and pushed them around to flop against the bed. The collar is still on, the leash is not, though the nipple chains linking to it are, and now dangle freely from Sephiroth’s piercings, each link shifting a fresh twist of heat in his abused nipples. Sephiroth starts to push his hands towards them to hold them up, then stops himself. “Please,” he rasps. “You said—a day?”

Vincent kisses the back of his neck. “You have to heal,” he says, though he’s running his hands along Sephiroth’s forearms, reading Sephiroth’s thoughts. He pushes them up towards the headboard, then pulls out cuffs that he buckles around Sephiroth’s wrists, keeping them stretched up as his arm draws back down to where it can toy with the chains. “More like half a day. And I do need to tie things off here that aren’t you.”

He’s naked now, finally undressed; he’s spent this entire time almost completely clothed, at least where Sephiroth could see him. He isn’t moving from this bed any time soon and Sephiroth relaxes back into him, even as he takes one chain and flicks its free end against the nipple to which it’s attached. “Work?” Sephiroth murmurs.

“I was working, Sephiroth,” Vincent says, mildly reproachful. “This might not be an actual field mission but I didn’t schedule the entire time off.”

Sephiroth believes him. With how the man can compartmentalize…his thoughts start to drift, unwilling to deal with work matters yet. But…“What do you do, when you need to?” he wonders, and it’s only a half-idle question.

“You know what I did,” Vincent says after a moment, lips still grazing against Sephiroth’s nape. “I worked till I couldn’t stand to be human, and then I went to my cave for a while.”

Then he’s silent. Sephiroth picked up on the ‘did,’ but curious as he is, he’s reluctant to unsettle them; Vincent might have been working earlier but there’s a note in his voice when he is truly relaxed, one Sephiroth hears very rarely if they’re not in Nibelheim. That composure of his is born out of a strong disregard for others’ opinions, but it’s sometimes a little bit of a mask. Sephiroth’s come to know the man enough to know that, too.

“It took longer,” Vincent adds, unexpected but not abrupt. He sounds thoughtful, but he hasn’t forgotten where they are or what he’s doing, with one finger lazily circling Sephiroth’s right nipple just at the edge of the tender tip. “I’d hunt down anything that I thought might be a hard enough challenge, and tear it apart. I’d eat it too, but that was…secondary. I could bring enough food if I wanted. But it was only violence, so it took longer.”

“Then I’m better,” Sephiroth says.

Vincent snorts, then presses his mouth behind Sephiroth’s ear as his finger presses down on the nipple, making Sephiroth twist on his cock. “Sex is better, yes,” he says, and then he kisses the point of Sephiroth’s jaw as Sephiroth tries to look back at him. “You’re better—I actually want to talk to you. I never wanted to talk, that was the entire point of going there. But…”

He lets the conversation lapse again. Sephiroth drops his head, then feels a tremor rise up through his buttocks as Vincent shifts inside of him. It’s edged with hurt, not the soft blur of their play but the hard razor of pure fatigue, but he doesn’t want to push away from the other man. He tries to breathe through it instead, and something must give him away because Vincent untwines his fingers from the nipple chains and then strokes both hands down Sephiroth’s thighs, firm and grounding.

“Smell,” Vincent says, and then Sephiroth realizes he’d muttered his thought aloud. “I can smell it on you, when it’s only what you want and when it’s true pain.”

“That’s not from hunting animals,” Sephiroth says.

“No—from hunting people,” Vincent says. When Sephiroth arches his head back, Vincent lets out a sigh and then kisses the side of Sephiroth’s throat. “You do what I do long enough…you learn, without having to ask. The genetic enhancements gave me a few more tools, but not the experience. You didn’t smell like others, when you woke up after I pulled you out of the snow. You weren’t terrified at all.”

Sephiroth blinks. “You didn’t try to kill me because of how I smelled?”

“I saw you before I smelled you,” Vincent says, amusement rippling his voice as he keeps his mouth moving down Sephiroth’s throat. “I told you, I recognized you—I had to think about you as a person and I was annoyed, because—”

“That interrupted your vacation,” Sephiroth finishes, as Vincent’s hands abandon his thighs and draw up to cradle his cock and balls. Not doing anything more than that, although even their warmth is a little much against Sephiroth’s still-tingling skin—but too much in a way that Sephiroth wants. “But it was a better vacation with me.”

Vincent laughs against Sephiroth’s shoulder before licking at it. “I enjoy this, Sephiroth,” he says. “This is not work, if that is what you are asking. I don’t have to go to the cave—I still want to, but it’s not a competition.”

Sephiroth wishes for a moment, with an intensity that surprises him, that he was facing the other man for this. Even if he turns his head, his arms are in the way, and he’d have to strain—but he never reads very much from Vincent’s face, he thinks as Vincent tightens his grip over Sephiroth’s cock, nudges himself just a fraction deeper between Sephiroth’s buttocks. There are other cues he reads to understand the man.

And other ways he can get what he wants. “Do you have to get up to finish your tasks?” he asks. “Can you do it from here?”

“Do you want me to ever get out of you?” Vincent says. He moves his hands to Sephiroth’s hips. “How do you want me to work, in that case?”

“In me, of course,” Sephiroth says, and then lets his aches slowly roll down his body, squeezing him around Vincent’s cock till the other man breathes in sharply. “If you have to get something—your tablet—then come back and turn me over.”

“You’re not going to get hard enough for me to sit on your cock,” Vincent says, idly rubbing his fingers over Sephiroth’s hips.

Sephiroth shrugs. “I want to be on your cock, not the other way around,” he says. “Chain my legs out of the way if you want and use me as your desk. I’m much more comfortable than that chair.”

Vincent makes a thoughtful noise, then pulls out of Sephiroth. It’s not quite as bad as before, but it’s still enough to make Sephiroth twist on his own, drawing his legs up as he turns onto his back. He watches Vincent climb off the bed and retrieve the tablet from the desk, as well as a full glass of water, then tries to lift his legs when the other man crawls back onto the mattress.

“You can’t,” Vincent says, teasing, before he puts the glass and tablet aside to pick up Sephiroth’s shaking legs for him.

He doesn’t tie them but they’re so tired they fall open on their own. Vincent mounds the blankets up under them, then slides his hands under Sephiroth’s buttocks, spreading them with his thumbs as he reseats his cock in Sephiroth. He puts the tablet on Sephiroth’s stomach, picks up the glass with one hand, and, ignoring Sephiroth’s slow groan, brings the tablet out of sleep mode.

Sephiroth lets his head fall back against his outstretched arms. Vincent pets at his left thigh, absently, as Sephiroth lets his eyes fall shut and his breathing slow.

Chapter 23: Interlude: The Clothes or the Man

It is something about the uniform, Sephiroth thinks as he slides his boots under his desk, socks stuffed into them. The edge of his coat bunches up over one knee, filling up the gap between it and the desk, and when he goes to push it away, his eyes sweep up and meet Vincent’s.

“Everything but that,” Vincent says, voice even and low. He’s leaning his back against the side of the desk, only half-looking at Sephiroth, his phone in his hand. His other hand is resting on the edge of the desk, and when Sephiroth pauses he clicks its claws impatiently against the metal. “Are you arguing?”

Sephiroth’s shoulders resettle themselves unconsciously, and then he deliberately and irritably rolls them a second time as he shakes his head. He wants this and yet he can’t focus on it yet, too much work and other commitments still nagging at his thoughts as he pushes back on his heels and strips off everything he’s wearing under the coat.

Vincent will see that—has already seen that, and he’ll deal with it. All Sephiroth has to do is leave it to him, and that thought doesn’t…wipe the rest away, but it takes precedence over them as easily as the breath leaving him.

He pushes his trousers down his legs, coiling up his belts into the sagging fabric, then straightens his back as he pulls his feet out of it, one at a time, without rising off his knees. His head does bob high enough to send his hair sliding against Vincent’s coat, and when he feels a tug at that, he pauses again.

Vincent doesn’t say anything. Only combs his fingers through Sephiroth’s hair, slow almost to the point of meditative, and then again, as he continues to look at his phone. Sephiroth can’t help an impatient huff and Vincent’s fingers don’t so much as hitch as he twists them around, scooping up a mass of hair in their curves, and then curls his hand over the back of Sephiroth’s neck.

Sephiroth’s shoulders twitch under the grip and irritation nips at his mood again, only to crumple like paper trash underfoot when Vincent abruptly pulls him forward, forcing his chin to press against the man’s hip as Vincent stares down at him. He stops his hands when they’ve risen a few inches, returning them to his sides as he drags a deep breath into himself, under the other man’s gaze.

“Are you done?” Vincent asks.

Are you almost slips out of Sephiroth’s mouth, what with the phone still in Vincent’s hand—but he stops himself there, too. He can’t hide it—he can see that in Vincent’s eyes, can see that little flick towards the other hand and then the cool assessment under the slight quirk of Vincent’s mouth—but he doesn’t. “Not yet. Tseng finally filed the Turk side and I need to—”

“You need to close your mouth,” Vincent says, soft and steady. His fingers don’t tighten on Sephiroth’s neck; Sephiroth only moves as if they had. He continues to watch Sephiroth with the same knowing calm as always. “If you set a meeting with me, then that is the meeting you’re going to have.”

Sephiroth opens his mouth—not intentionally disobedient, but he does, and before he can seal his lips again, a needy groan comes out of it. Vincent’s lips twist up further at the corners, but nevertheless, he drags Sephiroth’s head back by the hair till Sephiroth is digging his fingers into his hips to keep from digging them into the floor behind them.

He’s held like that till he’s finished groaning, and only ragged pants are coming out now—already, and they’ve barely started. Which amuses Vincent too, when he releases Sephiroth’s hair and then immediately takes hold of it again, twisting the strands together into a tight tail in his hand.

“Up on your chair,” he says. “You’re not ready to take my cock yet.”

Sephiroth feels disappointed, but it’s curiously muted, and when he pushes off his knees, his movements feel heavy but fluid, as if being mediated through something thicker than water. He is ready, he almost thinks—Vincent has that effect on him, effortlessly slicing off the static of the world and leaving him in a pool of quiet. But it’s not his decision either, whether he’s ready, and this wraps around him and then pushes in like steam in a sauna, melting off any protests on his side. Which are only another kind of static, at the end of it all.

He puts his hands on the seat of his chair, but Vincent directs him to turn around, to sit in it rather than to kneel on it. As he does, Vincent walks behind the chair and then threads his hair through the hole in the headrest. The chair’s an older model, thick leather padding spaced out on a steel frame, and he keeps the headrest and arms pulled out to full extension to accommodate his height.

Vincent adjusts that as well, pushing the headrest down so that it’s cradling only the lower back of his head. He finds out why when the man reaches over and pulls his arms up one by one, folding them back so that his elbows point towards the ceiling and his wrists are crossed behind the steel column mounting the headrest, trying to press through it to his nape. He’s bound that way with tape, thick rounds of it about his wrists and then passed around his throat as well, tight enough to tug when he swallows.

“Put your legs up,” Vincent murmurs, setting the roll of tape down on the desk. Then he puts his hands on Sephiroth’s shoulders. He adjusts the set of Sephiroth’s coat, smoothing his fingers over the leather, before letting his hands move further down, stroking across Sephiroth’s chest as Sephiroth brings his feet up onto the edge of the seat. Vincent chuckles, bending to press that against Sephiroth’s left ear, and then flicks hard at Sephiroth’s nipples. “Spread.”

Sephiroth is already hissing, and when his legs jerk apart, they run into the chair arms. The chair rattles in place and he briefly feels Vincent push a leg up against its back to keep it from rolling. Vincent is continuing to play with his nipples, pinching and rolling them as Sephiroth, knowing the couple inches between his thighs isn’t sufficient, levers his legs up over the arms of the chair. The sides of his coat flap awkwardly at his ribs and folds of it bunch up against his back, leather sticking and then peeling away from the sweat already trickling down his body.

Vincent reaches around and pulls his coat away from his back. Then tugs it here and there, straightening it out behind him, like it’s a—a tablecloth, part of the display the man is setting up. The room’s A/C is already sending drafts of cool air up his front, tendrils of it teasing at the sweat springing up across his inner thighs, enhancing how exposed he is like this. And not even tied that way, not yet—opening his legs only because he’s been told to.

“I’m not going to cage you, not yet,” Vincent whispers, lips and tongue tracing wet curlicues of heat behind Sephiroth’s ear as Sephiroth moans. “But you’re going to keep that cock quiet for now, if you want mine at all.”

Sephiroth’s already desperately hard, and when Vincent slowly squeezes his left nipple between forefinger and thumb, stretching the pinch over three near-unbearable seconds, he feels his chest jumping without even looking down. He nods anyway, biting his lip and grinding his head back into the headrest.

Vincent kisses him behind the ear, then nips sharply at the top. Then comes around to stand in front of the chair. He pushes the roll of tape aside and then picks his gloves out of his coat pocket, pulling them on before he dips into the bag at his feet. And Sephiroth watches and waits for him, legs hooked over the chair arms, body readied for the man.

When Vincent comes back up, he has a vibrator in one hand. Sephiroth sucks his breath and his gaze jumps to the man’s other hand, which is holding a small bottle. He looks too long at it, trying to read the label around Vincent’s fingers, and ends up gasping when Vincent flicks two of them roughly against his mouth.

“Open,” Vincent says, and when Sephiroth does, he puts the two fingers in. “Wet.”

Sephiroth sucks at them lavishly, pressing his tongue into the leather of Vincent’s glove so that its taste seems to seep out and coat the inside of his mouth. When Vincent judges them wet enough, he takes them out and then indicates between Sephiroth’s legs with his eyes.

“Show me your hole,” he says.

Sephiroth shivers, then forces himself to breathe and to flex, levering against the chair arms so that he can bend up his hips. The tape cuts in under his jaw, not quite choking him but not very far off, and with his arms bent backwards he has to rely as much on his core muscles as his thighs to hold the position. It’s difficult and strains him, and as Vincent bends over him, it’s all he can do to not let the burning in his muscles blossom into the kind of shuddering lightning that will make him come in the man’s face.

“Don’t,” Vincent reminds him, with a playfully cruel fingertip running down the length of his bobbing cock.

The resulting tremor that provokes almost makes Sephiroth miss the graze of Vincent’s hand between his buttocks, but then Vincent pushes in a gloved, damp fingertip, the leather yielding slightly differently than flesh as Sephiroth bears down around it. Sephiroth lets out a cut-off grunt; Vincent applies a knuckle to his perineum and the grunt turns into an aching moan. “Vincent,” he hisses. “Pl—”

“Quiet,” Vincent says, with a sharp look up at him. Telling him twice, which shouldn’t be needed; he grimaces and Vincent only nods, continuing to look. Then the man pulls his fingertip out. He takes the vibrator and anoints it with the bottle’s contents, then presses it smoothly into Sephiroth.

It’s a slimmer one, barely stretching Sephiroth on its own, but Vincent thumbs it on as it goes in and the buzz of it drops Sephiroth’s hips back to the chair. He squirms at the way it jars sideways, then rocks back against his prostate, pushed by the squeeze of his own body. The tape pulls across the front of his throat again and he gasps against the tension, then feels a tongue in his mouth, lips on his own.

Vincent kisses him into accepting the vibrator, stealing his breath from him till he can only whine and sag limply back in the chair. The man’s hands roam freely over his body, teasing his nipples again, then scratching lightly across his jumping abdominals and harder up the insides of his thighs. When Vincent finally leans back, Sephiroth has his eyes closed because the white spots shocking across his vision whenever the man touches him burn less that way.

So he doesn’t see it, only feels it, when Vincent straps cuffs on him. One on each ankle, thick stiff leather, and then a third about his scrotum, the leather thinner and softer but no less unyielding in how it stretches down his balls, stretches out the need growing heavily in them. There are tugs on each cuff and then he hears the clink of chains; one leading from each ankle to the ball cuff, keeping him from swinging his legs down or out. When he so much as shifts them, the tug spears electric jitters up into his gut, up along his spine to explode into dazzling bursts in his head.

He's already blind, when Vincent wraps the leather over his eyes. Fingers press down over his eyes, pushing into the soft flesh under them so that he groans. Then they slide up under his jaw, stroking it gently as Vincent laps at the sweat running out from under the blindfold. He lets his chin fall into their deceptive hold and a leather-covered bit’s pushed between his teeth, then strapped there.

“I think I’ll have you dry today,” Vincent says, as one would order a coffee, and as Sephiroth, mind sluggishly dragging itself out of its haze, starts to jerk against his bindings, Vincent reaches down to slap his cock. “Come.”

Sephiroth arches roughly against the chair. The chains yank painfully at his balls but it doesn’t stop him from striping his belly and chest, pained moans piling up behind his gag. Vincent doesn’t touch him but for the slap, hands going back to Sephiroth’s shoulders and holding them down as the aftershocks rock through him.

When they’ve settled a little, Vincent runs his palms down Sephiroth’s front, ending with them gripping Sephiroth’s thighs. It’s not a caress so much as a gesture of possession, a rightful one—Sephiroth is here to do what he says.

There’s a jerk at Sephiroth’s balls, and then a sudden lightening as he whines against his gag: Vincent’s unhooked the chains. He hears the man move around the chair and then feels Vincent tap his left inner thigh. “Show me your hole.”

Sephiroth groans, still shaking from his climax, but levers himself up. The vibrator’s tugged out and then Vincent pushes in a finger, slicked up with lubricant but still gloved. When Sephiroth hitches higher, Vincent pushes in a second one; this one makes the rim of Sephiroth’s hole ache a little but not badly enough. Vincent takes it out and then pushes in a thicker, longer vibrator.

“Down,” Vincent says.

Once Sephiroth’s in place, he hooks the chains back to the ball cuff and then sets about reviving Sephiroth’s erection with his mouth. With the vibrator burrowing away inside of Sephiroth, it doesn’t take very long, but Vincent keeps pinching at the base of Sephiroth’s cock to hold off the peak. He staves it off three times, until Sephiroth’s whimpering in a daze of denied need, and then he switches his hands to the chains, pulling at both at once so the ball cuff seems to yo-yo Sephiroth’s climax out of him, making it come in burning pulses while Vincent’s tongue snakes out every drop from his cock slit.

This time, when Vincent unchains him and asks to see his hole, Sephiroth can’t raise his hips high enough. Vincent has to cup one hand under him to help, though of course the man also uses the chance to mercilessly knead that buttock as an even thicker, longer toy is fed into Sephiroth. This one isn’t a vibrator but it doesn’t need to be; Sephiroth’s body is trembling constantly now, shaking itself around the plug’s hard ridges.

Vincent chains him back up and then spends a little time simply petting him. Soft touches, light massaging rolls across his shoulders and over the tape around his neck, pushing out some of the accumulated tension. It makes him cry out at first, with how sharply the knots release, but as Vincent works down into his shoulderblades, he starts to sigh into the caresses.

“Not a general now, are you,” Vincent murmurs as Sephiroth lolls in the chair. “Only a pretty toy, dressed up to play.”

The gag loosens, then is pulled out of Sephiroth’s mouth. He grunts as a muscle near the jaw hinge spasms, then sighs again as he feels a glass pressed to his lips. Water is tipped into his mouth, spreading its cooling relief down his throat and into his belly as he drinks it.

“I should read the report,” Vincent is saying, and then he rubs his fingers across Sephiroth’s mouth as Sephiroth twists a little against the static of responsibility trying to rise up through the haze. “Oh, no, not you. You’re only going to sit with my cock in your mouth and listen.”

Sephiroth groans. “Vincent—can I…”

Vincent gives him a moment, and when he doesn’t go on, chuckles. The man’s fingers come back, now ungloved, with a damp cloth that he uses to wipe down Sephiroth’s mouth and jaw. Then Sephiroth feels the cloth fall onto his chest, where it flops down his torso before fluttering between his legs as Vincent’s hand encircles his cock.

“Tseng didn’t send this one to me. I’m curious why—so I’ll read it. You can listen, but first, you’re going to come again,” Vincent says, steadily stroking his prick. “I’m having you dry, like I said. Now come.”

Shaking, Sephiroth does. Vincent has him lick clean the man’s fingers, then takes off the chains and cuts off the tape. The blindfold’s left on as Vincent pulls him off the chair and down to the floor, pushing the coat off him. What Vincent does with it, Sephiroth doesn’t know; he only knows the cuffs buckled to his wrists, which then are matched to the ones on his ankles. He’s bound on his knees, wrist to ankle, with his leg chains shortened when they’re rehooked to the ball cuff. A collar’s added, something for Vincent to pull on when he settles in the chair and then slides his cock into Sephiroth’s mouth.

“Hold,” Vincent says, so Sephiroth doesn’t nurse it, only swallows when it’s necessary to suppress his drooling. The man strokes the hair back from his face, pulls it over his shoulders to lie straight down his back, and then cradles his jaw for a moment. Sephiroth can’t stop the whine from fluttering deep in his throat, tickling at Vincent’s cock, and Vincent shifts a little.

But then he drops his hands. He moves something on the desk, and then, as he said, begins to read aloud the report Tseng submitted.

Sephiroth listens, but very superficially. He understands what Vincent is saying but it’s detached from any additional context, like watching a movie from another country without understanding any of the history it references. The thought comes into his head that perhaps this should not be that way, but then Vincent stops and puts his hand to Sephiroth’s jaw again.

“Suck,” he says, so Sephiroth begins to suck.

Vincent resumes reading, and this time even surface understanding slips away from Sephiroth. He's come too many times too quickly to come again, but as Vincent’s cock swells and rolls in his mouth, he starts to feel the tension drawing up in him as if he’s going to. The chains running between his scrotum and his ankles seem electrified, humming in tune with the heat twisting through his body. He sucks harder, moaning now, and when Vincent stops speaking he shivers, even before the man pulls his mouth away.

He can’t get off his knees, can’t move an inch as the chair goes rattling away somewhere and Vincent steps around to press up against his back. The plug’s dragged unceremoniously out of him and Vincent fucks in with barely a second in between, cock pushing roughly past Sephiroth’s already sore rim. Vincent’s hand comes around again, working Sephiroth’s own cock painfully hard and Sephiroth is dry, is dry and aching with use, but Vincent makes him come anyway.

It's a few minutes before he realizes his legs have sprawled out farther than they should be able to, as Vincent holds his slumped body back against the other man, and nearly another before he notices that the chains that should be wrenching at him are hanging slack against the insides of his legs. Vincent mouths lazily along his throat, one hand petting at his right thigh, and lets him work through his confusion.

“Better?” he asks Sephiroth.

Who snorts, as he drags his head around to nuzzle at Vincent. “Always, you know that,” he says. Then stops to wet his throat so he doesn’t sound so raspy. “But also, my coat…”

“Is that what you wanted to ask?” Vincent says, richly amused. “You can always get another. You lose just as many in the field.”

“I still have to file for replacements, and I can’t put you down as the reason why,” Sephiroth says, without stopping his nuzzling. Vincent seems to like it, tilting his head into it as he pulls the blindfold off Sephiroth. “Though sometimes I wonder if you’re trying for that.”

“Trying to be the reason why you shed your general’s coat?” Vincent ponders. He shifts so that they can see each other, but puts his hand up at the same time to let Sephiroth suckle at his fingertips. “Then I wouldn’t make you wear it when we fuck.”

“You like it,” Sephiroth presses, though he nips a finger so if Vincent wants, he can turn the conversation that way.

Vincent’s smile acknowledges this, but he merely traces his finger around Sephiroth’s lips rather than using it to silence Sephiroth. “Yes,” he says, and then his smile widens at Sephiroth’s surprise. “I like the look on you. I like the idea of fucking a general—oh, you’re still a lovely toy, Sephiroth, even as a general. There’s no reason why you can’t be both—can’t wear the coat and do what I tell you. Is there?”

No, Sephiroth thinks, and then pauses. Not because it feels incorrect, but because it doesn’t feel that way…and he wonders for a moment why he expected otherwise. Vincent has known him better than he knew the other man since they met, and it’s never put the man off; this is a critical part of why Sephiroth values their partnership so much. When they fuck, it isn’t about pretending they’re not who they are, even if Vincent teases him about being a slave and a toy. It’s about pushing away everything besides who they are.

“You didn’t hear anything I said when I read Tseng’s report, did you?” Vincent says, his finger drawing along Sephiroth’s jaw and then running along Sephiroth’s collar.

“I heard a little,” Sephiroth says, and then can’t help a noise of disappointment when he feels the chains running between his legs drop completely away, even as his ball sac tightens against its cuff in relief. “But I’ll need to reread it. Or—or have it read again?”

“You’re a very insatiable toy,” Vincent chides, even as he leans in to bite at the top of Sephiroth’s shoulder.

Sephiroth shudders. When his hands are freed, he brings them around to the front, shaking out the stiffness, but purposefully drops them against his thighs rather than using them to push himself off the other man. “If you want me to do something else, then tell me. I do listen to you.”

“True,” Vincent acknowledges. His mouth moves along the line of Sephiroth’s shoulder, then fastens just under the collar, sucking hard as Sephiroth lets out a ragged gasp. “And you are very appealing that way, following orders.”

“It’s your meeting, Vincent,” Sephiroth murmurs, closing his eyes. “Do you want me to read it?”

Vincent’s mouth eases up but doesn’t leave Sephiroth’s throat. He thinks for a few seconds, as Sephiroth waits on him, and then he makes a low, rumbling noise of amusement in his throat that sends tingling fingers all over Sephiroth’s skin.

“I’m going to cage you, and then you’re going to shower and dress and come back to work,” Vincent tells him. “Finish what you need to and then come home. If you do that, I’ll take it off and let you come wet on my cock. Understand?”

Sephiroth moans a little, as Vincent presses his lips behind Sephiroth’s ear. “Yes, Vincent.”

“Good,” Vincent says, before he pulls out. His hands go to Sephiroth’s thighs, pushing steadily against them as Sephiroth gasps and rocks and slowly adjusts to the lack of the man. Then he gives Sephiroth a nudge so Sephiroth reluctantly shuffles forward. “I’m looking forward to having a general serving me in bed. Bring your coat with you, we might as well finish ruining it.”

Sephiroth does read Tseng’s report once Vincent leaves. But first, he puts in an order for more uniforms.

* * *

“It isn’t only frippery. It’s a challenge,” Genesis tells Sephiroth once. Tone not as archly contemptuous as it could be, softened by exhaustion and by luxuriant self-satisfaction, as they’re lying across from each other on the floor. Angeal and Vincent have stepped to the side, briefly, and it’s only the two of them, thoroughly used and waiting to see what else might be asked of them, as Genesis breathes in till the skimpy garment he’s wearing strains across his chest. Then he exhales, and smiles not at Sephiroth but at the way the silk and his body shiver together. “Easy enough to tear it, but you can’t. You won’t, if you understand what I’m saying, and then…then he looks, and sees the effort you’re putting in, and if he understands…it’s well worth it.”

Of course Sephiroth does. It’s hardly experimental genetics—hardly a challenge, to use Genesis’ words, and there are enough clues here and there for Sephiroth to feel some assurance as to Vincent’s reaction. A few of the collars, the delicate ones, and the sets of traditional Wutaian silk robes that appear in Sephiroth’s closet after Vincent returns from one trip there. The robes in particular are telling, with the secret pockets and unusual seaming that turn up under Sephiroth’s searching fingers: Vincent actually has worn these, for long enough that he’s bothered to alter them for both weapons and transformations. And how Vincent treats Sephiroth’s uniform at times, as if it’s as much a challenge to his ingenuity as an enhancement.

But it’s not something Sephiroth talks to Vincent about first. Not out of shame or anything like that—more out of curiosity at an area he’s admittedly unfamiliar with. He’s never bothered to think of clothing beyond function, and as a career military man, he’s never had to. Uniforms do very well at removing that from the equation and all he’s ever had to do is evaluate their effectiveness for their intended use.

Then again, he thinks as he braids back his hair, this is not so different.

It’s the day after Vincent’s return from a work trip, coinciding with a company holiday that extends the weekend for long enough that Sephiroth’s still bearing the marks of their reunion. Tender welts lacing across his buttocks and down his inside thighs, sensitive enough that he stands with a little space between his legs to keep from brushing them together. The braids shorten his hair by enough that their ends only brush at the tops of his buttocks, but even that much adds a sharp prickle to the lazy aches that wash up his back and down his legs whenever a bruise is touched.

He lets the ripple of feeling go through him, but then reconsiders and loops the last few inches of the main braid back on itself before tying it off. Now there’s a loop, conveniently-placed, and the potential use of it adds another ripple, but he can push this one to the side as he picks up the silk slip.

He does have to be careful already, pulling it on. Filmy as it is, the silk has enough stretch to get it down over his head and settled at his waist, but he can see the wavy lines of tension across his belly when he plucks at it. A tug too hard and it’ll rip, and he sees in the mirror how that is tempting, how the shading of his skin through the black slip invites the thought of it. But that’s not for him to do, and that—that is what pulls his hand across rather than into, leaving the garment intact.

It's very brief, the hem of it rising so that his cock head drops out from under it when he raises his hands to tie its strings. One flimsy set goes around his neck, pulling the front of the slip up his torso but leaving it rather shapelessly wrinkled; that’s for the other set to fix. That one threads through several loops at either side of the slip, then crisscrosses his spine in place of actual clothing, as in the back, the slip only starts at the waist. A couple inches below where he ties off the second set of strings, knot settling into the small of his back and ends trailing about the top of his buttock cleft. The slip just covers that, taut across it even with the small slits up the sides of his legs that let him bend without tearing the silk.

His nipples are covered, the slip pressing lightly at them when he breathes. They’re a little sore, and he’s drawing that soreness out with his fingers when Vincent walks into the bathroom. Sephiroth stills, nipples pointed up into the silk, and for a moment it feels as if the growing hot burn in them has been swept out by the chill of the breath he pulls into himself.

Then Vincent steps up behind him. Mouth coming to rest against the back of his neck, hands curling around his wrists and carefully but firmly pulling his hands out from the slip and down to the counter. “Pretty,” he murmurs, nosing aside Sephiroth’s braid.

Sephiroth shivers against his mouth, his chest, his bared cock bowing the back of the silk into Sephiroth’s buttock cleft as the man leans forward. Vincent’s only half-dressed, unbuttoned shirt under a sleeping robe he sometimes wears when they’re alone in Sephiroth’s quarters. The robe’s silk but sturdier and thicker than the slip, and Sephiroth can feel the slip’s hem roll up his buttocks against it when Vincent presses against him.

“So this is what was keeping you,” Vincent goes on. He holds Sephiroth’s hands to the counter for a moment. “This is how you want to look.”

“Yes,” slides out of Sephiroth’s mouth, easy and inevitable as honey dripping off a spoon.

“Then you’ll wear it for the rest of the day,” Vincent tells him. The man’s hands lift from the counter and go to Sephiroth’s hips. Then push in, and across, drawing over the slip’s back so that the welts under them sing their aches into the silk’s teasing whisper. “And whatever else I put on you, while you’re serving me.”

Sephiroth bites his mouth and Vincent digs his nails in, raking them down Sephiroth’s buttocks so that his head jerks up and a cry startles out before he can help it. Then he shudders, clamping his hands onto the counter, as heated lines start to rise up under the slip, barely contained by the cooler silk.

They burn while Vincent pulls out a black leather collar and then laces its back up with a silk cord that flutters under Sephiroth’s braid. He also clips a silver chain to the front of the collar, then pulls its split ends down under the silk and fastens them to pressure rings he sets around each of Sephiroth’s nipples. The chain’s long enough to slide around under the slip, tweaking the rings with each breath, and when Vincent puts a palm flat between Sephiroth’s shoulderblades and tips Sephiroth forward, he staggers a little at the way the chain’s weight drags into the slip’s front.

Vincent catches his hands where they’re sliding on the counter and pulls them together, cuffing them in thick leather. He could still reach down if he wanted, but he doesn’t, keeping his hands where they’ve been placed as Vincent works up the slip’s skirt and wraps one hand around his cock while fingering him open with the other. He’s leaking precome over the fingers Vincent uses to shield the slip by the time the plug goes in, leaking and panting eagerly, but instead of bringing him off, Vincent tilts him even further over the sink and then turns on the faucet to spoon cold water over him till his erection wilts.

Groaning, settling down into aching denial, Sephiroth watches the man take up a black silk ribbon from the counter. It’s leftover from the package the slip came in, long enough to wind completely along the length of Sephiroth’s cock and then knot about the top of his scrotum, strong enough that the edges actually cut a little, when Vincent pulls him back against the other man and then teases at his bruised thighs so his prick tries to rise anyway.

“Pretty,” Vincent says again, tracing the word against Sephiroth’s collar. He’s watching Sephiroth in the mirror, eyes down on where Sephiroth’s hands are twisted around the chain between them. His lips graze warmly at Sephiroth’s throat as Sephiroth tips his head back over the man’s shoulder. “Docile. Doing exactly what you’re told today.”

“Yes, Vincent,” Sephiroth breathes.

The other man smiles. “Come,” he says, pausing for Sephiroth’s hips to buck helplessly, futilely, before he hooks a finger into the cuff-chain. “Into the kitchen.”

Once Sephiroth’s kneeling on the floor, Vincent takes up the looped end of his braid and uses that for a leash. At first he’s only required to bob forward for food, then Vincent’s cock as the man finishes off his morning tea, but then Vincent pulls him back to his feet. He’s handed a towel to dry dishes as the other man washes them, then led to the living room where Vincent draws him up onto the sofa, lying across it with his head in Vincent’s lap. Vincent turns the news on, but mostly looks at something on his tablet while his free hand drapes over Sephiroth’s shoulder, sometimes hip or waist. Occasionally it dips to cup a buttock, but if Sephiroth moves too much, Vincent pulls it back to the shoulder.

Then Vincent pushes at him, and when he looks up, the other man reaches down and curls a finger under the nipple chain, pulling at it till he whines. “Tea,” Vincent says, releasing him.

Sephiroth swings his legs off the couch and goes into the kitchen. He’s swaying a little at first, as much because of the distracting slide of the slip as the toys—more so, when he has to reach into a cabinet for a teapot and the nipple chain suddenly catches on the slip. He freezes and the chain slides free, only temporarily snagged, but it’s enough to slow his movements from then on. And he does understand.

He understands, as he returns to the living room with the tea and is rewarded by being ordered onto his hands and knees. Vincent flips up the back of the slip and takes the plug out long enough to fuck him, then shoves it back in so he has to hold himself in place, trembling, till he can trust himself to crawl back up by the other man without tearing anything. He is petted as the tremors work them out completely, long soothing strokes down his back, but it’s all his effort to keep his hands to Vincent’s knee, to keep from reaching down and ripping the ribbon off his aching cock.

When the news is over, Vincent takes him into the bathroom to relieve himself, unwrapping just enough of the ribbon to keep it from being soiled. Then his cock’s wiped and tied back up, and they go into the utility room. Sephiroth kneels in the doorway, hair looped around the door knob, as Vincent checks the bloody clothes he’s had soaking in the sink since his return. That chore complete, Vincent comes over, puts a gun case in Sephiroth’s cradling arms, and then opens it and proceeds to carry out some routine maintenance on the weapon inside.

When he’s done, he reaches across the case and unlocks the pressure rings, then watches impassively as Sephiroth writhes against the door, hissing at the agony of release, at the effort of managing it so that the case doesn’t drop and the slip doesn’t rip under Sephiroth’s gasping breaths. Vincent waits till Sephiroth’s calmed, then takes the case away and picks up Sephiroth’s hands by their cuff-chain. He pins them over Sephiroth’s head as he fucks Sephiroth’s mouth, and then he puts the pressure rings back on Sephiroth’s nipples.

He treats Sephiroth like that for most of the day, going about his plans with Sephiroth in tow to assist or to merely be present and available. The slip is something to work around at first, but as time goes on, it slides into merely another set of bonds to constrain Sephiroth’s world. He only has to refrain from testing them, to let their boundaries signal where he stops and rests, and he does. He’s docile, as Vincent said, letting the other man lead him.

“Pretty,” Vincent says a third time, as they’re nearing dinner and Sephiroth sprawls along the couch again, nosing at Vincent’s belly while Vincent’s hand works up the slip to rub and tease at his balls and bound cock. “Go get your coat.”

Sephiroth doesn’t think about it at this point, only groans as he has to pull himself away. It’s only when the weight of the leather falls over his shoulders, leaden compared to the floating gauze of the slip, that he pauses for a moment.

He looks up at Vincent from where he’s kneeling between the man’s legs, and Vincent takes him under the chin, grip just tight enough that the half-formed thought in his head softens, loses the edges that might have cut through the pleasant haze of the day. “Can I,” he starts.

Vincent tilts his head. His thumb runs slowly along the side of Sephiroth’s jaw, then strokes over the same spot. “What did you want the other day? When I asked you about Tseng’s report?”

The coat’s heavy on skin that’s been bared all day, but the warmth and firmness of Vincent’s hand pulls that pressure in line with the rest—with the hold of the collar around Sephiroth’s throat, the pinch of the rings on his nipples, the slippery tension of the silk against his body. “I wanted…you to make me read the report to you,” Sephiroth recalls, as if unearthing fragments of a dream, nuzzling at Vincent’s hand. “But that—”

“That sounds like work,” Vincent says.

Sephiroth nods, and then sighs as Vincent tilts his head up. The nipple chain goes taut and the twist at his nipples sends a shiver through him. “No, I didn’t want that, I realized. I wanted…I want…”

“Do you want me to fuck you like this?” Vincent asks him. Softly, thumb rubbing back and forth along his jaw, back and forth as Vincent pulls his head up towards that low, calm voice. “Fuck a general, doing what he’s told, a pretty little pet soldier?”

The coat ripples down Sephiroth’s back as he shudders. It slaps a little at his buttocks; the welts have completely faded away by now but the sense-memory of them is almost as hot, as burning, and then the silk of the slip tickles across his skin as it catches against the leather. “Can I come like this?”

Vincent laughs. He holds Sephiroth’s head up for another minute, reaching between Sephiroth’s legs with his other hand. “Not yet,” he says, as the plug rasps out from Sephiroth, as the ribbon starts to loosen. “Not yet.”

He stands up. Sephiroth has his mouth open, but Vincent lets him pant hungrily against the man’s thigh, only petting his head as the man pulls at his own clothing. Something bumps up against Sephiroth’s right leg and he startles, only to settle when he recognizes Vincent’s tail. He spreads his knees a little and the tail winds up between them, and when he gasps upon being speared on it, Vincent slides his cock into Sephiroth’s lips.

“Pick up your cock,” Vincent tells him, and Sephiroth plucks up the front of the slip with shaking fingers as he obeys. The tail in him starts to move, slow, its fur picking up remnants of the lubricant Vincent’s periodically smeared into him but still rough enough to make him squirm him place. Vincent clamps his hand over the back of Sephiroth’s neck and Sephiroth settles, but whimpers. “Hold. Hold.”

Sephiroth swallows hard around Vincent’s cock to stifle his noises. Vincent’s hips hitch forward and he repeats that, shuddering almost as much as the other man. The fingers on his nape slip a little, but then Vincent collects himself.

“Come,” he orders, his breathlessness doing nothing to soften the way the word wrenches Sephiroth’s body between his cock and tail. His grip on Sephiroth’s neck tightens, keeping Sephiroth’s head up, as he spills himself only a second later.

Somehow, the slip doesn’t tear. When Vincent eases it off Sephiroth later in the bathroom, soaked with sweat, the silk has a few strained spots but is still intact.

“Perhaps you should order your coats from them,” Vincent says, and then laughs again when Sephiroth sighs. He tosses the slip onto Sephiroth’s coat, then leaves both puddled on the floor as they move into the shower.

Chapter 24: Interlude: Performance Review

“You have changed,” Vincent replies, as he slides his fingers softly around Sephiroth’s clamped nipples, the pressure just enough to make the underlying pectorals flex against the clamps’ unyielding clasp. When Sephiroth’s knees twitch inwards, Vincent doesn’t slap or shove them back down to the bed, but only turns his hands so his thumbs brush over the nipple tips. “You were much more argumentative.”

They’ve only been at this a few minutes but a light film of sweat has already broken out over Sephiroth, the weight of his body dragging heavily over his bound arms as he arches for the man. Towards, not away, as the ache in his nipples peaks into bright hot pain that makes him pant and toss his head against the bed. His hands splay instead of fist, the weave of the bedsheet like sandpaper against his fingertips as the pain intensifies all sensation. “Habit,” he mutters, and then moans as Vincent drops one hand to lightly cup his tensed balls. “Everything about Shinra was—habit. It’s why…Rufus suggested a vacation in the first place.”

Vincent circles the metal locked about his scrotum with his fingers. His touch pushes about the pressure that the clamp is putting on that, temporarily drawing it away and down into the bottom of Sephiroth’s ball sac, only to allow it to rebound twofold when he lifts his fingertips. He lets Sephiroth shudder and jerk his legs against the bed a few times, patient as always. “I don’t hold it against you. I recognized you, as I’ve said, but we didn’t know each other at that point.”

“That was—is a relief. You’d be one of few,” Sephiroth says, and then he grimaces, and not at what the other man is doing to him, even though Vincent’s hand is now resting on the end of the ball clamp’s adjustable screw. Even though the rest of him is starting to shiver again in anticipation, forearms rubbing up against the binder holding them across his back, toes curling into the pillows mounded under them. “Are one of—”

“Well, yes, we know each other now,” Vincent says. Smiles, close-lipped and comfortable about it rather than seeming to restrain himself, as he tightens the clamp. Then he shifts up onto his knees, leaning forward over Sephiroth as his hands drag soothingly up and down the inside of Sephiroth’s thighs.

The initial burst of pain shoots out from Sephiroth’s scrotum and then dissipates quickly into a tight but bearable throb under the other man’s ministrations. Sephiroth drops out of his arch and gasps a last time, then whines as Vincent’s palms glide off his thighs and over his belly, up to his chest—past his nipples, helplessly pointed as they are in their steel prisons. Onto his shoulders to brush away some of the hair that’s sticking to them; Vincent hasn’t tied that back this time, leaving it to swirl about as Sephiroth is reminded to not try and predict the man, to not try and think this away like he does other things in his life.

“I don’t blame you. It’s been a while.” Vincent teases along Sephiroth’s collarbone as he speaks, letting his claws scratch lightly, opening up shallow scratches for the sweat to sting before he helps the skin to heal with a brush of his thumb. And then his fingers are suddenly at the nipple clamps, tightening them as well. “You were very enjoyable that first time, but I wouldn’t want to have to always work that much.”

Sephiroth half-hears the man, writhing against the bed so his own desperate noises rise over Vincent’s voice. When he finally slumps back, biting back more as Vincent lazily circles his nipples with soft fingertips, the words jumble repeatedly through his head, a little more meaning coming out of them each time. “Work?” he repeats.

His vision is a little unfocused but he thinks, as he looks up, that Vincent’s brow creases momentarily. It’s gone by the time the man leans over and licks the sweat running over Sephiroth’s throat, nudging Sephiroth’s chin back to lengthen and expose that. “You did make me chase you a few times, and not in play.”

“Oh,” Sephiroth murmurs, remembering now. Relaxing, as he realizes he’d tensed up against the bed. Relaxing under the other man as Vincent trails his mouth and his hands over Sephiroth’s prone body, very free with the nipples and scrotum, sparking rough electric streaks deep into Sephiroth’s flesh, pushing through Sephiroth’s attempted shudders until he’s too breathless for moans. “But not—not—”

“Not now, no. I can find you when I want.” Vincent’s unusually talkative today. It doesn’t bother Sephiroth—the words come in a low, lazy rumble, flowing together with the way the man strokes, then squeezes, strokes and squeezes, petting and then torturing. It’s only something he notes, as his own voice cracks into small, guttural mewls. “Have you when I want. I like you like that.”

That catches Sephiroth, like the tip of Vincent’s claw digging into a sensitive place. But when his head starts to lift, Vincent reaches up and twists the screws on the nipple clamps again. He flattens sharply against the bed, his muscles unstringing as the pain blossoms hotly through his chest and into his lungs to edge each breath, and Vincent moves on to tighten the ball clamp as well.

Then curls his hands over Sephiroth’s thighs and puts his weight onto them, red eyes watching unblinkingly, with clear satisfaction as Sephiroth sags under him and doesn’t fight the pain. Allows it—falls into it, letting it haze over body and mind till its twist through his flesh is indistinguishable from pleasure.

“You can speak,” Vincent says, seeing something in Sephiroth’s face. Sephiroth knows because of how his eyes focus on it, observing without judging. But also, from how it tells the man to bend down again, to press his mouth to Sephiroth’s parted lips and coil his tongue deeply between them, urging them wider apart as Vincent kneads loose the muscles in Sephiroth’s thighs. “I don’t need you quiet today. So long as you stay spread.”

Sephiroth whimpers into Vincent’s mouth, and then, when he’s allowed the air, groans. “Please,” he breathes, rocking his knees into the pillows. “Please.”

Vincent kisses the side of his throat, soft, as one hand roughly fondles Sephiroth’s balls, pushing them up against his hard and weeping cock so that he can feel precome smearing over the clamp. “You beg better these days,” he says, lips warm against Sephiroth’s pulse. “I appreciate that.”

His fingers go to the adjusting screw and Sephiroth sucks his breath, only to lose it all when Vincent bites at his shoulder. It’s barely a bite, the tips of the man’s canines skating across his skin as he jerks under it, but Sephiroth falls still as if the man had forced him, had taken him down like the aurochs Vincent hunts in the mountains and then strapped him that way, without an inch of give. But today he’s not. Only his arms are tied back, and the rest is all his own doing, keeping himself unresisting as Vincent slowly tightens the ball clamp further. Then draws a hand up to his left nipple, flicking it once to hear him gasp before the screw turns and traps him at the height of the cresting wave of pain.

The two sets of clamps, nipple and scrotum, pull the stretch of his body taut between them, strain making him quiver as Vincent’s fingers drift onto his breastbone. Thumb rubbing along its ridges, fingers carelessly trailing behind it as he fights not to twist into the uneven tension. “I said you didn’t need to be quiet,” Vincent says, one hand sliding under Sephiroth’s head, then dropping to rub at the back of his aching neck. “Tell me how you want to come.”

His other hand makes a C-curve around Sephiroth’s right nipple, subtly tensioning the surrounding flesh so the trapped nub throbs. Sephiroth hisses, then lolls his head as Vincent’s clever fingers push into the muscles at the base of his skull, relieving the tension there in sharp spasms that flicker white, then black at the edges of Sephiroth’s vision. “Wet,” he rasps, and then hisses again as he feels Vincent touch the nipple clamp. “Wet, please—please.”

“All right,” Vincent says. He takes hold of the clamp’s screw, but only that; he lets Sephiroth’s shivering tweak it. “But not yet.”

A ragged cry slips out of Sephiroth anyway. Vincent lets him, but then deliberately nudges the clamp. He jerks his chin up, then pushes his head back and tries to focus on the other man, understanding dimly that more is expected of him. “Please. Please, I need it.”

“Not yet,” Vincent says. He doesn’t make Sephiroth respond verbally, only waits for a shaking nod, before his thumb rolls against the screw.

Sephiroth doesn’t arch this time, even though the brightness of the pain is almost enough to blind him for a moment. He closes his eyes against it and goes limp against the bed, limp enough that he can sense the squeezing of air out of the pillows under his legs.

He’s breathing hard enough to deafen himself, but he hears Vincent make a low, thoughtful noise. He's petted along the sides of the chest, Vincent’s fingers just far enough away that their touch soothes rather than heightens the pain radiating out from his nipples. Then Vincent works down Sephiroth’s body, stroking along the knotted muscles, smoothing a few out, till he reaches the hips. His hands angle in and then down, deftly avoiding Sephiroth’s aching, swinging balls as he levers up Sephiroth by the pelvis and then slides out the plug he’d put in earlier.

Sephiroth’s eyes are still closed. He only feels his body tipped, as Vincent props his legs up over the other man’s knees and then keeps his buttocks spread with two fingers for a few seconds. There’s a rustle in the bedsheets and then Vincent’s other hand returns, two liberally-slicked fingers easily finding their way into him. He moans a little, but his capacity for resistance—for anything, really—has been ruined enough by the clamps that it’s only at the third finger that he starts to bear down.

“Spread,” Vincent says, quiet but firm, as he continues to push in his fingers.

The effort sends ripples up through Sephiroth’s body, as he hikes his knees a further inch against the pillows and Vincent’s lap, forcing him to loosen about Vincent’s fingers as he does. The clamps on his nipples and ball sac seem to corkscrew against his body, pushing him askew; when Vincent’s fingers stroke over his prostate, the jolt of it storms up through him and then catches up against the clamps, like lightning in a bottle, fizzing and crackling as he shudders on the man’s hand. And then a fourth finger nudges at him.

“Vincent,” Sephiroth pleads. “I need—”

“Not yet,” Vincent says, as he works Sephiroth further open. “I thought you learned the first time, what happens when you make demands on me.”

But the man stayed anyway, Sephiroth thinks but doesn’t say. Because he’s too tired, even as his body tries to muster up some energy to repel Vincent’s insistent pushing. Too many demands on him, and—

“Lie down,” Vincent murmurs. His knees shift under Sephiroth, pushing Sephiroth’s hips up and head down, but impossibly, all the blood seems to rush the other way, leaving Sephiroth lightheaded and weak. “Lie down, and let me open you up. I’m going to have you, like this, like I want.”

Not a demand. A fact. It clears things, takes them away with the blood, leaving Sephiroth only with that clear certainty. He will be taken, and he can’t stop it.

He lies there, whining a little and mostly out of habit, as Vincent fits all four fingers in and then, with deceptive gentleness, twists his hand to rub the ridges of his knuckles up against the straining rim of Sephiroth’s hole. It aches, aches worse than the clamps, but Sephiroth can only give and soon Vincent’s knuckles have disappeared into him. Running along Sephiroth from the inside, their indentations dragging Sephiroth up and then dropping him breathlessly into the valleys between, perfectly still as he’s made to soften.

Vincent’s entire hand is in him now. He does everything around it, breathing and existing. When it flexes—it doesn’t even move, only shifts, the fingers nudging against each other, Sephiroth lets out a cry that seems to rake hot blood out along his throat. But Vincent’s face is pale and clean, hovering above him.

“Come,” Vincent says.

Sephiroth doesn’t arch so much as tear apart, like sodden paper falling under its own weight. He feels the light gauzy slap of his own come striping across himself, the outline of Vincent’s fist as his body imprints on it, the cram of air shoving out of his lungs. He needed to come, he needed it badly, but it’s too hard and too much to be a relief.

No, that comes after, when he’s tumbled out of his climax and is lying helplessly against the bed again. Still on Vincent’s hand, but that—Vincent tugs at it, then rubs slowly across Sephiroth’s belly as Sephiroth whimpers and tries to tighten up again. “Stop,” Vincent says, stroking away the burn that starts up. “Stop.”

“I…” Sephiroth starts, his voice barely above a shattered whisper.

“Stop,” Vincent says, as he pushes a little harder across Sephiroth’s stomach. He’s smearing the come all over it, the tacky feeling oddly effective as a distraction as he slides his hand out of Sephiroth.

It still hurts. Hurts about nothing, as Sephiroth’s hole spasms and then settles into a sharp soreness. Worse when Vincent lifts his hand from Sephiroth’s belly, removing the counterbalancing pressure, but Sephiroth’s only managed to roll his head a little as a protest when the bed dips near it. He slits his eyes open, the world bleared at the edges as if he’s just woken from a long rest, and a glass is pressed to his lips.

He drinks, but Vincent only gives him a few sips rather than making him finish the whole glass. It’s different enough to stir his mind out of its daze, and he turns his head further to watch as Vincent seats himself at the head of the bed. Rearranges the pillows there, glass in hand, before putting that to the side and then resting his hands on either side of his hips. He’s naked now, missing the sleeping robe he had on earlier, and his erect cock stands up before him. Long and invitingly flushed; he looks at it himself, a slight smile on his face. Draws a finger lightly up its side, eyes half-closing, before he looks at Sephiroth.

“Come here,” he says.

Sephiroth is twisting over before he can help it—can think about it. He couldn’t make himself move on his own but when Vincent tells him, he…he doesn’t think about it. Only moves while he can, before his mind catches up and tells his body what it can’t do right now, wrung out and unsteady as it is.

He manages to get a knee under himself, keeping from flopping onto his belly. His nipples throb anyway, swollen in the clamps that bounce a little as the mattress shakes under him. Vincent’s smile widens but he merely beckons with his hand and Sephiroth, groaning, shuffles up towards him.

When he thinks to bend down and take the man’s cock in his mouth, he’s already moved past that, body more determined than his mind is focused. He hisses and glances back, only to startle as hands drop to his waist. Vincent makes an amused sound as he pulls a whining but yielding Sephiroth closer, and then lifts Sephiroth’s leg over his lap.

“Sit on my cock,” he says, and Sephiroth, thighs trembling with the effort, raises himself enough for Vincent to steer that under him.

It doesn’t burn: it feels like a finger pressed into a bruise, suppressing the center of the pain while the fringes ache all the harder. He’s too loose, he thinks as he drops fully onto Vincent, his body trying and failing to close fully around the man’s cock. It hurts in its own way, in a way that doesn’t settle and that makes him squirm even as his head droops in exhaustion.

Vincent presses the heel of his hand into Sephiroth’s left thigh, and though it doesn’t close up the gaps, the firm, even pressure shifts the world away from them. Sephiroth raises his head, panting again, and the glass is tipped against his lips again.

He finishes it this time, finishes it and then sighs as Vincent puts that away and lets him rest his head against the man’s hand, lets him sag its weight as Vincent holds it up by the chin. “I didn’t go on vacation only to find another argument,” Sephiroth says without thought. “But—but—”

When his thought falters, Vincent doesn’t pounce on it like others would. So it doesn’t fall apart, and doesn’t feel as if Sephiroth has to let its shards melt away into nothing least he or they sliver feet on them later; it merely lies where it is, quiet and waiting, until it happens to be picked up again.

“It’s habit. And you weren’t talking back. You said you didn’t want to talk, back then,” Sephiroth adds. Then sighs again as Vincent runs a thumb over his mouth, lower lip pressed out of the way just enough for the nail to click against Sephiroth’s teeth. “Wasn’t an option.”

“So you argued, and never talked to me,” Vincent says. Not pouncing now either, but only cradling, the way his fingers do Sephiroth’s head. “Even when I wasn’t talking.”

“Yes, but—you learned how to work around that,” Sephiroth points out. He wonders vaguely if they’re arguing now, but then decides they can’t be, not if Vincent’s touching him like this, slow and soft. Thumb across his lip, other hand drawing the sticky, wet strands off his shoulders and arms and then smoothing his hair out of the way as Vincent’s mouth warmly tastes his own. “Better than anyone else.”

“I think I was only trying to find a way to keep you quiet, at first,” Vincent says. He kisses along Sephiroth’s jaw, then stops but keeps his mouth in place as his hand trails down Sephiroth’s chest to just above the left nipple. “You don’t need to today. You can talk.”

“I know.” Sephiroth breathes in and feels how Vincent’s fingertips slip just a little closer. His nipples hurt too, and so does his ball sac. So does his cock, every graze of it against Vincent making his hips shift; he’s still sensitive from his orgasm but Vincent has him used to that now, has him trained to immediately start rising again if he’s not wearing the cock cage, and he can already feel his cock stiffening. “But I don’t…I don’t want to.”

Vincent doesn’t change upon hearing that. He does hear it, making an acknowledging noise as he leans back and looks Sephiroth in the eye. But he isn’t surprised or disappointed. He only looks to see that Sephiroth means it, and then he pulls Sephiroth towards him by the jaw. The shift rocks Sephiroth on the man’s cock, still too loose inside, and he mewls against Vincent’s mouth as the man lazily kisses him.

“Hold still,” Vincent says, his fingers touching the nipple clamp now. “You’ll tighten up.”

The clamp releases before he finishes speaking. Vincent swallows Sephiroth’s broken cry, sucking the air from him till he subsides, shaking so it’s only Vincent’s hand under his chin that keeps him upright. He does tighten, but not—

Vincent moves to the other nipple and releases that clamp. He gives Sephiroth a few minutes after that, using both hands to hold Sephiroth’s shoulders and keep him on his knees as he spasms in place. When Sephiroth’s head finally drops against his arm, he moves to let Sephiroth lean it against his shoulder. Lets it rest for a moment, carefully shifting his own head over to accommodate. And then pushes his hand down between them and takes off the ball clamp.

Relief. So much of it that Sephiroth goes out of the world for a little while, drifting and quiet and peaceful for all that his body is shuddering uncontrollably. He’s divorced from it, feeling it but not living in the pain, only riding above it as it pushes him high enough to find that distance.

When he comes back, his arms are free. Sagging to either side of Vincent, fingers limply stirred in the sheets, as Vincent idly strokes circles along his buttocks and hips. He flexes uncertainly, then groans into Vincent’s shoulder, feeling himself seated inch by inch back into his body as the aches travel through him. But it’s not unwelcome, the return. He feels…he fits properly, he thinks.

He's tightened up, as promised, snug enough about Vincent’s cock that every shift feels as if it’s closing up his throat, even though he can feel come leaking out from between them. It’s been long enough that Vincent has softened almost completely, but the press of his prick is still more than enough to make Sephiroth feel more comfortable draped over him than pushing free, even with a slight crick in his neck and back.

Which eases anyway, when Vincent turns the heel of his hand down and runs it along Sephiroth’s spine, working at it till little trembling lines flicker down into Sephiroth’s hands and make his fingers flutter in the sheets. “Water?” Vincent asks.

Sephiroth makes a demurring sound, then rouses himself enough to put his mouth by Vincent’s ear, when he thinks he feels the man moving under him. “No,” he says, his voice rough, but apparently steady enough for Vincent to settle back. “No, but…”

“I’m going to wait to fuck you again,” Vincent tells him, uncompromising but without any bite of anger to it. “It’s Saturday morning. We have all day.”

For a moment Sephiroth thinks he wishes it wasn’t, that it was night and he had that excuse to simply rest, but…no, he doesn’t. He wants it to be morning, and with that much time ahead of them. Vincent’s leaving tomorrow afternoon and will be gone most of the week, all of that time in places where he won’t be able to send so much as a status update. Not that Sephiroth fears he won’t return, but it only seems like a very long time. “To myself,” drops from Sephiroth’s lips, before he catches himself. “To…”

“You want something?” Vincent says. Then reaches around, sliding his fingers into Sephiroth’s hair and twisting it without tugging, making certain his hold is inexorable before he pulls up Sephiroth’s head. “Do you want to talk at all?”

Sephiroth blinks leadenly, and then lets his head droop till his forehead is resting against the other man’s, when Vincent loosens his grip a little. He thinks about it. Not pushing himself, only letting the thoughts collect together in his head as they please, knowing that Vincent’s not impatient either. They’ve learned each other, since that first meeting.

“Later,” he says, tilting his head as Vincent’s tongue slips along his jaw and then under it, its snaky length a sling for his chin for a second or two, before it withdraws. “When you’re feeding me. You like having me talk when I’m down there.”

“You like earning a cock in your mouth,” Vincent says, humor liberally warming his voice. His free hand dips between them and caresses Sephiroth’s cock, then closes around it just tightly enough as Sephiroth shudders. “But that’s not all you wa—”

“I want you to tie that up,” Sephiroth says, pressing his mouth to the corner of Vincent’s lips. Then around their edges as he speaks, as Vincent’s fingers cup over his still-sore scrotum, rubbing at the bruised ring the clamp has left. “I want to come wet on your cock, later. Do whatever you want for me to have that.”

“All that, and you want to talk?” Vincent says, voice still warm but deepening, coming from his chest rather than his throat.

Sephiroth nods, moaning quietly, as his balls are massaged. “I want a collar,” he breathes. “And I want—I want to have you in me, even if you’re not fucking me.”

Vincent pulls at his hair, tilting his head up and back. The man’s breath teases at the front of his throat, wet and clinging, and then his chin is allowed to drop so Vincent can kiss him. “Talking,” the man says, satisfied. “All right.”

They shower without soaping themselves, Vincent dragging his nails with pleasant roughness over Sephiroth’s scalp to clean off the accumulated sweat as Sephiroth sits at his feet. Sephiroth gets up to help dry himself off and so Vincent can comb out his hair without worrying about stepping on it, but then kneels again, in the kitchen in front of Vincent’s chair. Collared with black drake leather, more cuffing his wrists behind his back. His cock secured in its cage, twitching around its sound as Vincent oils up his hole.

“Tell me why Zack tried to buy me coffee yesterday,” Vincent says, coming back around. He’s wiping his hands on a rag, but tosses that aside and then drops into his chair with an amused expression as Sephiroth looks up. “He remembered and apologized, but then bought me an unnecessary bag of shortbread to go with my tea.”

“You came back early,” Sephiroth starts.

Then stops as Vincent crooks two fingers at him. He slides forward until he’s between Vincent’s legs, pushing his chest up against the edge of the seat with the folds of Vincent’s sleeping robe drifting over his hips. Something else whispers against him, then presses harder, sliding firmly up his inside left thigh and then along his buttock. He startles off his knees a couple inches, then drops back, reaching out with his fingers till Vincent’s tail worms across them and drops over his palm. He doesn’t close his hand but keeps it flattened open against his buttock as the tail curves over it and then presses into him. Further, a little further, his collar taut around his gasping throat as the tail’s fur rasps against the rim of his hole—it’s soft and he’s freshly-oiled, but even so, he feels it.

Feels it, fills him with it, until he can sag into it with a low groan. The tail doesn’t move once Vincent’s seated it—no fuck, but at least he isn’t closing down on nothing now. And it’s not lifeless rubber either, but something with its own warmth, with a slight pulse he thinks he can feel, now that he’s accepted it into him.

“I did,” Vincent prompts. “Was he celebrating on your behalf?”

Sephiroth shakes his head, then lays it against the nearer of Vincent’s knees as Vincent pushes three fingers under his chin. He feels his lips being parted with a thumb and docilely opens his mouth. Eats what he’s given before he continues. “It saved him a meeting with me, one he wasn’t looking forward to.”

“You aren’t only going to have it Monday?” Vincent asks, as chopsticks click against a bowl.

“I almost decided to—I know he meant well but the nuisance…you’re lucky you missed it. And he’s been a First for long enough.” Sephiroth feels Vincent’s thumb on his lower lip again and tips his head up without being nudged this time. He can hear the annoyance in his voice but he doesn’t feel it, doesn’t feel anything except the loose aches running through his body, the tighter ones where the collar and cuffs and cock cage grip him. “He should know how to handle something like that without my telling him. But I think it’s better coming from Angeal this time. He needs to take some responsibility for Zack, too.”

Vincent gives him something to drink to wash out his mouth before the next bite. Tea, warm but not scalding, less tannic than he usually tastes on Vincent. Green instead of black, he thinks as the man pets his cheek before settling that hand against the back of his collar. “He does seem too worried about what you think sometimes to think straight.”

“I know,” Sephiroth says after a moment. He leans into the caress. “I was angry and I didn’t think it all through—but you came early.”

“And I’ve fucked you into thinking better of it,” Vincent says, with a laugh embedded in his voice as he reaches over for another tidbit. “Tell me about this nuisance I missed.”

Sephiroth rubs his face against the man’s hand, content, and then opens his mouth.

Chapter 25: Interlude: Pick-Up

Vincent rarely messages when he’s out on a mission, and when he does, it’s invariably related to timing for his return. So when the message appears on Sephiroth’s phone, he glances at it while automatically swiping on his tablet to his calendar. He even has his finger over a meeting, ready to edit it, when it occurs to him that something doesn’t fit.

He looks at the message again. The numbers don’t fit the time conventions Vincent usually uses, and then, as Sephiroth continues to look at it, he realizes they don’t fit any time convention. They’re GPS coordinates.

Sephiroth is getting out of his chair when his door beeps sharply, signaling that someone’s overridden its lock. Then Tseng comes in, with only a brief, if wary, look at the hand Sephiroth has reaching for the sword rack behind him. “Vincent needs an unscheduled pick-up. He indicated that medical would be needed.”

He’d never do that, Sephiroth almost bites off, but something in Tseng’s voice catches him. The door’s still open behind Tseng—he nods at the man and Tseng comes in, letting that close. Then stands by as Sephiroth reconfigures the privacy shielding on his office with a few taps at the tablet.

“It’s a rural location, well away from any community, and there are at least two approaches for a small team without raising attention. He warned he might not be conscious about his actions,” Tseng goes on. He has his own tablet with him and sends something from it as he crosses the room. It’s probably the same map that shows when he puts the tablet on the desk between them. “Here’s the message.”

From the timestamp on Vincent’s message, Tseng must have already been on the floor and had barely thought before coming to Sephiroth’s office. He's summarized it accurately enough, probably because he drew the same conclusions that Sephiroth is now drawing: Vincent’s injury is serious but not so much that he couldn’t arrange a strategic withdrawal, and his warning means he’ll be aware but not necessarily able to distinguish friend from foe. So the transformations are likely an issue, and aside from their personal entanglements, Sephiroth can see why Tseng would consult with SOLDIER on this. “When is your departure time?”

There’s the smallest pause before Tseng inhales. “Everything can be together on my side in two hours. But General, if SOLDIER—”

“I don’t need a retinue, Tseng, only a seat. Make it two and a half, Angeal needs time to travel back from Sector One and be briefed,” Sephiroth says curtly.

This has to have been what Tseng was expecting, and he doesn’t look displeased about it. But he also doesn’t immediately nod and leave. “Commander Fair is closer, General. And—”

“Commander Fair is engaged in negotiations with a Sector Council for most of today, and while this merits attention, I don’t see the point in flagging it to the entire world. And General Rhapsodos can stay in Banora, unless you’ve something else to bring to my attention?” Sephiroth says.

“No, General. We’ll wait for you,” Tseng says. He dips his head now, then pivots and walks back out.

Genesis has been scrapping with Tseng again over some pissing contest between one of his lieutenants and Reno, and Tseng likely was angling to know whether he’d have to rearrange the Turks in his absence to manage that. He could have simply asked rather than bring in Zack, Sephiroth thinks in irritation; but for that, Tseng’s behavior is perfect. It almost makes Sephiroth want to point it out to the man—but that would be petty rather than relevant, and Sephiroth has other matters to arrange ahead of his departure.

He contemplates letting his mother know, but in the end, decides against it. Vincent mentioning medical care is an alert to something in that direction, but if Sephiroth goes himself, he thinks he’s as able as anyone in R&D to perform the initial assessment. And he’s not about to let his mother at Vincent when the man isn’t fully in control of himself.

No, he’ll leave it till he’s seen what they’re dealing with, and if she hears about this while he’s out, she can’t leave the city without Angeal knowing about it. Decided, he takes his sword off its rack.

Six hours later, Sephiroth is dropping out of a chopper onto a grassy hillock. He pushes up out of the crouch he’d landed in, then lopes down the hillside as the chopper carefully sets down behind him. The GPS indicates Vincent is less than twenty yards away, but the hillock is treeless and boulder-less, and he doesn’t see anything that—he turns sharply. The shadow that’d caught his eye resolves into a crevice, well-hidden by the grass overgrowing its edges. It’s only a small part where the grass has been recently ripped or scratched away, letting the reddish soil show through, that gives it away.

“General!” hails one of the accompanying Turks.

Sephiroth raises his hand to hold where they are, then comes up sideways to the crevice. Rural as the area is, it is rich in minerals so there are partial ground-penetrating radargrams for much of it. He pulls out his phone and checks: the map indicates there is a cave but is spotty on its dimensions.

He doesn’t call Vincent’s name, but instead drops a glowstick into the crevice, pitching it to land at the very edge of the daylight creeping into it. Then watches as the stick wobbles over a rock, rolls over it into the dark and is abruptly snuffed out rather than fading. Something sizable moves inside of the cave—the damn chopper hasn’t wound down yet, but his hearing can just pick out what are probably Vincent’s wings.

If so, Vincent should be more hampered than anything, given how tight the space looks. Sephiroth takes Masamune off his belt but leaves it in its scabbard, then eases himself down the side of the crevice. He scoops up a rock along the way and when he’s at the bottom, he tosses it inside, then slams himself flat as a violent lashing motion inside the cave sends a flurry of rocks in his direction.

It's silent higher up on the hill, which hopefully means Tseng has the Turks in order. Sephiroth’s not going to worry about them and if they shoot when they’ve been specifically briefed to hold perimeter only, he might pitch them in here when they’re done.

The cave goes quiet again, except for the dust clouds straggling out of it. There isn’t much wind so Sephiroth studies how they move and where they rise from, then shifts his position. He reaches into his pocket and takes out a small case that he flips open, palming the syringe inside. Tseng had offered to load it into a dart gun instead but even transformed, Vincent should be capable of understanding firearms and how to evade them.

The man routinely faces opponents who rely on bladed weapons too, but Sephiroth doesn’t intend to rely on either. Instead he slides himself slowly around the cave entrance, until the last of the dust clouds are puffing against his face. He regrips Masamune in his other hand, pointing it behind him and squinting against the particles in the air, then jerks forward so his head and shoulders enter the cave.

Just as quickly, he jerks himself back out, swinging Masamune high into the air at his side. As he hoped, the movement baits Vincent into charging out: a massive dark form rushes by Sephiroth, taking Masamune’s long silhouette as the target.

Vincent quickly realizes and flares his wings, using them to both slow and slew himself about mid-lunge. Masamune’s tip bangs off his forearm and Sephiroth feels it almost wrench out of his grip. Then he lets it go, gritting his teeth but needing the second it buys him as Vincent’s muzzle dips after his sword. While Vincent’s distracted, Sephiroth swings himself up the side of the crevice and then stretches over Vincent’s left wing, stabbing the syringe into the muscle massed at its base.

The moment he feels the plunger depress, Sephiroth shoves himself off the ground and leaps as high as he can into the air. The great arteries rushing blood in and out of the wing should carry the drugs in milliseconds to Vincent’s brain, but Vincent—twists faster than that, faster than instinct alone should drive him to do. No, he’s thinking, striking not at Sephiroth in the air but at where Sephiroth’s going to land, obliterating an entire swath of grass with a single bash of his wing. Then the wing swings back up, having the range now.

Sephiroth can’t resist gravity. The best he can do is throw his arms up over his head, sacrificing them for a shattered skull. And the moment his boots strike the ground, he kicks off, rolling himself as far clear as he can.

But—his arms aren’t broken. He felt the second sweep of Vincent’s wing cut over him, so close that it hooked and tore several strands of his hair away, but he’s unscathed, except for a sharp ache in his left knee and ankle that’s likely a nascent sprain. And now he’s well clear, so he crouches in the small depression he’s found himself in for another second, listening carefully. Then, slowly, he raises his head.

Vincent’s crumpled on his side near the crevice, wings still flapping but clearly weakening. His head turns in Sephiroth’s direction and their eyes meet—his are visibly larger than human eyes in this form, but even so, Sephiroth can recognize the personality in them. His upper lip writhes back, and then his entire body throws itself into a pained arch, hindlegs and tail thrashing viciously against the ground.

Sephiroth jerks up onto one arm, then makes himself hold in place. “Stay put,” he snaps when he thinks he hears movement above them. “Wait!”

The wings slap down, and then Vincent drags his head out from behind one as it merges back into him. Great patches of his body are losing their fur, showing scratched and scraped white skin behind—there’s a very thick, matted clot of blood on his left shoulder, previously masked by the dense black pelt of his other form. It breaks open and bleeds afresh as he jerks onto his back, all his limbs flinging out. Then he flips himself back onto his belly, head going down between his arms. He’s fully human now, but trembling badly all over.

“Vincent?” Sephiroth tries. He pushes up onto his knee and digs in his coat, then curses as he can’t find the—no, it hasn’t fallen out, the Curaga’s just broken in two. The pill should still work anyway—Vincent hates the shot form for unspecified reasons, though Sephiroth suspects Hojo—and he gets both halves between his fingers as he starts to work his way across to the other man. “Vincent?”

“I need to—sample,” Vincent grunts. He moves his right arm, then levers himself upright and digs at his wound with his bare fingers.

Sephiroth hisses at the sight, but doesn’t try to stop the man. He looks sharply around, and when he sees the discarded syringe kit, he detours to retrieve it. There’s an empty spare syringe in it, which, when he pulls the plunger out, does well enough to hold the small pellet Vincent digs out of himself.

“Curaga doesn’t work with it in,” Vincent mutters, seeing the other item Sephiroth’s holding. “My healing still does, give me a minute to metabolize.”

“Does it make you transform?” Sephiroth says, looking at the pellet. “Coating or filling?”

“Filling, I think. Delayed-release, I did get out here. And a coating would’ve worn off by now,” Vincent says. He glances up at the sky, then flicks a bit of ragged flesh off his thumb. Then looks at Sephiroth, a faintly bemused smile playing around his lips, as Sephiroth sighs and crouches down next to him. “I think it might be a derivative of whatever you just used.”

“Mother came up with that to sedate Second-Class and up for surgery,” Sephiroth says after a moment. “I doubted it’d knock you out, but based on what I know, I thought it’d last long enough for you to recognize me.”

“I scented you before you got me with it. But that one’s hallucinogenic.” Vincent indicates the pellet with a nod. “It did interrupt the hallucination, and then I remembered why I was waiting for you.”

Sephiroth considers that, and then Vincent. “You deliberately left it in till we could retrieve you?”

“I didn’t have any other way to carry out, for reasons I’ll explain later,” Vincent says, without any hint of defensiveness or anything besides calm rationality. Though he knows what Sephiroth is thinking, and as usual, he finds it more amusing than not. “You could have worn me out a little more before you tried. I saw you didn’t unsheathe it.”

“Vincent, if I take Masamune out, I expect to use its edge,” Sephiroth mutters. He gets up and turns around to go pick it up, then pauses and looks up. A wary Tseng peers over the top of the crevice, so Sephiroth tosses him up the sample with instructions to secure it for R&D. Then he retrieves his sword and goes back over to Vincent. “Your healing isn’t good enough to grow a limb back.”

“I think you have better control than that,” Vincent says, as if they’re merely trading jokes. Then puts his hand out, smiling patiently, as Sephiroth regards him.

After another moment, Sephiroth turns over the broken Curaga pill and just limits himself to an irritated exhale. He wipes the dirt off Masamune, clips it to his belt, and then stoops to get Vincent, who’s still bleeding from the shoulder but who’s trying to roll his legs under himself anyway, to his feet.

“It was effective on me,” Vincent says in a lower, much more sober tone. “They shouldn’t have refining capabilities for that.”

“They shouldn’t have that formula, period. No one should, and reverse-engineering it is far too complex without at least some pre-existing knowledge. Mother is going to be furious,” Sephiroth says. He helps Vincent start up the hill, hissing through his teeth; he can feel bruises starting to blossom under his clothes and they happen to be on the same side Vincent’s leaning against, but that isn’t why he hisses. “I need to call her.”

Vincent sighs. “Yes.”

That’s all he says. He takes another Curaga pill when they’re in the chopper, without so much as a murmured comment about SOLDIER’s dependence on them. When they land in Midgar, he lets himself be walked into a surgical room so his wound can be cleaned—and so they can take additional samples in case whatever the pellet had been carrying hasn’t fully metabolized. Sephiroth stays for it and notes the sample ID numbers as well as the names of all the personnel who are in the room, because while his mother is never going to use her research to cripple minds like Hojo, she rarely discloses the full extent of her findings without pressure.

But he does have to step out of the room afterward, precisely so he can lay the groundwork for that pressure with his mother. And as usual, his conversation with her lasts longer than either of them care for.

Afterward, Sephiroth goes into a small supply room off the surgical ward to collect himself and his phone pings with a message, from Vincent. It’s another pair of coordinates.

“I will have to ask at some point, if only because this is the same hospital the Firsts use and I want to know about any security breaches,” Sephiroth says when he finds Vincent in his car several minutes later, in the hospital parking garage, while his phone lights up with angry messages from his mother and panicked ones from the hospital security team. “You could have checked yourself out. They wouldn’t have had a right to detain you, with Mother and I both there.”

“You can ask me after I’ve slept and eaten,” Vincent says, head turned into the back of the seat, eyes closed. He’s gotten a set of clothes from somewhere, ill-fitting and rumpled, and it takes a moment for Sephiroth to accept him looking so unkempt. But still with the same quiet, firmly decisive air as always. “Or you can ask me to fuck you. Either way.”

Sephiroth puts his hands on the side of the car and looks at him. Then, taking a deep breath, he pushes himself back. He takes his phone out and sends some messages. Then he puts it away and goes around to the other side and climbs behind the wheel.

“I appreciate the pick-up, Sephiroth,” Vincent murmurs, as he twists around and then recurls in the other seat, facing Sephiroth. “I’ll deal with Tseng as well for this.”

There are any number of things Sephiroth could say to that. He could point out that Tseng has business interests in looking after his team, even contractors, or that alerting them to a leak of Shinra R&D trade secrets is, if anything, more valuable than the samples of what unauthorized and very soon to be dead researchers have done with it. Or that Sephiroth would have been more than happy to deal with Tseng, and all of Shinra, for Vincent’s mere return.

“You’re impossible,” is what he chooses, as he starts the car. “You’re welcome.”

Vincent’s lazy chuckle fills the air, and for the first time since Sephiroth saw the man’s initial message, Sephiroth feels himself relax.

Chapter 26: Interlude: Rest and Recovery (and Gardening)

Any kind of healing enhancement comes at the cost of a greatly-increased metabolic intake, so it’s entirely expected that Vincent spends nearly a week in a semi-hibernating state, crawling out of bed only to down gargantuan meals and use the bathroom. His pausing to murmur a few words every now and then actually perturbs Sephiroth more than it reassures, since the slurred, slightly dreamy sentences only serve as a reminder of how far from his normal state Vincent is.

“Well, he’s staying put, at least you know where he is,” Angeal says as he helps Sephiroth ferry the latest food order—Vincent obviously isn’t cooking—to the kitchen. “And I hate to say this, but I think the investigation’s…well…”

“Progressing more rapidly without my charging about the countryside, making it obvious that we’re looking for them?” Sephiroth says dryly.

Angeal ducks his head but doesn’t pull his next comment. “You’d think a giant winged demon bursting out of your illegal militia base would flag that too, but hey, if they’re that stupid, it lets us get to the money before they catch on. And you are kind of hard to miss, Seph.”

He’s right on both counts, and Sephiroth didn’t rise to generaling all of SOLDIER without learning when he needs to be on the field and when he’s better employed behind the lines. But even so, it’s maddening to have to sit in his office and wait for his daily briefing.

It’d be equally as maddening to be out with the field teams, fuming at the slow pace at which clues are turning up, while having no idea if Vincent is still curled up in the bedroom or if he’s decided he’s ready to go back to work. No—no, it’d be more so, Sephiroth admits to himself, stacking packets of meat in the fridge. He’s seen Vincent recover enough times to know that it’s like flipping a switch: one moment the man can barely crawl to the bathroom, the next he's out terrorizing whoever Shinra is paying him to and all Sephiroth has is a brief message on his tablet. Not that Firsts are that different, but they do at least have to check in with Sephiroth before they can return to duty.

“It’s going okay, right? I mean, I’ve been trying not to—I don’t want to know what the hell’s in his system, just wondering if there…there aren’t any complications,” Angeal says hesitantly. He seems relieved when Sephiroth frowns at him, passing over another bag full of meat. “I think this is the longest I’ve ever seen you take desk duty without Rufus slinging a budget increase our way.”

“It was a chemical attack, Angeal. It had to work out of his system first,” Sephiroth says, feeling both bemused and irritated at the other man. Angeal knows enough to know that…and usually wouldn’t be so insensitive as to remind Sephiroth of how frustratingly casual Vincent had been about leaving the damn bullet in himself, so they could extract as much of the compound as possible without further contamination. “His recovery curve’s what you would expect from something like that.”

Angeal ducks his head again, because yes, he knows, and because of their friendship he probes anyway. “Yeah, I get that, I just—he really doesn’t like Curaga, does he?”

Sephiroth presses his lips together. Then turns around and puts the meat in the fridge. “It doesn’t help much more than his own baseline healing would at this point, and he already eats enough as it is. If we kept him on it, we might have to start slaughtering on-site to keep up.”

“Yeah, I noticed,” Angeal says. He watches Sephiroth close the fridge, then clears his throat. “It’s just…whenever Gen’s shoulder acts up, he starts turning it down too. Says the taste goes weird on him.”

“You haven’t mentioned that before,” Sephiroth says sharply, jerking back around. “Either of you.”

“Well, because your mom came up with the other drug, so it’s not like he needs it, and I didn’t want—I know how much you hate having to go to her when this kind of thing comes up,” Angeal says. His voice tightens, although he’s still keeping it low and even. “And if I can get him to take it, it still works like it should. It’s just the taste.”

“Next time he has an issue, I want this documented,” Sephiroth says, and then waits until Angeal sighs and nods. He lingers by the fridge, half-thinking he should open it back up and ready some of the meat, and instead…Angeal always addresses what he thinks Sephiroth worries about, and not just his own worries. Even if it’s occasionally clumsy, it deserves a response. “I don’t think it’s anything like that. I think it’s…he’ll take Curaga if he wants to. He simply doesn’t want to.”

“Yeah, well, if he’s healing, he’s healing,” Angeal says after a moment. He pauses as if he’s going to reach for Sephiroth, but ultimately refrains. “Need anything else while I’m here? I’ve still got two hours before I head out to the botanical gardens.”

“Convince Genesis to rein in Roche before I let the Turks gang up on him,” Sephiroth says. “If I am staying at my desk, I don’t want to have that constantly in my inbox.”

Angeal barks a laugh, and then promises to see what he can do. Then he lets himself out, while Sephiroth does end up taking some of the meat back out.

He’s in the middle of bottling the slurry he’s made out of that and vitamin powder when he senses something. Nothing alarming and his hand doesn’t twitch as he screws on the cap, then looks over.

“I’ll have the rest,” Vincent says as he crosses the room. He looks immensely improved, with clear eyes and fluid, if slow, movements. His skin is still bloodless, but when Sephiroth hands him the blender, he takes it to the cabinet to retrieve a glass rather than pushing his head in and licking it out as he’s been doing for the last few days. “Are you going back to the office?”

“I don’t have any meetings, and I can do what I need to do from my tablet here,” Sephiroth says. He takes the bottles over to the fridge, then washes off his hands as Vincent pours the remaining slurry into the glass. Then takes the blender from Vincent and starts to wash it. “Or are you trying to excuse yourself?”

His tone sharpens more than he’d intended, but Vincent merely shakes his head. Not dismissively either. “I probably need another day, but I also need to stretch my legs.”

Sephiroth lowers the blender, staring at the other man until Vincent makes a quietly amused noise into his glass. He’s still drinking the slurry with obvious eagerness, even if he isn’t slurping it down.

“It usually doesn’t take this long,” Vincent adds. His amusement fades as he swallows more slurry. “Lucrecia’s seen me need this much time, but not longer. And I haven’t actually debriefed yet.”

“I can manage her,” Sephiroth says without thinking. Then he grimaces and shoves the blender back under the water; he doesn’t need to be told to know he’s taking his temper out on Vincent without any grounds to do so. “That makes sense.”

“I’m going to raid her files again once she’s gotten what she needs to protect SOLDIER,” Vincent says. He finishes off the glass, then comes to the sink to hand it to Sephiroth. Once he has, he cups up some water in his hand and uses it to rinse out his mouth. “Not immediately. She’s expecting me to do it.”

“I’m not going to object, Vincent,” Sephiroth says. He still sounds annoyed, and when he realizes that, his annoyance only grows. He bites down on the other comment he’d planned, about offering to help, and washes the damn glass while he tries to compose himself.

Vincent stands by the sink and watches him. Part of him, the part which survived Hojo and tolerates his mother, wants to tense up at the scrutiny, even though it’s not remotely in the same category. Which the majority of him has learned, and appreciates, and…he tells himself this, but when he stacks the blender and glass to dry, he has to focus to keep from cracking them as he puts them down.

“Then again, I have no idea where Tseng is at the moment. If he’s not in town, I can’t debrief,” Vincent observes, as if they’ve merely been having that kind of logistical conversation all along. “I do want to go out. Would it alarm Hewley if I showed up at the gardens?”

“You want to go there?” Sephiroth says, blinking. Vincent does know enough about gardening to keep up a conversation with Angeal, but he’s never shown signs that he actually shares the hobby.

“There’s an exhibition I find interesting, and it’s public enough that word will find its way to your mother without your having to update her,” Vincent says.

Which is how, that evening, Sephiroth finds himself walking with Vincent through a greenhouse themed around plants with well-established significance in literature, art, and folklore. “And poisons,” Sephiroth says, reading a plaque.

Vincent smiles as he studies a subtle arrangement of herbs, all very close in color so that one has to stare for a few seconds to pick out the intricate knot pattern. “Not my forte,” he says dryly. “My mother taught me a few things, but mostly to ensure I knew what to do if I ended up on the receiving end. She wasn’t much for them either.”

Sephiroth looks up from the plaque, a reply twisting on his tongue. But he can’t be certain it’ll only end the discussion, and Vincent brings his mother up very rarely…he shifts a little closer to the other man. They’re alone in the greenhouse, since while he sees the benefit in a public appearance, he doesn’t see one in their being constantly troubled by bystanders, and he’s in a position to request a private after-hours viewing.

“In Wutai in the old days you could send messages with the plants you decided to bundle together. You’d go into the woods to forage like anyone else, then take what you found to the marketplace,” Vincent adds after a few seconds. He walks over to the next arrangement, then waits for Sephiroth to catch up. “It’s too old-fashioned to use now, Yuffie’s generation would never even bother to study it—I’m not working, Sephiroth.”

“It’s very difficult to say that with you,” Sephiroth finally replies.

“I know. And usually you’re right to think I am,” Vincent says. His brows move a little as he studies this arrangement, but…not in frustration. “Someone working on this has learned the old codes. I noticed it when I saw the marketing. It’s not work either, just a little fun for themselves, based on what it says, but it’s interesting to see the codes remembered.”

Sephiroth starts to reach for his phone to look up the exhibition again. Then, looking at how Vincent is deliberately composing himself, voice and tilt of head and shoulders, he takes his hand out of his pocket. He’s very curious now, and he’ll be looking up the gardens’ marketing collateral later for names, but…he finds himself far more interested in the man standing in front of him.

“What does it say?” he asks.

“The names of two lovers—it’s a Wutaian children’s tale, the moon and the sun and how they’re only permitted to come together when there’s an eclipse,” Vincent says. “My mother told it to me once or twice.”

“I think the closest Mother’s ever come to a fairytale is when she read me the authorized history of Shinra’s founding,” Sephiroth says. He smiles humorlessly when Vincent looks at him. “And it was a challenge for me to research and find all the inaccuracies for myself.”

Vincent nods. “My mother told me that story because those names were code words she used with our relatives back in Wutai. She loved me, but she never spared me from our family or what they do.”

“Did you want her to?” Sephiroth asks after a long moment. He’s never seen any indication that Vincent is unhappy with his career choices—Vincent doesn’t even seem to mind the genetic work done to him, only the process by which he had to receive it.

And Vincent doesn’t seem unhappy now, only thoughtful. “She gave me the chance to make up my own mind about them, which is as much as she could do in her position, and more than she had to. I’m willing to leave it at that. But I’d like to know why she chose what she did, when I think about her. I usually don’t have this much time.”

Sephiroth debates a reply, then swallows it. Instead he looks at the plants in front of them. This one is a simpler pattern, but as he stares at it, he finds something tugging at his memory—he turns around and looks at some plants behind them. Then sweeps his gaze around the greenhouse, tracing the throughline he’s suddenly realized is there, bobbing in and out of all the arrangements. He’s not certain if that is the code Vincent is referring to or is merely artistic, but either way he finds it—it catches his eye in a way that he’s never had plants do before. He always has had difficulty understanding ornamentation without function, but now he thinks he sees how ornamentation itself can be a function. Perhaps not one he’d personally indulge in, but he can see, a little, what attracts others to it.

“I’d like to learn this code of your family’s,” Sephiroth says after a moment. He touches his pocket again, then clasps his hands behind his back as Vincent gazes at him. “I’ve pushed through more paperwork this week than I usually do in a month. Any more and I’ll probably have Mother demanding to know what’s wrong with me.”

“Over here,” Vincent says after a moment. Smiling again, something different to it. Something relaxed that wasn’t before; the man wasn’t concerned but he had been observing something in Sephiroth that’s now gone, and since he no longer needs to monitor it, he can indulge himself. Can indulge both of them, as he leads them to the other side of the exhibition. “Here. This is the beginning.”

Chapter 27: Fifth Vacation: Nibelheim Tourism

It’s an enormous stump, fully large enough that when Sephiroth and Vincent climb over its side and drop into the hollow center, there’s a good six inches between the top of Sephiroth’s head and the top of its rim. The wood is still quite solid, despite having been weathered barkless and until it’s nearly the same pale shade of Sephiroth’s hair, as he knocks two knuckles against it.

“There’s a major Jenovan cavern near here,” Vincent says from the other side. He sets down his bag, then stoops to look at something near it. Then he moves it aside with his foot and brushes at the inside of the stump until some scratches resolve into crude words. “Emptied out for years and years, no danger there, but I understand from Tifa that once it spoke so loudly that even the cultists didn’t dare stay in it overnight. They’d put their abductees here instead, to listen to the voices till they were convinced.”

“Overwhelmed, you mean,” Sephiroth says. He’s read the records from the time, and listened to the few remaining audio recordings, all of interviews with surviving anti-Jenovans. There were interviews with ex-cultists as well, but no raw materials remain, only summaries of long-since destroyed transcripts. “Or brainwashed.”

Vincent looks up at the sky as Sephiroth comes over to him, manner still calm and easy. “Overwhelmed seems more accurate, from what I’ve heard,” he says. “The dying alien at the bottom of it didn’t seem to have any true understanding of what it was doing, and only had one way to impress its thoughts on…but this is speculation, of course.”

“My mother would find it fascinating.” Sephiroth hears the way his voice curdles, and looks up at the sky as well; it doesn’t stop Vincent from studying him or him from sensing it and being irritated with himself. It’s only a short trip to check Zack’s recommended training sites and Vincent’s along mostly because they both need to be out of town so certain politicians can be lured into thinking their unauthorized theft of R&D secrets have gone unnoticed. Even so…Vincent is along, and they are going to have some time to themselves. Sephiroth shouldn’t be wasting a second of it. “We need to upgrade the weather station here. I understand microclimates but a more than sixty percent variance between reality and—”

“It’s only going to be a short shower. Half an hour at most, this time of year,” Vincent says, still looking at Sephiroth. That side of Sephiroth’s face starts to tingle and warm, with neither of those reactions signs that the man’s gazing at him with pity, or anything in that line. “Enough to cool things.”

Sephiroth rolls his shoulders without thinking, then has to do it again as his coat, its inside unpleasantly moist and sticky with the summer humidity, clings to his skin. “Shame,” he mutters. “A longer storm might knock out the comms, and then I could skip the call with her.”

Vincent’s too sensible to reply to that, since it’s not a call he can get Sephiroth out of, and in Sephiroth’s mother’s current mood, seeing or hearing him at all probably would make matters worse. Realistically, it’s a simple enough matter and Sephiroth should try not to dwell on it, so the call stays cabined to its time slot and doesn’t derail his thoughts for the entire day, but…he looks at the sky again, almost resenting the clouds rapidly scudding across it for their false promise of guaranteed separation from the rest of the world.

Hands settle on his shoulders. Then his elbows, as his arms rise a few inches in reflex. Sephiroth stops the words rising in his throat, then deliberately exhales and lowers his hands back to his hips. He still doesn’t want to speak with her, he thinks, but the thought is missing its jagged, seething edge to it, like how paper loses its crispness when dampened.

“The inscriptions are from Jenovan prisoners?” he asks idly, as Vincent starts to peel his coat off of him.

“I think they thought of them as converts, and I’m not sure,” Vincent says. The side of his mouth is quirked into a smile, as he leans over Sephiroth’s shoulder and lets the coat slide down between them to pool about their feet. He adds Sephiroth’s belts to the pile, but leans Masamune carefully against the stump wall. “Nearly all of them make no sense, and the ones that do are only names, a few dates. I think they bound their prisoners most of the time, so they couldn’t run from the voices.”

Sephiroth hums acknowledgement as he lets his head drop backward, resting it on Vincent’s shoulder against the soft lipping of the man’s mouth up the side of his throat. “Am I running?”

“No, but…we’ll be here for the storm,” Vincent murmurs, just before sinking his teeth into Sephiroth. It’s along the tendon, pushing hot lightning down it into the shoulder; the sensation isn’t quite enough to burn out all the tension knotting up Sephiroth’s back, but it starts to loosen its grip. “And you’re easier out of the way, aren’t you? Quiet that way.”

The hunger sliding through Sephiroth at the other man’s words shouldn’t surprise him at this point, but it does, catching and seeming to spin him with its ferocity so when Vincent’s grip jerks him back against the man, he gasps. Then subsides, going pliant as Vincent’s thumb-claw draws its tip up the vulnerable inside of his wrist. “Please,” he says without thinking.

Vincent rumbles, lazy-humored, but then nips Sephiroth under the jaw. “Ask,” he orders.

Sephiroth has to think for a moment, to drag his mind out of the hazy arousal clouding it. He feels oddly less frustrated than usual about it, considering they’ve not had much time for sex lately, between Vincent’s recovery and gearing up for this trip. “Cock, on your—on your cock, please. Even if you tie mine.”

There’s a small space, with no tension in it, before Vincent’s head slides against his in a nod. “Now quiet,” Vincent tells him.

A moan burns in Sephiroth’s throat, but he holds it in as he’s bound. Arms first, strapped forearm-to-forearm across his chest, with a strap running from wrist-to-wrist behind him to keep it snug. Drops of condensation rapidly collect on the leather binder, making it stick to his skin, but he finds it less irritating than when it’d done the same under his coat. The slight tug and prickle whenever the binder shifts against him only seems to pull heat up out of his skin, rather than trapping it, and even though sweat is already trailing down his back, he feels…relieved.

Vincent strips him of his trousers next but has him keep his boots on, pulling the trouser legs carefully over them as he steps back to lean against the stump wall. It’s unexpectedly cool, the wood, and so smoothed by time it’s almost like gliding over satin as Vincent digs into their bags and his hips hitch in anticipation. His nipples, already pebbled, tighten further above the arm binder, and by the time Vincent rises with the piercing kit in hand, they’re so hard Sephiroth almost warns the man off touching them.

Not that Vincent would ever listen—not that that’s Sephiroth’s role in this, telling the man what can or can’t be done. Even if the effects are all on Sephiroth’s end, his body shuddering on barely-capable knees as the punch of the needles seem to snap strings all over him, leaving him unraveling until Vincent shoves him back up by the hips.

Then holds him there, hands going back to grip his buttocks in a possessive, rough hold as he pants in Vincent’s face. “You’ll wear them for long enough,” Vincent says, answering the surprise threading through Sephiroth. Then he leans forward to lick at Sephiroth’s parted lips. “Long enough to remember who you answer to. If it’s a few hours or a few days, it’s still the same.”

Sephiroth claws the groan so that it dies behind his teeth, but shreds of it still leak out into the air, around Vincent’s lips and tongue as the man roughly claims his mouth. They’re due to rendezvous with Zack this evening; his nipples can heal by then, but he’ll still feel it. He can’t help it these days, whenever they put the rings in, can’t help feeling the drag of them against his chest and the hard spear through his flesh for hours after. He might still be feeling it on the flight out, depending on what Vincent does with him.

He's dizzy with ideas for that, as Vincent goes back into the bag and takes out more toys. A collar, an ornamental one that keeps a taut one-inch grip about his throat as he swallows more groans, arching his hips and shoulders against the stump as fingers deftly tease and roll at his ball sac. His cock’s hard and slapping against his belly but Vincent treats it as an afterthought, elbowing it out of the way as the man’s nails leave searing streaks across the back of Sephiroth’s scrotum, as the nudge of a thumb makes Sephiroth throw his head back against the wood.

His balls are tugged against their natural inclination, stretched down, and then something heavy and chilly closes around the top part of them. A steel cuff, polished to silk so that it’s the weight alone that tortures him, dragging him downward as he curls his toes in his boots and feels them start to slide across the ground.

“Not yet,” Vincent says, catching him with a finger through each nipple ring. They’re twisted and he whimpers, hauling himself up back up; Vincent doesn’t seem to notice the transgression but he doesn’t put much stock in that.

But he can’t do anything but wait for the man to deal with him. Which Vincent does in agonizingly languid stages, first attaching a long chain to the ball cuff that swings between his legs, each twirl of it sending tangled messages of aching pleasure up his spine and down his trembling thighs. Then using the chain to urge him off the support of the wall, forcing him to totter a few inches like a newborn fawn. He’s swaying in place, trying to keep his knees locked since he hasn’t been told to go down onto them, as Vincent slides in behind him and then spreads his buttocks.

There’s no verbal order but Sephiroth hears it thrum in the air anyway, shuddering with the effort of holding himself. He can’t manage everything, not now; the pinpricks of pain as he curls his nails into his palms only seem to muddle his head rather than clear it. He has to give something up and that’s control of his voice as he whines on Vincent’s fingers.

“Needy,” Vincent pronounces. He drops his arm around Sephiroth’s waist, pulling Sephiroth back enough to lean a little on him; his fingers go to the hilt in Sephiroth as a result so that the added support is neatly outweighed by how Sephiroth’s knees liquefy. “Not yet. Don’t make me tie your cock.”

Sephiroth tosses his head in reflex and he hears Vincent huff, then feels the man blow at his hair to get it out of the way. He whines again, the only apology he can muster, and Vincent nuzzles through the strands to tug at his collar with teeth, chuckling as he shivers.

They move back against the side of the stump, Vincent finally letting him crumple his legs under him. He’s struggling so much that he misses the exit of the man’s fingers, going boneless while still half-squatting when he feels the head of Vincent’s cock breach him. Vincent grunts at Sephiroth’s weight, then knees roughly at the chain between Sephiroth’s legs; the sudden jerk of it briefly gives Sephiroth enough energy to push himself up. He’s gasping now, each breath threatening to tear the collar off him, and then Vincent hauls him fully down onto the man’s cock and his knees give out.

His breath does as well. He sprawls across Vincent’s lap, filled with the other man, legs mere props as Vincent maneuvers them up and out of the way so that they aren’t taking any of his weight, aren’t any kind of barrier between him being spitted on Vincent’s prick. His head lolls against the stump wall, along Vincent’s shoulder, and when Vincent finally settles a hand around Sephiroth’s cock, he barely stirs even though the grip floods him with need so overwhelming that he nearly blacks out before he remembers to push open his lungs.

“Make your noises,” Vincent says, nosing behind Sephiroth’s ear.

His fingers tighten on Sephiroth’s cock as Sephiroth moans, pushing the coiling arousal down; it’s not entirely on Sephiroth now to hold himself and he moans again, a little energy diverted into a sluggish hip-roll. Then he twitches as something plops on his belly. Vincent’s teeth scrape at him, urging him still again, and he turns a blurry gaze down to where Vincent’s other hand wipes the drop off his skin. Then up at the now cloud-filled sky, panting at the gathering storm, as the hand wanders down between his legs to pick up the chain.

“Make them. But you’ll come when it’s done raining, not before,” Vincent murmurs.

Sephiroth whimpers. The chain moves between his legs, tweaking his balls this way and that, making him feel the weight of them—the growing pressure, the way it pushes against the cuff, turning him leaden even as Vincent scratches a nail lightly along the underside of his cock.

Then Vincent abruptly pushes up behind him. The shift of the man’s cock in him makes Sephiroth spasm all over, and when it’s done and he’s lying limp, he looks at the sky through heavy lids and finds it’s closed out by more than his own lashes: the edges of Vincent’s wings curve up on either side. Coming closer and closer together, as Vincent’s hand speeds up on his cock, until the last sliver of sky disappears and Vincent suddenly pushes his fingers down to the base of his prick to squeeze hard.

The wings wrap around them at the same time, membrane pressing down on him from all sides as the initial urge to jerk his legs out suddenly dissolves, like paper so soaked it’s falling apart. The wings are warm and somehow dry despite the wet air, the sweat slicking Sephiroth’s skin, and they soak up all his shudders. His gasps, his nerves, until it’s as quiet as Vincent had promised.

He passes the storm that way, in an all-encompassing daze. Not brainwashed—not when there’s no room for any thought at all, even though in this state it would be easy to push in something, easy as stroking his thighs, as mouthing his throat, fondling his cock and balls till the tightness of them spreads all over his body, running up against the hard metal of his nipple piercings as they keep his chest clamped together. He’s eased up near climax, then held back just as easily, like a pebble sliding back and forth over the same patch of ground.

Perhaps he makes noises. He might even beg, but he doesn’t have any conscious awareness of it. Only of his body, of the way it’s guided this way and that but always kept close and warm no matter what he does.

Though he does very little, in the end. When the light finally filters down onto his head and he raises it, blinking like an old man, the final surge that runs through him is all Vincent’s doing. Vincent’s hands on his cock, Vincent’s cock pushed into him, the way he’s rocked between the two until his climax spills out of him, leaving only a sagging shadow behind.

His head’s nudged from behind. He moves it, then parts his lips as Vincent slides come-streaked fingers one by one between them. “Did you hear anything?” he’s asked.

“No,” Sephiroth rasps. He gives Vincent’s little finger a last lap, then pulls a breath out of himself that, though tired, seems to draw from his very core. Thoughts start to stir. “Did you…expect…”

“No, or I wouldn’t have come anywhere near here. The alien might be gone, but even the few traces that are left are not to be taken lightly.” But Vincent’s more playful than reprimanding, even as he drops his hand to swirl at the chain, dragging a groan out of Sephiroth that rises over the links’ clinking. “It’s a clean site. But Cloud and Tifa both say sometimes even the clean ones—people think they hear things. The locals call them truth caves, with the effect they have.”

“Imagination,” Sephiroth grunts. He half-closes his eyes again as Vincent’s other hand cups his balls, fingertips brushing up against the cuff. It’s still stretching him, the soreness radiating from it starting to come back into focus as the temporary relief of his orgasm fades. “Reputation and imagination. It sounds like the effect’s more with…what people bring with them, than anything external.”

Vincent makes an assenting noise. “True. Which may not be at odds with your training goals.”

Possibly not, but Sephiroth finds himself reluctant to return his mindset fully to his duties. He doesn’t mind the rest of the conversation, he thinks, mindlessly nuzzling at the side of Vincent’s face. Only the connection back to work.

Not something he wants to bring here, not yet. And as he thinks that, the chain draws slowly, teasingly taut as Vincent wraps his hand up in it, knuckles grazing against Sephiroth’s perineum. Sephiroth shifts in place, hissing, and Vincent gives the ball-cuff a tug that expels a rough moan from him.

“Please,” Sephiroth says, and then stops. But Vincent murmurs to him, teasing him further, asking him what he wants. “Please—train—”

“Train you?” Vincent echoes, as one knuckle rubs back and forth, back and forth behind Sephiroth’s imprisoned ball sac. “A general, and you still haven’t learned how to serve?”

Sephiroth shudders in place, then mewls when that digs the point of Vincent’s knuckle directly into his prostate, squeezing it into the cock that still spears him. He doesn’t remember if that had been what he’d meant to say, but it’s what he wants to say now. “I want to,” he breathes out. “I want to. Tell me—tell me to tell Zack we’ll do breakfast, not dinner. Please.”

“It wasn’t that bad a storm,” Vincent says, but he’s kissing Sephiroth’s collar rather than taking it off.

“Tell me anyway,” Sephiroth says. Begs. “And—and tie my cock for it.”

Vincent laughs. “I should have taken you to one of the other caves. There’s another one of these stumps—Fair doesn’t know where it is.”

The implications of that spiral Sephiroth’s mind into a light daze, even as Vincent levers him off the man’s cock. Led out into the mountains and put into an empty stump, there to be retrieved as Vincent pleases—he wishes they had the time for it. Wishes so badly that he goes down onto his knees for a moment, emptied of everything else but that wish.

He’s allowed a few seconds for it to burn through him, and then Vincent pulls at the chain. Not hard but enough to push him back—to remind him that’s not what he answers to, a mere wish.

No, he answers to a reality, and the reality for once is welcome, as Vincent pushes him to his feet and then against the stump, his back to it with his arms still strapped together as Vincent leaps over the rim. The chain’s left to hang between his legs, not attached to anything, but its swaying weight is more than enough to keep him in place, cock rising inch by inch, as he waits on the other man.

Vincent comes back with a small heap of snow cradled in his coat. Even in summer, snow persists in the shadowy places, and he applies handfuls of it to Sephiroth’s erection as Sephiroth writhes and whines, rutting his buttocks up against the stump, the need not chased away by the cold but merely forced back in. Settling deep in his groin, aching, as Vincent wipes off the dribbles and then puts the cage on, threads the hollow sound into his cock. When Vincent detaches the chain from his ball-cuff, the sudden loss of its weight almost makes Sephiroth cry out; he could have used the extra grounding to keep his mind from flying away, so lightheaded is he. His arms are shaking after Vincent frees them.

But Vincent leaves the cuff on. It presses there between his legs, pulling him down as he’s directed to put his trousers back on and then take up his bags. The persistent pull of it keeps one part of his mind always on it, making him slow and overly careful as they both climb out of the stump and then make their way to a suitable campsite for the night. Too far from Vincent’s cave, but it’s an idle thought, not a wish. The collar and piercings and cage and cuff all keep Sephiroth in Vincent’s grip no matter where they are.

He takes his call with his mother while wearing them, and for once her sharp edges simply skim off him, blunted by the simple fact that she can’t read him as effectively from where she is. She probably notices, but she saves whatever ire she feels for later; Sephiroth will credit his mother with this, she can put her pride aside to wait for a better opportunity.

But that opportunity isn’t going to come while Sephiroth is out here, and he and Vincent both have to work to set up camp. So he pushes that aside, and goes to see what Vincent wants to tell him to do now.

They divide up the chores, except that once the camp’s boundaries are marked out, Vincent takes Sephiroth’s trousers and puts the chain back on the cuff. This time he attaches the free end to one of the tent pegs. If Sephiroth wanted, he could easily uproot it, so he has to mind not doing that as he moves about the camp. Has to keep the chain off the ground and untangled from his legs, but not so tensioned that the peg shifts. And when he isn’t minding that, he’s minding Vincent and what the man wants him to do, where the man wants him to go.

It's enough to keep him busy. Thinking but not dwelling, until they’re settled again, with the ubiquitous food tins open to warm by the fire and Sephiroth tied up again. This time with his arms strapped across his back, chest and face pressed to a tree trunk as Vincent runs a thin chain around it from nipple ring to nipple ring. His knees are pushed up to either side of the trunk and then Vincent takes the ball-chain in hand and attaches it to something farther from the tree; Sephiroth can tell from how it dips and then draws so tautly that he bucks his hips without thinking. The other chain yanks at his nipples and he shudders, rasping his cheek against the tree as he squirms between the two opposing pulls.

Its bark is much rougher than the stump’s near-silk, and the scratches mount as Vincent slides two fingers into him. Then holds a sat-phone to one of his ears and murmurs in the other, dictating his call to Zack. The other man already sounds distracted, and Sephiroth distantly registers the occasional muffled background comment from Cloud or Tifa, but not which one it is. Zack seems fine with the rescheduled rendezvous, not unduly worried about the weather, and only asks once if they need any additional supplies brought in. It’s a successful call, but Sephiroth is shaking when it’s over, shaking as Vincent’s fingers relentlessly stroke in and out of him, as his nipples and balls are pulled hot and sore by their chains.

“Good,” Vincent says, as he reaches around to detach the nipple chain. He rubs at Sephiroth’s nipples, soothing each in turn but far, far too briefly, before the chain between Sephiroth’s legs stirs. “Come.”

Sephiroth twists violently on his knees, crying out, as his cock surges against the cage, throbbing about the sound speared through it. Vincent makes an amused noise but he steps up behind Sephiroth, fingers dragging through Sephiroth’s hair over and over till Sephiroth subsides against his legs. The chain tugs again and Sephiroth whimpers, but heaves himself up onto his knees.

Vincent leads him back to camp that way, fingers half-twisted into his hair to keep his head up, and then rewards him by sucking and rubbing his nipples through dinner. He’s fed till Vincent is satisfied, fed till his pierced nubs are swelling up against the man’s caresses, and then pushed into their tent. Left to sit there for a while, as Vincent tidies up outside, and when the other man finally crawls in after him, he’s more than ready to answer Vincent’s demands. Rolling onto his back and spreading his legs, shivering at the end of the ball-chain as Vincent releases him from the cock cage and then nurses him dry. Then onto his belly, cock rendered soft for the night, soft but tight with the kind of ache that comes only when he’s been used far past his own needs, only able to lie still and satisfy Vincent’s.

He’s fucked like that, fucked and then cleaned again, Vincent’s tongue burrowing into him for every drop of come as he mewls on it. Then pulled up against the other man, Vincent’s cock soft too as it pillows between Sephiroth’s buttocks. Vincent unties his arms but leaves on the collar and the piercings.

And the ball-cuff, although he tosses the chain into a corner. “Let me wear it till breakfast,” Sephiroth murmurs, half-asleep but still with one ear on the man behind him.

“Through breakfast, if you want. They can’t see it like the nipple rings,” Vincent muses, and then smiles against Sephiroth’s throat as Sephiroth, unable to stop himself, twitches needily. “Through all the sites we’re going to look at, in case you do hear something out here. They did resort to that, some people—tattoos and amulets and things like that, to keep the voices out and remind them of their families. It did seem to work, apparently.”

“Likely the symbolism, rather than the thing itself,” Sephiroth says. Jenova was an opportunist, as far as he can tell from the records, and in the end it was rooted out and overcome by ordinary people rather than any kind of specialist professional team. “The power was in the reminder.”

“Agreed,” Vincent says.

He’s quiet for a moment, arm draped over Sephiroth, head pushed into Sephiroth’s hair. Sephiroth remembers he’s been coming here for decades, speaking to local sources unmediated by any investigator or historian, and likely exploring Jenovan locations on his own. “Have you? Heard anything?”

“No,” Vincent says. His fingers curl back to brush against Sephiroth’s belly. “I was careful about testing it—I still check with the locals every time I come, in case something’s changed. I never came here to lose myself, only to lose the rest of the world.”

Vincent tends to give up more of his past in moments like these. It doesn’t feel like it’s catching him in a vulnerable time, tired as they both are; it’s more as if this is the way Vincent finds the right state of mind to speak about it, as Sephiroth finds the right state to think without his duties weighing on him. “Careful in what way?” Sephiroth asks, stretching himself out under Vincent’s hand. “Cloud and Tifa would’ve still been children.”

“I made a few acquaintances besides them. Zangan, Tifa’s fighting instructor—when I first came, they were still finding an active cave once a year, not every five or six, and he ran cleansing patrols for them. I volunteered for a couple, and helped pull a few people out of active ones,” Vincent says. He leans his head against the back of Sephiroth’s shoulder. “I did think I needed to know, if it was something that could test the controls I’d developed against my enhancements. But I never heard anything, even when others did. I only felt…unwelcome, in a few places.”

Sephiroth hears the man, but is a little slow to prick alert, comfortable as he is. “Sensory? Or psychological?”

“I’m not sure. It never lasted long enough for me to fully test it, and anyway, it never deterred me from coming here,” Vincent says, sounding thoughtful. “It felt more like instinct, coming across traces of a…competitor.”

“I felt nothing, back at the stump,” Sephiroth says after a moment. He stretches again, as Vincent traces circles across his belly, and then tips his head as Vincent’s mouth presses aside his hair and caresses along his collar. “Nothing you didn’t cause.”

“You know who you answer to,” Vincent says, voice warm, hand splaying across Sephiroth’s skin in as much affection as possession. His mouth shifts a little, finding a sorer spot, and then lingers as Sephiroth shivers. “I wonder if you would have ever sensed anything at all, even at a live site. It fed on doubt, fear, things like that—nothing you specialize in. As pretty as you are when you’re in chains and serving me…you’re still as certain about it as you are when you’re commanding your teams.”

Nothing in what Vincent says is surprising, and Sephiroth has spent far too long with Shinra to be susceptible to flattery. But that is why he pauses, he thinks: Vincent does not traffic in empty compliments, and in fact rarely compliments anything. So it’s meaningful, to both of them, with a weight beyond what Sephiroth would give it were anyone else to say such things.

Including some alien being, trying to leverage anything it could for survival. Sephiroth doesn’t feel the need to test himself simply to test himself, but he does think if he did with this—Vincent would be proven right. “Then it’d be a waste of time to see, when we have little enough of it,” he finally says. “And I’m not inclined to subject myself to all the exams Mother would ask for to confirm any findings. I’m happy to let Zack stumble into these caves but don’t feel any need to see for myself.”

“Are you?” Vincent asks, and then smiles against Sephiroth’s skin again when Sephiroth, not mistaking his meaning, only sighs. “Cloud and Tifa mapped every inch of their trail in advance this time, and I think Fair only just talked them out of putting a harness on him. I don’t think we’ll be interrupted by him falling into another one.”

“Good,” Sephiroth mutters. Then he lets Vincent soothe the irritation out of him, going soft under the man’s mouth. “Let me wear it. We’ll have time tomorrow evening.”

“True,” Vincent says, as his hand tucks itself with a sense of finality against Sephiroth’s hip. “Wear it. You don’t need the reminder, but you want it so badly—need it so much, you can have it. Wear it while you’re working, and when you’re not, I’ll chain you to the ground by it and use your mouth till you can’t taste anything besides me.”

Sephiroth bites back a moan, as Vincent puts his mouth behind Sephiroth’s ear. Vincent bumps up against him, making his ball sac roll a little, so that the cuff’s heft pulls at him. Then tells him to sleep, voice soft, body close, pulling the tension back out of Sephiroth as things slowly settle in place. Even the cuff settles, its weight only a promise for the next day, telling Sephiroth everything he needs to know.

* * *

Sephiroth’s always a lot more relaxed around Valentine, unless they’re actually fighting something, but it’s one thing to see the man shrug off the countless little nuisances of Shinra bureaucracy while sitting around in a conference room. It’s another to see him do it outdoors, sipping at badly-burnt coffee and patiently waiting for their satellite connection to relink so Zack can finish downloading his notes from the cloud because he’s a moron and didn’t do it in town before they took off.

“Sorry, we were kind of distracting,” Cloud mutters as he comes back from refilling the water purifier from a nearby stream. He glances over at where Sephiroth and Valentine are sitting, then swipes the coffee tin from Zack. “I’ll do it this time, don’t worry about it. Connection still bad?”

“I’m working on it,” Tifa says as she uses two multi-tools to fiddle around inside the little black box that Shinra IT gave Zack. She pokes something, glances at Zack’s tablet, and then sighs and pokes something else. “Another five minutes? Can we wait that long?”

“Yeah—yeah, listen, don’t sweat it too much. Worst comes to worst, we go look without my notes and Sephiroth hands me all the comments he would’ve made anyway,” Zack says. And then the man in question happens to look up and Zack freezes in place. Then smiles and waves, and tries not to feel as if he can feel the bad patrol assignments piling up on his calendar.

Sephiroth’s eyes narrow a little, and when Zack throws a thumbs-up sign, he swears that the other man actually rolls them. But Sephiroth only nods and turns back to Valentine and whatever they’re discussing, leaving Zack to squat down behind the stump Tifa is using as a table and blow out his cheeks in relief.

“Right,” Tifa says. When Zack looks up, she’s not looking at him but at Cloud, who’s giving her the same expression of muted exasperation back.

Then the two of them both return to their respective tasks, and in the next ten minutes, they: produce coffee that has a function beyond delivering caffeine, stabilize the satellite signal, and manage to translate Zack’s idiosyncratic abbreviations into geographic commentary that Sephiroth finds not only helpful but interesting enough to take down on his own tablet. Basically, they make Zack look good.

“Well, figured it was that or have you just stroke out in front of us,” Cloud says once they’ve wrapped their working breakfast and have parted ways with Sephiroth and Valentine. “We did say we were going to bring you back from this trip.”

“You say that every trip out here, and despite my best efforts you succeed,” Zack says, with an arm slung around Cloud’s shoulders as they crest a rise in the trail. Then he unloops it as Tifa grabs his elbow and pulls him sharply to the left. Nothing in particular seems to motivate the gesture, but given his track record in Nibelheim, Zack assumes Tifa’s just saved him from some man-eating pothole and just goes with it. “Anyway, thanks a lot, both of you. First one to get to camp tonight gets me right where they want me.”

Tifa smiles a little, as she keeps pulling Zack down off the trail. “You seem pretty worried about your boss okaying all the scouting you’ve been doing out here. He already likes the area—he’s come in with Vincent the last three times Vincent’s been in town.”

“Yeah, but that’s vacation and this is work. He’s actually going to send in teams based on what I tell him, so I gotta make sure he can count on everything,” Zack says. He looks around as they start to encounter bushes; it’s nothing he can’t knee through, but it is obvious that nobody’s come this way in a good while, if at all. “I know Seph can come off like a hardass, but he doesn’t like wasting people’s lives. He won’t agree to drills here if he isn’t comfortable with it.”

“I get that, but isn’t the point of a field drill to make sure you get some real experience? And if you’re going to get that, you can’t get rid of all the dangers,” Cloud says as he brings up the rear. He doesn’t look surprised at where they’re going so despite how it looks, he and Tifa must have gone this way before. “Otherwise you could just do it on a computer.”

“Yeah, but that’s not what I mean by comfortable.” A branch snags at Zack’s ankle and he pauses to kick himself free. Something pushes against his back and he twists, only to realize it’s Cloud reaching out to steady him, because apparently that’s a patch of poisonous mushrooms a foot away; he at least recognizes it when he sees it, even if he doesn’t see it until he’s got his boot over it. He carefully twists back. “I mean, he wants to make sure the risks that’ll probably come up are the ones he thinks are worth testing teams against. He gets risk, he just doesn’t like people getting fucked up only because someone wants to see what happens when they get fucked up. Kind of how I got him to acknowledge our eternal friendship, actually.”

Tifa lets Cloud guide him away from the mushrooms, then takes his arm again and resumes leading them through the brush. There’s an odd smell drifting towards them, vaguely eggy but with an unpleasant metallic whiff to it—not any chemical that’d immediately trigger alarm bells, but Zack snorts hard and Tifa pauses again. “Mud pools,” she says. “You’re friends?”

“But yes, always and forever,” Zack says, and then grins as she politely just looks skeptical. “Yeah, I know, he won’t admit it if you held a sword to his throat, but that’s okay. He’s kicked a whole R&D team out of an ambulance for me. While it was moving, even! So I know I am, and that’s all that matters.”

“Did they die?” Cloud asks, looking slightly wary but not as if this information puts him off his game.

“What, the scientists? Nah, they just had to walk five miles into Junon in a rainstorm,” Zack says, and then he nods at Tifa to walk on. He’s not sure what’s so important about mud pools that they’re going off-trail for this, but he trusts these two at this point. Not only because they keep saving him—though that is a very, very unforgettable part of it—but because they do tend to just pause and listen whenever a Shinra special rears its head, rather than just writing Zack off. “That’s what I mean about risk that doesn’t help you learn anything—R&D used to do that a lot, toss us SOLDIERs into stuff they’d been monitoring without telling us everything so they could just see what happened. I wasn’t there for the worst of it, but they were still doing it back when I first joined, the part Heidegger was still running.”

“You weren’t a First back then, right?” Tifa says. She pushes a gap into the bushes for Zack and Cloud, then steps aside.

“Nah, just a cadet, though I had sky-high enhancement compatibility tests and I guess that was why I was on Seph’s radar. But still only a cadet, and it wasn’t like I was the only one. But I was solo on that patrol and when he got wind of the set-up, he and Angeal came down on R&D like avenging demons,” Zack says as he walks up beside Tifa. They’re standing on the edge of a muddy patch, with a fudgy center that sounds better than it looks. It blows a greasy-looking bubble that pops as he watches, sending a fresh wave of sulfur into the air. “I knew right then, if he was that pissed off over losing a cadet, this was somebody who gave a damn, whatever they liked to call him on the—oh, wow.”

Cloud and Tifa stay silent for a few seconds and just let him take in the area just behind the mud pool. Namely, the small, kidney-shaped, beautifully steaming hot spring. A tatzelwurm is lounging in one end of it, that’s how nice it is, and when they edge around the mud pool, it hisses at them before reluctantly retreating into the underbrush.

“Bath sex?” Zack says hopefully, and then catches himself. “Wait, strike that, we’ve got an itinerary and I need to stick with it or else we’re gonna end up making Seph and Vincent wait on us—”

“They’re not going to have to wait,” Tifa says as she slides her backpack down to the ground. “We can take a couple shortcuts.”

“Also, they already asked us to push one rendezvous back. I kind of have a feeling they’re going to do it again tomorrow,” Cloud says, dropping his bag next to hers. Then he turns and starts to undo Zack’s belt while Tifa slips behind Zack to grab his bag. “Besides, you need to relax or you’re going to step into another hole when you’re not looking. That wasn’t what happened with R&D, was it?”

“A hole? No, that’s all the mountains, all the time,” Zack says dryly. He still feels a little guilty about this, but Cloud and Tifa are the experts and if they say they can make up the time, they can make up the time. And anyway, he does owe them too. “It was a sewer drain.”

Cloud stops with his hands halfway into Zack’s pants. “So it was a hole,” he says.

Zack winces. “No, it wasn’t, I knew it was there, unlike your trapdoor trails up here, I just wasn’t expecting the thing to have laser tripwires—”

“Clothes first, argue later,” Tifa says, as Zack’s bag hits the ground. Her breasts push up against his back, promisingly firm, as her hands start to tackle his shirt. “You’re better at that when you’ve had sex.”

Zack isn’t sure which one of them she’s talking to, but…well, he’s not going to argue with her. And he does owe them, he hasn’t forgotten about that.

They get into the hot spring. It’s just a little too warm today for much lounging in it, but unlike the heat of the sun, the water’s heat seeps into his muscles and helps unknot them. The massaging helps too—he doesn’t let them just do all the work, but pitches in to rub up Tifa’s thighs while Cloud’s holding her from behind. And then he digs the heels of his hands into Cloud’s back while Tifa, now sitting on a rock at the edge of the pool, wraps her legs around Cloud’s head and moans.

Once she’s gotten off, she and Cloud drag Zack up and Zack sucks Cloud off while Tifa fingers him. The woman’s got a good, strong touch, and by the time Zack comes, his prostate feels as if it’s been worked into jelly, in a good way.

“I don’t think we’re putting this one on the training itinerary, though,” he says as Tifa pads through the mossy ground to the neighboring mud pool. “Can you see it? Bunch of dumb city grunts tramping all over, fucking around and trashing it…”

“Oh. We thought it’d be a good recovery stop,” Cloud says. He sits up and wipes his hands on his hips, then reaches over as Tifa comes back with what appears to be a double handful of mud. And then proves it is mud, when he takes some and smears it all over his shoulders and neck. “There’s good minerals in that, helps with sprains and things like that.”

Tifa sits down and streaks mud over her breasts. It’s not the unappealing grey-brown of Midgar mud but an inoffensive beige, and it does look nice next to the darker chocolate of her nipples. “Not as good as Curaga, but you pull something on a hike, slap this on for twenty minutes, it’ll get you back to town.”

“Okay, interesting. Something here that’s not trying to kill you,” Zack says, nodding. When Tifa offers him the mud she has left, he’s still a little hesitant but he dabs in a finger and then rubs it over the back of his forearm. It…doesn’t hurt, anyway. “Yeah, I still think we keep this one to ourselves. I mean, I’m doing this for work, but once it’s all set up, I still want to have some things around here I come to just to have fun.”

“You have fun in the mountains?” Tifa says, and then chuckles as Zack crawls over and starts to nose up between her legs. Her hand lands on the backs of his shoulders, feeling a little—oh, the mud. Which, even if it looks okay and doesn’t burn, still feels like mud—although that gets better as her fingers start to work at his muscles, and then Cloud comes over to help. “Well, if you want to keep this one off the list, that’s fine with us.”

“Yeah. Yeah, anyway, Seph probably wouldn’t be big on this anyway,” Zack says around Tifa’s thigh. “I know he’s come here for a break before, but with him work is work and PTO is PTO. He wouldn’t want to get the two mixed together.”

“If you say so,” Cloud shrugs, his hands wandering lower and lower. “Then we’ll just finish this up, and then get you back to work before he notices.”

* * *

“Parachute silk,” Sephiroth says, fingering the material. He wraps some over the back of his finger and then pulls it hard against the bent knuckle, watching as wavy glimmers appear. Some synthetics woven into it as well, he thinks, adding tensile strength. “This is Shinra R&D’s output.”

“They told me they were going to destroy the scraps,” Vincent says, as he finishes checking over the other items he plans to bring. “Since it performed as intended. There were some large pieces, so I took them to one of my—”

“One of your experts?” Sephiroth asks. Then he shrugs as Vincent glances at him. He doesn’t truly want an answer, at least right now. Perhaps later, when they’ve returned to their camp for the night.

They’re going to check sightlines from a slope opposite that where most of the planned training sites are. There’s a perch Vincent’s gone up to before when hunting, and that before him the Jenovans used when defending the valley against the locals trying to throw them out of the area. Zack had gone over the terrain in detail over lunch, working out approaches with Sephiroth, with the occasional color comment from Cloud and Tifa. It’s a short enough hike, but along a path too narrow for more than one person, and the Jenovans had apparently found it easier to add a few features to the perch so whoever was manning it only had to climb down for supplies every few days.

Sephiroth and Vincent don’t plan to spend that much time up there. In all honesty, Sephiroth doesn’t plan to look it over at all; he’s seen the spot during the chopper tour they took of the valley and for the fine details he trusts Vincent can provide anything that Cloud and Tifa did not. Which is all legitimate delegation, of course, but it still feels a little…unusual. Derelict of him. Irresponsible.

He is not that, he knows that well enough. For all that Shinra and its mistakes have put him and those he cares about through, the work he does for it is satisfying, personally and professionally. He would keep it if he could; if they’re ever foolish enough to take from him again, the work itself wouldn’t be enough to keep him at bay, but he would consider the loss of it insult to injury.

But he’s not going to do this for them, and as much as that feels like a transgression, it also sends a pleasurable frisson up his spine. He does enough for them that he should be able to demur when he pleases.

When he pleases, and when it pleases Vincent to take him away. The other man’s still looking at him, as he turns away from the admittedly stunning view, and when their eyes meet again, the cool assessment in Vincent’s face makes Sephiroth shiver again. He’s ready, he thinks. Zack is far from here and distracted by his companions, and the comfortable camaraderie he brings has slipped away from Sephiroth like the breeze is slowly sipping the warmth from him—chilly up here, even in high summer. He shifts on his feet and the clasp of the cuff around his ball sac, only a dimly-persistent sensation during lunch, suddenly seems three times as close and heavy, pushing back his scrotum as it attempts to tighten up against his body.

“Strip,” Vincent says.

Sephiroth’s fingers feel heavy as well, tipped with lead, as he removes his clothing. He hands each piece over to Vincent, who carefully folds and stows them away in one bag, the bag they’ll leave behind at camp. When he’s naked, he kneels without asking, his dangling hands curling where they graze against his thighs.

Vincent rises and moves around him. In front of him is a bundled-up tripod, its Teflon-tipped legs just protruding from the canvas bag housing it. Dappled shadows flit across it as the breeze tosses the branches of a nearby tree, and he watches them move back and forth as Vincent settles behind him, reaches around to push his hands up, and then threads them through the sleeves of the straitjacket.

Silk. It clings to Sephiroth even though his skin is dry and free of sweat, but then slides easily about his arms and torso as Vincent buckles up the back, wraps his arms about his chest and then straps them in place. Strong enough to resist, more than, but when he relaxes it seems to whisper against him with every passing trickle of wind. He rubs his arms against his chest and feels his nipples harden against the smooth fabric.

Vincent notices, and tightens a few of the straps. Sephiroth lets his body be jerked with the yanks, loose gasps rolling out of his lips. His scrotum clenches against its cuff and his cock rises up against his belly, beading precome at the top that catches bits of wind, which swirl down its length in a tease that makes him hitch at the hips. “I can’t put you away like that,” Vincent says in Sephiroth’s ear, voice nestling against its curve as his fingers grip Sephiroth’s cock. “You’re going to make this hard for yourself.”

Sephiroth only groans. The voice in his ear chuckles, and he feels slicked-up fingers push between his buttocks.

“Spread,” Vincent says.

He moves his knees apart, the cuff dragging at his balls, Vincent’s fingers pulling firmly along his cock as he shudders. His head dips involuntarily, then snaps back up as Vincent roughly shoves two fingers into him at once. By the time the gasp makes it out of him, Vincent’s twisted them in to the last knuckle.

“Come,” Vincent says.

Too soon, too little, his edges only a little burnt and the rest still raw and sensitive, even as Sephiroth’s climax obligingly mounts up in his gut and then makes him spill out over Vincent’s hand. He’s shaking afterward not from relief but from frustration, as he pants and twists his arms in the straitjacket.

Vincent ignores him, taking a rag and wiping him down between the legs, flicking at the ball cuff when he flinches at the scratch of it against his cock. When he’s clean, Vincent pulls out a latex sheath and tugs it over his cock. The man holds it in place with one hand as he pushes something into Sephiroth with the other—a vibrator, not only a plug, Sephiroth recognizes its shape at this point. Sephiroth jerks off his knees without thinking and Vincent unlocks the ball cuff.

It drops with a faint thud to the ground as Sephiroth shudders violently, in anticipation of the intense feeling of relief that should rush through him. So violently that at first he thinks that might be it, but then—then the blood pulses down into his ball sac, pulses there and thunders in his ears, and he’s so deafened by it that it takes him several seconds to recall himself.

He’s still kneeling on the ground. His cock and balls are strapped back between his legs, the pressure of the latex sweetly supportive against the lingering lightheadedness he feels, even as he squirms in denied arousal. Vibrator sealed securely inside of him, quiet for now, only rubbing him a little as his head and shoulders are cradled and he’s pulled down onto his side. Lying next to the tripod, still looking at it, as Vincent takes up his legs and then pulls a tight mono-stocking of parachute silk up them.

Desexed toy, maneuvered about and wrapped up like Vincent’s other tools. Once his legs are bagged, straps tightened about them at ankles and knees and waist, Vincent folds them up against his chest and tucks him into another bag. This one’s canvas, the same color and weave as the one carrying the tripod. It does have a leather top that the tripod bag does not, one that pulls snug about his throat to force his jaw up like a posture collar. There are leather straps stitched to its back that Vincent uses to pull him back into a sitting position, barely rocked back enough to keep from crushing his genitals with his own weight. He flexes in a moan and is resisted on all sides, silk and canvas, and when he tries to close his mouth, Vincent straps a rubber cock into it.

He moans again, around his gag, as he’s blindfolded with leather, as his hair’s bundled up into something at his neck. The suddenly-dark world spins around him, sightless but still able to sense motion—he thinks, except then Vincent heaves him up in reality and the jolt of it sends his head lolling back as all the competing sensations burst like fireworks in it. And then—and then the vibrator turns on.

Vincent takes him up to the perch. He’s not particularly conscious of it, aside from a general awareness of steady movement, swinging sometimes with and sometimes against the burring vibrator. Then the gradual increase in pressure on his buttocks as he’s put down and leaned against something. Slowly, brutally slowly, so the vibrator nudges here and there in him as he can do nothing about it but feel its wandering tip unspool him.

Then he’s still for a little while. There’s other movement around him, some sounds. The scuff of shoes on gravel and rock, the hiss of telescoping rods—the tripod, some distant part of him thinks. He mostly doesn’t think. Only waits there, bagged up, until Vincent decides to use him.

The rubber cock’s pulled out of his mouth and a real one is pushed in. He sucks greedily at it, and when he’s swallowed all the come, licks at his lips for the salt in the sweat running off his blindfold. A finger brushes away his tongue and then the hard edge of a thermos is rested against his lip, so he can drink some water. Then he’s gagged again.

Later, he’s tipped over onto his side and the canvas bag is pushed off. His waist-strap is undone and the silk bag is pushed down to his knees, and then he’s rearranged to drape over a rock as Vincent paints the inside of his thighs with lube and fucks between them, pushing up against his latex-cradled cock so that he whimpers into his gag. He’s left to lie like that, come going tacky between his legs as Vincent rests something light on his back, does something. Works, Sephiroth assumes.

When Vincent’s done, the items are removed and Sephiroth’s packed up again without being wiped down. Vincent’s come sticks and itches against his thighs as Vincent backpacks him back down the trail, back to camp, where he’s set aside again. Vincent goes about camp doing things as Sephiroth slowly subsides under the still-whirring vibrator’s attentions, going from squirming to exhausted limpness.

Its sudden stillness jolts a series of mewls out of him, enough that when Vincent’s hand presses against the side of his face, he shivers against the palm. He feels a thumb run lightly over his sore lips, soothingly cool, and then his gag shifts so that spit flicks down the back of his throat. He coughs as it’s removed. The thumb rubs over his lower lip again and he lets his mouth stay open for it, until fingers tip his head up for water.

Once he’s swallowed properly, Vincent feeds him a few mouthfuls. His tired body seizes upon the calories and begins to burn, particularly in his shoulders and hips. He twists without thinking and his muscles spasm, rattling the vibrator in him and squeezing his thighs up against his cock and balls so that he arches in the bag.

Vincent puts down the dish and unstraps the bag from around his neck, then digs fingers into the backs of his shoulders. The man kneads them till Sephiroth is only whining, not gasping, and then pushes the bag the rest of the way down. Sephiroth’s legs snap halfway-unfolded as soon as they’re freed, but then sag to the ground, feeling rubbery in the stocking still binding them together. Then he’s tilted back against the tree behind him, Vincent lifting his legs up and massaging at the undersides of his thighs.

His weight comes down on the vibrator, driving it against his prostate. Deliberately, Vincent using his sudden writhing to help work the man’s fingers against his leg muscles. The knots releasing in them almost override the pressure of the vibrator, and when Vincent finally lowers his legs and straightens them out, he’s slumped weakly against the tree. He twitches a little as a hand cups his jaw, then groans as Vincent opens his mouth for him and then closes it around another mouthful of food.

Once he’s eaten a few more bites, Vincent unties his legs and peels off the stocking. Bits of Vincent’s come, wetted again with his sweat, smear across his thighs as he struggles to push himself off the tree and onto his knees. Vincent steadies him by the shoulders as the man strips off the latex from his cock and balls; the flush of blood into them makes Sephiroth sway till he almost falls back on his side, but Vincent keeps him up.

“Come,” Vincent says, hand on the back of Sephiroth’s neck.

Sephiroth’s hips buck so hard that his knees slide a couple inches against the ground, but he manages to hold himself back from climax. “Please,” he rasps, throat aching with need, as Vincent makes a curious sound and then slides his fingers around to cup the front of Sephiroth’s throat. “Please…on your—your cock.”

Vincent laughs, rather than taking offense at his disobedience. His fingertips rub lightly along Sephiroth’s windpipe as he stoops. He slips his other hand between Sephiroth’s buttocks, tracing around the end of the vibrator, as much a warning as a tease. He gives Sephiroth a few seconds to brace on trembling legs, then pulls that out.

The tug of it along Sephiroth’s prostate nearly flattens him. He bends low over his knees, panting, eyes squeezed shut behind the blindfold, until Vincent takes him and pulls him back, straddling the man’s lap and then sinking down on Vincent’s cock. He arches and Vincent’s hands drop to his hips, pinning him in place as he whips till the pent-up tension in him finally snaps and come surges out of his cock.

Vincent cradles him against the other man as he recovers. Feeds him tidbits that can fit on a fingertip, one at a time till he can take bigger pieces. At some point the blindfold comes off, but he notices long afterward, as the soft darkness resolves into individual strands of Vincent’s hair trailing past his face, as he leans his cheek against the man’s jaw. He pulls up one of his legs, groaning as his overtaxed body warms here and there with soreness, then props it against the hand Vincent puts out to curl over its shin.

“Do you want to see?” Vincent asks him, and he glances to the side where there’s a tablet lying against a hump of grass. Vincent’s free hand flicks over it, and a meaningless overlay of green lines pops up over a topographical map.

It’s only meaningless because Sephiroth isn’t trying. He rubs his cheek absently against Vincent, thinking about whether he wants to. He doesn’t feel the perverse resentment he did yesterday, even though training out here is something he wholly approves of; it’s all the internal politicking that goes along with even sensible resource allocation that drives him close to insanity. Even if he’s good at it.

Even if he has other people to do some of it for him. He watches Vincent’s finger run along one green line, then twists his head to lick at the man’s jaw. “Later.”

“Later,” Vincent repeats, thoughtful and not irritated. His finger slides off the tablet and then drifts a few inches to Sephiroth’s thigh. He runs it up the inside, riding the way it shivers as Sephiroth inhales sharply, then dips his hand between Sephiroth’s legs to wrap about Sephiroth’s ball sac. Which is still bruised from being in the cuff so long, flesh softly swollen as Vincent rubs gently but mercilessly over it. “You’ll want to see it yourself in the morning? We have time.”

“Yes, but not—I know there’s no error, and I don’t see the need to redo your work, but I want…I want you to show me how you do it,” Sephiroth says. Lipping at Vincent’s jaw as he does, even as his breathing staggers from Vincent’s attentions. “You’re using tools my teams don’t. I saw, before you put me away.”

“Show you while you’re sitting on my cock up there?” Vincent muses, and then rumbles in good humor as Sephiroth’s mouth slips off him. “There’s room, but on the other hand, you need to lose your limp by tomorrow afternoon."

Sephiroth groans, both in pleasure and regret. Vincent indulges him for a few more minutes, only lightly stroking his scrotum. Then makes him get up.

The straitjacket and hair net come off and Vincent walks him to a nearby stream to wash up. He’s able to do that much himself, but appreciates Vincent staying to give him an arm back to camp, where he crawls into their tent. He’s not expecting much beyond flopping onto the bedroll, so when Vincent pulls him over and up against the other man, he musters up the energy to pull his arm over Vincent’s waist. His fingers brush at the knobs of Vincent’s spine and Vincent shifts a little; Sephiroth drags his fingers up to do it again, then sighs against Vincent’s shoulder as he feels the familiar coil of Vincent’s tail around his wrist.

Another coil snakes around his thigh on that side, and then the tail tip settles itself between his buttocks, just short of his hole. He pushes his hips back and the tail tip retreats, then returns as he reluctantly settles down.

“A good deal of it is what my old Turk supervisor taught me,” Vincent says into his hair. “You just seem not to send teams into this kind of terrain anymore.”

“It’s a secure border. But even so, we should keep up the skills,” Sephiroth says after a moment.

“Agreed,” Vincent says, and then his head moves. “Surprised?”

“You…treasure your ability to lose yourself here,” Sephiroth says slowly. “As do I.”

“But you think it’s important that your soldiers know how not to die in the mountains, and I raised no objection in the planning sessions,” Vincent says, sounding amused. And something else, a warmth to his voice that runs too deep for mere humor. “We’ll keep them away from my favorites, as we also agreed, so there aren’t any repeats of your first visit.”

Sephiroth resists the urge to roll his eyes at the reminder, but does huff into Vincent’s shoulder. “Part of the idea is to get them the training they need so they don’t need any rescue missions.”

“And so they’ll walk back out on schedule, rather than blundering around and finding themselves where they shouldn’t be,” Vincent says. He shifts his chin up against the top of Sephiroth’s head. “Trying to keep people out without explanations never works in the long term. Hojo tried. Lucrecia took a different approach, and has lasted much longer.”

“Her explanations don’t always comport with reality. But the difference is calculated, and I take your point,” Sephiroth says. With sincerity, because he does appreciate what his mother has accomplished. But praise for her still isn’t what he cares to spend his spare time on. “So you think it’ll be manageable.”

“Yes, I think you’ve put together a very workable plan,” Vincent says. Calm and level as always, without the extra emphasis of someone trying to flatter, and so carrying a good deal more weight with Sephiroth. “Although I may find myself across the border while you’re doing the exercises. You can handle your own forces without me, and military exercises aren’t what I come to this area for.”

Rational enough, and Sephiroth wouldn’t have been able to find any time to see the man for personal reasons. He wouldn’t have tried anyway, with the exercises top of mind, but having Vincent absent would remove the temptation. Not that he thinks that’s the reason for Vincent—he just heard what the reason was. Vincent doesn’t feed him stories to misdirect him; if the man wants to keep something to himself, he simply keeps it.

“If you have time afterward, I can come,” Vincent adds, almost as an afterthought. Except for how his mouth is there, warm and ready, when Sephiroth raises his head. The kiss is slow but deep, savoring Sephiroth’s surrender in a way that his rough treatment earlier didn’t, for all that it thoroughly exploited it. “Otherwise I’ll see you in Midgar.”

“I’ll find time,” Sephiroth says, making his own promise. “I’ll keep some for you.”

Chapter 28: Interlude: Training Session

It’s not unusual for any of the generals to attract an audience when they’re sparring. Sometimes that’s by design, to give the rankers proper role models and to remind the rest of Shinra, especially the elements who would prefer to keep SOLDIER entirely out of sight and out of mind, of their capabilities. But done too often, a practice match can give the impression that a SOLDIER general is merely a demonstration to be wheeled in and out amid other curiosities, so it's also not unusual for the First-Class training room to be closed to all.

As it is today, when Sephiroth decides that Genesis’ baiting requires more of a response than a simple reassignment. Genesis, unusually, doesn’t so much as toss a comment to Zack about having the cameras on stand-by, and once they’ve cleared the preliminaries, launches himself into the duel with genuine ferocity.

By the time Angeal makes it in from patrol, both Sephiroth and Genesis are stalking silently about their respective sides of the ring, watching for any slips in the other’s form. Genesis is behind on points but not by nearly the expected gap, having kept his tendency to flamboyance to a minimum and actually raising a good defense when he’s on the back foot. Sephiroth is nowhere near tired, and for once feels as if his muscles and his brain are both being put out to stretch themselves.

“Huh,” Angeal says, assessing them, and then he claps Zack on the shoulder, stopping the man’s nervous ramble. “Can I get in on this?”

“By all means,” Genesis says, flicking the tip of his sword in a come-hither gesture. “Unlike that shambles of a briefing, I think we’re actually learning something about our friend here.”

Zack sighs. “Protocol demands I point out we’re way over standard time for all the Firsts to be off-duty—”

“You’re not, puppy. Keep on answering those emails,” Angeal says as he pulls off his top.

The first two minutes after he joins are exhilarating in a way that Sephiroth rarely experiences, even—especially—out in the field. But after that it deteriorates: Angeal’s usually a solid opponent, but while Sephiroth can’t fault his skills, the atmosphere completely changes with him in the ring. It’s…looser, for lack of a better word. No true center of gravity to the fight anymore, not with how Angeal will break off an attack to slap dirt crusts off his shoe, step back to huff and roll his shoulders.

Genesis senses it as well, and abruptly cuts off the sparring with an acerbic comment and a flounce towards the showers. Angeal grimaces and glances after him. Then turns back to Sephiroth. “Didn’t spoil it, did I?”

“It ran its course,” Sephiroth says neutrally.

Angeal sighs as he sets his sword aside, running one hand through his hair. “Sure, nice of you—he’s been kind of wound up lately, waiting for R&D to get back to us on what the hell that stuff was that Vincent brought back. I keep telling him storming the lab isn’t going to make it happen faster.”

As it happens, they hadn’t argued over that at all, but now that Angeal mentions it, Sephiroth can see where Genesis’ restraint had sat ill with the man, and pushed other grudges to the surface. “Indeed. You can go after him if that will motivate him to keep his officers in line. I don’t need more underground fighting rings.”

“Nah, seriously, like we don’t have plenty of training rooms around here. I’m this close to dragging Roche into one myself,” Angeal mutters. He gives the side of his face a mop with his hand. “I can go another round if you want. Or…if you’re busy, yeah, I’ll go see what I can do about Gen. Zack, he complaining about the towels yet?”

Sephiroth raises an eyebrow and Angeal shrugs towards what should be an unoccupied corner. Then gathers up Zack as Sephiroth turns and sees it is in fact holding a visitor: Vincent, who’s standing with one of those mild expressions on his face. It’s a debrief week for Vincent and he’s been generally about the place, but he always does much better at keeping his business away from Sephiroth. So it’s a surprise to see him.

“The Turks keep an eye on when they think one of you might kill the other,” Vincent offers up when Sephiroth comes over to him. “I said I’d look into it before they had to resort to flipping a coin.”

A snort escapes Sephiroth as he tugs at his cross-belts; he’s bare-chested and the A/C is working to cool the sweat on him, but not quickly enough to keep it from collecting along the belts. “Then you’ll report back that SOLDIER leadership remains intact?”

“If you wish. I can also leave it to you to represent, if that goes farther,” Vincent says. He produces a towel, and after Sephiroth takes it, a bottle of electrolyte fluid, which Sephiroth nods away for now. “I had some personal interest as well. You never take out your sword with me.”

Sephiroth looks up from the towel with his face half-dried. “You’ve never shown an interest in this,” he says, glancing over his shoulder. “Except for—”

“Those times weren’t sparring,” Vincent says dryly. Then he makes a stronger showing of amusement, smiling with that characteristic rumble rolling out of his throat. “No, I wouldn’t ask you to take it out.”

Something of the earlier argument must still be clinging to Sephiroth because his voice sharpens. “Sparing me the dilemma?”

“I don’t feel as if I need to test us that way. I know what I can do, and as you’ve pointed out, my healing doesn’t extend to regrowing limbs,” Vincent says. His voice never so much as trembles, but he still gives off the impression of firming it up. Not in anger, in a way that makes Sephiroth wince and drop his head back to the towel. And then he observes that without making Sephiroth feel as if the man means to pounce on the weakness. “But it does mean I don’t often have the opportunity to see you at full stretch.”

“I haven’t had that either,” Sephiroth says after a moment, and knows that he sounds a little wistful. He catches the tilt of Vincent’s head and smiles. “Oh, I don’t think the Nibelheim aurochs are much of a test for you.”

“I’m on vacation when I chase them, not at work,” Vincent says. Noncommittal, as his eyes run over Sephiroth again, measuring something. “Was that sufficient?”

Sephiroth starts to answer, then stops himself. He wipes at his throat and shoulders, then at his back, considering the question properly. “Somewhat helpful. Better than if we’d ended in a disciplinary action,” he finally says. “If Genesis can give me a weekend before his next antic, I may not end up owing Tseng another favor.”

Vincent nods. He offers the bottle again and this time Sephiroth takes it. The wash of cool fluid down his throat makes him close his eyes, and for a moment, it almost sweeps the remaining tension out of him. It’s better than when he and Genesis came into the room, he thinks, and then he lowers the bottle and opens his eyes to find Vincent still studying him.

“You look like you’re wondering whether we should use the facilities,” Sephiroth says after a moment. After he’s taken a breath, and found it a little short. “Do you want to see me that way?”

“I enjoyed watching. You all have very different styles and it’s interesting to see where they clash, where they don’t.” Vincent still has the bottle cap and he idly spins it in his fingers. He doesn’t look away from Sephiroth. “Angeal is faster on his feet than you’d think.”

The ‘you’ clearly doesn’t include Vincent, but the compliment is genuine. “Many people have fallen for that one,” Sephiroth agrees, and then he feels a strange charitable impulse. “You caught Genesis on a good day, at least as far as his swordplay. He’s not usually so controlled.”

“He’s taking the R&D leak as seriously as you, even if it’s not his preferred mode,” Vincent says. Then smiles again, as Sephiroth shifts restlessly. “I enjoyed it, but I could come because I’m free now. Do you want to wear yourself out this way?”

“Am I being offered an alternative?” Sephiroth says, and then finds himself smiling back. They haven’t…sparred like this in a while either, he thinks suddenly; Vincent has never been grating company, but he usually has to smooth over Sephiroth’s mood first. “You liked the show so much, is there a way you’d like to show it?”

Vincent tilts his head again, hands loosely at his side as he moves closer. Much closer, but off-center, stepping up so that Sephiroth has to turn his head to track him and still ends up feeling the man’s breath ghost over his cheek rather than his mouth. “You are a worthy show,” he murmurs, and then, just as his breath flicks like a tongue-tip at Sephiroth’s ear, he twists behind Sephiroth. “Your private training room. Wash yourself first.”

Then he’s walking out of the room without a backwards look. Sephiroth takes a deep breath, mood much improved.

* * *

Sephiroth’s suite takes up one half of the penthouse floor, while a training room takes up the other half. He uses it when Vincent is in, but the man rarely joins him there, and when he does, it’s in a fleeting way. Calling him for meals, coming in to borrow something that Sephiroth usually doesn’t see him use; Vincent does get in exercise somewhere, but he seems to regard that as part of work, and keeps it out of Sephiroth’s view.

So it’s a strange, disorienting element in and of itself to see him moving about the room as if he paces its floor every day, going with assurance to the wet bar in the corner and retrieving ice cubes and a glass from it. He fills it with water from the filtered dispenser and then comes back over, sipping slowly at it as he studies his work.

The wall on this side has metal bars criss-crossing it, usually serving as anchors for equipment racks. Most of those have been moved to the side, and the space cleared for Sephiroth to be bound to the revealed trestle. Which is narrower than it is tall, the leather cuffs pulling from its corners holding Sephiroth’s ankles and wrists only a few inches wider than his shoulders. A wide enough stance for him to feel it in his hips and pelvis and shoulders, but not so wide that he can’t maintain it.

For how long, he wonders, and finds himself pressing back against the bars. The crossbar joint digs across the small of his back, then rides up his spine as Vincent dips two fingers into the ice water and abruptly flicks them at him. Small, ghostly touches of cold but he shudders at them.

“You’re going to move too much,” Vincent says. He puts the glass down on the floor and then picks up a set of straps.

He attaches them to the crossbars, using them to secure elbows and knees. His fingers run under each strap before it’s smoothed taut into Sephiroth’s flesh, a warm caress that makes the leather feel rigidly lifeless in comparison. Two for each joint, one above and one below, and when he’s done, he ties back Sephiroth’s hair into a sleek tail with another two straps.

“Are you hoping for a collar?” he says. Pushing away the top strap where it bumps Sephiroth’s nape and then licking at that, tongue circling the ridges of the spine as Sephiroth inhales sharply. His fingers slide between Sephiroth’s buttocks, then rub slowly over Sephiroth’s hole, taunting it as it clenches and Sephiroth hitches himself up till the trestle joint presses across the tops of his buttocks. “You wanted me to see how much I appreciated the show—if you want to flaunt yourself, then I’m happy enough to keep you on display.”

Sephiroth inhales again, half an answer twisting in his throat, hot and thick. Then spits out a groan instead as Vincent suddenly curls two fingers into him. Only to the first knuckle, all the stretch pressing on the rim without any relieving press further inside—he bucks again, then sucks in a whistling breath as Vincent obligingly drives his fingers fully into Sephiroth. Sticky clumps of lubricant squeeze out from between them and glide a few inches along the curves of his buttocks before dropping to the floor.

“You’re going to hang here for a while.” Vincent’s fingers turn back and forth, rolling Sephiroth open rather than fucking him. When Sephiroth arches, they still, letting him draw back from them. Their tips flick lightly at his rim as they depart, and then Vincent presses something cold and hard and curving into him. “But you can come as you please.”

The anal hook slips easily into him. Too easily, pressure that glances off his prostate and then tilts out of the way as he tries to bear down on it. He sags back, moaning, and the hook tucks against the top of his hole, stressing it ever-so-slightly when he shivers. It’ll open him without giving him what he needs and he badly, badly needs it, cock head flipping sticky drops of precome up against his belly whenever he shifts. He bucks up and the hook catches him and he has to stop, has to fall back and grind his buttocks into the unmoved metal joint but it’s not enough.

“You can come,” Vincent says again. Fingers splayed about Sephiroth’s buttocks, rounding them against the hook as Sephiroth squirms and pants. He’s fastened the hook to something, keeping it from moving, keeping it perfectly positioned to edge Sephiroth’s need with delirium. “You only have to ask for it.”

“Please,” bursts out of Sephiroth. He tosses his head back, then feels his mouth graze over the side of Vincent’s face as he slumps. The hook needles at him and his toes curl helplessly against the floor. “Please, I need to, I need to—I need to come.”

Vincent makes a low, pleasantly gravelly sound. Or it would be pleasant if Sephiroth wasn’t keyed up with nerves so singing that the noise drags under them like a plucking nail. “How?”

As he asks, his hands stroke around the sides of Sephiroth’s hips. The claws of the left lag on sweaty skin, pricking here and there, but the fingertips of the right slide almost till they can touch the jumping, tingling skin of Sephiroth’s groin. “Please, your hand, please,” Sephiroth groans.

Vincent kisses the side of his throat, approving, and then keeps his mouth buried there. Working and worrying along the pulse as his fingers push further around, grip Sephiroth’s cock. Every draw of his hand down its length rocks Sephiroth against the hook and he feels as if he’s been speared through the trestle rather than bound to it. Speared and even though he’s hung on it from behind, the point seems to come forward through his gut, pulling him inexorably up as everything comes to a—

He comes. Shaking, soles of his feet slipping a little against the floor so the ankle chains rattle. Vincent was right to bind his knees, he’d swing forward without them.

A finger wipes up the come from the side of his prick. He whines and twists on the hook even though he’s used to this by now, the tormenting touches on still-spasming flesh. Vincent strokes along Sephiroth’s cock again, steadying it with his thumb on the other side, and Sephiroth writhes tiredly against the bars, keeping his mouth open until come-covered fingers eventually land in it.

“I liked watching it, and you,” Vincent observes. Tongue curling in and out of his mouth, sliding in hot curves along near-bite marks now stinging as sweat runs out of Sephiroth’s hair along his throat. He takes his fingers out of Sephiroth’s mouth and dips to nip at Sephiroth’s left shoulder before he moves away. Briefly, parts of his clothing whispering along Sephiroth’s shivering back as he bends over and then stands back up to put the glass he’d retrieved earlier to Sephiroth’s mouth. “The way you manage the length of your sword in such tight quarters is particularly impressive.”

It takes a moment for Sephiroth to recall why Vincent’s complimenting him, on something that has nothing to do with how well he’s following direction, or taking the man’s cock. And the temptation of the water is overwhelming once he feels the icy lap of it against his lip, making him suck noisily till hard cubes bump up against his teeth.

Vincent lowers the glass at that point. He moves his arms further around Sephiroth, pressing up from behind as Sephiroth watches him fish out an ice chip and then bring it near Sephiroth’s jaw. The edge of the chip almost stings, it’s so cold, and then, as he rides up against it, the equally cold bottom of the glass slides against his collarbone.

“Genesis has skill too, but he lets his blade lead him too much. If you flank him quickly enough, he takes too long to change his balance,” Vincent says. His other hand comes up to press against Sephiroth’s belly. Burning compared to the ice Vincent’s running along the hollows of Sephiroth’s throat, burning enough that Sephiroth curls from it and ends up nuzzling the side of the glass, its chilly condensation running between his lips. “He makes up for it with his speed.”

“Still a compromise,” Sephiroth mutters without much thought. He feels Vincent’s fingers trail up his body, reaching a nipple just as the last of the ice chip melts away against his clavicle. His chest rises in a sharp huff and Vincent catches him, squeezes with loving slowness at his nipple as he shudders.

“Agreed. He could turn faster if he wasn’t occupying himself that way.” Vincent leans forward, dropping the glass a few inches so that his long fingers can scoop out another ice chip. This one he passes to his other hand, pressing the ice firmly against Sephiroth’s nipple, which is just beginning to smart under his attentions. When Sephiroth squirms, his chilled fingers seize and roll the other nipple.

Sephiroth twists and turns but can’t escape the attention. His nipples peak, then harden. Then bruise tender, hot no matter how much ice-water streams from them by the time Vincent moves on. His cock’s erect again and when Vincent bites his right shoulder, the sink of the man’s teeth seems to hook a line directly into the tip of his cock to yank upward, making him hold tense and quivering on the hook inside of him. “Vincent, please.”

“Hmm?” Vincent murmurs. Continuing to toy with him, one hand now fondling Sephiroth’s balls, a bit of ice slipping in and out between his fingers like a street magician’s prop, while the other lifts the glass back to Sephiroth’s mouth. “What do you want?”

To come, Sephiroth wants to come, but he’s trained and he opens his lips instead for what’s left of the ice-water to be poured down his throat. Moans as he does, so that the chill burbles and feels as if it scratches out into his chest as it travels into him. Then Vincent bites his throat and he jerks his head back to cry out. “Come, please, I want to—”

“How?” he’s asked.

A trick, he thinks, dazed. Giving him a choice that’s no such thing, making him struggle to ask and then keeping him locked in the desired direction not with chains and other bindings so much as with—with a light caress against his aching flesh, a warm mouth soothing the heavy beat of his pulse. If Vincent merely forced him, he wouldn’t submit so readily, wouldn’t crave submission so deeply, but the man seduces him into it.

“That,” he groans, as Vincent bites him again. He bucks on the hook and then shudders as Vincent’s hand rises to tease his nipples again. “That, that, from that—there—”

Vincent laughs. Bends down to rid himself of the glass and then pulls Sephiroth back against the bars with both hands, grinding the heels of his palms over Sephiroth’s nipples as he sucks roughly, possessively along the top of Sephiroth’s shoulder. “Marks. You want marks. You want marks this time.”

“Please, yes, please, I want—make me come, please—” Sephiroth moans.

His shoulders are on fire by the time Vincent is done, a double line of distinctly-burning marks marching along them and up either side of his throat. And his nipples are brightly sore, barely soothed by the fingertips Vincent circles about the white-hot nubs as he’s eased down from a second climax. The fire flares brilliantly as thumbs push firmly over his nipples, then, very slowly, smooths into a sweetly-dull ache.

Vincent holds him for a few minutes that way, letting the pressure up a little at a time, until Sephiroth can breathe and not merely suck air. Then the man steps back, twisting out from the space between the bars and the wall. He walks over to some items he has on the floor, just beyond the ability of Sephiroth’s still-blurred vision to focus. There are soft clicks and clinks and then the rich smell of food washes through the air.

Sephiroth rehydrated after the duel but didn’t eat, and has long since burned through the few calories the electrolyte fluid carried. He’s held up, not back, by his bonds as he moans and inhales and moans again, hunger for what he smells hopelessly mixed into the other hungers Vincent’s stoked into him. He sees the side of Vincent’s smile, knowing and sharp, and the man could hold him here, starving, without anyone’s knowledge and he’d make Sephiroth want it—he moans.

But Vincent’s kinder than that. He picks among the tins, then brings one over and feeds Sephiroth from it. Two perishingly small mouthfuls, barely a slick of flavored fat over the tongue before Sephiroth swallows them, and then he swings his chopsticks out of the way and steps up to give Sephiroth a deep, steadying kiss.

When he moves back, Sephiroth is lightheaded but calmer. Vincent feeds him the next three bites and he actually manages to relish the taste rather than the mere presence of it in his mouth. So he’s rewarded—he sees the pattern now, and uses the small amount of restored energy he has to bow himself up as Vincent stoops to suckle his right nipple. Leaving it softly throbbing, as Vincent places more food in his mouth.

“Angeal misses decisive openings because he’s covering his partner,” Vincent says. He goes and retrieves another tin of food, and alternates tidbits from this one with light strokes of the back of his hand against Sephiroth’s belly, thighs, upper arms. Light but the touches seem to cling long after the man’s moved on, keeping the heat simmering in Sephiroth’s body even as the sweat dries on it. “Though he might be different in the field.”

“He’s not,” Sephiroth sighs. Feeling a little as if he’s playing at this, playing at having a conversation. He knows they’re not—Vincent never speaks meaninglessly, and so if he wants to comment on their fighting styles, it’s because he has genuine observations. But this sits next to what the man is doing, rather than masking it, and Sephiroth is naked and bound and being slowly reduced to ruin by Vincent. “I’ve spoken to him about it, but it’s instinct, he won’t rid himself of it. We work around it.”

Vincent nods. Tracing Sephiroth’s lower lip with a piece of food, before laying it on Sephiroth’s tongue. “It’s a good foil for you anyway. It tests your responses in a way Rhapsodos wouldn’t.”

Sephiroth hadn’t considered that, and his lust-slowed brain is still turning over the thought when Vincent puts the empty food tin and chopsticks on the floor and then kneels next to them. Then his eyes alert him and he jerks, looks down, meets Vincent’s lazily-amused gaze just as Vincent’s tongue swirls out over the lip just pressed to his cock head and down the length of his prick. Black and muscular and able to tighten over him as his cock twitches, as he squirms on his hook.

“How—how long,” Sephiroth gasps, and then his head drops backward as Vincent’s lips slide around his cock head. Warming it, nursing it as that tongue continues to grip and slide over the rest of his cock. “How long—keeping me like—”

Vincent’s tongue feels like lightning as it zips back over Sephiroth’s skin and into his mouth. Lightning, storming up through Sephiroth, barely crackling about the hook before it plows directly into his head and leaves him jerking futilely against his bonds. “Until you say. I appreciate you like this, Sephiroth, and I have nothing better to do right now.”

Sephiroth whines. Wordless for all that he has no gag, wordless and helpless as Vincent leans forward again to take him. Which is what the man is doing, for all that he’s on his knees—Sephiroth is still at Vincent’s service, not the other way around. Not even able to beg for mercy, as his cock is sucked and licked and coaxed into trembling hardness. His lips spasm about pleas that collapse back in his throat, while his body heaves and twists and only ends in following Vincent’s directions. With his cock buried deep in Vincent’s throat, it’s as if he’s no better than a delicious treat that the other man is savoring.

And then Vincent pulls back, just short of the peak. Holding his thighs, squeezing them lavishly as they spasm and force his knees to strain against the leather securing them to the trestle. Breath floats over his cock and he feels precome dollop out of him in response, that little of a touch more than enough to command him.

“You wanted marks, so I’ll give you marks,” Vincent says. Nuzzling his way up Sephiroth’s left thigh, mouth trailing along the shaking muscles, letting them graze the points of the man’s teeth. Then he stretches his jaw around and takes a good amount of flesh between his lips, between his fangs.

Only a little deeper and he’d pierce the artery. Sephiroth stills, breath caught in his throat, and then feels it dribble out from his lips as Vincent shifts his mouth just a little, turning it just enough so that his fangs bruise instead of pierce. The heat seems to rush up to meet his mouth anyway, spilling all over Sephiroth’s thigh as Vincent steadily works himself down from the creased join with the pelvis. Leaving marks, ones that blossom wet, stinging red as sweat trickles down over them.

“Please,” Sephiroth manages to push out. His lips feel dry, for all that the rest of him is utterly soaked in his own need. He licks at them and his bottom lip sticks to his own teeth, so that he has to bite it free. The trace of coppery blood makes him shiver, and then he arches and the taste deepens as Vincent swings his head over to start working at his other leg. “Please.”

“What would you like?” Vincent asks him. Caressing his knee, fingers gently tracing over the constantly-shifting cap, teasing at the burn of exhaustion in the joint while his mouth ravages up Sephiroth’s right inner thigh. “Marks?”

“N—no,” Sephiroth grunts, and then heaves a contrary, illogical whimper out of himself when Vincent’s teeth immediately release him. The sudden lack of pain is more jarring, leaving him bereft. Till Vincent pushes up on his knees, licking at his cock again and then all the aching torment in him has a focus again. “No, please—come, I want to—”

“How?” comes the damning question.

Sephiroth can’t answer. Too busy wringing himself on his hook as Vincent alternately whispers and scrapes that mouth up his body, kissing about the base of his cock as it twitches and then coming up his flexing belly. Hands rising ahead of it, circling his nipples again as they burn afresh. Then on his feet and cradling Sephiroth’s jaw in his hands, lovingly kissing Sephiroth till he’s dazed and breathless.

“Water,” Vincent says. Then, laughing, pressing a kiss to Sephiroth’s cheek as Sephiroth reflexively laps at the air.

He backs away and retrieves a bottle from where he has his other things, rather than going to the wet bar. His fingers curl under Sephiroth’s jaw again and support it as Sephiroth laps water this time, drinking half of it before his head falls back. Vincent’s other hand comes around to stroke along his hair but doesn’t push his head forward.

Instead Vincent kisses him again, long and deep and soft. A display of appreciation, of how he knows Sephiroth will mewl and shiver and not come, not yet. Not before being told and Sephiroth needs that, he wants to tell the man. Needs to be told, can’t ask for it, asking that of him is too much and he needs the other man to do it for him.

But that isn’t the rule Vincent’s set up. So he steps back, breaking the kiss, and then continues to show what he appreciates about Sephiroth. Rubbing nipples raw and sore, then piercing them with barbells that squeeze more than the usual rings do. Kissing them while his fingers stroke along Sephiroth’s perineum, gathering up the sweat and then petting it against the bite-marks on Sephiroth’s inner thighs, pressing salt and wet heat into their tenderness.

“Please,” Sephiroth finally gasps, as Vincent’s nails dig at the bites. “Please—wait—”

Vincent’s fingers lift but don’t leave Sephiroth’s skin. “Wait?”

Sephiroth gasps again, and then gratefully drops his forehead against Vincent’s temple, as the man pushes up against him. Vincent’s clothes are a torture in and of themselves, different kinds of weave brushing up against all the sore spots Vincent’s mouth and hands haven’t gotten to, but he needs the support. He works his mouth by Vincent’s ear, nothing coming out, and then whines desperately when he thinks he feels Vincent start to move away.

But the man doesn’t. He waits, palms resting against Sephiroth’s bitten thighs. Breathing slow and steady against Sephiroth’s own ear, a metronome that eventually helps Sephiroth regulate himself.

“I want to come,” Sephiroth groans. He lips at Vincent’s ear, more for the calming feel of flesh against his trembling mouth than to provoke the man. “With—in me, in me, and—gag me. I can’t—I can’t ask—not again—”

“Do you want to come again?” Vincent runs a knuckle idly up the inside of Sephiroth’s left thigh, then fondles Sephiroth’s ball sac when Sephiroth’s breath stutters. “After this time?”

“I don’t—I don’t want to ask,” Sephiroth moans. “Please.”

A second knuckle circles up Sephiroth’s other thigh, making the bite-marks spark as Vincent holds Sephiroth firmly by the balls. “Enough,” Vincent murmurs, observing and not ordering. “Enough admiration, you’ve had enough. You want someone to take you like the pretty little toy you are.”

Sephiroth shudders at ‘pretty,’ and from the way Vincent huffs in his ear, he knows the other man knows what that means. Vincent should—he trained Sephiroth in this dance. Trained him to partner the man’s words with surrender, trained him to submit far better than anyone’s ever trained Sephiroth to fight. Sephiroth had to learn that on his own after a certain point, had to take on that burden because no one could reach him, could even touch him—

But Vincent touches him. Tipping his head back and kissing him again, thumbs stroking his cheeks, before the gag goes in. A plain rubber ball, strapped in with latex, something for Sephiroth to suck mindlessly on as Vincent drops back onto his knees.

He’s sucked dry, then kept strapped to the trestle as Vincent tidies up a little. Moving empty food tins to the wet bar, dropping something into a trashcan with a staticky rustle that makes Sephiroth twitch on his hook. Waiting, weary but still prickling with awareness, expecting it when Vincent, instead of taking him down, squeezes more lube into one hand and then kneels in front of Sephiroth again.

Vincent makes Sephiroth erect again, his mouth demanding now rather than coaxing. Two slick fingers push up alongside the anal hook at the same time, then withdraw as an electric storm seems to flood through Sephiroth’s body. But then return, carrying chilly lube with them as they make Sephiroth far wetter inside than he needs to be. Wet enough for the tail that coils into him next, nestling its rippling bends against the hook as Vincent releases his cock and stands up. Leans in, one hand taking him by the hair and the other by the prick as he shakes between them.

“I should keep you here all night. I could tuck a vibrator in you, let that rattle you senseless,” Vincent murmurs. Then pauses, as the image he paints jitters in Sephiroth’s lolling head, shivering from the way his tail is flexing against the anal hook. “Rub another one between your legs, tape two to your nipples, and you’d come over and over again. You’d like to celebrate that way, wouldn’t you, tied up next to your own trophies. But I won’t. Needy as you are—”

Sephiroth whimpers around his gag, whimpers and presses his cheek to Vincent’s arm, his eyes closing.

“—you need less of a workout and more attention. I saw that too, Sephiroth.” Vincent’s voice changes subtly, almost meditative as he kisses Sephiroth’s temple. “Thinking through every blow instead of letting your training carry you. It’s beautiful in its way, but it wasn’t what you wanted. Only what you needed to do, for Rhapsodos. But now I have you, so come.”

The world disappears. Only need, and then only sweet, dazed relief, washing through Sephiroth as he drops against the other man.

He’s taken down from the trestle, feeling worked back into his limbs as Vincent hauls him somewhere. The training room’s attached shower, it turns out when he blinks slowly at the water swirling down the tile. His body is still weak and he lets himself be flopped about as soap suds curl around him to disappear into the drain. Then dried, leaned against the wall and whimpering a little, slightly aware as the towel’s soft nubs nevertheless rasp his thighs into twitching.

Vincent’s kept the gag on him. He doesn’t wonder at it, only nurses it as his head is turned to the side so Vincent can pull his hair out from behind him. Bundle it into a towel to wring dry as his legs are pushed over. He rolls onto his buttocks and shivers, moaning, with how that rocks the bruise the anal hook has spread deep inside of him. But still, he sits there and sucks his gag and only watches as the other man does what he pleases with Sephiroth.

Which is making him into a pretty trophy, it seems. Gossamer-thin silk stockings, shimmering silver one way and nearly transparent the other, are carefully rolled up his legs and then clipped in place with a garter belt slung about his waist. The straps hanging off it run down either side of his buttocks, inner ones insistently pressing at them even though they’re too flimsy to hold him open. They only tease him with that, tease him over his still-hot bite-marks as Vincent then pushes his legs together so the raw spots stick to each other. He squirms in place, feeling the silk stretch as his knees rub over each other.

“No fighting,” Vincent tells him, and he stops. Breathless even though his breathing is slow as honey, simply sitting there while his legs are tied together.

Vincent uses soft cotton rope. Far too frail to hold him, if Sephiroth tried. If Sephiroth had energy or will to try, but he doesn’t, and so the loop of it about his ankles and then up his calves feels less like a binding and more like security. He’s already still so the rope only traces delicious pressure up his legs, tight and close and softly rasping as it comes up to where the bite-marks start.

He's tied again above the knees, and then at the middle of his thighs, about the tops of the stockings. Then Vincent tucks the loose end between his thighs, caressing the insides so he moans, and lets him stare at himself as the other man lifts his arms. Pretty white diagonals, crisscrossing up his legs between where the rope wraps horizontally about him. The silk seems to shiver under it so that he doesn’t have to.

A matching slip’s dropped over his head and shoulders, then pulled down into place. Vincent pushes him away from the wall so that the back can be laced up and tied; it has no back but for those fragile threads that pull the front taut and smooth over him, silk stroking at his aching nipples and trailing over his sensitive cock as it rolls against his lap. Then his arms are tied back with the rope. Upper parts harnessed to his sides, with rope crossing over his chest to keep the slip stretched across his pectorals so the nipple piercings press up against it, and then wide rope bracelets that clasp his wrists across each other at the small of his back.

He's turned back against the wall and the hem of his slip is lifted, fingers sliding out his cock so it can be bound as well. Vincent uses thinner cotton rope, still white, and wraps his cock till it’s snugly limp despite how its flesh jumps and burns at the slightest touch. Then ties his cock to his balls, and pushes it all back under his slip.

Sephiroth moves a little in his bonds, then lets his head fall against the wall as Vincent shifts against him. Nosing at the man, not pleading, only needing some way to express how tightly secured he feels as Vincent gets arms under him and then pulls him up off the floor. The ball of his gag rolls across Vincent’s jaw, leaving a faint trace of his spit, as he’s moved to the nearby tub and carefully placed in it. Back leaned against the side, legs tucked against himself, slip brushed up one more time for a well-oiled plug to be pushed into his hole.

This last piece makes him strain a little. But not very much. He’s still not fighting, only gasping, speechless, as a blindfold is settled over his eyes and a hand brushes his hair back over his shoulder.

He lies there for a while. The shower turns on, and Vincent uses it—Sephiroth can hear the sound of limbs moving in the spray, and twice, a rough grunt. Then it dwindles away and there’s the soft padding of wet feet, the muffled whisper of towels slung about. The feet come towards the tub and Sephiroth pushes himself up, anticipation suddenly cutting through the comfortable haze he’s been in.

Damp hands grasp at his shoulders, then pull him over the edge of the bathtub and down onto the floor. A body is immediately pressing over and along him, hot breath on his throat and hot hands pinching and smacking at the still-unhealed bruises and sores of his body. He squirms under the assault but the silk slip and stockings, delicate as they are—they squirm with him. Flow with him, not softening the torture at all but heightening it, reminding him. No fighting, he doesn’t fight, he only arches off his bound wrists and whimpers pleas into his gag.

It's loosened, much to his surprise, but as soon as the buckle slips, Vincent’s tongue is worming under the ball to lift it out and replace it. Vincent ravages his mouth, and it’s only when the man drops down to lick at his nipples that Sephiroth can actually speak.

“Please—please, your cock, your cock, please,” he groans.

Vincent’s untying his legs. Cutting through the rope, letting it flop loose to either side as he drags Sephiroth’s knees apart and then drops between them. Grabbing up the backs of Sephiroth’s thighs and forcing them further apart, opening Sephiroth up even before he twists the plug out of Sephiroth. “You’re not going to come again,” he warns.

Sephiroth’s breath catches. And then he sucks in what seems like the last bit of air in the room and begs, “Like this.”

“I should keep you,” comes Vincent’s voice, shockingly low and ragged. He presses over Sephiroth, cock driving smoothly into place, palms splayed across Sephiroth’s piercings, and then bends over to take Sephiroth’s mouth again. “Like this.”

Sephiroth falls apart under him. Not required to do anything else, no fighting, nothing but lying there as Vincent fucks him till the world goes away again.

He doesn’t come. He still hasn’t come later, when Vincent’s somehow gotten them across the hall and in their own bed. Without the blindfold and stockings but still wearing the slip, its hem ridden up over his buttocks so Vincent can cup one as he nestles his head against the man’s shoulder. “You could,” he says, watching his fingers nudge idly between Vincent’s thighs. “It’s Friday night.”

“Saturday morning,” Vincent says, and then muffles an amused noise in the top of Sephiroth’s head as Sephiroth glances at the tablet balanced against Vincent’s right leg. “If I wanted to dose you with Curaga before I left Monday, which I don’t. And you’d rather feel it healing.”

Sephiroth makes an annoyed noise, but the man is correct about him. He still can’t help flexing a little, watching as the rope around his wrists stresses with it. He’s tied there and at his cock, but that’s all…though for a moment he can remember the stretch of the rest of it, can remember and then moan into Vincent’s mouth as the man twists about for a kiss.

“I should schedule our annual inter-battalion tournament soon,” Sephiroth says when Vincent’s done. He settles back against Vincent’s shoulder. “I could arrange for a seat in the VIP area for you.”

“Next to Rufus? And we’ll likely have Kisaragi representatives. Interesting company for me,” Vincent says. His fingers drift down between Sephiroth’s buttocks, and then he squeezes one to cut off the huff Sephiroth’s starting to make. Nothing’s filling Sephiroth now but the pressure runs up into him as if there is something, the same soft ache ringing about his hole as Vincent lets go, rubs a thumb over his rim. “Do you want to talk now?”

Sephiroth pauses. Then lets out the rest of his breath, slower and in more of a groan, as he shakes his head and closes his eyes. A moment later, he feels Vincent’s mouth against his hair. Settling in for the night as well, quiet and peaceful.

Chapter 29: Interlude: Working Out a Few Kinks

“I want to sit on your cock,” Sephiroth tells Vincent, with his cheek pressed against the other man’s thigh and Vincent’s long fingers drawing slowly down the curve of his scalp. “I want to sit there till you’re done with your call.”

Vincent’s voice smiles down on him. “Is that all?” he asks.

Sephiroth should think before he answers, but…he doesn’t want that. That’s what he doesn’t ask for, but at this point he doesn’t need to make such thoughts obvious with Vincent. He only nods against the man’s leg, and uncurls his hands so his palms are flat against his thighs. Vincent’s fingertips trail out of his hair and across the back of his neck, then clamp down over that; he arches his shoulders instinctively, then drops them as he exhales roughly and tilts his head back to look up.

“Spread,” Vincent says.

His knees jerk apart, and then his hands slide off his thighs to either side as Vincent steps away, removing the supportive leg so that he tips forward. He lets the change in balance carry him over onto his forearms, resting evenly on them as Vincent moves around him. Fingers brush at his hip and he cants his buttocks up in anticipation—but Vincent only gathers up his hair, combing it together into a long tail that’s threaded through a thick rubber tube, long enough to roll against the whole length of his neck.

Vincent tugs him back to upright on his heels by it, then reaches around to press something against his parted lips. He opens them further and a rigid plastic mouthguard is fitted over his teeth; he uses them occasionally in non-weapon sparring. It’s a little strange to feel it in his mouth now, with its associations of training schedules and evaluations and all the things he normally avoids when—a band of black latex tightens over his mouth and cheeks, its snug tension cutting through his thoughts like a heated knife in butter, leaving them melted into nothingness.

A matching posture collar is next, latex over something lighter and thinner than steel but just as unforgivingly rigid. And it’s a little molded, so even though the latex offers less cushioning than leather would, the collar still seems to grip up Sephiroth’s chin rather than to close under it. These days Sephiroth has more than half a suspicion that Vincent has infiltrated parts of R&D, and how Sephiroth’s mother hasn’t noticed enough to come complain about it—

His arms are jerked back none-too-gently, though once they’re behind him, Vincent’s hold loosens and the man strokes them rather than forces them into bending. Even so, the sharp movement has done its work, shaking Sephiroth out of the unwelcome work thoughts. His eyes fall half-closed, head sinking against the posture collar as much as it allows, tension running out of him like water draining from a sieve as Vincent slowly replaces it with snug restraints.

A leather chest harness, framing out his pectorals when his arms are twisted up against his spine in the reverse-prayer position. The arm binder that laces to its back-strap, clutching him from elbow to wrist. Broad leather bands that encircle each of his folded legs, keeping him on his knees as Vincent walks around to stand before him. He moans into his gag, rocking forward, when Vincent stoops and runs one hand along the front straps of the harness. Teasing at the muscles pressing up against them, touch light just before metal bites into each of his nipples.

Vincent tugs at the leash attached to the clamps. At first he’s holding it high over Sephiroth’s head, the direction of the pull as much up as forward, and Sephiroth arches his back against his bound arms, head tipping back so the edge of the collar digs into his scalp. But then Vincent wraps the leash around his wrist, one round at a time, with a ruthless upwards jerk at it for each. When he has only a foot left, Sephiroth is whining and twisting in place, cock fully hard and slapping lightly against his belly as wave after wave of fire lances down from his nipples.

He moves to the side, holding the leash straight out in front of Sephiroth so there isn’t a particle of slack. The posture collar doesn’t allow Sephiroth to turn and track him, but the graze of oiled fingers along the inner curve of Sephiroth’s buttock is sufficient to make him hiss around the plastic in his mouth. The clamps pull viciously at his nipples, making him squirm back into the fingers now probing deeply into him. The mattress they’re on ripples back and forth, sometimes sharply enough to make the clamps flick up, sending a slap of agony up with the motion and flat into Sephiroth’s throat and face so he gasps around his gag. He can feel the latex swell up over his lips as it flattens his noises.

“Come,” Vincent says, very softly.

It’s a fleeting thing, the word, just skating the edge of the whirlpool of pain and arousal that has Sephiroth in its grip. But it’s still enough to reach into him, to take him and bend him and have him spilling himself out over the bed, cock untouched and hole unceremoniously empty, as Vincent withdraws. Only the bite of his bonds reaches over him, digging in across his chest and back, around his thighs and close about his throat as he slowly shudders into a dazed aftermath.

He's barely aware of the world beyond him, of a rough, coarse touch against his still-recovering cock and then the deceptively soothing coolness of metal rings tightening over him. The edges of the towel Vincent’s just used to wipe him off tickle the insides of his thighs, drawing a surprisingly forceful start from him. And then his abused nipples ache afresh as the leash swings unhindered from them, as he’s pulled backward by the hips.

Pushed onto a cock. He knows this, takes comfort in the physical familiarity of it—he doesn’t have to think to accept it into him, to let himself reshape around its pressure. Which shifts slightly, critically, as he’s tilted by the shoulders, the angle of pressure now flowing up along his spine to balance out when it meets the backwards tug of the harness straps over his chest.

“Close your eyes,” Vincent says, dropping his mouth against Sephiroth’s shoulder. He holds both of them with his cupped hands, thumbs stroking gently along the clavicle as Sephiroth shivers and obeys.

The hands lift from Sephiroth’s shoulders, and something stretches over his eyes—his face, more of the latex draping down over his cheeks and spreading back across his forehead. Over his mouth and jaw as well, sticking a little there to the band already sealing off his mouth before Vincent tugs at it. Some sort of mask, with a hole for his nostrils and holes for his ears, but otherwise smooth and taut, smooth taut even pressure all over his face and head once Vincent’s fastened the back, done the strap that loops under his bound hair. Vincent passes his fingers along Sephiroth’s cheekbones afterward, letting the hood transmit the flex all over Sephiroth’s head, latex deadening the warmth of the touch but intensifying the pressure of it at the same time.

Something wet, burning hot wet, grazes against Sephiroth’s ear and he jumps. Jumps and clenches about Vincent’s cock, clenches at it for support as his body sways roughly at the jolting of his clamped nipples, the clutch of the cage on his cock, the tensioned snugness of his bound arms and chest and legs. And the way that the hood and posture collar seem to lift his mind away from all of that, from his struggling trapped body, awash with violent sensations that simply…dissolve, in the close black world he floats in.

All but for when Vincent speaks to him, because his ears are still free. Free, but helpless, a shocking reminder of the perfectly bound state the rest of him is subject to. “You’re on my cock now,” Vincent murmurs, lips working along the scrolling inner shell. “On my cock, keeping it warm.”

Vincent’s hands caress over his shoulders again, then slowly drag down over his pectorals. They flirt with his nipples till he’s whimpering, twisting on the man’s cock every time a clamp is allowed to tug back into place.

“Not a general. You don’t have to worry about being a general,” Vincent tells him. “The only duty you have is to keep my cock warm.”

Then the hands fall away. Vincent shifts back and Sephiroth moans and trembles on his lap, but it doesn’t give the man a moment’s pause. He’s retrieving something from the side, and then manipulating it behind Sephiroth—he only stops to take Sephiroth’s hair and sling it over one shoulder, letting it tangle with the leash, the weight of it dragging with exquisite pain against the nipple on that side—and then he takes his first call.

His arm comes to drape around Sephiroth’s waist as the call progresses, its fingers idly tracing over Sephiroth’s right thigh. Then he switches to his other arm, skating his claws up Sephiroth’s leg and then cupping Sephiroth’s balls with them, occasionally letting a point prick between the rings binding Sephiroth’s cock as Sephiroth squirms. Sephiroth isn’t trying to hold back his whining, but the triple layer of gagging seems to muffle him sufficiently, since Vincent never even bothers to give an excuse for any unusual noises.

Or perhaps he doesn’t care, and whoever he’s talking to can hear every second of him toying with Sephiroth. “Yes, a coffee break,” Vincent says just then, and then his mouth is suddenly fixed to Sephiroth’s shoulder.

He sucks the flesh up against his teeth till, blind as Sephiroth is, he can tell he’s bruising in the shape of the man’s fangs. Vincent rolls Sephiroth’s scrotum against his palm, the back of one claw pushing threateningly up against Sephiroth’s perineum, and then cranes around to nibble with head-spinning delicacy at Sephiroth’s earlobe. He must be on an earpiece, he hadn’t even stopped to put his phone down.

“Cockwarmer,” Vincent says as his tongue coils lovingly in the shell of Sephiroth’s ear, like a snake nestling down in its burrow. “Nothing to speak about to others. Only something to entertain me in between these calls.”

His hands rise to Sephiroth’s nipples and release the clamps. Sephiroth arches as far as he can, till he can feel the leather straps straining about him—but they hold. He’s held fast, spitted on Vincent’s cock; Vincent reaches around and loosely closes his hand about the front of Sephiroth’s throat over the collar, and then pulls Sephiroth back against him as the call restarts.

Most of the call seems to be conducted by others, because Vincent spends it lavishing attention on Sephiroth’s fingers. He licks at each till he’s coaxed them out of their aching grip on Sephiroth’s hair, then sucks them until they feel soft as wet rags, all the resistance leached out of them. And he plays with Sephiroth’s nipples, rubbing at them till they almost seem free of pain, only to give them a sharp twist that redoubles it.

When he does have to speak, his hands drop to Sephiroth’s hips. Sometimes his left only goes as far as Sephiroth’s belly, its claws riding carelessly over Sephiroth’s twitching abdominals. Then it’ll slip lower, wrapping over the cock cage so the warmth of his hand lures the flesh into trying to swell up against its prison. Sephiroth groans in his hood, behind his gag, shuddering at the man’s pleasure.

“Such a pretty decoration for my cock,” comes Vincent’s voice again. He catches his teeth against the curl of Sephiroth’s ear as Sephiroth startles, then presses the heels of his hands into Sephiroth’s thighs and drags them slowly up towards the groin. “You want to come again, don’t you?”

Sephiroth is tired now, but he can’t help bucking weakly at ‘come.’ Vincent’s hands catch him and press him back down, even as the man starts to rock at his back and pull lightning through him with each slide across his prostate. Then one hand shifts over and Sephiroth throws his head back against his collar, mouthpiece grinding against the roof of his mouth, as he feels the cage loosening.

“Come,” Vincent says, and Sephiroth is spasming before the cage is even fully open.

Vincent lets that shake off on its own, falling against Sephiroth’s left thigh and then away as he fucks up into Sephiroth. He comes himself, mouth dropping to pant against Sephiroth’s shoulder. His hands tighten on Sephiroth’s thighs, then loosen after a minute; a minute more and his head is lifting.

He frees Sephiroth’s arms and legs, then takes the hood and collar off. Once the gag is away and Sephiroth’s spit the mouthpiece into Vincent’s hand, he uses the last of his energy to crane about and lip at the man’s cheek. Vincent pauses, then turns from where he’d been reaching for a bottle of water and kisses Sephiroth, who can’t lift his head but who hungrily reciprocates.

“I like the hood. It’s…quieting,” Sephiroth rasps once they’ve settled against each other.

Vincent pauses again, then presses his mouth to the bridge of Sephiroth’s nose. “You’d like it again, in that case. Only for longer, with more.”

“You like mixing me with your work calls, and you have as many as I do these days,” Sephiroth points out. When Vincent snorts, he musters up enough energy to nuzzle at the man’s jaw. “You like having a Shinra general warming your cock while you put up with their bureaucracy."

“It’s certainly a better benefit than I’ve been offered elsewhere,” Vincent agrees. His hands curl around Sephiroth’s hips. “Off.”

Sephiroth grimaces, already feeling the hollow ache inside, and Vincent leans over to kiss him again.

“I’ll sit you back on me after a shower and a meal,” Vincent promises, and then laughs at Sephiroth’s look. “Not another call. I have no more calls, only your insatiable appetite. Off, and if you’re cooperative, I’ll put the hood back on too.”

That is sufficient incentive, and as much as it makes Sephiroth’s limbs shake, he raises himself.

And Vincent does keep his promise. After dinner, they settle back in the bedroom, Vincent with his tablet in hand and leaning against the headboard, with Sephiroth laying against his chest and astride his cock. Legs bound thigh to calf, forearms folded together along his breastbone now and strapped in place, cock cage paired with the hollow sound so that he slowly beads precome from the tip as Vincent lazily caresses Sephiroth with his free hand. And the hood, smoothed over a strip of tape sealing his mouth and a latex strip wound around his eyes.

“Sleep like this,” Vincent whispers in his ear. “Such a good, docile little cockwarmer—sleep like this, because you have nothing to do till I feel like fucking you again.”

Sephiroth shivers, stretching his head back over Vincent’s shoulder. He shivers, and listens, and then he obeys.

* * *

Sephiroth has no idea how Vincent got the new toy through security. Sometimes he thinks he should be more concerned about matters like that, but it’s difficult to see anyone else accomplishing the same feats. He is admittedly biased, of course.

And distracted, work affairs immediately receding from his mind as he stares at the new collar. It’s a posture collar, the curve of black leather beautifully functional, topping a long, shining steel rod that trails black leather straps on either side. At the other end is a simple anal hook, tipped with a small, slightly ovoid ball but otherwise a single clean line, clearly designed to keep him open without satisfactorily filling him.

“Give me your coat,” Vincent says. “Then strip.”

Sephiroth slips it off and hands it over, then obeys. His hair’s already tied back so he turns and puts his hands on the desk, palms flat on either side of the tablet that flicks incessantly with incoming messages. He sees them but their meaning is utterly gone; they’re merely interesting flashes of movement he sees as Vincent fits him with the toy.

Slipping the hook in first, so slim that Vincent only oils it and doesn’t stretch him before. The toy does that, pulling gently at his hole at first, as Vincent lifts his chin and closes the collar about his throat. He swallows against its snugness and the hook presses slightly upward, catching his breath.

“Not yet,” Vincent says as his feet start to shift apart. “I haven’t told you to.”

Sephiroth moans a little, but settles back in place. He leans on his palms as Vincent aligns the rod with his spine, cool but rigid between his shoulders and at the base of his spine. Then laces the attached harness over his back and chest, straps tensioning around his shoulderblades and pectorals, forcing them out as he’s made to straighten. As if he’s at inspection in the barracks, he thinks, and moans quietly again, leather tightening about his ribcage and over his triceps.

His hands are lifted from the desk one at a time, and then his arms are folded behind him. The upper parts are pinioned to his sides with more straps, while the lower arms are tucked along the rod, made to cross just where the anal hook begins. Tight cuffs hold his wrists in place, too broad for him to bend his fingers around and free anything, even to try and slide them under the hook and relieve some of the growing pressure it’s putting on him inside. When he breathes, it transmits through the harness and down the rod to the tip of the hook, canting it against his prostate so that his knees weaken.

So little movement, yet it immobilizes him so easily. He breathes more shallowly, but then gasps, all his care forgotten as Vincent hauls him back against the other man. Hands wrapped over the tops of his shoulders, wicked mouth hot against his ear, body flush against his own as he squirms and hitches, the hook riding inside of him, catching him every time he twists and rendering any attempt to avoid it futile.

Which is the point, he realizes, even before Vincent rumbles in pleasure and slides his hands slowly down Sephiroth’s body in a possessive, confident caress. “Don’t struggle,” he’s told, as his hips are gripped and he’s made to rub himself back against the man’s growing erection. “Take it. Take it.”

A jagged whimper leaves him, and if he wasn’t wearing the collar, his head would droop. But Vincent knows the signs of his surrender well enough without that, and chuckles again. Presses a kiss to his temple before pulling him away from the desk and steering him to his chair. He’s seated on it, ramrod straight, staring up at Vincent as the man takes his nipples in hand and tortures them to aching tenderness. They feel as if they’re red as hot coals; he can’t glance down to look for himself but he can see that burning color in the backs of his eyes when he closes them.

Vincent taps the side of his jaw and he opens his eyes. Then twists, unconsciously at first and then with growing helpless need as the hook in him digs and nudges, as Vincent lifts a short whip. “Spread,” Vincent says. “And stay spread.”

Sephiroth heaves air into his lungs that feels weighty as concrete. The harness strains against his breathing and drags the rod against his back, till it’s more of a punishment than a support with how it bruises the top and bottom parts of his spine, leaves the middle aching as it flexes between the two.

He spreads his knees. His inner thighs are offered up. The whip dips down and tickles at them, whispering over their quivering muscle, and then flicks back, looking deceptively delicate. But the bite of it is no such thing, flashing heat all over him, making him arch violently against his posture collar and rod. The hook jitters inside of him, spreading merciless pleasure in opposition to the pain, mixing the two until he’s giddy and panting, unable to do anything but stretch himself open for the blows.

Vincent paints him with welts from knee to thigh crease on either side, just enough space in between for the room’s cool air to tease the unmarked areas with illusory relief. Then Vincent drops the whip and turns to the desk. After taking up Sephiroth’s coat, he shakes it out and then drapes it across Sephiroth’s shoulders, fastidiously pulling it straight. “You look like a general,” Vincent says, smiling, his fingers sliding under the coat to trace softly along the harness straps. “But we both know better.”

“Please,” Sephiroth breathes, and then whines as his nipples are pinched.

“I’m going to suck your cock now,” Vincent goes on. He lets go of Sephiroth to brush his own coat back, ensuring he won’t press it to the floor with his knees as he lowers himself. “You will come, as many times as you need to. I want you dry before I cage you.”

Sephiroth’s hips jerk on the seat. He shudders, all his arousal bound about the tip of the hook in him now, hanging just out of reach—it seems, until the heat of Vincent’s mouth surrounds his cock. Then he does come. Obediently, easily, one climax after another drawn to life by Vincent’s lips and tongue as if it’s simply opening a door for the man, when for Sephiroth they feel as if they’re ravaging every inch of him. Dressed like a general, yes, but under his coat he’s soaked with sweat, rivulets of it gathering along the straps tightly crossed about him. Tied in place, legs spread needily, his hole clenching against the very hook that is keeping it forced open like a second hungry mouth.

Vincent’s a little kinder after he’s worked Sephiroth dry, letting Sephiroth rest a cheek against his front as he picks up the cock cage. He coats the matching sound in a thick layer of lubricant so it spreads welcome cool wetness down the inside of Sephiroth’s sore, parched prick, and when he’s done, he lets his fingers trail teasingly along Sephiroth’s welted thighs. Then wraps them firmly over Sephiroth’s cock, in between the cage’s rings, squeezing it till Sephiroth shivers and cries out against his belly.

“Keep your mouth open,” Vincent says.

His hand curls under Sephiroth’s jaw, urging Sephiroth to tilt upright again. An uneven gasp dribbles out of Sephiroth as the hook shifts about in him, making it easy for him to follow the instruction. Vincent’s thumb strokes approvingly along his jaw as the other man picks up something from the desk. A black leather hood.

“This one lets you keep your mouth open,” Vincent says, turning it over in his hands. “But you won’t be able to see, and I’m going to plug your ears so you can’t hear either. So I’ll tell you now—you’ll be on your knees, with my cock in your mouth, and you’ll hold. You’ll hold until you hear otherwise. Understand?”

Sephiroth looks at the hood and feels a slow, irresistible wash of peace press through him, even as his lungs burn and his body aches. “Yes, Vincent.”

Who smiles. “Good,” he says.

There’s a separate blindfold, thin black leather so soft it smooths about Sephiroth’s eyes like warmed butter. Then the gel plugs, fitting into Sephiroth’s ears like kisses. The hood goes over both, pulling taut under Sephiroth’s jaw as he lifts it slightly off the collar. Then tightening gradually at the back as Vincent tugs at its lacing; the way it stretches over Sephiroth doesn’t feel like tension so much as a lascivious caress.

Sephiroth is guided out of the chair and down onto his knees. A hand wraps around his left ankle, another curves over the knee, and his leg is moved a couple inches over, widening his stance. Cuffs are locked over both ankles, with a rod between them that grazes icy kisses against his buttocks when he’s pushed back by the shoulders. He feels Vincent’s fingers tighten briefly, then draw lazily away, drifting across his chest. Then twin bites at his nipples, making him gasp; the slap of cold air through his mouth heightens the way the rest of his face and head feels warmly clasped by the hood.

Then he’s given a cock. He swallows once to acclimate his mouth and throat to its shape but remembers what he’s been told, and simply holds it. Until he hears otherwise, he has nothing else to do.

* * *

It’s night, or it was night when Sephiroth was hooded. He doesn’t know whether it still is or not, and it doesn’t particularly matter.

He’s kneeling on their bed. Dressed up like a living toy, he saw that much in the bathroom mirror before Vincent closed his eyes. Smooth black latex stockings seal in his legs up to the mid-thigh, where they’re gripped by the same thick cuffs that hold his thighs to his calves. Matching gloves run from the middle of his upper arms down to close his hands in tight mitts that are folded over his elbows. Strapped there, as his forearms are strapped across the center of his back. Silicone sleeves keep his cock and balls stretched limply between his knees. His ears are stuffed with molded silicone, and under the latex hood, additional bands wrap over his eyes and lips; a mouthpiece keeps his teeth slightly apart as he groans around it, hood rippling with it as Vincent bends him backward over a pillow.

Nothing holds him back, just as nothing holds his knees apart. Only the push of hands across his chest, a downwards push and a brief hold before they lift. Mere touches but they order him in place and he holds where they tell him to. Folded back and arched up, the drift of the A/C feeling as real and firm as fingers in the utter darkness. He doesn’t feel it where the latex covers but he feels the flex and stretch of the latex itself as he twists sluggishly, like a wistful echo. It makes the exposed parts of his body feel that much more opened, made that much more available to the unknown.

There’s a firmer, intentional touch. Too broad for a wandering fingertip, dropping in shifting loops over the right side of his chest and then working sinuously in a diagonal across his belly. Fur teases across his nipple and when he inhales, he feels the way the air sleeks past the latex under his nose. He writhes up into the caress of Vincent’s tail, moaning deeply as it seems ready to wind itself about his throat—but then retreats, dropping with disorienting speed down his torso and then curling about his aching cock and balls, tip flicking a delicate, maddening tease along his perineum.

At the same time Vincent’s mouth fixes on his shoulder. He’s bitten along the top of it, a straight stinging line, as hands scratch and knead electric sparks up the sensitive insides of his thighs. Vincent’s tail ventures further, and when its tip brushes up against Sephiroth’s hole, Sephiroth rubs his hips down into the pillow without much hope of satisfaction.

So he’s caught off-guard, whining, when the tail immediately pushes into him. Fucked and filled, twisting against the hands now gripping his buttocks while Vincent presses menacingly soft kisses to his nipples. They’re expecting abuse, stiffening themselves against it, only to be lured back to tenderness by the man’s lips and tongue.

Something like Vincent’s tail whispers across Sephiroth’s left ribs, then slides back up to circle over his left pectoral. Vincent’s nursing his right nipple, keeping it distracted as whatever it is draws closer and closer to his left, and then twists over to drag a stiff, rough edge against the suddenly-tight nub. Sephiroth jerks and the riding crop taps him high on the shoulder.

Barely a bite to it, but then Vincent’s mouth leaves. Sephiroth can’t hear the slice of the crop through the air, not in the close blindness of the hood, but the latex is thin enough to let him sense the change in air above him as Vincent shifts. He tenses up, but the blow—he can’t hold against it forever, and when it doesn’t come, the breath starts to leak out of him—

It comes. On the other side, slashing the air out of him as much in surprise as with the rough burn of it. And then back on the expected side, while he’s still feeling the spreading pain of the first against his hip. He’s struck on the pectorals, spiraling up to peaked, defenseless nipples—and then, as he’s whimpering in anticipation, Vincent switches to his inner thighs. Sephiroth hikes himself against the pillow, rolling about the tail still tucked inside of him, trying to displace some of the burning. When he moves too far, Vincent does strike his nipples.

The agony of it sends him slumping back against the pillow. Legs falling helplessly apart, eyes rolling back under the hood and blindfold, shocked out of it straight into the deep night. Floating there, waiting, until patient, insistent lips and fingers stroke and suck him back into his body, dragging him into its heaving, aching struggle as Vincent strips the sheath off his cock and finally permits him to come.

“I enjoyed it,” Sephiroth murmurs later. Head resting on Vincent’s shoulder, hands laying across Vincent’s belly where they’d flopped as he’d curled against the other man, eyes closed against the softly persistent drift of Vincent’s fingertips running over the still-fresh bruising of his left inner thigh. “You could see for yourself.”

“Yes, I can,” Vincent says, but there’s something unsatisfied about his tone. Not an accusation, nothing that sharp to it, but like his touches, it isn’t easily brushed aside. “You heard me?”

Sephiroth raises his head. Lets it loll a little, as Vincent strokes his thigh, but he sees the way that the man is considering him and it’s not the usual post-coital appreciation. Or it is, but again, there’s that additional intentness. “When?”

“Before the crop hit you,” Vincent says. He reaches over with his free hand and pulls a lock of Sephiroth’s hair out from between them, just as Sephiroth’s weight was starting to drag at it. Then smiles without stopping his studying of Sephiroth as Sephiroth shifts further onto him. “You tensed.”

This is not something Sephiroth immediately remembers, although he does once he concentrates. He doesn’t remember it being more than a moment, and certainly didn’t find it to be an interruption. “Oh. Not in distaste, obviously.”

“No, but that wasn’t what I was looking for out of you,” Vincent says. His gaze continues to be observant without assigning blame, and his hand comes up to curl along the collar Sephiroth’s wearing. “Latex is too thin—leather probably is better, for what I’m thinking of with Tseng.”

“I’ve enjoyed the latex ones,” Sephiroth says after a moment. Then he tilts his head back, letting Vincent’s finger trace along the collar and then run up his throat to hook over his lower lip. “But you’re probably right. Air pressure changes. Those still come through.”

“Nothing should come through, except what I plan to,” Vincent says. He pauses for a moment, the intentness fading somewhat as Sephiroth lazily sucks at his finger. “That’s what you want out of this.”

“Yes, and you know how to find it for me,” Sephiroth breathes, before he pulls the whole finger into his mouth. He holds it, letting his eyes half-close, as Vincent’s own gaze entirely turns away from meditation and into warm appreciation. “I enjoy the way you work.”

That rumble vibrates in Vincent’s chest, just behind his curved lips. His answer is in how he pulls Sephiroth’s mouth forward and then slides his fingers out of the way for their kiss.

* * *

Tseng doesn’t take a dinner invitation from Vincent lightly. Even aside from the political ramifications—internal and external—he understands very well that it’s a highly personal matter for the other man. It being personal, of course, isn’t the same as it being emotional, and in fact Tseng never has been able to make up his mind whether Vincent views him as more of an ally versus an interesting and useful diversion. Nor has he ever been able to stop finding it fascinating.

He could, and should, be more objective. He never turns down the invites but he always reminds himself of that. And then inevitably forgets it within seconds.

Vincent doesn’t turn when he walks into the kitchen. Nor does the man kneeling on the floor, and as comprehensively-bound as Sephiroth is, Tseng knows very well that that has little to do with it.

Knows but looks anyway, unable to help himself. Sephiroth is a striking man by any measure but presented like this…he’s naked, the expanses of smoothly-defined muscle made silky-looking and deliciously pale, like mounded cream, in between framing black leather. His legs are strapped thigh-to-calf and positioned neatly under him, while more straps lace firmly about his chest and shoulders, swinging back to connect with a steel rod that runs from the posture collar clasping his throat down his spine to narrow at the buttocks, its end curling to disappear into his hole.

His arms are pinioned behind him, a thick cuff on each upper arm fastened back to the rod. Sleek leather gloves him from elbows down, ending in strangely elegant, unseparated ovoids over his hands, which are lying against the tops of his buttocks. Crossed above at the wrists, slightly bent at the fingertips, clearly relaxed. The man’s breathing is slow and shallow, almost slow enough for sleep.

The hood on him keeps Tseng from knowing for sure. It’s taut over his cheekbones and clings to his jawline, the black leather doing little to depersonalize him. Instead it seems to…idealize him to a certain extent, smoothing away the man and leaving behind an eye-catching figurehead. Although when Tseng comes closer, he can see the subtle signs: the way the lacing at the back of the hood flexes deep into the leather with every breath, the fine sheen of sweat over the shoulderblades and buttock slopes. How Sephiroth’s head lifts not when Tseng’s foot strikes the floor, or when Vincent puts the knife he’s using to chop vegetables down by the cutting board, but when Vincent makes a low, good-humored noise.

“Take a seat,” Vincent says, half-turning and gesturing to a chair in front of Sephiroth. “I’m finishing up here and should have it on the stove in a few minutes.”

From him it’s not incongruous at all, the domesticity, but an understated and unmistakable indication that this is his set-up. Tseng takes it as the warning it is, but also sits where he’s told. Careful to lift his legs over Sephiroth as he does, careful to not even let the edge of his suitjacket inadvertently brush against the man.

Earplugs under the hood, Tseng thinks, with embedded earpieces. The hood is so finely drawn against Sephiroth’s face that now that he’s seated, he can make out the lines of a blindfold under it. And it’s not a single piece as he’d initially thought, with a leather band wrapped over Sephiroth’s mouth so tightly that it nearly melds into the underlying hood.

Sephiroth settles back down after that initial alert shift, and the wink of silver at his nipples and cock keeps pulling Tseng’s eyes down him. Silver pressure rings grip each nipple, with a chain drawing straight between them, without the slightest sag in it; the nipples themselves are shockingly red, almost purple, and even a faint air current must feel like fire against them. The shallow breathing is enforced by the clamps, since a deep inhale would tug hard at them.

The cock cage and the bit of hollow sound peeking out of the tip of Sephiroth’s cock, Tseng has seen before, but he still can’t grow used to it. He’s following the beaded drop of precome decorating the sound’s tip when a hiss startles him.

When his head snaps up, Tseng finds himself looking at the eye-less, mouthless face molded out in front of him. Then he looks over at the stove, where Vincent is now tossing various ingredients into a pan. Vincent should look overdressed in comparison but he seems a perfect counterpoint instead, free instead of bound, casual in rolled-up sleeves and no suitjacket rather than meticulously-packaged.

“Do you think Corneo’s the dark horse?” Vincent asks, arms and hands moving with quick, unshowy confidence.

Tseng starts again, and watches as Vincent smiles at the cooking food without turning around. They’re here to discuss leads on the stolen R&D compounds; remembering this feels like dredging memories up from decades ago. “I think he’s a front, or a cat’s paw at best. He has been operational since you first started at Shinra.”

Vincent’s smile lengthens a little rather than broadening. “Yes. He does have that kind of talent for surviving, never quite worth dealing with.”

“I still don’t think it’s worth dealing with him now. He’ll be more useful left in place, since it’s never that difficult to trace back his connections,” Tseng says. Feeling cautious about doing so, even though it’s only good, clear sense for professionals like them and Vincent’s never penalized him for being that.

He shouldn’t think of it that way—but as the thought comes into his head, Vincent replies to him, tossing a suggestion about Wutai. They share connections in common over there and some of them are deeply—unfortunately—personal to Tseng, so that’s more than enough to distract him.

But it’s work as well, and it’s easy enough to slip into business talk with Vincent, who has a very sharp mind and excellent political instincts, for all that he prefers to hold aloof from most power struggles. Tseng has to admit this is part of the attraction as well, a rare opportunity to speak with a peer who knows as much as he does, and who hasn’t the slightest interest in usurping his role or his teams.

They’re several minutes into the discussion when Vincent puts a lid on the pan, washes off his hands, and then comes over to the table with a glass of water for Tseng. Who takes it gratefully, as he’s been doing the majority of the talking and he’s unused to it. He starts to put it to his mouth but then pauses as Vincent steps behind Sephiroth.

“Drink,” Vincent says.

Sephiroth doesn’t stir. Hasn’t stirred since they started talking in earnest, even though Tseng’s dropped several names he knows the other man would be interested in. It lulls Tseng a little—he hasn’t forgotten but the need to react slips away from him, like a mouse who’s decided the shape in the corner is merely lifelike and not a true cat. And then there’s the way Vincent tells him to do it.

Tseng sips at the water, and watches as Vincent, now making his own remarks, reaches for the back of Sephiroth’s head. He peels away the leather band from Sephiroth’s mouth, uncovering a smoothly-seamed opening that’s tailored closely to Sephiroth’s lips. Which are bright red from the pressure of the gag, plumping out into the air as Vincent runs a thumb back and forth over them.

“Go ahead,” Vincent says with a nod. To the hand Tseng’s unconsciously dropped to his crotch, making him flush self-consciously, guiltily.

Even though his fingers are unbuckling his belt and opening up his fly, pulling his cock out. He feels less in control by the second despite the man in front of him—the one kneeling, the one being casually offered up as if it’s no different than a slice of lime in his water. Which Vincent retrieves next, once Tseng has shuffled forward on the chair and had Sephiroth’s mouth pushed onto his cock.

The back rod keeps Sephiroth from leaning too far forward, it and its attachments; even as Vincent’s hand strokes up the back of the man’s head, a shiver is starting to spread through him. He keeps shivering, the trembles growing like ripple out from a pebble dropped into a pond, as his lips close just about the end of Tseng’s cock, his tongue lapping gently at the slit. Or maybe he’s holding perfectly still and it’s Tseng who shivers. Vincent asks Tseng a question twice, and when Tseng finally gathers himself enough to answer, his voice cracks into a dry, airless gasp and he has to drink water to wet it.

“You can touch him,” Vincent says in the middle of Tseng’s reply. The interruption smooth rather than harsh, a swiftly-decisive stroke, as he comes back to stand behind Tseng’s chair. His hand drops onto Tseng’s shoulder as the lime wedge plops into the glass; the weight of it seems to not only stop Tseng’s twitch but press down past it, holding Tseng in the chair as securely as any chains. “You should touch him.”

“I…” Tseng says, as Sephiroth’s hair sways just behind the black curve of his head. It’s braided back, a single thick plait that flows out of the join of hood and collar and is fastened again at the bottom of the back rod so it can swing from side to side. “I don’t think we’re going to finish this today.”

Vincent shrugs indifferently as he takes the water-glass from Tseng’s hand and puts it on the table beside him. “I think we’d both rather ensure we have the real endpoint, and not mere middlemen. Those compounds would have effects on some of your enhanced team members, too.”

Tseng knew that the other man knew about them but he still starts. Vincent’s hand clamps down on his shoulder, and in synchronicity, Sephiroth runs the flat of his tongue under the head of Tseng’s cock. “We’re looking into it, Vincent,” he manages in a strained voice.

Sounding like any other bureaucrat. Vincent huffs, amused, as his grip relaxes. As it shifts up the line of Tseng’s shoulder, fingers now angled so they’re crossing over Tseng’s collarbone in front of his neck. “Would you like to touch him?”

Tseng opens his mouth to deny it, but all that comes out is another gasp. His hands are fumbling at the sides of his chair, trying to clutch it like a frightened child; when Vincent speaks they jerk up, then drop to his thighs. Then, inevitably, slide out to lay against the sides of Sephiroth’s jaw, holding it up so that the man can suck more firmly at him.

He can feel the working of Sephiroth’s muscles under his fingertips, through the leather. Steady, unhurried, in comparison to the way he’s increasingly falling into a disheveled mess. Sweat dribbling into his shirt-collar and sticking it at the back, strands of his hair irritatingly glued behind his ear—the groan that comes out of him when Vincent’s hand, barely even trying, curves up and over his throat.

Vincent tips him back against the chair, with the man’s other hand coming down to rest lightly on the top back of Tseng’s head. Lightly, very lightly, only positioned to snap his neck and not about to. But the hint is there, and the hint makes Tseng groan again, shaking more than the bound man servicing him. He doesn’t want to die, a small, wild part of him thinks. He genuinely does not, and yet he’s never been so excited in his life.

“Put your hands down,” Vincent says.

Tseng’s hands snap to grip the sides of his seat. Vincent leaves his own hands in place a moment longer, not pressing, and then lifts them. He goes around the chair and behind Sephiroth. Touches the other man on the top of the head with two fingers, then drags them back over the hood. Sephiroth makes a low, hungry noise, moving enough now that his bonds creak.

Vincent smiles, looking at it, and Tseng glimpses a sliver of white teeth. His hand moves lower, hooking into the slack of Sephiroth’s braid and then shaking the other man by it. Not roughly, only toying with it, but Sephiroth immediately comes off Tseng’s cock, openmouthed and straining back against his harness, his nipples flushing visibly redder as the chain between them bows over his rising chest. When Vincent lets go of his hair, he remains upright, panting roughly now, his head and shoulders twisting in short, jerky motions.

He sags a little as Vincent pushes up behind him, giving him a thigh to rest his head against. His chin stretches up and he whines breathlessly, trying to defy his posture collar to nuzzle at the hand Vincent slowly passes over the side of his head, across the cheek, and then finally to dip into his mouth. Three fingers, then two, bending them so Sephiroth can nurse at their tips. Then Vincent stoops down and plucks at the nipple chain with his other hand so Sephiroth drops his jaw again in a low cry.

“Turn around,” Vincent says to Tseng.

Who does so, white-knuckled and cut off at the knees for all that he’s seated. He watches as Vincent unbinds Sephiroth’s legs and then urges the man up. Sephiroth stumbles stiffly to the table, then bends pliantly over it, guided by Vincent’s hands on his belly and back. His legs slide open without asking, bringing him flat against the table, moaning quietly and without resistance, as Vincent parts his buttocks.

“Use your fingers,” Vincent says, as he takes a tube of lubricant out of his pocket and offers it to Tseng.

Tseng has to pry his hand off the chair with a rough grunt in order to take it, but he takes it, and uses it. He’s being offered this for a reason, he thinks helplessly. He’s not being allowed to toy with Vincent’s—with Sephiroth merely to toy with him, to treat the man like a sexual amenity, even if that is what it looks like. He knows better, but he knows what this looks like—he knows and he can’t help thinking about it, thinking about how his fingers disappear into Sephiroth’s hole. How the flesh around them quivers, the full, inviting globes of the buttocks and the warm, slicked clench inside, all but for the hard strip of the anal hook that’s holding Sephiroth open for him. For him, his fingers, his use, and it’s not his use but it puts that thought in his head.

That’s the genius of it, making him think that as he’s made to do what Vincent asks. His fingers, and then his cock, with his hands crushed around the table’s edge as Vincent holds his hip with one hand and opens him with the other. Even when Vincent’s tying his hands behind his back with his own belt, he staggers over Sephiroth’s broad, trembling back, watching the shoulderblades as they flex and arch to either side of the steel rod. And he thinks about it, thinks about being where he is as much as he thinks about being the man on the table. He’s hopelessly confused between the two and it makes him feel drunker than any form of alcohol ever has.

He's fucked, hard and thoroughly, while his cock fucks into Sephiroth. Confused as well, one side of his prick pressed by hot, yielding flesh, the other bruised up against rigid metal. No matter how much he bucks and twists, he finds himself stuck between the two. He can’t free himself and, he thinks, he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to untangle them, doesn’t want to straighten it all out and go back to his well-ordered, well-understood life. He’s confused and desperate and if Vincent put his hands on Tseng’s neck right now and forced his nose and mouth into Sephiroth’s back—

Tseng comes.

“I know you’re working on it,” he hears Vincent saying. As the man holds him up, eases him out of Sephiroth, sits him back in his chair. Come leaking out of him to smear about the seat as he groans and feels his head thump weakly against the chair back, with Vincent’s hands brushing the wet hair out of his face. “We’re likely going to find the source together.”

“SOLDIER will be told,” Tseng mutters.

Vincent laughs, not unkindly. He pets Tseng’s cheek. “Good,” he says as Tseng shivers. “Then all I’d ask is you let me do the kill for you. I’ll take it off your hands.”

Tseng groans, and tilts his head against the chair. He doesn’t try to free himself, only watches as Vincent gets up and then goes onto his knees. The man noses between Sephiroth’s buttocks and licks Sephiroth out; with how Tseng feels, he’d think Sephiroth should be even more wrecked, but while Sephiroth starts that way, he seems soothed rather than worked up by Vincent’s attentions. Gasping dies to groaning, and then to the occasional feeble mewl and hitch, as Vincent runs his hands slowly up and down the man’s thighs.

When Vincent’s satisfied with his work, he stands up. His hands cup Sephiroth’s buttocks as he presses his groin against them. He holds the position for a moment, then steps back. His cock is still hanging out of his trousers and it swings casually as he helps Sephiroth stand up and then maneuvers him back to his knees. Straps his legs in place again, as they had been when Tseng first entered, with the only difference being that now Sephiroth is facing the other chair in the room.

Then Vincent goes and retrieves dinner. He parcels it out into two helpings, one for himself and one he feeds to Tseng. Who perches on the edge of his chair, still feeling as fragile as a soap bubble, while Sephiroth quietly kneels between Vincent’s legs with Vincent’s cock in his mouth. Sephiroth’s still there when Tseng leaves.

Tseng never answered Vincent, but he knows it wasn’t a question in the first place, what the man had said to him. When the decisive report comes in, he sits in his office for a few minutes, thinking about what he should do. And then, feeling phantom hands on his throat and head, he messages Vincent for a meeting.

* * *

The last traces of Vincent’s come slip down Sephiroth’s throat, easing some of the rough, raw feeling that’s been spreading through it. He feels the hand on his head push him back, carefully calibrating his speed as his tired body tries and fails to slump. The rigid rod along his spine and the tight straps wrapped about him forbid that but he suffers anyway, as the nubbed end of the anal hook rubs and twists against what feels like a deep, swollen bruise buried inside of him.

Vincent’s hand slides off his head to his right shoulder, joined by the other hand on the other side, and he’s held upright until he calms. He’s been worked up and then made to quiet himself so many times now that he’s surprised he can even still notice it. But he does. He does, he feels how he’s pushed back from the edge with small, firm touches, utterly commanding. His breath slows, and though the burning in his throat starts up again, he feels his body relax.

The hands leave his shoulders. He kneels in his bonds, finding it surprisingly easy to let them hold him this time. The hook doesn’t shift again until Vincent’s hands return, touching the back of his head. He shivers, but then stills as he feels the hood’s laces loosen. A soft, protesting moan escapes him, but he’s thoroughly learned his place at this point and the thought of resistance doesn’t even occur to him.

Having the hood peeled away feels almost as if he’s been released from a great height, the sudden loss of tension rushing through his head like an icy wind. He gasps and sways a little—Vincent’s hands are gripping his shoulders again, keeping the hook from burrowing too roughly at him—and then settles as the rest of his bonds tug and slide their way back into his consciousness. He still has the blindfold and the earplugs, remaining points of pressure that help to transition him to the empty air.

But they’re removed as well, blindfold last, and he’s left…bereft, he feels for a moment, as he blinks blearily at the world. Only a moment, as then there’s a hand firmly cupped against his jaw, turning him into a warm, damp towel that makes him shudder as it rubs over his face. It’s soft but the rasp of it against his unready skin sends overwhelming trails of electricity down into his body to pool in his gut, trapped along with the rest of his need behind the cage still locked about his cock.

“Tseng’s gone,” Vincent informs him. Then drops the towel and pulls his chair a little closer to Sephiroth.

“I…know,” Sephiroth grunts. He opens his mouth before he sees the glass in Vincent’s hand, out of sheer habit. Then lips its soothingly cool water and lets his throat be wetted. “I smelled…something else.”

Vincent smiles. He’s turned down the kitchen lights, thankfully, since the whiteness of his teeth alone makes Sephiroth’s dazed eyes squint. He puts the glass back on the counter and then picks up the steaming plate there. “You like this version better, with the water chestnuts.”

Sephiroth’s too weary to do much more than murmur appreciatively as Vincent tilts his chin in one hand. He is hungry, his stomach growling once as the first piece slides across his tongue, but Vincent still has to whisper to him to chew before he swallows. It’s much easier to let the other man direct him.

“I wonder if it was worth the trouble finding these,” Vincent says, the slight lilt of his voice enough to catch at Sephiroth’s ears. When he focuses, the man is raising a piece of food in chopsticks towards him, but then Vincent nods at something on the table. The earplugs. “I turned them off because I knew you weren’t even listening to me.”

“You’ll tell me what he said,” Sephiroth says. Then senses a flicker in Vincent’s attention, and curls his tongue down over his lower lip to catch that drop of sauce. He leans forward as Vincent watches him, straining against the posture collar to lick at the chopsticks. “Later.”

“Tomorrow at this point.” Vincent doesn’t make it a criticism, only a statement. He feeds Sephiroth a few more bites, then takes the plate off his lap and moves it to the table. “Show me your nipples.”

Sephiroth’s stomach has settled down, and while the food hasn’t overcome his exhaustion, he can feel the gloss it’s thrown over that. Thin, barely holding as he groans and then cants himself up and back, angling his chest towards Vincent’s dropping hands. “I don’t want to—”

“Stop, no, I know. You were what Tseng needed to see, for all that you weren’t listening,” Vincent says, smiling. His fingers brush with languid nonchalance against the clamps, letting Sephiroth twist on the hook, before taking hold of them. “But you still didn’t listen.”

“Are you—” Sephiroth starts, and then the clamps snap open.

He feels as if he drops through a trapdoor to slam knees-first against the floor below. The impact smashes up through him, a shockwave that has him reeling, feeling his mouth gasp without hearing it, for long minutes. And Vincent doesn’t soothe him either—the man seizes his shoulders so he doesn’t throw himself over, but otherwise merely lets Sephiroth jerk and spasm and shudder through the pain until it fades of its own accord.

“You know I don’t punish you,” Vincent’s saying when he drifts back to awareness. A finger curls between his jaw and the posture collar, running slowly back and forth to ease a stinging sore he hadn’t even realized was there. Another strokes gently over his forehead, then rubs about his temple as he sighs and leans into it. “I make you see consequences.”

“Vincent,” Sephiroth whispers. He rests his head in the caresses for another second. “Please. Tomorrow. Talk tomorrow about—”

“All right.” Vincent sounds indulgent, and confirms it with a laugh he muffles by kissing the top of Sephiroth’s forehead, just at the hairline. “All right. How do you want to come tonight?”

“Like this,” Sephiroth says, but then finds his head trying to twist in the collar. Vincent pushes him back and then pushes his shoulders down, making him stop moving the hook, but he still finds words coming out of him. “No, like—with—this—”

“I’ll keep you bound,” Vincent promises.

A ripple of relief goes through Sephiroth, and his thoughts come together a little more easily with Vincent already reading him so well. “With your mouth, please.”

That surprises Vincent. “Not my cock?”

Sephiroth moans before he can help it, which makes Vincent smile again. “No,” Sephiroth says before he loses his mind again. “No, I want—keep me open, I want to feel that. When I come, I want to feel my hole and your mouth, and wet, I want to come wet. And then—after—after I want you in me.”

“You want me to empty you out and then sleep in you, don’t you?” Vincent says. When Sephiroth whines in agreement, Vincent pets his cheek. “Would you like the hood back on?”

“Yes but—” Sephiroth runs out of breath and has to inhale “—you had my mouth tonight. I can still taste you.”

“Ah,” Vincent says after a moment, with both hands cupping Sephiroth’s jaw, thumbs just tucked into the posture collar. “The other one. So you’re all sealed up as I’m drying you out.”

“Please,” Sephiroth begs. “Please. I don’t want to—”

“Talk. Yes, I know,” Vincent says, voice and eyes warm. He leans forward again, his mouth pressing softly against the place between Sephiroth’s brows. Then against Sephiroth’s lips, drawing out a long, deep kiss as his hands run down Sephiroth’s body, lingering at every strap before settling at Sephiroth’s buttocks. Making them spread a little against the ache of the hook, making Sephiroth groan and open his mouth further. “Then we won’t talk. I think I’ve done enough of that tonight, too.”

His hands rub at Sephiroth’s buttocks a last time, then move to Sephiroth’s thighs. He unbuckles the leg straps, giving Sephiroth a quick massage under them as they loosen, and then helps Sephiroth stand up.

Sephiroth’s legs are stiff and unwieldy but it’s only a few steps to the bathroom, where Vincent has him relieve himself, leaning against the other man with Vincent’s hand guiding his cock. Then he’s wiped with another towel, face and chest and between his legs before it finally comes up to tease his cock head with its nubbly weave, rolling the flesh up against the sound speared through it. By the time Vincent flips the towel into the sink, it’s freshly dribbled with precome.

More flicks off the sound against Sephiroth’s thighs as he’s walked to the bed. He feels the rod shift at his back and the pressure of the hook lessens considerably. Vincent puts a hand between his buttocks to grab the top of the hook and keep it from moving about as the man tips Sephiroth onto the bed, face-first and then rolled onto his back. Then Vincent pushes him up till his legs can be folded fully onto the mattress.

He's left to lie there for a moment as Vincent moves to the top of the bed. Retrieving a silk belt, which he wraps about Sephiroth’s eyes and into his mouth before tying off. The light tension of the silk doesn’t replace the hood but it starts to run out the tension in Sephiroth’s body, enough of a replacement that he doesn’t feel the need to push up against his bonds. The leather bands Vincent adds over his eyes and mouth increase that feeling, and then—earplugs. And finally a leather hood, mouthless this time, stretching perfectly about Sephiroth’s face and over his head. Every pull of the lacing pushes more tension out of Sephiroth, until by the time the ends are pushed under the top edge of his collar, he feels perfectly slack.

A mere toy to be positioned, as Vincent lifts his knees and bends his legs. Straps them thigh-to-calf again, then plumps them up on pillows. More pillows cradle his torso, supporting him so that the rod along his spine aligns him rather than grinds up into him. Then he feels the hook slip fully into him again, adjusted till its curve is ever-so-slightly tugging at his sore, hot hole.

It tugs more when he whimpers and shivers, tied too tightly to struggle but unable to help himself, helpless as Vincent’s tongue dives into him and tastes him. Works at him, coiling along the hook, playing its tip against him, sometimes cushioning it and sometimes pressing down on it as he mewls. Only to himself, the double gag thoroughly silencing him, and then the hood stretched over that, holding in his cries as he lies there. Firm palms holding him spread, bound up like an offering, one Vincent is relentlessly devouring.

He doesn’t even notice when his cage is unlocked. Only when the sound is removed, barely ahead of his first orgasm. A flood of come that disappears into Vincent’s mouth as he switches to Sephiroth’s cock, sucking it through the climax and then beyond, bringing it back to erect almost immediately. It hurts but Sephiroth can’t resist it, can only whine to himself as his body is played with.

His cock aches more now, free to harden and stand up in the air, than it was in its cage. Vincent bumps over its head as he crawls up Sephiroth’s body, biting and licking as he goes, and it feels like a slap. Sephiroth’s head twists, is caught by the collar and the rod, and then he arches the little he’s able as the hook rides the rim of his hole. Pulling him roughly open, his thighs now pinned by Vincent’s knees as Vincent’s tail slides into him. Vincent’s mouth is at his nipples now, switching between them as they peak with pain, so brilliant that Sephiroth squeezes his eyes behind the triply blinding layers, and then spread with Vincent’s attentions. Spread sore and swollen, the ache pervading all of his pectorals, under the soft, merciless sucking of Vincent’s mouth.

Sephiroth comes again from that alone. His cock untouched but for where his come occasionally sticks it to Vincent’s belly. He comes, and comes, and finally he can’t come any more.

Vincent senses that and doesn’t climb off, but lies against Sephiroth for a while. Mouth kind now, pressing kisses to Sephiroth’s shoulders and sometimes over his sealed mouth while Vincent pets his chest and torso in long, smooth, calming motions. His shudders, violent and bone-rattling at first, gradually slow and decrease, until he’s been eased back into slackness.

Then Vincent pushes off of him. It’s so soft and quiet at this point that Sephiroth doesn’t even think to make a sound, but only lets himself be cushioned in it. Dimly aware that he’s still displayed on their bed, ravaged to within an inch of his life and still in his bonds, still offered up for Vincent’s pleasure if the man wants it. He’s used up but that doesn’t matter, and he doesn’t think about it. He only waits.

Eventually, the aches grow. Niggling at first, then cramping seriously enough that he starts to drag at his legs and arms. Vincent touches him again at that point, pushing down on his shoulders just long enough for him to notice. Then untying him, working methodically from his legs to his chest harness. With a lengthier massage this time, helping muscles to wake and joints to break through the initial flush of pain into the steady ache he can manage without resorting to Curaga pills.

Once the harness is unstrapped, Vincent turns him on his side and unlocks his wrists. His gloves are left till after the posture collar and anal hook are removed and his torso can angle into the half-fetal curl it wants to. He’s glad of that, since while he recognizes he needs to be untied, the removal of his bonds still also removes the pressure that’d been keeping him together. In its absence he feels unformed and too loose, like sand slipping between the fingers, and the grip of the gloves and the hood help counteract that.

But Vincent eventually takes those off too. And everything under the hood, and then, as Sephiroth lolls limply against him, he hauls them into the shower. Just a rinse, but Vincent takes the time to rake fingers along his scalp, loosening the layer of dried sweat there.

Then back to bed, on clean sheets. Sephiroth still feels too loose and is revived enough to squirm restlessly as Vincent pushes him over. He calms a little, feeling an oiled finger at his hole, and when Vincent’s cock finally fills him, he groans. But it’s not till the collar pulls taut about his throat that he truly sags in relief.

“That’s enough,” Vincent murmurs, with an arm snaking over him. A warm mouth brushes at the collar—thin leather, barely functional beyond its illusion of snugness—then moves to the back of Sephiroth’s shoulder. “Enough. We’ll deal with the rest in the morning.”

Sephiroth sighs. “Thank you,” he murmurs back.

* * *

“Hood first,” Vincent says, after studying Sephiroth for a minute.

Anticipation is skittering about under Sephiroth’s skin, making it twitch and itch unpredictably, the epicenter constantly shifting. But so are…other things, and so Sephiroth holds himself to only a nod as he straightens up on his knees. His hands are opening and closing at his hips and he tries to stop himself as Vincent walks behind him, but that only seems to call attention to it.

Fingertips touch his left shoulder and he inhales sharply, then shakes his head in irritation. Vincent hooks his hand behind Sephiroth’s braid and presses rather than curls it against the back of Sephiroth’s neck. Sephiroth opens his mouth, but unexpectedly, the order that comes is, “Look at me.”

Frowning, Sephiroth tilts his head back. He pauses when it bumps into Vincent’s thigh, but then Vincent’s hand slides out from behind his hair and up to cup over his forehead. Firm and cool and assured, and something of that last part seeps down into Sephiroth as Vincent’s red eyes watch him.

“You’re not going to see what I do. Or hear, or speak about it. You’re only going to feel it,” Vincent says softly. “You’re going to have no choice but accept it. So—”

A frustrating, contrary urge to snap at the man rises in Sephiroth, but as soon as it does, Vincent’s thumb swings out to stroke over his brow. A small motion, but one that interrupts the feeling, and by the time Sephiroth breathes out, it’s gone.

“—close your eyes,” Vincent says, as the world already starts to slip away.

Leather settles over Sephiroth’s eyes, pulls snugly about his head, both a barrier and a push at the tension lingering in him. His head is tilted forward again and then fingers touch at the corner of his mouth; he can’t help turning into them, flicking his tongue out at their tips as he opens his lips, but the thick, filling rubber cock that’s slotted between them soon stops that. It has grooves for his teeth that will keep it from being too taxing on his jaw, while still amply crowding out all the space in his mouth for any independent action—he feels his groan batter impotently at its tip, making it tickle the back of his throat.

Groaning, thinking about those insinuations, thought-out consideration mixed with intent to keep him like this for a while. It increases the prickling under his skin and makes his neck and shoulders loosen of their own accord as soft gel earplugs are pressed in, as a taut leather second skin is smoothed over his scalp and down his cheekbones, under his jaw.

The blackness is complete, and not only clinging but gripping, as the laces in the back of the hood are slowly, inexorably tightened. Vincent seems to take his time about it, giving time to the susurrations of pleasure that run down Sephiroth’s back to sluice through his groin and cock with every tug. Sephiroth’s wearing a cage, bound securely with steel rings and spitted through on a sound, but nevertheless he moans and humps the air as if he were free to rise.

He's not. Once the hood is on, Vincent makes certain of it. Pulling a harness about his chest and binding his upper arms to his sides, then wrapping a sleeve about his forearms to keep them close across his back. His fingers are left free, and Vincent gives them playful licks as they twist blindly after the man’s tongue, tingling with cooling spit while another harness is buckled tightly about his waist and hips.

This second harness loops to either side of his cock and balls, subtly plumping them forward, putting additional pressure on them when they’re already heavy with suppressed need. Then it runs back between his buttocks, lifting and spreading them in tight individual cradles so the straps bite when Sephiroth tenses.

He does that when fingers start to open him up. Two, rough and brisk for all that they’re liberally coated in lubricant. His chest harness seems to sling his breath back into him to smolder in his lungs, while his armbinder rasps across his spine. Then Vincent stops, reaches about him and ties up his legs. Thigh to calf, two thick straps about each leg, bruising him when Vincent returns to fingering him.

Slower for this second round, slower and patently lascivious, thumb lingering about his rapidly-aching rim, needling it as three fingers tease his prostate. He’s unable to rock very much in either direction, and when he goes so far as to try and slide one leg, Vincent catches him by the instep. Pushes his foot back and then pulls all the fingers out, leaving his hole empty but for the sticky, cold traces of gel as leather cuffs are locked about his ankles.

He's pinned at that point, pinned and spread, kept entirely in the dark and at the man’s mercy, but Vincent goes beyond what’s necessary to secure him. It’s merely pleasurable for Vincent, when Sephiroth’s nipples are clamped, biting steel dizzyingly icy against heating flesh, and then pulled so Sephiroth is forced to bend over his knees. To lay against them, squirm against them, whining into the soft, pervading, unyielding silence of his gag and hood, as the nipple chain is hooked to something on the floor.

The smell of leather and sweat doubles and then triples, laced through with the scent of Sephiroth’s own trembling need. Thick and sticky in his sinuses, almost as if he can feel the precome slowly leaking out of his sound coating his nostrils. Then he blows out his entire lung capacity as a series of metal balls are pressed into his hole, and when he finds the little space left in him for a following inhale, he…doesn’t care about smell anymore.

He feels only, as promised. Doubled over and held there, as fingertips and then a tongue trace his twitching, desperately straining hole. The last metal ball is close enough to his entrance that he can’t fully close down about the thinner handle that’s sticking out of him and Vincent is—is licking him, tongue snaking into that space, working about the ball and Sephiroth whimpers and rocks in place and feels only the need filling him. And then—a hard, jerking push on the balls, as Sephiroth’s hips are forced upward a few inches. They tilt in him, strung not on string but on an unforgiving anal hook so he can’t resist it, ratcheted up at the back so the burning in his thighs runs straight into the grip of the clamps at his nipples.

Fucked both ends and yet not fucked at all, only teased with it by lifeless toys as Vincent leans back. Palms on Sephiroth’s buttocks, squeezing them carelessly. Then pinching. Slapping.

Pain blossoms across both buttocks, so stinging in its purity that Sephiroth briefly, initially forgets about his bondage. But then, cleverly, he’s allowed to settle into it. To grow accustomed to it, take in that burn till its edge dulls and no longer cuts away the rest of his suffering. Only adds to it, heightening his arousal and how keenly he feels the restraints on it.

The next time Vincent hits him, it’s with a long, flexible instrument. A belt or a rod, Sephiroth isn’t certain. Doesn’t care, only cares about feeling the way the blow ricochets through him. Nothing but shockwave at first, plain motion jarring his shins and breaking the slight stick of them against the floor. Then pain unfurling faster than he can breathe, caressing him at both ends, white-hot across his buttocks and drowning red in his head. He sucks on the cock in his mouth, clenches about the one in his ass, feels the waves of hurt pinging between each of them as he shudders.

Lesser points, bubbling up in uneven distraction: the yank at his nipples, the growing strain in his shoulders and hips and knees. A sliding press on the small of his back, washing down from his arms flexing in their binder. And then Vincent strikes him again and it all comes together in another blinding wave.

Two more and then—hands wrapped under his thighs, relieving some of the pressure of the hook bearing down inside of him. A warming, soothing mouth, a tongue that swirls tenderly over his shaking flesh as he rubs and drags his chest over his thighs, nearly forgetting the relentless nipple clamps. He’s lowered, weak thankful mewls trapped under his hood, until the end of the hook rests gently against his back.

Still filling him. Holding his hole a little open, just enough for Vincent’s tongue to work past the balls, cushioning his sore insides from the rigid steel even as he’s made to stretch a little more to accommodate it. He’s too wrung out to squirm and can only slump in his bonds, quivering, as an arm moves between his legs, as fingers touch his cock. Like fire, bands of fire, scorching him between the rings of the cage, but he can’t move away from them. Can only wait and feel his mind burn a little more, a little more as the sound is eased out of his cock slit.

An immense pressure seems to evaporate from him when the sound’s weight drops away, but an immense pressure remains. Relieved but not, Sephiroth quietly submits to the spasms that start to gather in his thighs and back as soon as he feels Vincent’s fingers about his balls, brushing up against the base of his cock. The cage loosens and he shivers against his knees, head hanging so his forehead grazes the floor. Vincent’s hand replaces it, strokes him twice and then grips him there as his orgasm tears the rest of him apart.

When Sephiroth gathers himself back up, he’s half-unbound. His legs are freed but sprawling uselessly out in front of him, feet pointed in different directions as Vincent pulls the blindfold off. His gag’s already out, as are the earplugs, and he finds himself blinking slowly at the discarded hood on the floor as Vincent pauses to pull his limp body back against the other man. His arms are still bound but he doesn’t protest, only rests his head against Vincent as he’s given a little liquid.

Not water, there’s something that gives it a tang. Electrolytes, Sephiroth thinks idly, as he uses the small spur of energy that results to twist his head enough to lap at Vincent’s jaw. Vincent dips down and kisses him, but then pulls away as he tries to suck at the man’s lip. He has to drink more for that. And then Vincent finishes untying him.

They shower, Sephiroth on his knees again with his arms propped against the wall as Vincent washes him outside and in, one fingers probing gently at his hole. When he starts canting his hips up into it, Vincent stops and pulls him out to dry and comb his hair. Ignoring his wistful, soft protests, it seems.

But not truly. As usual, Vincent’s only waiting for the right time, which is when Sephiroth’s damp hair is tied back into a loose tail, out of the way as Vincent tips his chin up with two fingers. “You need to eat,” Vincent says.

Sephiroth nods, but when the motion slips his jaw away from Vincent’s hand, Vincent doesn’t stop him. Instead he’s allowed to press his cheek to the man’s thigh, to nuzzle at it before lipping at Vincent’s fingertips. “You need to…finish planning,” Sephiroth murmurs. “If you’re not going to end up calling for another early pick-up.”

He doesn’t mean it as a slight against the man’s skills. Vincent doesn’t take it as one, though he does move his hand to lift Sephiroth’s chin again, studying Sephiroth’s face. Looking for any signs of the increasing frustration Sephiroth had been showing before they’d started, and finding absolutely none.

“Yes,” Vincent finally says. “I’ll do it on the couch, after we eat. What do you want with it?”

“Not the hood,” Sephiroth says, and then lets himself smile when he sees the surprise in Vincent’s eyes. He doesn’t feel the need to impress the man, or to challenge him, not at this point, but he does appreciate when he can catch Vincent, given how rarely that happens. “I want to see you. You don’t have to—tell me, but I want to…”

“You want to see, just that,” Vincent says in a soft, thoughtful echo. From the way he does, Sephiroth can tell the man’s reading through his slurred words, barely-coalesced thoughts to the full meaning. “Like a pet, watching their owner.”

Not a soldier, not a general who has to both consider how to control actions and events happening well beyond his personal reach and to submerge his feelings about some of the possible outcomes. Sephiroth flinches a little, not wanting that thought so soon, then twists his head over to suck at Vincent’s fingers.

“Slower,” Vincent says. Not mistaking the flinch, only watching him for longer. Putting together context, as the man does. “Collared and in your slip. You’re docile enough now, I think you’ll do as you’re told.”

Sephiroth shudders, then lets the fingers drop out of his mouth so he can press his cheek to Vincent’s hand. Which cradles it, thumb rubbing over his lips, before dropping to close about his jaw.

He’s dressed in a black silk slip and has a delicate silk-and-leather collar fastened around his throat before Vincent leads him to the kitchen. He’s fed on his knees, as usual, but left free. Not that it matters, with how slack his hands are against his thighs. He doesn’t touch anything Vincent doesn’t ask him to, and Vincent doesn’t ask.

They finish and go into the living room. Vincent sits on the couch at one end, lounging in a sleeping robe as Sephiroth stretches out over the rest of the cushions. Head in Vincent’s lap, wrists bound now in leather cuffs but still relaxed against his chest. He watches Vincent work on a tablet for a while. The tablet’s propped against the couch arm so Vincent’s free hand can pet along Sephiroth’s hair. Sometimes stirring it out of the way to stroke at Sephiroth’s back, circling over his shoulderblades and running down his spine to just where the slip’s back ties criss-cross.

It's peaceful. Disturbing that peace isn’t why Sephiroth eventually twists himself around; when Vincent glances down at him, he meets the man’s gaze and then holds it as he leans forward to nose open Vincent’s robe. Vincent smiles, and slides his hand into the front of Sephiroth’s slip to rub a sore nipple as Sephiroth lazily takes the man’s cock into his mouth. Watching him continue to work—not seeing the work, because that’s less important, and not ignoring it, because that’s only temporary. And what Sephiroth wants to see, in the end, is that this lasts. Which is what he sees, he thinks, before he closes his eyes.

Chapter 30: Interlude: Vincent Cleans Up

Cissnei’s seen a lot of fucked-up things during her time with Shinra, even before she was co-opted from R&D Ops into the Turks. She’s used to it by now, but the thing about getting used to it, you still end up wondering from time to time. Things like why the hell the clones always seem to look the same, because sure, they’re clones, but also you can make clones look like whatever you want them to. You grow them in a vat of goo and you can program their genes, right? So why do they always end up looking like one of the three original Firsts?

“Lack of creativity, I dunno,” Reno grunts as he steps back to check his electrorod. He frowns at the charge meter, then takes another step back so he can get the space to spin it around in his hand; he’s got external batteries but he thinks kinetic recharging just looks cooler, the dumbass. “I mean, it’s not like Hojo was selecting his trainees for their ability to think beyond him. Not after how Crescent snaked Head of R&D away from him.”

“But he didn’t pick Rhapsodos and Hewley. That was that other guy, Hollander,” Cissnei says as she draws a fresh syringe. Well, she tries to—the bottle she’s using taps out a little short. She frowns at the little film she can still see clinging inside of it, then sighs and just flushes out the whole syringe so she can start a fresh bottle. It’s not worth shortchanging this kind of work, not if she doesn’t want a sequel in a couple months, and one round with tentacled homicidal clone-drones is enough. “Heidegger’s pet genius.”

“Genius, hell. I had to take a couple debriefing shifts when they finally caught up to that one and let me tell you, Crescent’s a cold fish but she’s sane,” Reno mutters. Then grimaces as the tip of his rod skates over some nearby equipment. He stops spinning it to check for damage, then glances at Cissnei as she strips the plastic wrapper off the new bottle. “Honestly, between you and me, I think they were gonna make Rhapsodos and Hewley look like the General eventually. Just Crescent caught on first.”

“Well, she’s protective of him,” Cissnei says.

She squirts the syringe to clear air from the needle, then fishes the right tube out from the bundle at the end of the life-support case and jabs the needle in. A couple seconds after she depresses it, the thing inside the case quivers all over, eyes snapping open in a glassy stare. Cissnei curls her free hand over the butt of her gun, but like all the other ones, this one dies quick and easy, floating in its tube. And then Reno steps up and fires off a pulse from his rod into the case’s electronics just to make sure.

“Protective, yeah, wants to make sure she’s got the original mint…” Reno trails off, twisting his head over one shoulder. Then he flips his rod around to lean it against his shoulder, sliding around so that he and Cissnei have their backs to the main entrance out of this place. “Hey, just finished.”

Valentine is standing at the other end of the cases, and Gaia knows how long he’s been there. He’s never been anything but well-mannered around Cissnei, and Elena actually likes him for paying attention to her ideas and not her stammering, but the guy is unnerving. They all know he’s been through a lab like this one, but somehow Cissnei can’t picture anyone having the balls to try and clone him.

“Good,” Valentine says. He walks up the aisle between the cases, but only glances at the one they’ve just done, its limbs still twitching as the fluid inside the case slowly clouds over. “The servers have been loaded out. You can go with them and I’ll stay here for R&D.”

Reno nods. He’s a little tense about it but he’s already backing up when Cissnei has to go and ask, “You sure? I mean…”

R&D isn’t scheduled to be here to finish clean-up on the incomplete clones for another couple hours. It’s a creepy unauthorized lab with tubes and tubes of dead clones that look like Hewley, except with silver hair like Sephiroth, and it’s not like R&D is going to be great company to look forward to. Cissnei’s had to do a couple solo missions in places like this and they’re a big feature in her nightmares. And Valentine’s bizarre, but he’s still one of theirs, and if the Turks didn’t have that kind of attitude, Cissnei wouldn’t have been able to survive all the stuff she’s gotten used to.

“Tseng wants at least one of you riding with the servers,” Valentine says, and then tilts his head as Cissnei winces and nods. He almost looks appreciative behind the placid expression. “It’s not an inconvenience for me to wait. Dr. Crescent’s coming ahead and she’ll be here in ten minutes.”

“Oh, shit,” Reno says under his breath. He’s had a couple bad encounters with her, courtesy of some stuff Rude once admitted even he doesn’t have all the details about, where Tseng had had to get SOLDIER medical to help out with him afterward. “Yeah. We’ll go. Have fun entertaining her.”

Valentine smiles close-lipped and then stands there, watching, as Reno and Cissnei back out of the place. They get almost all the way out of the lab, but then Cissnei realizes she’d forgotten the little disposal case for the used syringes. Reno bitches at her, first because she hadn’t grabbed it and then because she wants to go back to grab it, but he doesn’t actually hesitate to keep her company as they duck back into the clone room for it.

“Shit,” Reno says again, one second after the door’s closed behind them.

He grabs her shoulder and shoves them both behind one of the clone cases, just as Cissnei hears Dr. Crescent’s voice drift in from the opposite end of the room. “…expect, Vincent. I thought Hollander was dead.”

“He is dead,” Valentine says. He’s audibly irritated, but doesn’t sound like he might turn around and kill somebody, the way the General always does after a meeting with his mother. “You said Heidegger was allowed to keep his files. He’s clearly been passing them along to someone who’s at least as good as Hollander, for years.”

“That isn’t a very high bar,” Dr. Crescent says. There’s a plinking noise, like she’s tapped a clone case.

“It’s a high enough one for the cloning vectors to work on adults,” Valentine says.

It’s quiet for nearly a minute; Cissnei times it on her phone. Then Dr. Crescent exhales, sounding eerily like her son when he’s frustrated. “I already looked at some of the files, they’re degrading just like Hollander’s early work—do you know how long it took to stabilize Rhapsodos and Hewley? I had to invent an entire new suite of gene-splicing techniques, and even after stealing them, they can’t figure out how to use them.”

“That’s the point, Lucrecia,” Valentine says. Still only mildly irritated. “These are testing subjects for anti-SOLDIER methods, not for a better SOLDIER. Heidegger was more aware of his shortcomings than you thought. He knew when he lost Hollander that that was too high a goal to shoot for.”

“I don’t need the reminder when I can see it for myself,” Dr. Crescent snaps. She’s quiet again, and then they hear her shoes move as if she’s turning to walk back out of the room. “You aren’t planning on handling this before Sephiroth hears of it, are you? I need to talk to him.”

“Liaising with SOLDIER on R&D’s behalf isn’t part of my remit,” Valentine says dryly.

Dr. Crescent doesn’t stop walking. The sound of her footsteps fade, but Cissnei doesn’t hear a second pair so she grabs at Reno’s arm when he starts to peer around the case. Then she bites down on her gasp when Valentine calls her name.

“Let Tseng know. SOLDIER and he already have operations in motion,” Valentine says, calmly and casually. “But she’s early, and I don’t think he’s had a heads-up.”

“Yessir,” Reno says, yanking hard at Cissnei’s arm. “Sorry about that.”

“It’s not an inconvenience,” Valentine says, and then calls after Cissnei again. When she turns, he hooks his chin at the floor across the aisle from her. “Don’t forget this time.”

“Oh—oh.” Cissnei swings her arm across and snags the disposal case, and then she and Reno hustle themselves out of there.

She doesn’t think she’s in trouble. If anything, once the adrenaline’s made its way out of her system and she can think about it, Valentine probably improvised with her and Reno in mind, because he is kind of a Turk liaison with Dr. Crescent, for certain specific issues. And they all knew Heidegger’s days were numbered once he was fired, with both R&D and SOLDIER just waiting for the man to be officially designated as kill-on-sight. But it’s the details that make her wonder.

“How did Heidegger get someone to pay for all of it? It wasn’t all stolen Shinra material, sir, and with how long he must have had the place operating…” Cissnei says at the end of her debriefing with Tseng. “And—and Valentine delaying Dr. Crescent. Because he was, wasn’t he? And I’m only asking because if we’re supposed to take Heidegger but leave someone else alone—”

“There aren’t any other orders for you, Cissnei,” Tseng says. He pauses, expressionless, and then shakes his head slightly when she starts to apologize. “It’s good of you to think to ask, but the matter’s over your paygrade.”

“Understood, sir,” Cissnei says, and then pauses. “Just wanted to make sure someone was thinking about it.”

A flicker of something, not quite exasperation, goes through Tseng’s eyes. Not quite fatigue either, it’s a little too jumpy for that. But either way, it’s gone and he’s reaching for the tablet on his desk. “Someone is, Cissnei. Thank you.”

“Thanks, sir.” She gets up, then hesitates. “If there’s anything else I can take off your plate, let me know. I know you’re busy these days.”

Tseng smiles at her, but then nods at the door. “Thank you, Cissnei.”

Which is that, she guesses. She still wonders a little, but…at the end of the day, she’s used to leaving it there. So she does.

* * *

Genesis pauses briefly when he sees Vincent standing in the crematorium hallway, then steps up to the man’s side. Vincent tips his head in the smallest of acknowledging nods, merely looking on as the grunts wheeling in the gurneys dither about. He doesn’t so much as flick an eyelid as Genesis snaps for them to keep going, as if the sight of a Turk consultant in this kind of setting is remotely out of place.

“Clever of Tseng to choose his witnesses based on palatability, though I suppose you also provide accurate counts,” Genesis remarks as the gurney procession walks by them.

“I do,” Vincent says, in that perfectly smooth voice he uses whenever Sephiroth isn’t present. As unemotional as a robot, and yet there’s clear intelligence behind it.

It’s the sense that Vincent not only is suspending judgment, but that it doesn’t even occur to him to expend any effort on that. Those might as well be anyone’s bodies on the gurneys—but if that was the case, Tseng wouldn’t have someone here. Genesis wouldn’t be here, watching every hand for the palmed syringes, the hidden sample tubes, making absolutely certain that every piece of the dissected, dismembered corpses is delivered straight into the fires and doesn’t leave this place to recirculate among scientists. And yet, Vincent seems to know enough—or think highly enough of himself—to not be concerned.

“Common enough work for you, I suppose,” Genesis finds himself saying, as the last gurney passes through the doorway.

“No,” Vincent says. When Genesis looks over, he finds the man still gazing on. Even if it’s detached, that gaze doesn’t let a single detail slip by it.

Vincent doesn’t offer more. A barb to draw him out rises to Genesis’ tongue, but at the last moment Genesis twists himself around and applies his energies instead to their watch.

It isn’t because he cares to spare the man. There is nothing to spare Vincent from, as far as he can tell, but the people loading the crematorium already know quite enough. They only need to be here a few more minutes, and then the great metal door is shut and locked, and the operator is handing Genesis a tablet to double-check the settings. The woman hesitates once he’s signed off, glancing at Vincent, but the other man only continues looking at the door.

“Get on with it,” Genesis snaps.

The woman startles, then swipes her finger over the tablet. A few little red and amber lights go on, both on the door and on a few neighboring instrument panels, and then they all leave. The grunts to go back to their duties elsewhere, the operator to a depressing little office to whatever she does when she’s waiting to sweep out the ashes, and Genesis and Vincent to a small breakroom.

“You’re here till the ashes are poured down the drain, I take it,” Genesis says when Vincent takes one of the two seats.

Vincent nods, and then produces two small tins. He sets one on the table in front of him and then pushes the other across it. Then retracts his arm to open up his tin, as Genesis, both bemused and irritated, has to laugh.

“He should have just come himself, if he’s so worried,” Genesis says as he takes the other seat. The breakroom drawer near his elbow has some flimsy disposable utensils, which will have to do since the collapsible chopsticks that Vincent has just made appear are clearly not for sharing. “I certainly don’t think he’s lost the stomach for it.”

“I’m here on the Turks’ behalf,” Vincent says, without looking up as he starts eating.

Genesis frowns at the man. Then pulls the second tin over and opens it up. He can’t help sniffing at the gorgeous aromas that waft out, but he continues to study Vincent until the man finishes his first mouthful and looks at him again.

“I would have expected Tseng to try body-snatching. Oh, I’m not accusing him of being in league with Heidegger—we all hated that man. But he doesn’t like R&D looking into the bodies any more than Sephiroth does,” Genesis says. He forks up a piece and has to actively work to not make an approving noise when it touches his tongue. Damn the man, but Vincent is clearly aware that there’s no need for subterfuge when the bribe is this good. “You and I both can watch all we want, but in all honesty, I’m not so afraid of the janitors sneaking out a fingernail off one of those bodies.”

Vincent continues eating without any appreciable reaction. “I think Tseng understands the limitations of operating within a corporation. He respects R&D’s remit.”

“Well, that’s why he hired you, isn’t it?” Genesis says. Then laughs again, eating more. “You know, with the early ones, they did try and decant a few. It never went well—a dog or a parrot has more capacity to understand harm than those things, and they don’t wear a recognizable face. As a fellow professional, I think you’ll understand when I say it wasn’t killing so much as switching them off.”

At that Vincent does raise his brows. His expression doesn’t carry any hint of revulsion, but there is surprise. “You were still a child.”

“So was Sephiroth. He still put in a request to his mother to let him end it, and like a good administrator, she considered it against program goals and costs, then approved it. And I say ‘approved’ and not ‘sided with’ because it wasn’t for his benefit,” Genesis says. He doesn’t think he’s envious of the man’s calm, he decides, but he can’t deny that it is fascinating, in the same way that a natural disaster can’t be ignored. “She fought members of her own team on the point, and she’s stood by the policy since, but you know, his request was worded that way because him ending it is all he could think of at the time, and she approved it as-is. Then watched him do it.”

“I’ve seen that file,” Vincent says. He pauses and wipes off his lip with the back of his finger, then pulls out a napkin to clean off the finger. “It’s still the policy that SOLDIER will oversee any destruction of clones.”

“I think she regrets that these days. Not that the neurological results look any better—if anything, this last round looked worse—but standing by while he disposes of them isn’t giving her anything new to work with. And as disgusted as she is by the shoddy science…well, she can’t help wanting to tear into it, can she?” Genesis replies.

Vincent raises his brows again. “I don’t speak for Lucrecia.”

“No. No, you do not,” Genesis says. They’ve engaged in sexual activities together, he finds himself thinking as he stares back at Vincent, and for all that, this might as well be a logistics session with an AI model. “I do wonder who you speak for these days. It’s one thing to remind Tseng what might annoy Sephiroth, quite another to convince him to help outflank R&D.”

“They have shared interests, as you just pointed out,” Vincent says. A perfect reply, but instead of returning to his food, he keeps his eyes on Genesis. “I have nothing to say if Lucrecia’s research continues to be in service of SOLDIER.”

“You were hired by Shinra, not SOLDIER,” Genesis has to point out.

“I know who pays me, and I know who values me,” Vincent says, unblinking. But he does tilt his head, giving off at least the impression of curiosity. “Are you concerned I may be acting for a third party?”

“I think whatever you say, and whatever disclaimers you put on it, you think for yourself,” Genesis says after a long pause. He pushes back in his chair and watches as the corners of Vincent’s mouth twitch. “If Sephiroth can’t come, I come. Angeal tried once, and we’re not going to make that mistake again. I agree with Sephiroth—they already have us, and an autopsy’s enough to tell them where the clones failed to develop. There’s no reason to grant them spares so they can try out all the things we’ve refused to do.”

“Agreed,” Vincent says, and then allows a full smile onto his face when Genesis blinks. It’s cool and detached but nevertheless lacks any sense of mockery. “You’ve never come across clones of me, have you?”

“Have they tried?” Genesis asks reflexively. Then pushes sharply forward in his chair as Vincent’s words sink in. “Has she?”

Vincent simply looks back at him, unchanging. Then the man resumes eating, although since he’s still looking at Genesis, it doesn’t come off as dismissive, but rather, eerily assured. “You’ve never come across any. So I can understand the position you and Sephiroth take on this. I’ll tell Tseng that status quo has been maintained.”

Genesis opens his mouth, then closes it. Then, pressing his lips together, he toys with his fork for a few seconds. “So why bring the food?”

“I thought it’d be long enough that we’d need lunch, and neither Sephiroth nor Angeal will be free any time soon,” Vincent says, as if anything he does is that simple. “I generally don’t wait on an autopsy team. It is useful for SOLDIER medical in developing new treatments for you, and so I understand your position. But it’s not identical to my own.”

Because if there have been any clones of him, they’ve simply been erased, is what he means. Prior to Shinra, he wouldn’t have had any medical team to provide benign reasons for keeping anything from a clone after death, and even now, Genesis knows he has an aversion to seeking out medical services he’s rightfully entitled to by his contract.

Genesis also knows how much that bothers Sephiroth at times, which is hard for him to understand. For such an intelligent man, Sephiroth has certain blind spots, and one of them is his belief in what he personally controls. He controls SOLDIER medical, therefore he has no reason to be paranoid about it. Which may very well work for the man, and in all honesty, Genesis recognizes that he too needs those kinds of services from time to time. But he doesn’t control SOLDIER medical, and so he retains a certain degree of skepticism about it, no matter how much that irks Sephiroth and worries Angeal. Like any weapon, the only difference in benign and malicious use of medical knowledge, after all, is in the wielder.

“And I think I understand yours,” he says to Vincent after a moment’s thought. Then he takes up the tin again, resuming his meal. “This is certainly more delicious than whatever they have in the cafeteria upstairs.”

Vincent smiles again, close-lipped, and tips his head. Not a bribe, Genesis thinks as he takes another bite. No, not a bribe but a way of making a point: they have to share this, each for their own reasons, and as they do, they might as well look after themselves. And he does agree with that.

He finishes the entire tin.

Chapter 31: Interlude: Stay-at-Home Weekend

When Sephiroth wakes up, his hand is drifting absently over the sheets, seeking out something whose lack bothers him as he slowly blinks into awareness. He stares at the bed for a moment, then grimaces and turns his face into the mattress. Then he sighs and pushes himself up on his forearms.

Vincent’s not there. He knows the man wouldn’t be; this last trip was a rare dead end for Vincent, a failure of intel that meant he came home late at night rather than two days later, and agreed with Tseng to debrief in the morning. Sephiroth had been happy enough with the surprise, and he is, he supposes as he slowly stretches himself out, still happy enough.

Alone in their bed, but…twinges and sparks start up all over him, the heat sharp but sudden, and fading quickly so that his initial hiss slides into a long exhale. Not quite dead, he thinks, stretching again and feeling how the aches start to smooth together into a low warmth just under the skin. Filtering into the muscles, needling deeper in some places than others, as he pulls himself to the side and then swings his feet to the floor.

He goes into the bathroom and turns on the shower, but then steps out of the stall to draw his hair back over a shoulder and look at the interlaced bruising down his back and buttocks. The twist of his arm as he holds his hair out of the way sends a corresponding, sluggish twist of dull pain down his spine and into the opposite side of his lower back. It evens out when he raises his other hand and brushes it over his skin, letting his fingers push the ache around a little. Like a halo of heat from the tips, one that makes him roll his shoulders as he inhales deeply.

They’d been very rough last night. Rough enough he’ll probably have to stay in all weekend, unless he wants to take out his winter uniform, but…his plans can be moved easily enough, he thinks as he moves under the shower.

The push of it makes him gasp and then groan a little, and the way that ripples down his body goes directly to his cock. Which reminds him of how sore that is too, how often Vincent had wrung it dry last night—it’s the memories more than the thump of the shower that makes Sephiroth’s feet hike apart. He pushes his hand down between his legs, then pulls it back and reaches up to adjust the shower to a gentler spray.

He still brings himself off, but slowly, massaging rather than jerking at his cock, with his other hand roaming over his bruises. The water sluices down his nape and over his shoulders, running the heat through him rather than driving it down so he ends not on his knees but with his forehead pressed against the wall, breathing slowly. He’d been on his knees last night and he’ll be on them again soon enough, but right now…right now this is ideal. He’s calm but not dazed; he doesn’t want to be stumbling about his own apartment, by himself, ruining the elegant marks Vincent’s left on him out of sheer carelessness.

So he takes his time for once. Rinsing off and then drying himself off, and then padding back into the bedroom with his hair still twisted into a towel. The cool air moves over him, teasing especially at his bruises, which are taking longer to cool from the shower than the rest of him, and for a moment he considers remaining naked.

But he happens to look out the doorway and sees the glass jar of tea steeping on the counter. Vincent’s as meticulous about cleaning up as Sephiroth—the bedsheets are rumpled only on Sephiroth’s side, with Vincent’s pillow slightly dented at the end where Sephiroth’s head had pushed into it but otherwise fully plumped—but occasionally he’ll leave something like that on the counter. Some incredibly rare tea he picks up only in Wutai, too delicate to be brewed in boiling water.

Sephiroth decides to dress himself. He has no intention of going out, but with an aborted mission Vincent probably will spend some of the weekend working—the man’s professional pride alone will drive him to look into the intel failure himself—and if he is, he won’t be in the bedroom. Although he might still pay Sephiroth some attention, if Sephiroth approaches him correctly about it.

So it’s black leather briefs, cupping Sephiroth’s cock and balls tightly enough that the front slopes evenly, if not completely flat. It’s certainly snug enough that Sephiroth can feel the press of it up against the plug he’s pushed into himself when he buckles the sides of the briefs together. He inhales and rests his hands over the straps for a moment. Then slowly pushes his palms forward, running them down the front so he can feel his own cock rolling under the leather. When it starts to feel as if the leather’s pulling him back, forcing his cock to stay soft, he takes his hands away and adds the locks to the buckles. Presses his hands over them, then moves them back to grip his buttocks.

The briefs are open there, cut away to leave each globe fully exposed. Slightly lifted and tensed, skin taut over the bruises striping him so that just a light graze of his fingertips leaves a moan on the tip of his tongue. He takes his hands away, flexes them as he calms his breathing, and then turns back to pick up a collar.

Black leather, covering his entire throat and laced with silk cord rather than buckled in place. The ends of the cord are tasseled and tickle distractedly over his welted back as he pulls the towel from his hair. He goes back into the bathroom and finishes drying that, then ties it at the point just below the tops of his shoulders with another silk cord, so the loose part can fan over him. Brushing back and forth as he walks back into the bedroom, picking up a pair of leather cuffs as he goes, and then into the kitchen.

When Vincent returns from his briefing a half-hour later, Sephiroth has eaten breakfast and is making up a plate of cut fruits at the counter. He stops when Vincent comes up behind him, hands firmly rounding over his buttocks so he puts the knife down and arches back against the other man, closing his eyes when he feels Vincent’s teeth sink into the edge of his jaw, just by the top of the collar.

“Flaunting,” Vincent murmurs. He pulls away, then kisses the bitten spot as he locks Sephiroth’s wrist-cuffs together. “I need to put together a few things for Tseng.”

“You do show your work,” Sephiroth murmurs back. He lets his chin drop forward, then opens his eyes, the rasp of his hair and Vincent’s clothes and Vincent’s hands dappling him all over with skittering, tingling sensations. “In the living room or at the desk? I’ll bring over your tea.”

Vincent doesn’t move away, although he doesn’t hinder Sephiroth from picking the knife back up and leaning over to clean it off in the sink. His mouth drifts along Sephiroth’s jaw as his hands rub slightly too deeply for gentleness, moving off Sephiroth’s buttocks and around to the front edges of the briefs. “Living room,” he says. “Bring a few other things to entertain yourself with. I’ll be at it till lunch.”

“Tseng does have subordinates,” Sephiroth can’t help saying, though he keeps his voice low.

It still earns him a light squeeze at his cock. He whines and Vincent chuckles through the kiss he presses to Sephiroth’s left shoulder. Then the man pulls him back from the sink by the crotch, heel grinding with taunting precision along the curve of his cock before lifting away. Sephiroth is left teetering, catching his breath, as Vincent simply picks up the fruit plate and walks away.

Once he recovers, he carries out his instructions, and joins Vincent in the living room with the tea on a second tray. Vincent’s made himself comfortable: suitcoat stripped off and unbuttoned shirtsleeves loosely rolled up, shirt half-unbuttoned with his bare feet up on an ottoman. He moves to one corner, beckoning Sephiroth to kneel on the couch rather than on the floor.

Not next to him: the fruit plate is there, so Sephiroth reluctantly slides his tray next to it. He hands Vincent a cup of tea and Vincent, eyes on the tablet balanced in his lap, catches him by the cuff-chain. Then licks at his index finger before slipping the cup out of his suddenly-trembling hand.

Sephiroth sits heavily back, forgetting, and then stifles a groan as the heels of his feet dig into his abused buttocks. Which clench around the plug in him, which tightens the collar around a second groan. Vincent doesn’t look over but the man smiles tolerantly as he sips his tea. “Orange?” he asks.

As if he’s the one in a position to plead. Breathing in deeply, Sephiroth leans forward and plucks a slice of orange off the tray. Then leans over to hold it to Vincent’s mouth.

He almost puts it in Vincent’s hand at first, but Vincent’s free arm moves too far out for that, grasping Sephiroth by one elbow and pushing up on it. Then Sephiroth understands and lifts the slice higher, so Vincent can nibble absently at it. Sometimes lapping enough to graze at Sephiroth’s fingertips, a flirtation that pools heat in Sephiroth’s restrained cock. And then, as a spurt of juice threatens to run down Sephiroth’s finger and drip off onto Vincent’s shirt, Vincent’s tongue flicks out and curls nearly around the knuckle, snug and cluse and hot; Vincent’s hand similarly clamps around Sephiroth’s elbow to hold him in place. Every rub of the man’s tongue rasps its heat right through his sword calluses, as if his hands are as tender and vulnerable as someone who’s never wielded anything rougher than an orange peel.

When Vincent feeds him, Sephiroth is subject to the man’s attentions, as firmly controlled by that act as by any kind of binding Vincent happens to put him in. When he feeds the other man—when Vincent has him serve, he thinks as he shivers and kneads his knees into the sofa cushions, moaning helplessly as his fingers are licked clean. It’s all the same, he serves either way.

Vincent lets go of his arm. He drops his hands to his lap, pulling them sluggishly back so that he just misses hitting the jar of tea with his cuff-chain. Squirming already, the crotch of the leather briefs growing warmly sticky with sweat and precome. But when Vincent nods, he inhales—shaking—and picks up another piece of fruit.

By the fifth piece, he’s moaning regardless of whether Vincent’s tongue is playing with his hands or not. Vincent pauses to pick up the leather muzzle from the other tray and gags Sephiroth with it.

They go through half the plate, Sephiroth nursing mindlessly at the muzzle’s built-in ball-gag, when Vincent saves where he is and then turns to move the plate to his lap, the jar of tea to the table on his other side. He has Sephiroth twist around and recuffs Sephiroth’s wrists behind his back, then picks up a vibrator from the tray in his free hand. A gesture from him and Sephiroth shuffles forward, then throws himself into a tight arch, digging his fists into the tops of his buttocks regardless of how bruised they are, as Vincent pushes the vibrator against his crotch.

It's not anywhere near its highest setting, but the steady pulse of it through the leather briefs is torturous enough that Sephiroth can’t help trying to ride Vincent’s palm. Grinding himself down on it, making it worse as Vincent starts dragging the vibrator in a loose ellipse, working Sephiroth’s cock as it tries to harden against the briefs. It never fully can, but the stickiness under the leather grows into a slick squeeze as stars expand and die against the backs of Sephiroth’s eyelids. Some kind of—high point is reached, just enough of a crest for Sephiroth to feel both too weak to protest the downhill slide that follows and desperately unsatisfied by how short it is.

Come is pinching out of the sides of the briefs as Vincent removes his hand and unstraps the muzzle. He moves the tray out of the way and pulls Sephiroth over by the front ring of the collar, kissing Sephiroth with a want that shocks, considering how controlled the man still looks. Sephiroth immediately sinks under it, tipping his head back into a needy whimper, and Vincent releases him. Then tastes Sephiroth again, repeatedly, as his arm curls around Sephiroth’s waist.

He maneuvers Sephiroth back a few inches, then pushes away to snake out of his trousers. Sephiroth dips between Vincent’s knees as the man turns to face him, then pauses as the familiar weight of Vincent’s tail rubs up against the front of his throat, just hard enough to be felt through the collar. Vincent swings his leg over and lies on his belly, bared from the waist down with his tablet now braced against the couch arm.

“Lick,” he says, as his tail moves out of the way.

Sephiroth bends over, then noses between Vincent’s buttocks. When his tongue reaches the man’s hole, Vincent lets out a grunt and then a long, rough groan, his knees spreading a little more. His tail rubs over Sephiroth’s back as Sephiroth laps at Vincent, its fur feeling like sandpaper and silk against the bruising there. It works down to Sephiroth’s buttocks, then swings its tip back and forth between them, flicking against Sephiroth’s skin as Vincent’s breathing starts to speed up. Too light to be called a slap, but still, against the welts each flick feels like the beginning of a heated spear driving directly into Sephiroth’s cock.

By the time Vincent comes, Sephiroth is spraddling himself against the cushion, trying to push himself low enough to rub his cock against it. Vincent catches him at it and, still gasping from his climax, drags Sephiroth off the couch and between the legs he swings down. He has Sephiroth clean his cock off, then hold it in Sephiroth’s mouth till Sephiroth’s whimpering has slowed down and Sephiroth is only shivering in place rather than trying to rut against the floor.

Then he takes his cock out. He finishes off the cup of tea in his hand before feeding Sephiroth a couple pieces of fruit. “I could bite those bruises of yours till they’re bleeding, and then lick them off and you’d beg me to tear them off completely, putting that one on,” Vincent says as he wipes juice off Sephiroth’s lips with his thumb. “And then you’ll have to take all your meetings Monday from your knees.”

Sephiroth sucks his breath against Vincent’s thumb, then lets it out in a ragged mewl as Vincent’s tail brushes between his thighs. “I can’t stop you, Vincent,” he murmurs, nuzzling at the man’s hand. “If that’s what you want, I can’t stop you.”

“Spoiled. Still planning like a general, however you dress,” Vincent says with a laugh. He glances at his tablet and his humor fades, but only briefly. His eyes have already warmed up by the time he looks back at Sephiroth. “I want to finish this so I don’t have to do it through lunch. If you come up here and let me, I’ll take whatever you put in yourself out and let you keep my cock warm this afternoon.”

A groan vibrates Sephiroth’s throat, but he lets himself be pulled back onto the couch readily enough. Vincent moves to the middle, then cuffs Sephiroth’s hands back in front of him and lays him on his belly over the man’s lap, positioned so Vincent can rest his tablet on Sephiroth’s back and fondle Sephiroth’s buttocks with his other hand. Tracing bruises, stroking with Sephiroth’s shudders, thumb occasionally nudging at the strip of leather covering the end of the plug.

Sephiroth splays his palms under himself, then digs his fingertips into the cushions. He can’t help a low cry when Vincent runs the edge of a nail very lightly over one welt, pressing his cheek roughly into the sofa as he holds himself to only that much.

“I do like this pattern on you,” Vincent says. Then leans over, his hand stilling as he brushes his mouth against the back of Sephiroth’s shoulder. “Hold still and I’ll lick all the come off when I take the briefs off you later.”

“You’re making that difficult,” Sephiroth grunts.

Vincent pets his buttock. Then squeezes it, slowly, as Sephiroth moans. “Hold,” he says, voice lower, firmer.

A shudder goes through Sephiroth. He inhales sharply, then pushes the air out with his tongue. When it relaxes back into his mouth, the rest of him relaxes as well. He holds.

Chapter 32: Sixth Vacation: Period Cosplay

Sephiroth’s latest tour of the south presents no reason why he should feel particularly frustrated. It’s the same as any other such tour, a mix of true organizational work and mere political showmanship, and he’s been carrying out such duties since well before he became the head of SOLDIER. People have short memories, and moreover, are not as a rule talented at extrapolating from words, so they have to be shown that SOLDIER is strong, quick to respond, and capable. If it makes him feel more akin to a prize chocobo led around by a smiling fool than a general, well, that is simply the way of the world.

“Someone has to fill the role, and if you want your officers to be willing, you have to show them the way first,” his mother says, entirely logically and entirely at the wrong time. She’s come along to carry out her own inspection of the R&D teams here, and she doesn’t like this sort of thing any more than Sephiroth does. But she has him to comment on as a distraction. “If you keep looking as if Rufus would be safer sitting with the locals, they might get the wrong idea about the chain of command.”

“They aren’t invited to dinners like this,” Sephiroth grates out. One of the reasons why he hates this part so much: he’s stuck with almost an entirely nonmilitary crowd, few of whom bother to understand even the basics of what SOLDIER does. If he could use events like this to network with the local unit commanders, he’d probably find it less frivolous. “But I take your point, Mother. Shall we go pay our respects together?”

“I already spoke to Rufus,” his mother says curtly. Then looks pointedly past his shoulder. “Gast is mangling something. I need to attend to that.”

Sephiroth hadn’t expected any different from her, and only feels somewhat sorry for poor Gast as his mother promptly stalks through the crowd towards the other man. But Gast has his wife with him, and is riding high off a series of recent impressive discoveries during the latest excavation season, so he should be as well-equipped to deal with Sephiroth’s mother as anyone else. They’re slated to have breakfast in the morning and Sephiroth can check in with him then.

So he forces down his frustration, makes his expression marginally polite, and goes to have his daily public conversation with Rufus. Who at least seems to understand, unlike his father, that trying to force Sephiroth to truly feel excited about such things is a losing proposition and one that wastes resources better spent elsewhere. They chat about banalities in front of a select group of locals, then move to a quieter spot for a more business-oriented discussion. Then, ten minutes in, Rufus steps back. “Thank you, General, I think I have what I need,” he says, his eyes flicking over Sephiroth. “Far be it from me to command you not to enjoy yourself, but if tomorrow’s drills require an early start, I don’t think the dignitaries will take it the wrong way. They’re all looking very forward to the exhibition matches.”

Sephiroth inclines his head with a murmured thanks he’d almost feel if the man hadn’t mentioned the damn matches. He’s going to be the headliner, of course, matched against the local champion. Who at least is an officer with a good reputation and so far, what seems like a genuine dedication to the art of swordfighting. But even so, it’s going to be a dog-and-pony show, and the vast majority of the effort Sephiroth is going to spend on it will be trying to make them not lose by too many points.

But he’ll take any opportunity to exit that he can, and so slips out of the dinner a few minutes later. He stops in the hall outside the banquet room to orient himself, then spins sharply.

Vincent raises his brows and Sephiroth relaxes. Then tilts his head; he’d known Vincent would be along but this is the first they’ve seen each other outside of the weekly Turk-SOLDIER briefings. “Not an emergency,” Vincent says as Sephiroth crosses over to him. “I’ve run out of work for the moment, and Gast mentioned this.”

Sephiroth pauses. When the other man moves slightly back, he takes another step forward. Then falls in alongside Vincent as Vincent starts to walk down the hallway. They’re heading towards Sephiroth’s assigned guest quarters, and while he assumes Vincent has been put up elsewhere, he doesn’t mind at all if the man changes for the night. “I didn’t know you two had connected.”

“Only briefly. It didn’t seem wise to let him learn by accident that I might be in the area,” Vincent says, and then smiles when Sephiroth exhales with irritation, which essentially confirms Sephiroth’s deduction about his mother not thinking about that. “And I was a little curious, admittedly. My parents visited him a very long time ago at one of his digs here. He still remembers.”

“So he knew your mother, too,” Sephiroth says.

Vincent nods. Then changes the subject, asking Sephiroth about a local politician who’s of mutual interest to SOLDIER and the Turks. This carries them to the rooms, where Vincent, as always, expediently deals with Sephiroth’s shortening temper by fucking him out of it.

“I have to leave in a few hours,” Vincent says as they’re lying in bed afterward, Sephiroth’s damp hair spread over most of it to dry. His tail shifts a little where it’s wrapped about Sephiroth’s neck, then flicks its tip out of the way of Sephiroth’s nuzzle. But his fingers curl under Sephiroth’s jaw in its place, rubbing lightly over Sephiroth’s lips. “Tseng was going to let you know this in the morning, but you’ll need to curtail the drills by a day. They don’t have that bridge fixed and they’ve been waiting till the last minute to confess it to you—mostly because they were still hoping to fix it, I think.”

“More advance notice would still have been better,” Sephiroth mutters, though his ire is muted by the company. He lets Vincent turn his head and urge it back onto the man’s thigh. “It’s too late to schedule a different…yes, we’ll have to cancel.”

Which is fine from a training and preparedness standpoint, since the drill in question is one the local units regularly do anyway and Sephiroth’s presence would have added nothing functionally to it. But watching a unit move through a routine drill can throw up interesting insights, depending on their level of professionalism and corresponding level of complacency…he shouldn’t dwell on the lost opportunity. He’ll find another way to have the insights he needs, and it’s at least a better problem to have than yet another politician’s inane request for strongman support.

“Rufus will still want you to stay as scheduled. But there’s no reason you have to do so in town, is there?” Vincent asks.

Sephiroth looks up. “What are you planning?” he asks, drifting his hand up Vincent’s other thigh.

“It was something for the return, but Gast reminded me—there’s another site down here, one leftover from the Wutaian incursion a thousand years ago,” Vincent says. He puts his hand over Sephiroth’s, but only to ride it as Sephiroth continues to work it towards his cock. “The cancellation would free me up too, so I thought I’d see it. For pleasure, not work—my family had an interest in the area.”

“Do you need me to arrange that?” Sephiroth asks.

Vincent shakes his head. Sliding down the pillows a little, slouching his hips towards Sephiroth’s mouth as his tail tugs Sephiroth along. “Only if you have any reason to think my arrangements might not be acceptable.”

“You’re a tease, Vincent,” Sephiroth says, even as he lets the coils of muscle about his neck bump up his chin, make his breath hitch. “Trying to make my trip better?”

“If you’ll let me,” Vincent murmurs. Lifting both hands to Sephiroth’s head now, tangling his fingers in Sephiroth’s hair. His head goes back onto the pillows and he sighs at Sephiroth’s mouth touching his cock. “Will you?”

Sephiroth shouldn’t need to provide an answer, the man can safely assume…but he’s being asked. “Yes,” he murmurs back. “Yes.”

* * *

The site is only a couple hours out from the city, but it’s so isolated that Sephiroth has to have a chopper drop him at the head of the trail that Vincent indicated. This side has historically been disfavored for development due to perceived bad luck since the incursion in question; more rationally, the bedrock is porous and floods out easily during monsoon season, as well as being prone to frequent sinkholes. Modern architecture finds it cheaper to build on the extensive chunk of harder and less-waterlogged rock on the other side of the river.

But that side commands poorer views, and the landscapes revealed once Sephiroth reaches the top of the hill are outstanding. He can see why the Wutaians chose this part for their brief stint as overlords, local conditions notwithstanding.

“Very little left of their buildings, under the jungle,” Vincent remarks, standing next to Sephiroth. He’s dressed much more lightly than Sephiroth usually sees outside of the bedroom, in only shirt and trousers, and the shirt is a Wutaian-style cut that hangs open for most of the chest. “But a good bit of their plumbing still works. There’s a cistern big enough for a pool just behind that.”

“Are you asking me to wash up?” Sephiroth says, amused.

Vincent twists his hair back into a fresh ponytail. It’s slightly cooler here, the hill high enough to crest the sticky haze that hangs along the river itself, but still very hot. “It feels worse now, but the sun will be behind the trees in another hour. Bathe now and by the time it sets, you’ll have dried off.”

Sephiroth snorts, but starts to raise his hands to his uniform coat. He stops when Vincent turns and takes the lapels in hand, giving them a short, firm tug, just enough to rock Sephiroth on his feet. Vincent watches Sephiroth, takes in the resulting suck of breath and slightly-dropped gaze, and then smiles.

“I want to show you something, but not like this,” he says, as his fingers curl under the lapels to just graze at Sephiroth’s skin. “I’ll dress you for it. So strip, General, and wash.”

Sephiroth wants this break. He’s been thinking about it since Vincent raised it, tucked in the back of his mind like a cool pebble, less an irritant and more a soothing reminder to run his thoughts around through the two exasperating days since. And now that it’s started, he finds it much easier than usual to let the cues nudge him away from well-trammeled cares and to simply put himself at the other man’s direction.

He takes off everything but his boots, stuffing his clothes into the small bag he’s brought with him, next to the fresh uniform he’ll wear back. Then follows Vincent around a few remnant walls to the pool Vincent mentions, which indeed is full of fresh, clear water, just cool enough to make a difference against the sun.

Vincent takes off his shoes and trousers, revealing his top to actually be a full robe, which he lets hang behind him as he drapes his legs into the water. He has already been up here long enough to secrete supplies, and pulls out what appears to be a long, curved piece of antler, polished smooth all over but for the inside curve, which retains something of a ridge. “The water’s not running strongly enough for soap. Use this to scrape yourself off.”

“I’ve seen these,” Sephiroth says, turning the antler over in his hand as, bootless now, he climbs into the pool. It’s pale yellow, but looks warmer against his own skin. He tests it against his hip and then rubs his fingers over the patch, feeling how the resulting tingle slowly fades away. “In museums. Did you raid poor Gast’s stocks?”

“No,” Vincent says. He flips his robe back so he can drop more of his legs into the water, then leans over to dip up some to splash over his face. Then he looks at Sephiroth. “Only my own. I’ve picked up a few things over the years that my family’s lost.”

His mother’s side, he doesn’t have to say. Sephiroth looks more closely at the antler, now making out the nearly-vanished carving at one end. He’s tracing out the clan crest when water patters against his back.

Vincent, his tail now twining around him and down into the water. Being playful, unconcerned—knowing entirely well what he's doing, letting Sephiroth understand what this means, what he's showing Sephiroth. Letting Sephiroth have a moment to breathe slowly under the way that knowledge sinks in, both patient and effortless about it, as if the weight of it is nothing.

The man knows everything about Sephiroth at this point—everything that matters, and unlike the rest of the world, never has shown any signs that any of it perturbs him. Sephiroth has accepted that he will learn what Vincent wants him to learn about the other man, but has always had his curiosity; he accepts its ongoing presence in a way he wouldn’t for anyone else. But for that reason he would have expected Vincent to be satisfied with leaving him that way.

He never should assume that, he thinks as he turns the antler over in his hand again, so the crest is underneath and out of sight. Then he puts it to his leg again, the inner side. When he scrapes down, there’s a flash of warmth from irritated nerves, but then the water sluices in and steals it away. “Like this?”

“You want me to touch you,” Vincent says, as water dances over Sephiroth again. “A live demonstration.”

Sephiroth shrugs, and then makes his way over to the other man. The bottom of the cistern is uneven and the water is just under his shoulders here, rather than mid-chest. He bends his knees and allows himself to drop further as he moves between Vincent’s dangling legs, wetting the tops of his shoulders before he rises up to hand over the scraper.

When Vincent takes it, Sephiroth lets his hand fall to Vincent’s half-bared thigh. Vincent idly twists the scraper between thumb and forefinger, rolls his hips so that his robe falls further away from him, as Sephiroth dips and licks at the cock resting on the stone rim. It warms under his tongue, flushing quickly as he starts to mouth at it; he slides his one hand down and brings his other up so that he’s resting them on the tops of Vincent’s feet, which move to press their toes against the sides of his buttocks.

“You said you’d dress me,” Sephiroth says in between half-swallows of Vincent’s cock. He feels the tip of the scraper thread through some hair sticking to his shoulder, then flick the strands away so that it can skim lightly over his back. “How do you want me? It’s your—arrangement, how do you—want me?”

Vincent inhales slowly and deeply. He runs the scraper over Sephiroth’s back again, harder, and then reaches over to take up a handful of Sephiroth’s hair. Wrapping it up in his hand and pulling Sephiroth’s head away from his cock for a moment, just enough for Sephiroth to feel strain in his neck and gasp, staring up at him—then he drops his hand, urges Sephiroth’s mouth back down. He keeps hold of the hair, holding it out of the way as he starts to use the scraper in earnest.

“This was the heart of the royal court,” he says as he works down Sephiroth’s back, then upper arms. He turns the scraper as he moves it, running it evenly over the slopes of Sephiroth’s body, shaving off dirt and sweat and leaving a growing blush in its wake. Hot, tingling—sensitive, so that the lap of water as Vincent starts to shave at the sides of Sephiroth’s throat alternately feels soothing and shocking in its relative coolness. “You had to bathe before you could enter it, and there were other purification rites. If I’d gone to school in Wutai, I would have had to study all of that even though it’s not practiced anymore, but it was the Age of Heroes for them.”

The draw of water at Sephiroth’s newly-scraped shoulders feels like fingers, plucking just under the skin, pulling it taut here and there as Vincent turns his head. He still licks at Vincent’s cock when he can, but he can only have a mouthful every few passes of the scraper. “You picked this up later?”

“Not that much, actually. My father made a point of tutoring me about Wutai at home. My mother never asked him to that I saw, but I assume it was for her sake,” Vincent says. He tosses his handful of hair over Sephiroth’s shoulder, then hooks one hand under Sephiroth’s arm and turns him to face outward across the pool. The scraper swishes through the water and then Vincent lifts it out, using his thumb to wipe off the edge very like how he’d wipe a blade. “For a boy it wasn’t that much of a trial. Plenty of battles to hear about.”

Sephiroth can’t help a smile. Vincent’s as cynical as he is about war, and far more coldblooded about violence, without troop well-being on his mind, so picturing him listening to heroic tales with a child’s naïveté…then the scraper presses down his chest and he loses the smile, arching towards it.

The splash of water over him afterward spurs a gasp out of him. His hands drop into the water and flatten against the side of the pool; he knows there’s nothing but naked need on his face now, as his head lolls back over the rim under Vincent’s amused, intent expression. Vincent cups the side of his face, thumb passing gently under his chin over and over, lulling him as the scraper sets itself against his collarbone and then pushes down again. Sharp, so sharp he starts to jerk as it pushes farther, comes so close to the—but at the last minute it curves away, only its tip dragging at the edge of his areola, and in its wake his nipples are stiffening, as is his cock.

“I’m going to scrape you clean, and then tie you here,” Vincent says, his hand flowing down Sephiroth’s throat and then passing from the left pectoral to the right. “Tight enough to make use of how sensitive you’re going to be for a while, tight enough to keep your nipples stiff all night. They’d pierce their prizes but I don’t have time for that. This will have to do.”

“A prize?” Sephiroth breathes. Letting his head move against Vincent’s thighs as the man continues to run the antler over him, blushing him all over with heat. “Something an ancestor of yours took in battle?”

“We weren’t soldiers, ever,” Vincent says, humor rippling in his voice. He works the scraper across both sides of Sephiroth’s chest, then flips a handful of water over the skin. Lets Sephiroth hitch at the intensified cold—it’s not icy, the water, only slightly cooler than lukewarm, but on scraped skin it approaches the deep burn of Nibelheim ice—before he moves on, starting on Sephiroth’s abdomen. “Spies and assassins. And the occasional legitimate advisor. But those usually don’t make the history books.”

Sephiroth groans a little, twisting languidly in the water as Vincent works. When the other man reaches the end of his stretch and pulls Sephiroth out of the water, Sephiroth comes crawling out as if he’s become part-liquid while soaking in the pool. Vincent lets him lay his head on the man’s thigh as his lower back and buttocks are scraped, not missing the opportunity to tease at his hole and flirt fingertips along his perineum. He rubs after the touches, spreading his legs, but when Vincent pushes him away, he limits his protests to breathless whining.

Only a few hours away from a major metropolitan area, but it very much feels as self-contained as they are in the Nibelheim mountains. Nothing for Sephiroth to think about except what pleases the other man, and how he feels when Vincent’s taking what he wants out of Sephiroth…nothing at all, as he goes naked on his hands and knees, trembling, his untended cock turning the water pooling under him cloudy, and doesn’t even think of begging for the man to touch it. He needs it, but he’s content in his need.

Vincent works the scraper over every inch of him, even between his fingers and toes. He can’t help jerking when the rounded tip nudges behind his balls, lifts the head of his weeping cock, travels back up to circle his nipples, and when the scraper finally drops to the ground, Sephiroth pushes up on his knees and stretches his mouth around Vincent’s cock. Vincent grunts and his hand lands on Sephiroth’s head, but then sinks into the strands, permitting Sephiroth this much.

Come down his throat, warm and salty, creamy in a way that somehow echoes how the sunlight now feels across Sephiroth’s back. The air is cooling a little, and the water evaporating off his skin leaves it feeling even more taut, his bath treatment working to seal him into his need rather than loosen that and open him out. He drops onto his elbows, panting, but when Vincent pushes his hands with one foot, he keeps them up by his head and doesn’t reach for his cock.

“Hold,” Vincent says, going back to his cache. When he returns, he has a bottle in his hand, as well as the expected rope, and smiles at how Sephiroth blinks at it. “I don’t care to have my prizes chafing. So hold.”

He pours out a good amount of oil, then applies it to Sephiroth’s back first before working it back over the shoulders and down the front. When he massages it in around the nipples, Sephiroth does pull his arms down and drags his nails along each thigh hard enough to leave pinked streaks, streaks that haven’t faded by the time Vincent reaches his waist. Vincent sighs, tapping one with the back of his hand, and Sephiroth drops his forehead against the other man’s shoulder, moaning and mouthing at Vincent.

“No marks tonight,” Vincent says. “You’re going back in the morning.”

“I’m wearing trousers in this damn heat,” Sephiroth mutters. Then jerks, groaning again, as Vincent flicks his nipples. “Vincent, please.”

“Prizes should be seen, not heard,” Vincent says. He gets up and walks behind Sephiroth, gathering up Sephiroth’s hair as he goes.

He gives the bundled strands to Sephiroth to keep out of the way, then shakes out the rope, running it through his fingers to remove any twists before he begins looping it about Sephiroth. It’s silk cord, and by the time it touches Sephiroth, the oil has already absorbed into Sephiroth’s skin. Something light, and nearly odorless at first, but as the cord crosses and tightens into knots against his skin, a faint fragrance starts to rise into his nose. He sniffs it and the aroma opens further in the warmth of his sinuses. Sweet but not floral, almost grassy at times.

“They still sell this in the marketplaces,” Sephiroth says. “The oil of the gods, I think it’s how it’s translated.”

“Only the royals could wear it, and they only grew it in the royal gardens,” Vincent says, before his breath suddenly wets Sephiroth behind the ear. He follows it up with a long, sucking kiss, teeth just scratching the spot, as the cords pull into a tight lacework over Sephiroth’s left pectoral. “Anyone can now, yes, but back then it’d only be for the king and his consorts.”

Sephiroth breathes in and looks down at himself. The cords web across the pectoral rather than merely framing it out as Vincent usually does, with strands leading up to a tight loop about his nipple. Keeping it peaked, tugging at it continuously as he breathes, as Vincent creates an identical net on the other side of his chest. The outer circles of the web plump his muscles up into knots that seem placed to perfectly heighten the sensitivity the scraping left him with, sending waves of tingling between them so that he finds he has to consciously keep his hands at his hips.

“Not a prize, then?” he says, tilting his head back.

His lips graze at Vincent’s cheek as the other man peers over his shoulder, and then he rocks on his knees as Vincent gives the silk cord a sharp yank. Only at a point on the back, between the shoulderblades, but the force of it radiates out and around, pulling knots into flesh, pinching his nipples. His breath catches.

“Who said you aren’t?” Vincent says. His fingers splay against Sephiroth’s back, tips lapping in and out of the cords to keep them tensioned. Then drag slowly downward, having finished their work.

He pulls Sephiroth back by the hips against him and presses an openmouthed kiss to the side of Sephiroth’s throat. Then grasps at Sephiroth’s wrists, a second before Sephiroth would have tried to reach. Taking that burden away, letting Sephiroth release the stress of having to hold himself and only being held instead, as he shudders.

“Vincent,” he murmurs, his hard, heavy cock sending urgent washes of need through him every time he shifts. “Vincent, please—my hands—”

“An ornament to the court,” Vincent says. He pulls one of Sephiroth’s hands back between them, then moves up so that he can curl Sephiroth’s fingers around his own, half-risen cock. Then he takes the other one and stretches it out to the side so that he can pull something over it. One of the mitts, one that tightly wraps Sephiroth’s fist in butter-smooth black leather, makes appealing curves out of its uselessness. “Kept over from the last regime, a prize to show off.”

“A slave?” Sephiroth says. He only holds Vincent’s cock, can’t quite muster the focus to tease it. He’s still shivering, skin jumping with every brush of Vincent’s mouth against him. “A pretty one?”

Vincent hums thoughtfully. The man doesn’t seem to take offense at the lack of caresses, and when he’s done with the one hand, simply pulls the other off his cock to secure it the same way. Then he pushes Sephiroth forward, onto gloved fists and knees, with a fresh handful of Sephiroth’s hair.

“Pretty, yes,” Vincent says. He comes around, tugging at Sephiroth’s hair, but then tugs again when Sephiroth makes for the pool as he’d taken the initial tug to direct him towards. Then he pulls Sephiroth’s head back so that Sephiroth’s throat makes a beautifully strained arch for the claw-tip he runs down its front. “A slave…but a high-ranking one, if you’re allowed here.”

“Consorts?” Sephiroth says, remembering what Vincent had said a few minutes ago. He looks up at Vincent through what seems like a piece of gauze, the world rippling slightly with heat. Heat from the descending sun, heat from within himself. “Is this a boyhood fantasy we’re playing out?”

Vincent tilts his head, smiling, but only winds another round of Sephiroth’s hair around his hand. Sephiroth has to rise off his knees, but takes the opportunity to press up against Vincent’s leg as he does. He’s permitted to lip at Vincent’s thigh and hip, but when he leans over, Vincent pushes him away from the man’s cock and puts his chin at the waist. Then reaches around, hooking fingertips into the silk cord again, making it pluck at Sephiroth’s nipples. It’s teasing, not painful, but a tease that mounts in Sephiroth, making him moan and forget and try to grip at Vincent’s calf with his mitted hands. When Vincent turns his shin and foot and presses them against Sephiroth’s erection, Sephiroth shudders so heavily that he almost slides down, down to drop face-first against the ground.

“Come,” Vincent says.

Sephiroth buries his cry in Vincent’s belly. Leather-covered fists catching Vincent’s ankle between them, hard enough that when he recovers and moves back, he can see he’s bruised the man. He bends and kisses one without thinking and Vincent pauses mid-step.

Then moves away. He takes Sephiroth by the hair, unspeaking, and leads him to part of the pool where there’s a dip in the stone rim. Sephiroth crouches in it, nose barely hovering clear, as Vincent pulls his hair down into the water and thoroughly wets it. Handfuls are scooped over his scalp to run behind his ears and over the back of his neck, curving to trickle off his jaw. Vincent scrapes him there too, using nails instead of the antler, scrapes him till his scalp is stinging even under the cooling water.

His orgasm has taken some of the edge off, but hasn’t touched the center of the arousal Vincent’s built in him, and he can feel that settling deep into his gut, deep and burning. When Vincent finally deems his hair clean enough, the man lifts him back onto his knees by the chest harness and the tugging at his nipples sends jolts directly to his cock, making him hiss and lift his hips where Vincent’s pushing against him.

Vincent rests his hand against Sephiroth’s back for a moment, then rumbles in amusement. “Wring out your hair,” he says, stepping away.

Sephiroth doesn’t look after him, only does as directed. As he uses his wrists to squeeze the water out of his hair, Vincent returns and moves behind him. Reaching around, taking his cock as he immediately spreads his legs and weaving silk cord snugly around it. Then, as he’s inhaling against the tightness, letting it blur out of the initial discomfort into the knot of need in him, tying more about his ball sac. He’s harnessed top and bottom, at the other man’s will now. Certainly a prize, he thinks, and wonders if that’s why Vincent didn’t assent to the consort question.

It's idle curiosity, no actual meaning read into it. He doesn’t want to put that much effort into it, not when Vincent’s going to such lengths to take away the need for it. Only telling him to spread. Not even telling him to hold as his buttocks are spread and a hot tongue delves into him, makes him drop without asking onto his crossed wrists and cry out. The cords tied around his cock and balls do that for him, keep him soft and tight and so, so needy as Vincent takes the time to wet him, to stretch him, to fuck him.

To clean him after, wiping away the come before sliding in an oiled plug. More of the same scented oil, the fragrance blossoming into something smoky and strangely lulling as his body warms it out of the plug. Or that could merely be the way he’s being treated that is making his head swim, making it unnecessary for him to speak.

He’s a pretty plaything, sitting quietly as Vincent combs his hair, then ties it into a loose side-tail with black silk cords that match the ones about his chest and genitals. It’s much cooler at this point, the temperature dropping considerably in the lengthening shadows. Sephiroth glances at the still-sunny stretch on the other side of the pool, but then looks up when Vincent touches his shoulder.

Vincent wants him here. Coiling a collar around his neck, a strip of black leather that feels more like a necklace, with its silver ring spinning icy kisses into the hollow between his collarbones. Instead of taking up the ring, Vincent slips a finger into the criss-cross of cords over his pectorals and twitches it so he bites back a mewl. “I’ve sweated, getting you ready,” Vincent says. “After I wash, I’ll take you to the old audience hall.”

Sephiroth nods, and then settles in the shadow as Vincent pulls off his robe and drops into the pool. The other man doesn’t use the antler, Sephiroth notes, but only his fingers. The sun continues to drop over the treeline, and the remaining dampness evaporates from Sephiroth’s skin. He’s been out naked in the Nibelheim mountains, so this is nothing, but…he can still feel the change. Like a feather dusting him here and there, except for across his chest where the knots keep nudging his nipples into the chill. He twists his head to get his hair to the other shoulder, and the drift of the strands across his pectoral makes him shiver, makes the netting around his ball sac and cock seem to tighten.

He's not trying to touch himself through the mitts when Vincent pulls himself out of the pool, but Vincent looks at him and then laughs, knowing what Sephiroth is thinking about. The other man sweeps some water off himself with his hands, but is still very damp when he takes his robe and tosses it on. “I’ll dry on the way, if you can’t wait,” he says. “You know we have all night.”

“Are you keeping me that long?” Sephiroth says, and his voice is thick and rusted, as if he hasn’t spoken for days rather than an hour at most.

Vincent catches him by the elbow as he rises, turning him into a deep, forceful kiss. He moans and puts his hands up against Vincent’s hips, fitting their leather-molded curves against the tops, and then inches his feet apart as he feels Vincent’s tail slip up between his calves. The tip tickles as high as his inner thighs, then swings around to wrap over his wrists as Vincent pulls them together.

“No one’s coming to pick you up before dawn,” Vincent says. “No one can even walk up here without our seeing. I’ll show you.”

They walk a couple hundred yards, heading towards one of the more intact ruins sitting on the highest part of the summit. It was clearly once a very large building, but most of the walls and the ceiling have fallen away, leaving only the foundation and two intricate metalwork platforms spaced at opposite ends of the old hall. The platforms are round and have railings with an opening on one side, presumably where some sort of ladder or other way to ascend used to be.

“I read about this,” Sephiroth says, and again, his voice sounds strange to him. He finds himself lowering it, even after Vincent steps up behind him and strokes two hands down his hips, cock pushing familiarly between his buttocks and nudging at his plug. His voice grows more breathless as Vincent nips at his shoulder. “Whispering hall…the king sits here, and the petitioner on the other one. And the place could be crowded wall-to-wall but the king could still hear you as clearly as if you were standing next to him.”

Vincent nips him again, just under his collar, and then at his jaw when he leans into the man’s mouth. “Yes,” Vincent says, hands sliding to his buttocks. “We’re sitting up there.”

“A king, then? Not only a successful general?” Sephiroth asks, twisting around to catch at Vincent’s mouth. “With his—”

“Consort. They would have kept the ordinary slaves below,” Vincent says, as he tugs Sephiroth’s earlobe with a canine. Then kisses behind the ear, lips riding Sephiroth’s sharp hitch as his hands run forward to cup over Sephiroth’s cock. “But you can still be a slave, if you like that better. You’re pretty enough either way.”

Sephiroth finds himself laughing, even as Vincent tightens his grip and sinks teeth into his flesh. It’s a play, they’re playing at this, and he laughs but not in mockery. Not in the least, when his body yields at the merest gesture from the other man, when his mind gratefully takes its lead.

“We have to go up, and then I’ll finish dressing you,” Vincent says.

“Clothes?” Sephiroth says.

He sounds disappointed. Vincent traces a claw between the cords wrapped about his cock and Sephiroth ruts his buttocks back into the man, then groans when Vincent simply pushes him off.

“You’ll wear the clothes I like on you,” Vincent says. “As long as I like them on you. I can have you bare whenever I want, we know that. I could invite the entire barracks here and fuck you in front of them, and I could make you like it.”

Sephiroth moans before he can help himself, and has to put one hand against the base of the platform to steady himself. Vincent leans over and kisses him again, on the mouth, and then leaps up into the air.

It’s easy work for either of them to reach the platform, even without a ladder. Though when Sephiroth lands, he finds himself grateful for the plentiful spread of quilts and pillows he finds, because the impact jars up into the plug in him, rocking it deep enough that he promptly drops forward and presses his cock against the bedding, even its bindings not enough to suppress how badly he needs in that moment.

But the bindings keep him needy. Bruising down his cock and balls, and then digging insistently at his nipples so that he ends up rubbing himself like an animal once he’s started. Vincent has to slap his buttock to make him stop, and then seize him by the hair, pulling him up onto his feet while he’s still startled from the blow.

“I will touch you,” Vincent tells him, with the unspoken nothing else filling Sephiroth’s head with thick heat.

Sephiroth nods, shakily, but keeps on his knees as Vincent pulls out something. “Red,” drops out of Sephiroth’s mouth.

“Red and black were the colors around here, back then. Not my clan’s colors—my family always took the colors of their current lord and didn’t have their own,” Vincent says. His tone casual now, almost musing as he strokes along the silk. “Does it bother you?”

“No,” Sephiroth says without thinking, and then, when Vincent only looks at him, he shakes himself. Tries to think, and then…shakes his head again. “No, not…it’s darker than Rhapsodos would like.”

“I thought you’d see that,” Vincent says, the corners of his mouth curling up.

He straightens it out before he holds it up for Sephiroth to slip on. A silk dress, not in the traffic-stopping scarlet Genesis favors but a subtler, richer burgundy. The top is cut like the slips Sephiroth’s worn before, thin straps pulling silk flush over his bound chest—whimpers spill from him as the dress stretches over his nipples, the shiver of it torturing them more exquisitely than clamps—but the bottom runs nearly to his ankles. It’s tailored very close to him, and without the two slits up either side, he couldn’t move in it without tearing the silk.

But the slits run from generous to provocative to simply offering him, stopping just below the tops of his hips. Vincent pushes him back onto his knees and the dress floats between his legs, caressing against his cock; when he squirms, it only clings more to him, sticking to his skin, looking like a broad red tongue sweeping back under him. “Lift up your arms,” Vincent says.

Sephiroth does, and then sighs as Vincent finally ties his wrists, lacing a leather strap through rings on the mitts. Then the strap is hooked to a short chain that fastens to the railing, keeping Sephiroth’s arms up as Vincent puts a black leather garment about his midsection.

“Corset?” Sephiroth says, looking down. “They had—”

“If it was a corset, it’d have boning,” Vincent says, informative but not scolding of Sephiroth’s lack of knowledge. He smooths the leather, which runs from just below the ribcage to just above the hips, before he starts to pull at the lacing at the back, tightening it till Sephiroth can’t push out his belly no matter how deeply he inhales. “They didn’t. And anyway, with a corset holding you would be like holding a statue. I want you closer than that.”

His hand presses at the top back of the—the belt while he jerks at the laces with the other. The leather is stiff enough to bend Sephiroth with it but it bends, swaying Sephiroth back against Vincent so that his buttocks rub through the dress and over Vincent’s lap. Sephiroth pushes his knees farther apart, letting his weight drag on his wrist-chain when it’s not being pulled back by the lacing. Pliant, he thinks, as far below a breeze tousles the slim-trunked trees. Making him pliant as well as clasping him, that’s what the belt does.

He falls into it, letting himself be bent however Vincent wants. The laces are long enough that Vincent can wrap them around Sephiroth’s waist to tie off in the front, and then the other man lets his hands glide down over Sephiroth’s belly, swishing the silk between Sephiroth’s legs as Sephiroth moans and lifts his knees off the ground. Vincent’s mouth is wet and hot on the side of his throat, pushing his head over and then mapping a trail from behind his ear down to the top of his shoulder. There Vincent presses harder, leaving small prickling dents with his teeth that his tongue then swirls away as Sephiroth hikes himself backward, straddling the other man.

It's much softer than usual. True, Sephiroth is managed into it, hands sealed away and cock bound, but Vincent hasn’t done it with pain. Flirted with it, yes, even now, with his quick little nips that leave Sephiroth’s breast jerking in its harness, but pain isn’t the primary tool Vincent’s using to keep him centered in sensation. It’s been a slow, seamless glide here, rather than a forceful plunge.

“The whispers are gone, but you can still see everything,” Vincent says, kissing up the other side of Sephiroth’s throat. He laves along the collar, catching its edges with his teeth, then sucks at one of the knobs of Sephiroth’s spine. “No walls, you can see all the approaches. I don’t even need to use my wings to check.”

“But did you?” Sephiroth asks. Half-closing his eyes, head tilted as Vincent returns to lavishing attention on the tops of his shoulders. They’re quite damp at this point, but the air pulls away enough moisture that when Vincent returns to a spot, his mouth sears over the cooled skin.

Vincent wraps his arm around Sephiroth’s waist, adjusting how Sephiroth sits on him. His hand then drops and tucks into one of the dress’ side-slits, caressing at Sephiroth’s thigh as he nibbles at Sephiroth’s nape. “A few minutes of flying around. There’s a small materia ore deposit nearby. Not enough to be commercially valuable, but it throws off—”

“Radar,” Sephiroth finishes, briefly amused that Vincent would still mention it; while the full list of Vincent’s enhancements is not in official Shinra records, he is officially on the guest list, and the SOLDIERs, at least, should know not to scramble air defenses after him. “A secret even when you’re a king.”

“I never said I thought about being a king,” Vincent says. His other hand is splayed across the belt, its warmth gradually penetrating the leather. A mark of possession without leaving a mark, Sephiroth thinks; when they go back in the morning, he’ll still be feeling its invisible shape on himself. “I did find this era interesting. When my mother told me about it—it was as close as her family came to legitimacy. We put an advisor here, with a minor official title but in truth nearly the chancellor.”

Sephiroth leans his head against the other man’s shoulder. When Vincent mentions his family, it’s almost always when they’re being intimate, and when Sephiroth has reason to be distracted. Asking him to choose between his curiosity and his needs, but…he needs. His cock is still throbbing in its bindings, and his ball sac is so sensitized that the brush of his own inner thighs makes him tremble. His nipples are aching from being kept at peak for so long, without even the temporary reset pain can bring. He needs, and yet, he doesn’t feel at war with it. He’s being kept that way, which satisfies Vincent, and he wants to be kept.

“Did they sit up here listening with the king?” Sephiroth asks. He can give free rein to his curiosity, since his needs, while ever-present, are not his to command. “No, they’d be down on the ground floor in that case.”

Vincent smiles against his throat, then skates a cheek against Sephiroth’s hair as he reaches over, unlocking the end of the chain from the railing. “Down there but with spies up here, among the consorts. Pretty things, asked to do nothing but lie back and listen,” he says as he pulls Sephiroth back towards the other side of the platform. “Well, there were a few other duties.”

Sephiroth slips off his lap to one side. The twist pulls unevenly at his chest harness and he whimpers, pulling mindlessly at his wrist-strap. Vincent turns him the other way, laying him down across the quilts and then fastening the chain again to the railing. Then climbs over him and pulls out an insulated crate from behind a pillow.

“Pleasuring the king?” Sephiroth asks, as he watches Vincent unearth the preferred food tins and a bottle of dark-colored liquid, its sides frosting immediately in the air.

Vincent moves the tins and bottle to near where Sephiroth’s lying, but then reaches behind the pillow again. This time he pulls out a set of leather cuffs on a short chain, which he fastens around Sephiroth’s ankles before crawling back to lie alongside Sephiroth. “I’m sure that was involved,” Vincent says dryly, as he draws his hand up Sephiroth’s hip and side and then drops it to brush over the dress’ bodice. “But they would accept fealty pledges on the king’s behalf, too. It was a bit old-fashioned how they did it—you’d line up to kiss the king’s nipples.”

Sephiroth blinks hard. He’s studied Wutai, but hasn’t had much cause to look into their history in the south; it’s been centuries since Wutai showed any interested in the region. “You’re serious.”

“My father swore to me that this was true, and when I grew up and looked for myself, it turned out he was right,” Vincent says, with a bemused smile on his face. As his finger trips lightly over the silk cords of the chest harness, circling Sephiroth’s left nipple. Every pass tweaks the harness in all directions, stirring up overlapping twinges of heat that all pool into the almost-painfully sore nub. “It was a local custom, not a Wutaian one, but they adopted it. The king was both your father and your mother, you looked to him for protection and for care. So you kissed his hand and you kissed his breast. But he’d put his consorts forward to take the second kiss for him.”

On the third pass, Sephiroth can’t help squirming. His wrist-chain clinks and he looks up, then gasps when Vincent takes the opening and jerks him down so his arms are pulled flat against a pillow, over his head. He’s half-under Vincent who swings an arm over him, still continuing to toy with his nipple with the other hand. His legs start to draw up reflexively, but the ankle-chain catches him and he stops. Then lets his legs twist over as Vincent stoops down and presses his mouth to Sephiroth’s nipple.

The other one, not the one Vincent is already teasing. Sephiroth bows up, crying out, and then feeling his cry shiver to pieces in his throat as Vincent’s clever tongue toys with his nipple, tugging it this way and that way against its restraints. “Vincent, Vincent, please, I can’t—”

“Over and over again,” Vincent says as he lifts his mouth. He blows at the wetted spot on the silk, then nuzzles at it as Sephiroth whimpers helplessly. Then he moves over to the other side, though he only kisses this nipple lightly. His hand moves as well, going to the nipple he’s just left and thumbing it as Sephiroth continues to squirm under him. “He had several, so they could share the burden. Imagine you taking that on, a day of nothing but people licking you. You’d be so tender here, I’d have to tie your nipples like this just to keep them together.”

“I’m already tender,” Sephiroth groans. He flattens his hips as Vincent shifts further over him, his cock already jumping against its bindings from what Vincent’s doing at his chest, and now further tormented by the graze of the man’s body heat over it; Vincent’s robe is hanging fully open, with only Sephiroth’s dress between them. “You’d keep me like that because you like me that way.”

Vincent rumbles his amusement. And then stops playing with Sephiroth’s chest so he can pick up a food tin. He opens it, but instead of finding chopsticks, uses his fingers to pick out some sliced fruit. “You’d be very noisy. The king might not be able to hear what’s being said to him, even with a whispering gallery. And then what would you tell your spymaster?”

“Is that what you are in this?” Sephiroth says. And then keeps his mouth open, taking the half-piece that Vincent lays on his tongue.

The other half, Vincent eats himself. “But you could be gagged,” he muses. “Gagged and blindfolded…you might not even know whether it’s the king or not who’s taking you up here. It could be anyone.”

“Taking a royal consort, abusing them without permission.” Sephiroth takes another piece of fruit Vincent offers him. He’s still shuddering, the dampened bodice seeming to drag just that fraction more over his nipples, but talking is…not a strain. It seems natural, seems as simple as falling silent. Vincent won’t press him either way, and while he always knows that, he doesn’t always feel it. Which is entirely internal to him, but tonight he simply doesn’t feel the difference. “That seems unpromising for a would-be chancellor.”

“That might have been how they consulted with each other. My ancestor had the formal duty of changing the bedding in the hearing chamber,” Vincent says. He opens another tin, which has sweetmeats in it, and then shares a swig at the bottle, which proves to contain honey-laced tea. “The king would finish his audiences for the day, and leave the consort behind, to be cleaned up with the rest.”

“Gagged,” Sephiroth murmurs, lipping a sweetmeat from Vincent’s finger. He chews and swallows, and then tips his head up as Vincent unexpectedly decides to taste the remains in his mouth. “Used.”

“Used all day.” Vincent puts the bottle down and then lays his finger, which is chilled as a result, against Sephiroth’s right nipple. When Sephiroth twists and gasps, he leans over and kisses Sephiroth on the throat. “Exhausted. Perhaps a little kind treatment is all that’d be needed to persuade them.”

“Or perhaps they’re too tired to even do what they’re told,” Sephiroth says, sighing as Vincent’s mouth works down his throat. He turns his head to the side, then lifts his leg as much as his ankle-cuffs allow as he feels Vincent’s hand push aside the front of his dress and start to move up his inner thigh. “All they can do is lie there and be taken.”

“If they don’t have anything else of value to offer,” Vincent says, a laugh in his voice. His hand closes around Sephiroth’s ball sac, pulling at it with relative gentleness, but the resulting wash of arousal makes Sephiroth jerk and moan in his bonds. “But I’m not my ancestor, or the king they served. I don’t have to share you and I don’t need anything more from you than you, Sephiroth. So I’m going to have you to myself all night—”

Sephiroth jerks again, and the air sticks in his throat, neither coming in nor going out. He feels dizzy but well-secured, spinning firmly in the place Vincent has set for him. “Please.”

“—but you can come when it’s dawn.” Vincent gives his balls another tug, then withdraws the hand. Rearranges his dress over him, even as he tries to spread his knees, before reaching for the food.

He feeds Sephiroth from three or four of them, all of them dainty snacks rather than the filling homestyle dishes he usually makes, with his free hand and sometimes his tail caressing Sephiroth. They stop talking for a while, Sephiroth only moaning and whining as Vincent strokes him. Vincent washes his mouth out with the tea, then kisses him till he’s too breathless to even make noises.

The sun has fully set at this point, and the moon is still rising, just cresting Vincent’s back as Vincent turns Sephiroth onto his belly, pulls up the dress and takes the plug out. He fucks Sephiroth, taking his time about it, and then sweeps his come into Sephiroth’s hole and replaces the plug.

“I never wanted to be king, but I thought about being that kind of advisor. When I was young, and hadn’t had to actually practice the family profession yet,” Vincent says as he curls up behind Sephiroth, pushing them near enough the railing that Sephiroth can bend his arms to put his hands by his chin.

Vincent’s hands move in long figure-eights, circling the tops of Sephiroth’s shoulders and moving down to the elbows before returning. They smooth off the edges of feeling the man’s climax while knowing his own is still hours away. “For the power?” Sephiroth asks.

“A little. Mostly because we lost, and when you’re young, you always think you can do better.” Vincent’s kissing Sephiroth’s neck again. When Sephiroth’s tremors fade, he moves his hands down to rest over the belt. “The king was assassinated by one of his consorts, you know.”

Sephiroth…had learned that, but it hadn’t risen in his memory till just now. “Not your family’s advice?”

“My understanding is it was, but the consort acted too early, and the wrong heir came to power. My family was sent packing, and the regime fell apart a few years later,” Vincent replies. He stops kissing Sephiroth’s nape and rests his forehead against it for a few minutes instead. His hands move down off the belt, then back up, pulling Sephiroth back against him as Sephiroth hitches. Then they rise to Sephiroth’s wrists, detaching them from the chain but leaving the strap fastened around them. “My mother told me before she left that the recurring failing in my family is picking the wrong partner. Our clan records are full of that sort of thing.”

He pulls Sephiroth back up into a semi-sitting position, nestling them back against a mound of pillows he builds up. Sephiroth can’t help a moan and a little writhing as he’s shifted about—plug rocking, silk cords tweaking, leather belt pulling silk taut over everything—but he’s comfortable enough as he curls against Vincent. Head bent against one shoulder, his own shoulder open to Vincent’s nips as the man slings his arms about Sephiroth.

The sky over them is filling with stars. Angeal doesn’t mind stints in the more remote outposts because he can walk out at night and have this kind of view, which you could never find in Midgar even on the quietest night, but Sephiroth has never been fascinated by it himself. Scientifically the stars can be studied, and practically, they can be used for navigation, but…lying under them like this, with nowhere to go and many reasons why he can’t pay attention to anything else. With Vincent’s mouth warming him against the evening chill and yes, even the hands toying with him, one circling a nipple again and the other sliding under his dress to do the same to his cockhead…the stars are a pretty backdrop. Undemanding on the senses.

He can spare any thoughts he has for what he truly cares to, looking at them. “Tseng said once that you never partnered up when you were in the Turks. I think he was surprised you work so well with his teams now.”

“With them, not in them,” Vincent says. He’s casual about it, thumbing at Sephiroth’s cock slit as he speaks. Then he cranes about and swallows Sephiroth’s shivering groan straight from Sephiroth’s mouth. “If you’re asking, it’s somewhat related to my mother’s words.”

Sephiroth wonders for a moment if he should have kept his tongue. But…that slips away, as Vincent keeps touching him. Always, always teasing, but the man doesn’t make it a sustained assault. Whenever Sephiroth starts to shake too much, Vincent moves his hands. He’s put both on the belt now, flexing his fingers every so often to urge Sephiroth to yield to the mouth nuzzling under Sephiroth’s jaw.

“She said very little about my father, so I always paid attention when she did,” Vincent says. He presses a last kiss to the side of Sephiroth’s jaw, then seems to fall into a brief reverie. “She didn’t choose him.”

“You mentioned,” Sephiroth says, in case the man wants to stop there.

Which Vincent recognizes, says the way his mouth quirks into a smile. Then he splays his fingers over the belt, pressing down on them as Sephiroth instinctively straightens. “She had to stay with him once she had me. She didn’t want to bring a child of hers back to her family. So I thought for a long time that partners should part when necessary, rather than try and force themselves together. Your mother, for example. We work together as much as we need to and no more.”

“You work with her far more than I—” Sephiroth stops himself, hearing his voice sharpen. It’s as jarring as a slap, against the rest of their time here, and for a moment he thinks—

“You might want to save me from her, but you know better than to give into that all the time,” Vincent says. Then he kisses Sephiroth on the temple, pushes his hands down to Sephiroth’s thighs. “You know better than to think she can singlehandedly change me. I still want you.”

Not a ruin, Sephiroth thinks, letting out his breath. Sitting above a ruin, but remembering—being reminded that this is, in fact, durable. And so he turns and opens his mouth to Vincent, lets his body drape over the other man, lets all the ways Vincent has bound him hold him firm. “How?”

Vincent’s smile widens. “Use your tongue,” he says, before pushing Sephiroth forward onto his elbows.

He stays back against the pillows, pulling his robe apart and hiking up his knees. Sephiroth twists himself about, the panels of his dress wrapping up around his legs so that he can’t part them without tearing it, with his hands bound…he crawls with his arms instead. Noses under Vincent’s cock when the man lifts it out of the way, mouthing Vincent’s balls till those too are pushed from him. Then he licks at Vincent’s hole, cleaning the slick out of it as it slips out, as Vincent’s breath quickens, as Vincent’s hand goes out to twist in his hair.

Vincent pulls him up and pushes his mouth down over the man’s cock, then comes. Sephiroth nurses him carefully as his hand sails out of Sephiroth’s hair to grab at the railing, stopping only when he’s recovered enough to push at Sephiroth’s shoulder with his other hand. His fingers then come down, caressing as much as gripping at Sephiroth, as he slides by and drinks some of the tea.

When he’s done, he offers it to Sephiroth, who shakes his head but then nods at the silk still tangled about his legs. Vincent unwraps him, stroking under the dress till Sephiroth is panting, and then positions Sephiroth right at the railing as he bundles the dress out of the way with one hand and holds Sephiroth’s cock with the other. “It’s not dawn,” Vincent whispers in Sephiroth’s ear as Sephiroth groans. “But if you need to relieve yourself—”

“I can’t,” Sephiroth gasps. He rubs his mitted hands against the belt. “I can’t, it’s—clenching—”

Vincent shushes him. Soothes him, long nuzzles against his throat until he relaxes enough, pushes back his other need enough, and can empty his bladder. He shudders boneless in the man’s arms afterward, so Vincent has to carry him back to the pillows.

They twine around each other, sometimes staring at the stars, sometimes touching and nuzzling. Sometimes talking. It all flows from one to the next, like the scenes in an old Wutaian story-scroll.

“She told me they couldn’t afford for me to ‘break’ any more, that the workers’ compensation claims were already astronomical,” Sephiroth finds himself telling Vincent at one point. Speaking mostly into Vincent’s chest, lying against the man with his bound hands resting on Vincent’s shoulder while Vincent cups his buttocks. His ankles are unchained but he’s still wearing the cuffs, their weight dragging at his legs as those sprawl to either side of them. “Either I learned to get along with Genesis and Angeal so they could be my sparring partners, or I would have to put up with robots and simulators.”

“Still sore about not being able to replicate you,” Vincent comments. Then tilts his head to mouth at Sephiroth’s shoulder. He moves the thin strap of the dress out of the way so his tongue can flick under it, then slides it back in place as Sephiroth arches up into his lips. “That was the original brief for R&D, as I remember. Not a supersoldier, a method for supersoldiers.”

Sephiroth huffs. “Until Hojo got to it, but yes. And that was—is still what she’s looking for. She doesn’t quite believe that training has anything to do with it, no matter what statistics I show her.”

“So you were partnerless, more or less. I know Hewley and Rhapsodos eventually provided friendship, but—”

“They’ve always been absorbed in each other,” Sephiroth says. He sighs, closing his eyes, as Vincent rubs his thumbs along the inside of Sephiroth’s buttock cleft. Pushing his flesh about the plug still in him, working it up from a dull ache to nearly a tight, hot one. His knees start to shift against the quilt and Vincent slides his thumbs back a little, lessening the intensity of the caress. “But if they weren’t, I still…I still don’t think they would suit me, either or both. The fact that we’ve all gone through the enhancements…that alone isn’t necessarily common ground.”

“You’re not looking for a partner to soldier with,” Vincent says. Pushing up on Sephiroth’s buttocks a little, and when Sephiroth arches, he dips his head and catches Sephiroth’s mouth with his own. “I used to think of partners purely in terms of professional goals. I don’t think my mother ever actually wanted a partner at all, but she—loved me, in spite of that. I don’t believe she left my father and me to find another partner. I think she left because I was old enough she could try to be alone again.”

Sephiroth raises his head. “Is that what you were looking for in Nibelheim?”

“No, that was—I needed to be alone, I didn’t necessarily want to. I did keep leaving the cave,” Vincent says. His eyes drift upward, and for a moment Sephiroth thinks they’re going to return to stargazing. “But I wasn’t looking at the time. If I’d met you in a work context, I wonder sometimes if I’d have considered you—you’re very pretty, Sephiroth, of course. But not everything is about looks.”

“You’re very impossible, and whenever I find you in a bloody pile in our bathroom, I wish that was only rooted in your looks,” Sephiroth mutters. But he’s soft about it, even before Vincent smiles and hikes on his thighs so he’s straddling Vincent, groaning as his cock reminds him about how very much it still needs relief. He sees why Vincent bound him with silk rather than the usual cage now. “You’re the only person I have ever called a partner. The only one I’ve ever wanted—”

He stops himself. Not because Vincent looks as if he’s going to object to anything Sephiroth is saying, but something of Sephiroth’s mother’s influence still lingers. Making him ask himself if he wants to put his trust in something that may not last. Although now, he realizes with the words hanging in the air, it’s not Vincent who he thinks will fail first.

“I wasn’t looking for partners outside of work.” Vincent moves his head, not in a negating shake, but to press himself backward into the pillows. He pulls at Sephiroth’s hips again, rolling the panels of the dress out of the way, until Sephiroth is sitting across his waist. “I was never much like my father, but I don’t know if I’m so much like my mother either—I didn’t think about wanting one before you, but I cannot see myself walking away from this. You might find that bloody pile somewhere else some day, but it won’t be because I wasn’t trying to come home.”

Sephiroth’s breath dies for a moment, and it has nothing to do with anything physical. He stares at Vincent who returns it with a calm, unflinching gaze. The man’s thought through this before saying it, considered it from all angles, and decided to say it anyway. He knows Vincent well enough—he knows Vincent. He might not know everything about the man, but he knows him. He feels confident in that, and so…he knows what it means, for Vincent to say such a thing.

“If that happens, I may very well destroy the world, if I have to do that to find who stopped you,” he finally says. The words come out very quietly—and very easily, both surprising to him. As the way that the tension that’s gathered simply dissolves away at Vincent’s touch, as the man slips his hands up to Sephiroth’s waist. “I don’t know if I’d stop even then.”

“I know,” Vincent says. He looks up at Sephiroth for another moment. His hands move over Sephiroth’s forearms, holding them, and then back to Sephiroth’s waist. “Ride me.”

Sephiroth tilts his head back as Vincent pushes him up by the hips to work out the plug. He stares up at the moon, hanging full-bellied over them. Not white but a warm, creamy yellow, like crystallized honey…narrowing to slivers as his eyes close, as he’s seated on Vincent’s cock. Vincent holds him by the wrists as he works the man to climax, and then twists them over onto their sides, pulling Sephiroth up to him and kissing till Sephiroth nearly sobs from sheer lack of breath, as if the man hadn’t spilled at all, as if that isn’t his come squeezing out between them.

“My family chose badly here,” Vincent says as they lie together, Vincent still seated in Sephiroth. “I’ve thought about it, and changed my mind over the years…I wouldn’t be the king or the spymaster now.”

“I remember it was the general in the end,” Sephiroth says, pressing his mouth to Vincent’s jaw. “I remember now. The general, who was fed up with all of it, and tore down the whole city after kicking the Wutaians out. They moved the capital across the river.”

“He had a good consort, and my father always thought she was the one who handled the politics,” Vincent says. “He also thought she might have been part-Wutaian, though they tried to cover it up afterward, since that wasn’t popular, obviously.”

Sephiroth moves his head back. “Did your mother have thoughts?”

“If the woman was, she wasn’t from our line. My mother was less forthcoming about other clans, I think because it was less immediately relevant to my survival,” Vincent shrugs. Moonlight dancing in his eyes, making them redder than usual, because he knows exactly what Sephiroth is thinking and it thoroughly amuses him. “I want you to know what I know about my family. It’s your right as a partner. But it’s difficult to know where to start, with how…involved it can be.”

“I’m happy to wait, Vincent,” Sephiroth says, once he’s gathered his breath. He pushes his arms up from between them, then crooks them as much as the wrist-strap will allow so that he can bend them behind his head. It pushes up his chest, tugs at the harness, makes his nipples spark, and as Vincent smiles and shifts himself down to nuzzle at them, Sephiroth lets his head fall back. “And discuss it in…whatever setting seems appropriate…”

“I don’t think we can come back here as often as Nibelheim,” Vincent says, voice richly amused. As he laps and sucks at a nipple, as his hands press up and down Sephiroth’s hips as Sephiroth starts to mewl. “How do you want to come?”

Sephiroth’s head lolls towards the side where the sun should rise but it’s still dark. Vincent’s lips vibrate around his nipple as the man laughs at him, laughs and then pets him breathless.

“How,” he’s asked again.

“On—on your cock, wet,” Sephiroth gasps. He closes his eyes, twists his mitted hands against the bedding, gives himself up to the man’s attentions. “But not from—not from that. Untie my chest, and—and from that, from—playing with—”

“All right,” Vincent says. Stopping long enough to press his mouth gently to Sephiroth’s breastbone, just above where the silk cords rise out of the dress’ neckline. “No marks, but you have enough from me anyway. You’ll remember.”

“Please,” Sephiroth sighs, as he feels Vincent start to move in him again. “Please…”

Vincent stays in him afterward, till dawn does come. And then makes good on his word, bringing Sephiroth finally to climax with his cock still filling Sephiroth, with the remnants of slashed silk cords falling out of the dress at both ends as his spit-wetted fingers roll Sephiroth’s nipples till oblivion whites out the rising sun.

They have breakfast on the platform but then clean up and climb down. Sephiroth washes in the pool and dresses himself for his duties, and then walks down to the chopper pick-up spot alone, since Vincent says he’ll tidy the site on his own and needs to deal with something on the way back into the city. He would have preferred the man’s company, but enough of the night lingers that he’s able to breeze through the rest of the trip with barely an impatient glance. Apparently he’s so convincing that Gast, who’d been pressed into service by the locals as a lead host, receives a significant boost in political capital. He’s certainly convincing enough that his mother only tries sniping about it once before reverting to her more usual critiques of Shinra bureaucracy.

It’s not entirely down to a relaxed state. He’d realized something at the ruins, but he has to wait till they’ve returned to Midgar to address it, when he can update his will.

He’s required to have some sort of contingency plan on file, due to his rank. It doesn’t have to address all issues, but Sephiroth’s personal life has always been subordinate to his professional life, and so he finds it easier to have everything in the same place for matters like this. And certain types of information are actually easier to keep away from his mother if he uses official Shinra channels.

“Okay, no flags should trigger since you’re not removing her from next-of-kin, you’re just adding Vincent on,” Zack confirms. “And obviously, your standing order’s just on the SOLDIER side, so the only flag that’ll go up is to us three. If this is what—if this is good to go?”

Genesis moves restlessly in his seat. “He drafted it himself, Fair. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be looking at it.

Zack twitches but keeps looking at his tablet, a slight frown on his face. He still leaves it to Angeal to lean over and whisper at Genesis, who looks unrepentant as usual. But who is less vocal about this than Sephiroth had been expecting, and when he is vocal, it’s largely to snap back at whatever Angeal had said to him.

“If the man wants to choose the time and place for Valentine’s battles, I really don’t see why it’s our duty to save either of them,” Genesis says as he looks back at Sephiroth. His eyes are relatively free of rancor as well, even if his tone still carries an edge. They’re considering instead, and if it’s the same way Genesis mentally calibrates a challenge even he can’t take lightly…he hasn’t been that serious about many of their duels. “I quarrel with the living, not the dead. If this is what you want as an epitaph, so be it.”

“I appreciate your endorsement,” Sephiroth says dryly.

Genesis snorts, and then sits by as Angeal makes a half-hearted attempt to question where this is coming from. Sephiroth, unable to suppress his irritation now, points out that Vincent is already on record for nearly every other beneficiary category in Sephiroth’s file and Angeal backs off. It does at least seem as if Angeal isn’t blaming Vincent for this, but only can’t fathom why Sephiroth wants to address something like this now, when there are no major threats on their radar.

“Because right now I have the luxury of thinking about it,” Sephiroth tells him, and that finally convinces the man.

Zack updates the damn order, and then he and Angeal get up to leave. Genesis remains seated, and waves Angeal off when the other man turns at the doorway and looks back at him. Angeal’s eyes flick to Sephiroth, who shakes his head, suppressing a sigh.

“You don’t have to look so troubled, my friend,” Genesis says with an acidic smile. “I’m still not here to talk you out of any folly.”

“Is that what you think this is?” Sephiroth asks.

“No.” Genesis’ smile turns slightly less sour, if still utterly drenched in self-satisfaction, as Sephiroth narrows his eyes. “It’s actually improved strategy, in my opinion. Angeal and Fair would fight any fight you set them at, we both know, but pitting them against your mother would have been a fool’s decision. If all that they have to do now is make sure Valentine gets your body, it might actually stay out of her hands. Although I still will blame you for her retaliation against Angeal.”

Sephiroth pushes himself back in his seat. “If I’m dead, you have no reason to be limited to only blaming me, Genesis.”

“Well, I suppose that is the question,” Genesis says. He’s studying Sephiroth now, not merely lounging in his chair and thinking up ripostes. “If that is your goal.”

“As opposed to what? Vincent’s not a scientist, Genesis,” Sephiroth says. He watches Genesis’ expression more closely. “He is my chosen partner, and if anyone should have the power to decide where and how I end, I believe it should be him. Not Shinra, and certainly not my mother. She’s had and she will have my entire life to extract what she wants to learn—”

“I’m not arguing with you. For that matter, I’m not even going to waste time on whether your mother similarly believes death ends all. If she tries for Angeal and you’re not around, I’ll deal with her as I see fit,” Genesis says as he finally starts to rise. He gives his coat a fastidious stroke of his hand, removing a wrinkle, before looking back at Sephiroth. “You want to let Valentine decide when your life truly ends, not when your death starts. Angeal doesn’t understand yet. I know you won’t appreciate my work in ensuring that he does.”

“I do,” Sephiroth says, and then smiles when Genesis shows a fraction of wariness about it. “Convince him it’s nothing that needs his interference, Genesis, and you will have my gratitude.”

Genesis stands for another moment, staring at him. Then abruptly turns and leaves without another look or word. More like him, Sephiroth thinks, and then puts that matter aside and picks up his tablet to return to work.

Notes:

I think this is as close as this version of Vincent will ever get to a proposal.

The little detail about licking your lord's nipples as a proof of fealty actually is a very obscure feudal European custom.

Chapter 33: Interlude: Vincent Reveals (Some of) His Process

The slip is new, coming straight from a tissue-paper-lined box to drop over Sephiroth’s head as he holds his braided hair out of the way. Pale, pale green, with silver-tinged lace edging and…an interesting customization that’s made evident once Vincent smooths down the bodice against him. His nipples stiffen under the man’s touches and push themselves through small slits in the front; the edges of each slit are worked with embroidery, so this is intentional.

“One of your best features,” Vincent says, gliding his lips over the top of Sephiroth’s right shoulder as he moves behind. His fingers pinch Sephiroth, just enough to draw a seed of pain into the exposed nubs. Then drop away as Sephiroth exhales sharply.

“One of your favorite toys,” Sephiroth breathes.

They’re standing in his private training room, across from a floor-to-ceiling mirror. Vincent’s smile is reflected in it as the man guides Sephiroth’s hands to his hips, pressing them there. Then it buries itself in the curve of Sephiroth’s throat, its whiteness shortening as Sephiroth tilts his head back against Vincent and lengthens his neck, as Vincent fits a black leather harness over the slip. Straps criss-cross his chest, making taut rhomboids out of the silk bodice so his pointing nipples are highlighted, flushing vividly against the light green. His upper arms are fastened to his sides by the harness, and then Vincent turns and walks him over to the wall, pushing him up against the metal poles that make up some of the equipment racks.

Vincent pulls out cuffs near the floor and spreads his ankles, then kneels up and similarly binds his thighs so that he’s kept with an open stance, tied back against the poles. His cock head is briefly visible in the mirror, flirting with the edge of the slip, but then he twitches as Vincent tickles fingers up his inside thighs and the lace shivers down over his cock. He groans at the feel, slippery silk paired with the almost-sharp cut of the lace edging, and then again when Vincent strokes over his chest.

“I’ll keep these hot and tender,” Vincent muses, teasing at Sephiroth’s nipples. His fingernails press at them, blunt side and then the nail flicking over the tips. Then he stoops and presses quick but wet kisses to each as Sephiroth squirms, his tongue coiling briefly over the exposed flesh while the heat of his breath dances over skin held behind silk and leather. “You like them that way, and as a trophy, you should be shown at your best.”

Sephiroth moans, and his voice cracks twice during it. Vincent raises his head, looking at him—looking at him, enjoying the view as he pants and arches against his bonds but also considering it. Watching the effect of a rolled thumbpad, a circling fingertip.

Then smiling, as he leans in to take the air from Sephiroth’s mouth. “I want to feed you so I’m not going to gag you yet, but you can keep your words to yourself,” he murmurs.

Sephiroth sucks in a shaking breath, nodding absently. Then letting the simple weight of his head drop him into a nuzzle at the other man’s jaw. Nothing for him to do, he’s only here to be displayed. So he can indulge as he likes, mouthing at Vincent’s chin, letting his lips trip clumsily over its point when Vincent moves. It doesn’t make a difference in what’s going to happen to him.

Vincent lets him play for a few seconds, though the man’s right hand leaves Sephiroth’s breast. Then returns, with something that he fits onto Sephiroth’s nipple. Metal, but warmed in his hand so that Sephiroth sighs at it instead of startling, sighs and laps the hollows of Vincent’s throat till the clamp tightens enough for him to jerk.

His mouth is caught, and pressed back till his head is pinned to the pole behind him. Vincent locks a second clamp around his other nipple, and then moves a hand out to shake a bundle of black silk cords loose as he steps behind Sephiroth. Who catches up with his breath, almost, looking at the uninterrupted view of himself in the mirror.

Pretty silver adornments on his nipples—they pinch, yes, tugging strings of heat out of him every time his chest pushes against their grip, but they don’t look like the vises and sharp-toothed clips Vincent usually uses. The pressure ring itself is almost masked by a series of thin loops circling out from it, giving it the look of flower petals, of jewelry.

But their function is to torture Sephiroth, however pretty their form is. The loops are used as anchors as Vincent weaves and knots the silk cord across Sephiroth’s pectorals, pulling taut in all directions at the trapped nipple. Breaths go from merely reminding him of his position to enforcing it, jerking sharply at the pressure rings if he gasps, if he so much as rolls his shoulders. His nipples are reddening under the abuse as he watches his reflection, but no matter how much they blush and swell, they stay imprisoned. Trapped but offered up—Vincent reaches around and lightly taps their tips once all the cords are knotted and the resulting bolts of electric pain make Sephiroth shudder roughly against the pole. Which pulls harder at his nipples, which makes him tremble again, until Vincent ends the cycle by pulling his shaking shoulders back and biting sharply into one.

“It hurts,” Sephiroth finds himself groaning. “It hurts, Vincent, please…”

“I know it does,” Vincent says softly. His hands start to stroke down Sephiroth’s arms, pressing around the harness straps at the spasming muscles. Soothing, at first, but then they start to curl the limbs back behind the pole. Pulling Sephiroth’s hands away from where they’re kneading at his hips, but also, pulling at the silk cords so that the rings on Sephiroth’s nipples gradually tighten. “You’re going to be very sore.”

Sephiroth inhales and the coolness of the air dragging into his lungs slices outwards, then tangles in ribbons with the hot pain radiating out from his chest. It’s dizzying and if not for the pole at his back, he’d slump. His ankle-cuffs ring distantly as he shuffles in place, as his arms are curved ever more closely about the pole, as the cords press into his pectorals and the rings into his nipples.

He whines, but Vincent’s unmerciful as always and doesn’t stop until Sephiroth’s wrists are crossed in place behind him. Locked there in leather cuffs, his fingers splaying uselessly against the pole, with no choice but to adjust to his new position.

Adjust. He does, eventually. The pain never stops, and in fact only deepens as already-tender flesh is given no respite by Vincent’s set-up, but it does shade into that blurry, bruising haze that fills up everything else and leaves no room for him to think. Only to feel, only to see—no need for words between those two. Not with Vincent’s attentions to him.

Mouth at his throat, then his shoulders. Hands on his thighs and then up under the slip, softly massaging his cock and balls with oil while his chest restraints ruthlessly tweak his aching nipples. He can come, he’s told, and does, a pretty, shaking thing splayed against the bars.

Vincent steps away from him but doesn’t leave. It’s only the man has other business at the moment, wiping off his hands, moving things around, changing his clothes—and Sephiroth isn’t going anywhere. Strapped in place next to prize swords and spare armor, the pale green silk fluttering between his legs, a frivolous-looking luxury amid functional black and silver. And his nipples, kept hot as Vincent promised, flushed hot and sparking painfully with the slightest movement. But he’s only a trophy, and the point of trophies is not to move.

Toys, however, do, although it’s a fruitless endeavor. He’s not going to escape by arching under Vincent’s mouth when it returns; in fact, he’s only pressing his poor clamped nipples further into it, making it easier for the man to suck and torment them. Vincent’s dark head resting on his breast as he wrenches weakly against the pole he’s tied to, Vincent’s hands running up his thighs and oiling him open, fingers barely moving as his own struggles stretch him around them. But he's there to be toyed with, and so Vincent uses him that way. Making him come again like this, and then standing up and rubbing off against his inside thighs so between their climaxes, his legs are thickly painted with sticky seed.

He can see the gleaming streaks in the mirror afterward, tracking how they move sluggishly downward as Vincent, behind him again, carefully spoons mouthful after mouthful between his shaky lips. Sometimes a dribble will escape, running down his chin in an echo of the come running down his legs, but Vincent does raise a hand to wipe off his mouth. His thighs stay unwiped as, once he’s sucked the man’s finger clean, Vincent drops it to rub one or the other of his nipples.

“You’re tired,” Vincent says, pressing in behind him, hand now curling over Sephiroth’s hip as Sephiroth’s trembling invites the slip to stick up between his legs. “And I think we’ve ruined this one.”

“I like it,” Sephiroth rasps. He half-closes his eyes as something clinks on the floor, as Vincent frees up both hands and pushes his arms around Sephiroth’s waist, embrace supportive even as Vincent’s teeth mark the skin around the right shoulder strap. “Keep me waiting in it next time.”

Vincent peels up the slip’s hem with one hand and with the other, takes up Sephiroth’s cock, just roughly enough that Sephiroth moans and twists to make the nipple rings tug at him. “You’re so fond of the cock cage now, it’s not really a hardship for you, I think,” Vincent says as he passes his thumb across the head of Sephiroth’s cock, then kisses away Sephiroth’s resulting whimper. “I might have to try a different one to keep you as needy as you should be.”

“Put me in whatever cage you want, so long as you’re touching me,” Sephiroth breathes, and then deliberately slumps into the man’s arms.

* * *

He’s not thinking very much about it when he says it, but of course Vincent is. And of course it bears results later.

They’re preparing to go out to Nibelheim. The new training exercises are going well, and in fact, Angeal has a fresh class of recruits out in the mountains with him. Sephiroth’s only dropping in for a day, as far as his official duties go, and it’s a surprise inspection so he has reasons to not go in through the public route. But it’s entirely personal interests that lead him to take the weekend before off, so when he and Vincent reach the old airstrip in the foothills Vincent prefers, they have time to themselves.

They usually don’t spend more than a couple hours at the place, but there’s a small, squat concrete bunker with enough room to overnight. And all the manner of interesting objects squirreled away in its underground storage space, as Vincent demonstrates when he produces a steel-barred cage that could comfortably fit him in transformed state.

“From the research expedition that set this up?” Sephiroth guesses.

“No, from the Jenovans. It’s all checked for traces and there’s nothing wrong with this, or any of the other items down there. But the locals still would rather throw out anything they find from that time. If I take it away, they don’t ask questions,” Vincent says.

Sephiroth steps half into the cage and checks one of the bars, finding it solidly-built. He looks up and notices some heavy damage on the top bars, and then finds some more scratches here and there, but all in all, it still seems usable.

He steps back out to check the lock, but then pauses when he sees Vincent watching him. The man’s expression is a little different from his usual contemplation of Sephiroth, with a trace of…not concern, precisely, but Sephiroth has the strong impression Vincent wasn’t completely assured of Sephiroth’s reaction to this. And that is very rare, both the lack of certainty and that Vincent would allow a situation where he wasn’t certain of Sephiroth.

“So I’ll be kept in here,” Sephiroth says, still looking at the other man. He raises his hand and puts it against the lock, then runs it along one of the bars. “Till you’re ready for me.”

“I’ll leave the door open,” Vincent says, and that little dash of curiosity goes through his eyes again. “I might come in and join you, if I feel like it.”

“But I can’t come out to join you,” Sephiroth says, and the way his breath shortens is enough to put that appreciative light in Vincent’s eyes. “You’re going to tie my chest so if I try…”

Vincent steps up to him at that point, reaching up to push his coat off his shoulders, and it’s as it always is between them. Simple, easy submission to the man, who treats Sephiroth not as if this is his due but as if this is as natural as breathing.

He strips Sephiroth and makes a prize out of a general. Dressed in a flimsy silk slip, identical to the one they’d ruined a few weeks ago down to the nipple slits, and carefully packaged up before being put into the cage. Sephiroth’s cock is locked into its smaller cage and threaded with the hollow sound, while his ball sac is drawn down from his body and then held stretched by a tight steel cuff. The weight of the metal keeps his genitals swinging between his thighs, brushing up against the teasing waft of the silk slip as he’s pushed into the cage.

This time Vincent doesn’t strap him into a chest harness, but uses only rope, working it through the exterior loops of the nipple rings and webbing it tightly over his upper arms and chest before positioning him up against one of the cage walls. More rope knots him to the bars before his lower arms are threaded through them and then bent so his wrists cross outside the cage. Vincent does cuff his forearms with drake leather, but it’s really the rope that holds him, frail in theory against his strength, but in practice, unbreakable without viciously ripping the clamps from his nipples.

“Please,” Sephiroth whispers as Vincent, outside now, reaches in and runs leisurely caresses over his pinioned torso. His nipples twist as ropes are strained and tweaked, sending washes of warm pain down into his caged cock. “Please—more—please—touch me—”

“Spread,” Vincent orders.

Sephiroth jerks his feet apart, expecting fingers or perhaps a mouth to probe up between his buttocks. But instead Vincent hooks his hand into the back of the ropes and pulls sharply, tensioning the entire net across Sephiroth’s chest. He rocks into the chilly bars, crying out, his knees weakening—Vincent pulls again and Sephiroth’s left knee gives way so that he drops several inches. Which is what Vincent wanted, Sephiroth realizes when he feels Vincent’s other hand cupped over his shoulder and pushing down on it.

He slides down the bars to his knees, whimpering as his nipples are yanked this way and that by the tugging ropes. Vincent lets him rest there for a few minutes, even touching him—stretching him, working him open with two oiled fingers but with the other hand still dragging at the ropes at his back whenever he struggles. His ball sac tries to tighten against its cuff and he throws himself against the bars in a desperate arch, moaning as Vincent lovingly strokes over his prostate—only to eventually sink into a helpless, squirming daze as the cock cage holds him in, as his nipples grow sorer and sorer with every twitch.

“No,” he moans when Vincent pushes the plug into him. Struggling the little he’s able, the bars crushing apart his buttocks as the plug settles in place. “No, please—I need—I need—”

“Quiet,” Vincent says, pressing a piece of silk between his teeth.

Sephiroth sucks at it instinctively, then whines in disappointment. But by then Vincent’s pulled it taut, dragging Sephiroth’s head back against the bars. Another round of silk slides between his lips, and then Vincent works the strip a few inches higher to bind Sephiroth’s eyes. Blind now, his begging muted, Sephiroth twists his head against the nearest bar and finds Vincent’s hand. He nuzzles frantically at it, trying to lip around his gag, but Vincent gently, firmly, pushes his chin forward, holding it in place as something slithers over Sephiroth’s forehead.

Leather. A hood, descending over him as he gasps one last time. Then his exhale curls back on him soaked with the earthy scent of the leather, a smell that seems to sink down into him and turn him heavy and slow. He shudders once or twice, and whimpers are still escaping him, but as Vincent smooths the hood into place, Sephiroth quiets.

Aching with need, but secure that way. Firmly grasped by the hood, and then that pressure now seems to flow seamlessly through the ropes netted about his throbbing nipples, the cuffs on his wrists, the nudge of the plug into the clamp of the cock cage and ball cuff. He sits quietly, docilely, back pressed to the bars as his legs are tugged out from under him and then pulled open. Cuffs are fitted to his ankles to keep him spread and it pushes his weight back onto his buttocks, tipping him onto the plug’s point so that he mewls into the soft darkness. But he doesn’t struggle because no matter what happens, he can feel himself.

Can feel how the air slowly cools, faster against bare skin, slower where the silk is sticking to him. His sweat keeps a little heat in, paradoxically, deceptively…eventually it grows chillier there, where the slip is damp, than where the sweat has already evaporated off him. He can trace the pathways of want through his body and how they pulse greater here, where a tremor in his arm has pulled at his left nipple ring, with an echo there, in his ball sac where the lace hem keeps tickling his thigh into twitching. But they all eventually circle back, they all come into his head and crowd out everything else, every other thought he could have except how much need is growing in him and how tightly he’s being kept in this place, in his place.

He drifts. Vincent’s there, he knows that even without the man touching him—he wishes Vincent would but he can’t say that, can only want it and so it swirls up with all the other need in him as he waits. Quietly longing, readied for it whenever the other man wants.

And Vincent always comes, he never has to think about that. Only want it, only want it so badly that when he feels that first graze against his ankle, he only trembles because to do anything else would be pulling away from the depth of his need.

The touch comes again, longer, running up his shin and then drawing around his knee. A hand, but it’s a mouth that presses against his inner thigh on the other leg. A mouth, warm and wet, with teeth that mark him with hot, stinging bruises as it works up towards his desperate cock, throbbing in its cage. He moans under the hood, feeling the wet silk of his gag wrinkle up against the leather, and cants his hips even though that makes his nipples burn in their clamps.

Vincent licks at his cock, glancing over its cage’s rings, and then, sharply, grabs both of Sephiroth’s thighs with either hand. Sephiroth starts and then shivers heavily against the bars, only to let out a muffled cry under the hood as Vincent bends him nearly in half, raising his legs till his ankle chains are creaking. He’s worked up the cage wall, just enough so that the other man can get under him, and then his plug is removed and he’s seated on a cock.

He's fucked roughly, every thrust jerking ruthlessly at the ropes about his chest. By the time Vincent comes, his nipples feel both as if they’ve been crushed to small, burning diamonds and as if their hurt has spread to grip his entire chest in a hot, tight vise. And then—and then Vincent slides out of him.

Sephiroth whimpers, legs shaking, bound hands twisting uselessly behind his back, but he can’t stop the other man from withdrawing. Can’t stop how he’s pushed back onto the floor of the cage, still bound and now thoroughly used. All he can do is wheeze through the hood’s nose hole and try to outwait the burning in his nipples.

But then Vincent’s touching him again. Outside the cage now, at his back, reaching under his buttocks and forcing him up as a tongue worms its way between the bars and into him. He arches, forgetting himself, and then chokes as the chest ropes catch him up. Slumping back against the bars, shuddering despite the pains that bring, as Vincent laps his hole clean, rubs fingers along his perineum, plays havoc with his tied cock and balls. He can feel himself dribbling through the sound, wet streaks swinging out from its tip as his cock rolls in Vincent’s hand. There’s a sudden surge through him, so sharp that at first he thinks he’s been slapped aside—that Vincent has yanked him that way even though he can feel both of the man’s hands and they aren’t in position for that.

But then the surge comes again, harder but much more focused, driving straight through his groin and out into his cock along the sound, and he moans, realizing now what it is. Moans and shudders, not even bothering to struggle as Vincent’s tongue coils deep into him, working him in time with the fingers stroking his perineum. Milking him, drop by drop, until he has nothing left.

He sags against the bars, then startles feebly when he feels his body move further than it should. He’s still bound but his hands—he’s been uncuffed, and then he also feels the ropes about his chest and upper arms fall away.

Sephiroth’s too exhausted to move on his own, and also, the quiet of the hood is still on him, so he only lies against the bars as the cage floor vibrates under Vincent’s feet. The other man’s come into it again, and is pushing something along the floor—bedding of some kind, which he works under Sephiroth before pulling Sephiroth’s body down onto the floor and arms up. He chains Sephiroth’s wrists back to the bars, then settles himself over Sephiroth, mostly between Sephiroth’s legs but also stroking at Sephiroth’s arms. Tracing some of the rope burns, Sephiroth realizes, starting to moan again, but as soon as he thinks that, Vincent’s hands go to his head.

Vincent unlaces the hood and then cuts away the silk strip, picking the remains out of Sephiroth’s mouth as Sephiroth blinks dazedly at the top bars of the cage. He finally manages to focus on the other man’s face, resting his cheek against the hand Vincent has cupping it, and then tilts his chin. Vincent kisses him, long and deep, before rising to pull over a thermos of water.

Once Sephiroth’s drunk about a third of it, Vincent puts it aside and then pushes himself to Sephiroth’s right side. Sephiroth’s ankles are still chained, and when Sephiroth pulls his right knee up, Vincent shifts back to center to accommodate but is careful to avoid Sephiroth’s chest. “I used to sleep in this,” Vincent says, looking down at Sephiroth’s left nipple. “Early on, before I had full control.”

Sephiroth’s head is still spinning, his body is still—but he hears the man. He’s not going to forget, and while not responding immediately doesn’t come as naturally to him as it seems to Vincent, he…understands this better now. He listens, and Vincent speaks, and this is sufficient for Vincent, at least; the man doesn’t always need a response, any more than Sephiroth’s need always has to be expressed in begging.

“It was less an issue of mental control than you’d think…the anatomy doesn’t lend itself to in-between forms, in a lot of ways. If the nerves weren’t fully in place yet, my brain had no connections to make,” Vincent adds after a moment. “I had to train the rest of my body to manage till it could catch up. Indoctrinate it, really, so when I did finish the transformation, I wouldn’t have so much to heal from.”

Sephiroth’s eyes go to the top bars again. The damage there had looked as if an animal had done it rather than a person, but with the new context…he looks back at Vincent, who has a faint smile on his face. “R&D never would’ve used something like this. No padding, gaps for the subject to reach through—”

“I think Lucrecia pushed for better tranquilizers over restraining units once she took over,” Vincent says. When Sephiroth gives him a slow nod, he nods back, thoughtful, before reaching out and just laying a fingertip on Sephiroth’s left nipple. Which is still locked in the pressure ring, even if it’s free of its net. His expression grows appreciative as Sephiroth bows up into the touch, mewling, and then he reaches for the latch on the ring. “This was what I could find. Anyway, those composites they use for standard Shinra restraining cells don’t hold up to my claws. The Jenovans knew their metalworking, if nothing else.”

“Vincent,” Sephiroth breathes. He twists at his wrist-cuffs, pulls up his knees, rubs his caged cock into Vincent’s belly—Vincent’s naked but for his unbuttoned shirt—and then lets out a shaking exhale when Vincent continues to only touch the latch. “Please. On your cock, please.”

Vincent smiles again. Then takes his hand away, but only so he can lift Sephiroth’s hips and slide back in. He’s half-hard, and moves deep enough to make Sephiroth cry out; he strokes at Sephiroth’s thighs, then runs his hands up to caress carefully around Sephiroth’s nipples till Sephiroth’s shudders subside.

“The transformations did take a long, long time to handle,” Vincent says as he watches Sephiroth. His brows pinch slightly, but then smooth out as he bends over to lap some sweat from Sephiroth’s collarbone. “I had to learn, it wasn’t something that came with the genes…clones of me end up locked in transitional form, which is very painful. I did explain this to your mother once, and she had the sense to listen to me about it, so she’s never tried my exact combination again. But I can’t say the same for others. But my clones tend to take care of it, and I only have to come end it for them afterward. I can’t teach them what I’ve learned, so that’s as much as I can do.”

Sephiroth lies there under him, listening and looking at Vincent’s calm expression. This is a long-settled matter to the man, and he’s offering an explanation, not a request or a complaint, but at the same time…at the same time he wants someone else to know. It matters that someone else understands him. And Sephiroth does understand what Vincent is saying—and he understands these days that Vincent doesn’t need the validation. Only the understanding.

“Vincent,” Sephiroth finally says, and when Vincent cocks his head, Sephiroth summons up what’s left of his energy and bears down, slow and inviting, on the other man. “How do you want me?”

“I want…” Vincent pauses and looks Sephiroth over, the detached air slowly dissolving as his eyes travel down Sephiroth’s body “…like this. Like this, until we leave in the morning.”

Sephiroth groans at the thought of it, groans and closes his eyes as Vincent’s head drops towards him. He parts his lips when Vincent’s breath passes over them, then welcomes Vincent’s tongue into his mouth. “Then tie me back up,” he murmurs. “Sleep with me, in here.”

Vincent chuckles into the kiss, warm and indulgent as he is not the rest of the night.

He has Sephiroth again, on the floor of the cage, flicking the nipple rings open at his climax so despite the cock cage, Sephiroth writhes and bucks along with him. Then he takes more rope and reties Sephiroth’s arms, forearm-to-forearm across his back with lengths crisscrossing the front to nudge and scrape knots against Sephiroth’s aching nipples. The plug goes back in and Sephiroth’s legs are unchained from the cage bars and tied together, then folded under him as he kneels for dinner from Vincent’s hand.

Vincent wipes him down afterward with a towel, but keeps him in the slip, silk stiff with dried sweat where it isn’t freshly-dampened. He’s stretched out on the bedroll and made to cry out again and again as Vincent nurses his nipples, sucking them till they’re beyond raw and a mere puff of air pulls shivers all over his body. Wrung-out, he can’t even sag in relief when Vincent pulls his cock out from under the slip and frees it from the cage and sound. He can only lie there as Vincent rides him, the other man taking his pleasure one last time before pushing Sephiroth to the side and then climbing out of the cage.

After completing a few more chores for the night, Vincent does come back. And then he tucks Sephiroth up against him, both of them leaning against the cage wall with the folded-up bedroll for a cushion. His fingers tease between Sephiroth’s buttocks, scraping away dried come and oiling Sephiroth up till he can fit his cock back in, and then he throws one arm over Sephiroth and curls his chin over Sephiroth’s shoulder.

“My prize,” he says quietly, just as Sephiroth thinks him asleep. His mouth works through Sephiroth’s hair to rest against Sephiroth’s nape, just as Sephiroth feels the furred length of his tail wind over their hips to brush against Sephiroth’s cock. “Not from a war, but I survived.”

“Isn’t that a war?” Sephiroth says. Not quite thinking, and then, when he does, he half-wonders if he should have saved the words and only listened.

But Vincent doesn’t tense. If anything, he presses more firmly up to Sephiroth, his mouth warm against Sephiroth’s skin. “Yes,” he says, nuzzling at Sephiroth. “Now sleep.”

Sephiroth sighs. He’d tensed, he only now realizes, as Vincent nuzzles him again, following a muscle in his neck as it relaxes. But there’s no need for that, not here. They can rest.

Chapter 34: Interlude: Couples’ Night

The cuffs are new. Black drake leather, their supple grip on Sephiroth as Vincent laces them up a not-so-subtle hint at how long Sephiroth is expected to stay bound in them. They extend longer than the others, several inches down from the wrist and then a flap that comes up the back of his hand and curls his fingers around a cool metal rod. His palms are left bare, openly vulnerable when he relaxes his hands against the padding underneath him, while the leather tightens across the tingling underside of his wrists.

Vincent pulls through the last inch of lacing on the left and then reaches for something. Sephiroth hears a click and then feels a point of intense heat near his skin, not yet blistering him but enough to make him inhale against the piece of cloth wound into his mouth. The lacing pulls tighter, till the cuffs feel like a second skin, and then Vincent straightens up. He flicks aside dark little burnt fragments and then bends down again, buckling straps over the lacing. “Melted together, not knots,” he says of the laces, which are synthetic and which had made Sephiroth wonder about that, considering Vincent’s usual preferences. “More permanent.”

Sephiroth hadn’t wanted to talk, he’d said before. He can’t talk now, the choice removed from him, and not even by his gag but by the sheer intensity of the arousal pulled up into him. Thick and full in his throat, keeping his tongue weighed down and his lungs lacking the breath for anything but deep moans as he lies under Vincent.

They’re in a windowless room in a Turk safehouse somewhere, all features removed except for purely functional ones that only explain to him how he’s going to be kept here. The padding under him is thinner and firmer than a normal mattress, more of a platform, with a slick, waterproof covering that’s already sticking to his skin. It makes moving around on it sting with friction, so he’s encouraged to stay still, to not fight his bonds.

He's on his back, with his arms pressed out to either side of his head. Bent at right angles when he pulls at the straps that lead off the cuffs over the padding to anchors in the floor, a much harder position to develop any opposing leverage from. The cuffs feel more like gauntlets, and when Vincent’s done stitching him into them, the other man clasps Sephiroth by his helpless palms and leans over to kiss him through the gag, serpentine tongue teasing around the cloth as he writhes and arches in place.

Vincent’s hold burns through the cuffs, the hot impress of them lingering even as he pushes himself back. It makes Sephiroth dig his arms back rather than forward, pulling his chest muscles into straining relief. He can’t see them but he understands the effect well enough, with how Vincent’s appreciative gaze traces another burning silhouette out of thin air, marking it in Sephiroth’s mind as he feels how securely he’s bound.

Pinioned, not just bound. His arms spread and hands rendered useless for anything but serving as passive targets of Vincent’s caresses, as the other man moves over and bends to lap the sweat collecting in the hollows of Sephiroth’s palm. He pulls at his legs as Vincent’s tongue swirls in increasingly forceful motions, near-whipping at his skin; his ankles are tied down as well, laced into cuffs that go a few inches up his shin and strap across his instep. The slack on them is a little more than on his arms, but it’s deceptive—it lets Vincent reach between his legs, as the man finally decides to move on, and flick on the vibrator buried inside of him.

Sephiroth throws himself up against the pad, lifting his whole back between his shoulderblades and buttocks. Vincent pushes himself out of the way to facilitate that, not out of any real kindness but because he knows Sephiroth will wear himself out faster if he’s given a little room, given the idea that he can try to pit himself against the man’s meticulous arrangements. Groaning and gasping into the increasingly-soaked gag, dragging the back of his head and the heels of his feet against the padding so that it starts to develop indentations that don’t fully erase themselves when he falls back. Rubbing himself till the stick of the pad’s covering feels like a raw rash, letting himself be stung by his own heat, with every hot needle pulling a thread through him that ends directly at his cock.

When he’s done, limp but for his weak whining, Vincent shifts back against him. One hand caresses lightly down Sephiroth’s heaving chest, playing from nipple to nipple as Vincent licks his own palm. Very gentle, fingertips soft against the peaking nubs, and he thinks it’d be quicker, easier, if the pain came instead so he could let it wash him away, but…Vincent has other plans. Lengthier ones. He’s here to be toyed with, not given mercy.

He comes the first time in Vincent’s hand, the other man lazily moving against him while still fully-dressed. Vincent unties the gag from his mouth and has him suck the come off the man’s fingers, then reties the sopping cloth in place, ratcheting it more tightly against the corners of his lips to compensate for how his spit has softened it. Then Vincent discards a few layers of his own clothing, sitting back on the pad in only a half-buttoned shirt as he trails his mouth down Sephiroth’s body. Tasting every inch of it before he finally, with excruciating patience, finds his way to Sephiroth’s re-risen cock.

After his second climax, Sephiroth’s ungagged again and given a little water. Then blindfolded, the leather contoured snugly to his face and lying smoothly against the back of his head because like the cuffs, he’s been stitched into it. He’s given more water and then mostly allowed to rest, only kissed on the mouth and throat with the vibrator off, for a while. But eventually Vincent wants to play with him again, and turns the vibrator on.

High, high enough that it’s just short of enough on its own, without a command—but it’s not enough. His buttocks are grinding out frustrated furrows in the pad, his fingers flexing against the bars pressed into them, as Vincent runs a single teasing fingertip up and down his prick until, forgetting what he’d said, he starts begging. Then he’s gagged again, leather in his mouth as Vincent straddles him and sinks down onto his cock.

The new gag isn’t laced in place. When it’s removed, he’s still hauling in lungful after lungful of air from his third orgasm, Vincent’s slick clinging to his softening cock. This time a few cool, sweet pieces of fruit come with the water, offering him the fleeting feeling of refreshment.

Fleeting, because he’s bound and blind, mind and body both weakened by relentless stimulation as Vincent does whatever he pleases with Sephiroth. His ankle cuffs are unhooked from the floor anchors and then attached to a long bar that holds him spread as his legs are pulled up into the air. Vincent pushes fingers up between his buttocks and removes the vibrator, then pushes in a rubber cock, long but not very thick, something that Sephiroth’s exhausted body easily takes in.

Too easily, his brain too lulled into mindlessness for him to realize until after the cock starts to move on its own, sliding through a thick coating of lubricant, with Vincent’s hands both petting at his thighs. He jerks at the spreader bar and is dimly gratified to hear whatever is holding it up whine as torturously as he is from the strain—but he’s still being fucked by a machine. And a second later, gagged again, silenced and forced to take it, twisting and shuddering and never actually freeing himself from the rubber cock’s methodical, incessant strokes.

Vincent has been spacing his orgasms out, calculating how much his enhancements can assist him. He’s being whittled away regardless, but there are still those brief, brutally welcome pauses in between, when he’s given the illusion of rest as hands and a mouth and a long, lean body soothe away his shivers. Given the idea that he might catch up, might be able to restore himself, before the machine sets back to work again and he’s driven to pure mindless need.

He loses count by the time Vincent finally turns the machine off and draws it out of him, lowers his legs. Constellations of bright white stars still peppering the smooth press of his blindfold, when his ankles and wrists are taken off their straps and he’s pushed onto his side, then his knees. Cuffs still on, blindfold and gag still on, he’s half-led, half-carried across a chilly concrete floor and then pushed down so that his right knee touches a round metal grating.

It's a shower stall of some kind. Water sweeps down across his skin, pleasantly warm as it slowly erodes the layers of tacky sweat from it. Vincent lets him lean against the man’s thigh as fingernails scrape over his scalp, working around his blindfold. Drake leather because it’s waterproof, because he can be washed in it, kept in it. Still very much a toy, simply being tended to now because Vincent wants him to last.

Once the water turns off, Sephiroth’s wrist cuffs are hooked to points on the wall that spread his arms like they had been against the padding, bent out at right angles to keep him up off his knees and pressing his chest to the tile. Vincent dries him off, then combs his hair out and puts it in a loose plait that’s tucked over one shoulder. Sephiroth shifts on his knees, trying to soften the aches accumulating in them, and Vincent pauses to slip a towel under his legs.

False kindness again, as then he’s thoroughly whipped from back to upper thighs. Broad, burning stripes across his body that leave him whimpering around his gag, and then, when that’s removed so he can be watered and fed a little, sucking helplessly at Vincent’s fingertips in a mute, ignored plea. He’s gagged again, and then a pair of leather briefs are strapped onto him—not laced into place, at least, although Vincent pulls the buckles at the hips tight enough that the seams cut hotly across his welts, leaving the stars whirling dizzily against his blindfold.

The briefs hug his sore, wrung-out cock and balls snugly to his body, but then cut away to expose his bruised buttocks to the air. Framing them, leather taut all around each globe so that it’s offered up like a sweet as he’s taken back out and restrapped to the bed. Belly-down this time, the pad covering clinging to his cheek and chest and limbs as Vincent’s mouth wanders over his welted buttocks as if the man is lapping at a dessert. And there’s a hole in the piece of leather that nestles up between the buttocks, he discovers—is made to discover, as Vincent’s tongue worms into him first, followed shortly by two fingers.

He's still opened up from the cock machine, achingly open, open to the point that the pressure of being filled is welcome no matter how much it sharpens the ache. He hitches weakly into Vincent’s mouth and fingers, mumbling wordlessly around his gag, fingers clutching the bars strapped into them as if they’re lifesavers, and Vincent pulls away. Plays with his bruises instead, dragging fingertips and then something shivery and slithering, a waterfall of leather strings that makes Sephiroth twitch all over as his nerves are overwhelmed. Twitch and then brace himself, expecting the susurration to flip to a vicious blow any moment.

But Vincent doesn’t strike him with the flogger. Only teases him, circling it up and down his back and buttocks and thighs until he thinks he’s mapped every single bruise against the bars in his hands, his fingertips moving in helpless echoes of the caresses. Occasionally the leather strands flick a little, but never more than a light whistle across his skin—light but with how fresh the welts are, it’s still enough to lay him breathless against the bed. Shivering himself, drained of come and of energy, and yet unable to resist the other man’s attentions.

Then fingers in him again, the directness of them enough of a change from the flogger’s tickling that Sephiroth somehow finds it in him to arch back. He’s tightened up a little, he can feel it—Vincent loosens him up again and then fucks him. Long, languid strokes, as he lies completely limp under the man and feels the series of shudders that takes Vincent during the man’s climax skate over him, rather than riding it together with Vincent.

He's licked out afterward, still limp, utterly exhausted and yet still feeling strings of pleasure pulling him back to consciousness with every turn of Vincent’s tongue in him, against him. And after that…after that he dozes a little. Tied to the pad, kept spread and available, he can’t do anything else.

Not until Vincent decides to have him again, cock burying itself to the hilt as he startles out of his floating stupor, a cry crammed up against his gag. He shudders several times before his body finally remembers how abused it is, and goes slack under Vincent. Used now, nothing left in him, nothing but whatever Vincent wants to put in him.

“I’m not sleeping in you like this,” Vincent says, half-scolding, half-amused, at the wavering whine of protest that makes its way out of Sephiroth’s mouth after the gag’s removed. He puts some water to Sephiroth’s lips, delaying that long at least, before he snaps the blindfold’s lacing with his claws and peels it away. “There’s a real bed in the other room.”

“But in me,” Sephiroth mutters, still only half-conscious, and most of what’s aware thinking about how much more he’s going to ache with Vincent out of him. The way the right wrist strap goes slack when Vincent unhooks it from the floor seems to jar up through his body, painful in a way that he thinks he needs the still-tight, still-even pressure of his cuffs to counteract. “Wait.”

Vincent sighs. “I’ll collar you, but only if you get up.”

Sephiroth moans a little, hearing that, and lets Vincent pull his arm down to where the man can start tugging at the wrist buckles. But then the cuff actually loosens and he tenses up again. “Vincent, please—I can’t. Not yet…”

“Talking now,” Vincent says, sounding as if it’s more to himself. A private joke, as he presses his mouth to the side of Sephiroth’s throat. Nipping a little, the pinches distracting from how the cuff is continuing to loosen and making Sephiroth feel as if that entire side of him is unraveling with it. “I’ll tie them again after we shower and eat. Get up.”

That tone—Sephiroth shivers, whines again, but knows better than to ignore it. He forces his limbs to help Vincent, then curls into the other man, feeling wholly unmade, as they go back into the bathroom.

Vincent does leave the briefs on for a little longer. Letting Sephiroth flop to the floor as he relieves himself, then hauling Sephiroth up and positioning him in front of the toilet. Sephiroth leans on him and then shudders as Vincent undoes a leather lace that runs vertically down the front of the briefs, about an inch off-center, and tugs Sephiroth’s cock out through the slot to let him piss. Only after that does Vincent take them off.

“Make me ask you to do that next time,” Sephiroth murmurs when they’re finally in the damn bed. Which is yes, much easier on him than the floor pad, but he still can’t help twisting at the silk belt Vincent’s wrapped about his wrists.

Silk there, silk bound around his cock and balls to push down the ache a little. Silk around his throat, so when Vincent hooks a finger in the silver ring at the front, Sephiroth has to push himself immediately into the man’s lap or risk the collar tearing off. Easier and harder on him at the same time, and Vincent very much enjoys his dilemma, from the way the man lies back and curls his hand around the back of Sephiroth’s neck. “Demanding for a slave. I should keep you gagged all the time, and tell you to hold till I say otherwise so you’re too busy listening for that to think about asking for things.”

Sephiroth’s breath catches. Then he dips his head, laying his cheek against Vincent’s belly as he feels Vincent’s fingers trace along the collar. “Will you?”

Vincent snorts, amused. Then pulls Sephiroth’s head a little higher, sliding down the pillows at the same time so that his head is on them. “I’ll think about it,” he says, before giving Sephiroth a soft bump against the jaw with his knuckles. “Sleep first.”

Chapter 35: Interlude: Vincent Comes Back from Another Business Trip

Vincent’s been gone for nearly two weeks when Sephiroth opens the box.

It’s one of Vincent’s longer trips, prolonged several extra days by weather issues and a local political tiff that’s limited transportation options in the area. Sephiroth can leverage SOLDIER’s influence with respect to the latter but is forced to follow Tseng’s lead to ensure no suspicions are raised that this is for the benefit of one particular individual; this is absolutely correct and Tseng is as diplomatic about the matter as Sephiroth could wish, and yet it sets Sephiroth’s teeth on edge.

He and Vincent have been separated for longer periods, but they’re usually because Sephiroth is the one out of town, on one of his inspection tours that keep his time packed with the expected mix of genuine work duties and networking inanity. The southern tour he’s just completed aside, the constant state of low-level irritation the tours create in him is generally enough to keep his conscious mind off non-work matters. However frustrated he is, in the end it’s all for SOLDIER’s benefit, and he’s always prided himself that his personal issues do not disadvantage the organization he leads.

When he’s in Midgar and Vincent is out, Sephiroth takes the same approach, but…it’s not that the distractions are fewer, since if Sephiroth wanted to fully preoccupy himself with work alone, he could do so. He did do so before that first trip to Nibelheim, and Angeal and Zack’s comments about his improved mood aside, he managed well enough for the first thirty years of his life. But in Midgar…

In Midgar he lives with Vincent, and when the other man is not present, Sephiroth lives with that absence in a way that he doesn’t when he’s on tour. The dark, quiet kitchen with its blank-canvas lack of aroma—Vincent is diligent about cleaning up after himself, but even when he isn’t cooking, there’s usually the hint of just-brewed tea in the air. The uninterrupted showers, Sephiroth’s hands racing brusquely over his body so he can get the matter over with before he thinks too much. The open, unresponsive space in the bedroom.

It makes something inside of him ache, in a way that utterly refutes his mother’s repeated comments about the drawbacks of human affection. He’s been a fighter for long enough to know the difference between a pain that has to be frozen out, least it lead to permanent weakness, and a teaching pain, one that indicates something that needs addressing. Going back to the way he’d been before…he’d managed, and nothing more. He can see that now.

But he can’t do anything about the damn hurricane, with all his and SOLDIER’s resources, and so he has to sit tight and wait for the storm winds to die down. He knows Vincent’s otherwise well, and that the mission itself was completed successfully—Tseng had the sense to acknowledge that early on—so there’s no real reason for concern. It’s only he misses the man.

The first day past the initial expected return date, he proceeds as he always does, dealing with work matters and then eating with his fellow Firsts. They make a point to find him for meals, even Genesis, whenever Vincent is out, and if he still hasn’t become the type of person who craves constant jocularity, he can appreciate the gesture. It distracts him.

The second day, he returns to his office after dinner in the canteen to plow through some additional administrative chores for quarter-end, and ends up staying long enough that he showers there rather than returning to his personal quarters. Then dosses down on a couch in the Firsts’ lounge, waking a few hours later ahead of the cleaning staff to change his uniform and go back to his desk.

Someone must tell Angeal, because on the third day, the man drags him to a show at the botanical gardens. Angeal doesn’t bring Genesis and keeps the overt concern to only a few looks, spending most of the time strategizing with Sephiroth about where they might be able to send a troublesome officer of Genesis’ for a much-needed cool-down exile. Roche has had too many enhancements to simply kick out of SOLDIER and Angeal argues—albeit reluctantly—that the man has too much potential to consider other termination avenues. It’s enough of an engaging discussion that Sephiroth forgets to be annoyed at Angeal’s tactics for shielding Genesis from his responsibilities as Roche’s actual commanding officer. Enough that when Angeal drops him off at his quarters, he only hesitates for a moment before going in.

He resists logging in after he’s showered, but still ends up tossing and turning in his bed. In the morning, the fourth day, he cancels some afternoon meetings so that he can book a couple hours in a simulator and come out of it exhausted enough to merely want to push through what’s in his inbox, without finding more work for himself.

But then he’s home again, on his own. There are messages from Zack, probably at Angeal’s prompting, asking if he wants to do this and that, but Sephiroth ignores them. He walks pointlessly through his apartment once before taking hold of himself and going into the kitchen. It’s one thing to acknowledge his mental state, another to wallow in it, and he needs—he needs to eat.

He wouldn’t grant himself the title of cook, but he does understand the mechanics of it. He certainly wouldn’t venture into the kinds of dishes that Vincent seems to turn out as if it’s no more complicated than washing one’s hands, but since they started cohabitating, Sephiroth has picked up a few things. Enough to make himself a pot of congee, with about a third of the homemade toppings Vincent would have set out. Simple but delicious, and filling, both in his stomach and in the air. He sits at the table and breathes in the familiar smells, and for a few minutes…

But it doesn’t last. The ventilation is efficient, and he can’t help but clean up after himself, and soon there’s no more than a faint sting in the air from the discarded scallion roots in the trash. Sephiroth rubs his hands, still damp from washing the dishes, against his hips, and then, exhaling, turns to go into the bedroom.

Vincent doesn’t keep everything here, Sephiroth knows that. They’re both so organized that Sephiroth barely has to think to register whether something is missing, or even to pick up patterns: certain items go with Vincent when he’s not in. The metal cock cage, for example, although Vincent leaves behind the box of sounds that can pair with it. A few of the collars, a handful of toys.

And then sometimes things appear in their closet. The box showed up a day before Vincent left on this trip, a flat, white box with no labels or other distinguishing features of any kind, held shut with clear tape at the edges. Sephiroth had noted it, but no more than that; Vincent had been in the middle of strapping him into a harness at the time, and he hadn’t had any thought to spare for even wondering. But he looks at it again, now, and…he picks it up.

The contents rustle a little. Tissue paper packed inside, but loosely enough for movement. From the dimensions and the weight, it’s likely to be clothing of some kind, and for a moment Sephiroth’s imagination amply crowds away the empty silence with all the possibilities.

His breath pauses, then returns, slowly. He feels a tentative push of arousal deep in his groin, and breathes in again. Holds the box for another second, then carefully sets it down and goes to lie down on the bed.

There he sprawls on his back, not only entertaining the ideas his mind raises but indulging in them. Chasing them, expanding them, letting the elaborations blush heat throughout his body as he caresses himself. He pulls at his nipples, rolls his balls between his fingers, then oils up two fingers and presses them into himself while he strokes his cock against his thigh. He wishes he knew what was in there, but Vincent hadn’t mentioned it, and Vincent always has a very specific set-up in mind—he doesn’t want to ruin it. He doesn’t. He tells himself that, but then thinks about it, and—it’s enough.

It's enough, for one more night. He sleeps better than he has all week. But then he wakes in the morning and while the hurricane has finally blown itself out, the word is—not even from Tseng but from SOLDIER’s own assessment of the aftermath—that it’ll be at least a day before they can restart flights in and out of the area.

Sephiroth’s reasonably busy overseeing the spin-up of disaster-relief resources, but the hurricane’s impact was fairly localized and the commander assigned to the area believes she has it under control. She requests extra supplies but no extra personnel, and after much discussion, Sephiroth allows himself to be persuaded that this is a good time to trial Zack’s leadership skills. So they’ll be sending him to the area to liaise with the local commander—he can drop off Roche while he’s at it—and while Sephiroth himself will eventually need to put in an appearance, it shouldn’t be until relief efforts are well underway.

So he’s stuck here in Midgar another day, waiting, and when he returns to his quarters after enduring a canteen dinner with the others, he doesn’t hesitate. He showers, scrubs himself dry, and then walks into the closet naked to open up the box.

Inside is a lovely piece of lingerie. White silk, gossamer-thin, with a lightly-brocaded pattern of cranes and dragons in silver thread and silver lace edging. The silver is very pale, almost the same shade as the white but for its sheen, and the effect is to make it look as if the design is rippling like a stream over the garment.

The slip goes down to mid-thigh but has leg-slits that come back up nearly to the hipbones. Sephiroth has to tug it on with very careful pinches because of how closely it’s tailored, the silk slippery between his fingers yet sticking to his damp skin; once it’s on, it’s nearly transparent on him, the silver brocade patterns looking painted directly onto the skin.

The top is unusual, with a halter cut pieced out so that each of his pectorals is separately covered, and an ovoid slit revealing his breastbone once he’s pulled the ties up about his neck. They lace there and knot off, and then he discovers two small slits in the bodice when he’s smoothing it down, positioned to allow his nipples to peak through them. Sephiroth tugs at the nubs, then rolls them roughly between his fingers, hissing to himself, until they’re dark pink and slightly swollen, which should keep them sticking out of the slits.

Then he looks back in the box. Under more tissue paper is a matching pair of panties, flimsy things that barely have enough room for him to tuck in his cock and balls. But they stretch to cup him, silk whispering in a delicate tease about his growing erection as he sinks down on his knees and leans against the wall, rubbing his fingers over the panties. His cock warms under his touches, and the silk keeps the friction from growing too painful even without oil—he moves his other hand up to his nipples again, flicking and twisting at them as he starts to rock his head against the wall. They tighten and he almost feels it all over, with the way that the slip flutters around him as he gasps.

There’s a noise elsewhere in the apartment. Sephiroth stills, his eyes going to the other side of the closet where his spare uniforms are, some of them with small weapons tucked in—but the noise comes again. Footsteps, steady and measured, recognizable, and after a moment, Sephiroth deliberately exhales and pushes his legs out in front of him. Spreading his knees, still touching himself. Making his nipples hot and tender, as the stretch of silk over his cockhead starts to dampen with precome under his thumb, and when Vincent steps into the closet, Sephiroth lets out the cry that’s been building up in him.

He doesn’t come, not yet, but he’s close. His hips buck off the ground, then come back down with enough of a jolt that it drags his hands away, and then Vincent’s gaze pins them where they are, even as longing twists his body.

“Tseng said he told you late tonight,” Vincent finally says.

Sephiroth nods. Then can’t help another, softer, shaking noise, as Vincent takes a step into the closet and between his legs. “Late,” he agrees.

“I couldn’t do anything about the flight out, but I’m a little faster once I’m in Midgar city limits,” Vincent says. Casually observing, the same casualness he shows as he reaches down and picks up Sephiroth’s right wrist, then the left, bending both back to touch the wall over Sephiroth’s head. He holds them in the same gloved hand; he’s dressed as if he’s only just come in, with fading raindrops visible on his overcoat. “You couldn’t wait?”

“No,” Sephiroth says, his eyes trying to close as if he’s trying to avoid—he wouldn’t avoid anything with this man, even if it’s unpleasant. And he knows it won’t be that. He knows, so he makes himself look up at Vincent. “No, I wanted you.”

Vincent sighs, but he’s smiling. “I was saving this for when I came back. I had a feeling something would come up,” he says. He tightens his grip on Sephiroth’s wrist, and then reaches down to tip Sephiroth’s chin up with his other hand when Sephiroth arches. “I don’t punish you.”

“But there are consequences.” Sephiroth licks his lips, lets his chin rise even more in Vincent’s hand, so that the slip pulls taut over him. “You make me feel them. I want to, Vincent, please—I waited but I couldn’t feel—”

“Come,” Vincent orders.

Sephiroth gasps, heaves up against Vincent’s hold—Vincent grips his wrists but doesn’t fight to pin them in place, instead smartly riding the surge before letting Sephiroth’s own inclinations drop them back against the wall. His body was missing this, missing someone who knows what to do with it, what to make it do, and obeying the man feels as natural as breathing. As calming and all-encompassing as turning around after a dive, and seeing the water grow smooth again overhead.

“This one is for show,” Vincent says as Sephiroth slumps against the wall, sticky warmth in his panties slowly cooling, shoulders still jumping with short, sharp pants as the fever in the rest of him only continues to creep deeper. “For display. So you’re going to keep wearing it, no matter what you do in it. Because I want my trophy, Sephiroth. It was not an easy trip, and I was looking forward to seeing the pretty little trophy Shinra was going to give me for it. That’s the consequence.”

As he talks, he moves closer, putting his feet to either side of Sephiroth. Who moans, softly and continuously, at the ideas Vincent snatches out of his own imagination and then spins into promises that make his mouth fall open and his eyes close. He feels Vincent’s gloved fingers stroke over his cheek and throat, then run across his lower lip. When he turns to nuzzle at it, the hand presses him forward again. Nosing at Vincent’s trousers till they’re replaced with a hard cock Sephiroth eagerly sucks.

Vincent uses him briskly, then wipes off his mouth and pulls him to his feet. The other man takes him across the hall to his private training room, then clears off part of the equipment rack to put him up. Crossed wrists bound with a leather strap to a bar above his head, legs likewise tied to diagonal bars that keep him conveniently spread. He is still wearing the soiled panties, but he’s leaking again, keeping them from drying out. The silk instead works up behind his balls and sticks there as he squirms, blindfolded, while Vincent pets him and tells him what’s going to happen to him.

“I’m going to whip you,” Vincent murmurs, as his hands slowly untie the halter top and peel it down. “Whip you here, till you come again, so these—” he gives Sephiroth’s nipples hard tugs, then kisses over Sephiroth’s whimper “—are that lovely red, and then I’m going to tie them so they stay that way. You have a weekend with me, and there’s no reason why I can’t have you now.”

“Please—” Sephiroth tries, but Vincent kisses him again.

“I’m not going to fuck you yet. You waited for me, you can wait a little longer. I haven’t even eaten or showered yet, you greedy little toy,” Vincent says. Chiding, his hands pulling relentlessly at Sephiroth’s nipples, but even as he does, he draws softly at Sephiroth’s lower lip with his own mouth, presses their bodies warmly together. “Have you eaten?”

Sephiroth wants to say no, wants—but he can’t lie to Vincent. And Vincent knows what he wants, always. “Yes,” he groans.

“Then you’re going to wait while I do. With your nipples tied, with your cock tied—” Vincent laughs when Sephiroth’s hips try to buck against his bonds “—you can come during your whipping, but that’s it till you’re on my cock. And I’ll feed you again, don’t worry—you haven’t had nearly enough come over the last two weeks. You’ll have it now.”

Words evaporate from Sephiroth’s throat, then mind. He hangs from the trestle, only moaning and writhing, as Vincent proceeds to carry out his words. Striking Sephiroth across the chest, over and over, until the welts are as strong as an iron vise screwed about him, till his brutalized nipples are somehow both burning-stiff and tender as jelly. Then adding fuel to their burning, kissing and stroking his nipples as he mewls weakly. Smoothing silk back over them, teasing them back out through the slits in the bodice. Silk cord drapes over his shoulders, then coils behind his neck and down his breastbone before being woven across his stinging, aching chest.

He breathes fire. Gasps it, twisting till he runs out of energy and can only lean against the bars, unresisting, as Vincent meticulously knots and tugs till his nipples are trapped in a silken web. Hard, sore, so hot—when Sephiroth breathes, he feels as if he has coals attached to his chest and as if he’s stabbing them up into a wall of not-cool-enough air. And every movement, even his whimpers, pulls at the web and only hauls his poor nipples up into them.

Vincent stops touching them, but only to fondle Sephiroth’s cock through the panties. Sephiroth did come again during the whipping, and his seed is squeezing out from the edges of the panties and trickling down his thighs. His cock is still sensitive, but Vincent plays with it anyway, and the silk underwear is deceptively facilitative, seeming to smooth over the roughness just until it suddenly catches up with Sephiroth and he’s left jerking uselessly, balls tensing at the ache that shivers through him.

“You’re hungry,” Vincent comments, amused at something, and then the panties suddenly tear away.

The sudden drop of Sephiroth’s cock into the free air sends a snap up through Sephiroth that seems to explode out the top of his head. He lolls afterward, panting, grateful for the hand Vincent puts up to support his chin—but then a gag is pressed into his mouth. A round rubber ball, but it’s wrapped over with something soft and sticky…his panties. Vincent’s tied them around the gag before forcing it into his mouth.

He sucks at it, tasting the slightly acrid earth of the rubber through an overlay of his own come as Vincent buckles the gag tightly in place. “Wait,” Vincent says, kissing the corner of Sephiroth’s mouth where it strains against the gag, as a snug silicone sheath is rolled down Sephiroth’s cock. “You’re going to wait for me now.”

And then the man walks away. Sephiroth aches from his treatment at Vincent’s hands, but aches even more at the absence of it, at the lack of new blows and nips and caresses to keep him from feeling how deeply the hurt burns, how much he’s overcome by it. He wants the man back—he wants him.

But it’s different now. He’s kept this way, deliberately bound and put away, and even now, in the dark, he knows that. He knows it’s not truly an absence. He knows Vincent’s there from the way that his nipples pulse soreness every time he shifts, from the need already pooling up again in his restrained cock, from the twists of pain in his joints and the soft, soft shadow left by the press of Vincent’s mouth against his skin.

Waiting like this isn’t a burden, but a quiet break. The physical torment quickly becomes very shallow, like the ruffle of water at surface-level, when in the deep it’s only calm.

When Vincent comes back, Sephiroth’s relaxed enough that a puffed breath against his right nipple, though it immediately triggers whorls of scorching ache through that side of his chest, only makes him groan. He doesn’t struggle, only waits as Vincent puffs again, then licks lightly at the nipple. Then laves generously at it, sucking it, nudging it against the teasing edge of a tooth, until he’s shivering uncontrollably. But he’s still not struggling.

He takes it in, lets himself understand there is nothing else to do, as Vincent tortures the other nipple the same way. Then unties his legs and hauls them up, folding them and retying them to the upper diagonals of the trestle. Vincent slicks his hole up and then fucks him that way, eventually pulling the gag out so that the man can have his mouth at the same time. His cock rolls heavily between them, twitching in the sheath, while the rasp of Vincent’s clothes over his tied nipples eventually works him up enough to whine.

Vincent spends himself in Sephiroth, his hands going to the bars for support as he pants. They return soon enough, cradling Sephiroth’s buttocks as the other man kisses along Sephiroth’s throat. “Better?” he asks.

“Hurts,” Sephiroth groans. When Vincent’s hand comes up to cup the back of his head, he lets it twist so Vincent can suckle the soft flesh under his jaw. “Aches. Please, Vincent—please, I want to feel it—I want marks.”

There’s that chest-low rumble, and then Vincent obliges, drawing the spot between his teeth till Sephiroth can feel the bruise rooting. “I need to take you down,” he says, and then laughs in Sephiroth’s ear when Sephiroth instinctively clenches around him. “Bedroom, sitting on my cock. You can do it till you fall asleep.”

“Nipples—tied?” Sephiroth murmurs.

“You’re going to be marked there even if I take them off. You can’t sleep in them,” Vincent murmurs back, but then he moves his other hand up to brush at one. He sucks another bruise to life on the top of Sephiroth’s shoulder when Sephiroth shudders. “Do you want to come again?”

Sephiroth trembles all over, unconsciously reacting and yet very conscious of what Vincent is offering. One more—but then, he thinks, he’ll fall asleep faster. He’s not ready for that yet, not ready to take the other man’s presence as given. “N—no. Morning,” he says. “Morning, on your cock.”

“Needy,” Vincent says, sliding his face so that his forehead rests against Sephiroth, just under the ear. His lips move in a graze against Sephiroth’s skin, and then he lifts his head back, but pauses when Sephiroth shakily stretches up to kiss him. He sounds tired himself, but he accepts the kiss without hesitation. “It was a very long trip, Sephiroth.”

“I wanted you,” Sephiroth says without thinking.

Vincent’s mouth moves into a smile against Sephiroth’s, even as the other man sighs. “I’ll tell Tseng we can debrief in the afternoon instead.”

“If he hasn’t thought of it already,” Sephiroth has to add. Then opens his mouth as Vincent decides to plunder it of all its breath. “Please.”

“All right,” Vincent says, as his hands move towards Sephiroth’s bonds. “You are a reward, after all…I don’t mind enjoying it.”

Sephiroth smiles, and then lays his head against Vincent’s shoulder.

Notes:

This was partly inspired by the comment thread with Reveenka on the previous chapter.

Chapter 36: Side-Story: Yuffie and Vincent’s Idea of a Friendly Coffee

“Want me to do it for you?” Yuffie asks, folding her legs under her.

Like usual, Vincent doesn’t bother answering her. He’s already flipped his coat out of the way and has his hands out, so Yuffie sighs and gives up the chicken under her arm.

The whole way here, the dang bird had been squawking so loudly that despite having eyes on her back, Yuffie had been seriously contemplating just wringing its neck and apologizing when she got to the rendezvous spot. But the moment they’d landed on the same roof as Vincent, it’d shut up. And it stays quiet and very, very still, except for a convulsive twitch in one dangling leg, as Vincent takes it, cradles it against his side, and then slashes its throat with one claw.

At that, its eyes go wide and then glassy, its beak falling a little open as it sags. Vincent’s got the perfect angle to catch the thin dark-red arc in a thermos set on the tiles between them, and he does it without so much as a flicked eyelash, let alone some of the stupid stories wannabes tell about him swinging his tongue around and salivating like a hungry mutt. If you didn’t know better, you might think he’s just another Shinra R&D stiff, taking samples with antifreeze in their veins, except he's even more of a pro than they are with their SOLDIER bodyguards clogging up the roads around them.

“So…you gonna tell me why you’re in town?” Yuffie asks as the blood flow starts to taper off. She puts one knee up to her chest, then stretches it down along her other leg and absently rattles her heels against the tiles. Then sighs and pulls both legs up as Vincent’s brow lifts ever-so-slightly. Somehow he manages to make her feel more like a gawky trainee than any of her actual instructors could, without a single word. “Or we just gonna turn up a couple bodies, find another private feud over something stupid, argue with Dad about why we gotta put up with people who don’t even know what’s gonna keep them alive…”

“It’s your privilege to argue with your father, not mine,” Vincent says, with a slight smile on his face. He presses his finger across the chicken’s neck, and when he takes it away, the slash is clogged enough with feathers that there’s only a little dribble still snaking down from it. “It wasn’t something I personally would trouble him with.”

“Yeah, because you already did it, and just want some vitamins so you can get back to Shinra on time. They gonna worry that much if you’re late?” Yuffie asks, snorting.

Vincent puts the chicken on a square of newspaper he has ready. When Yuffie promptly picks it up and starts folding the paper into a bundle around it, he merely takes up his thermos and starts sipping. He looks okay—his clothes are still good enough to hide whatever might be going on under them, and his eyes aren’t going that muddy color. “I don’t want to trouble your father with Shinra either,” he says. “This has no relevance for them, and he should be busy enough fending off the Iga. I’m surprised you aren’t in the thick of that.”

“Yeah, well, if you’re gonna try and avoid a marriage, you can’t, like, be standing around for it,” Yuffie says. She peeks at Vincent, who looks completely unsurprised to hear this, and then can’t help a kick at the tiles. “Personally, I feel like if I just punched my self-appointed fiancé in the balls, that’d cut it short, but Dad wants to be smoother than that about turning them down, or something. Dad.”

“That never was his strong point. Your mother would’ve handled that,” Vincent says, which is exactly what Yuffie’s been thinking for the last couple weeks.

Except from Vincent it just sounds…reasonable. Just a fact, and not the start of a never-ending spiral of Yuffie and her father trying to score hits off each other because neither of them can do what her mother used to. She’s old enough now to get that without being old, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t still make her angry. Doesn’t mean she doesn’t feel like she should still be angry.

“Would she really?” Yuffie finds herself asking, sharply. But it’s okay with Vincent—he’s known her forever, and he knows it’s not at him.

He knows she couldn’t even scratch him over this if she somehow got her whole clan behind it, and unlike a lot of people, he doesn’t care about lording that over her. He just sits and drinks his blood, and then, after a second, nods. “She had the better connections to them anyway. Your father has to start over, to a certain extent.”

“Well, or he could just stuff his pride and stop being a jerk to the in-laws. It’s not like they want me handed over either, they just can’t get over themselves long enough to agree we’re right,” Yuffie mutters. She toes at the roof tiles. “I bet Mom would’ve just shelled out to have you drop in on a couple people.”

Vincent chuckles into his thermos. “She and I shared some political views, but I was hardly her go-to, Yuffie. Your father’s more likely to do that.”

“Dad? Nah, he’s too scared to even look like he’s borrowing somebody from Shinra, even though we all know that’s not really what you’re doing over there,” Yuffie says. She swipes her foot across the tiles again, then looks at Vincent. “Well, so, Melphie says her aunt’s really just interested in the healing factor. There were a couple jerkasses who wanted to explore a couple more enhancements, but we’re pretty sure we’ve IDed all of them. We haven’t found all of them—”

“No need. As long as their disappearance won’t unbalance anything, your father doesn’t need to concern himself with that,” Vincent says. He wipes his mouth with the back of his finger, then pulls out another piece of newspaper to swab at that and at the rim of his thermos. Then he crumples up the paper, sets it on fire, and tosses it high enough that it comes down only as specks of cooling ash. “Enhanced healing factor on its own shouldn’t be problematic, but—”

“We’ll keep an eye on it, yeah. I mean, you’re cool, but one thing Dad does remember from Mom is not counting on our being the only ones with the cool stuff,” Yuffie says. She tucks the dead chicken under one arm as Vincent starts to rise. “Anyway, whatever you say about us, we don’t need the money that bad. People can find somewhere else to stand up their Sephiroth clones. But I gotta say, Vinny, not all the clans are with me and my dad on that, and we also don’t have the spare cash. If Shinra’s really interested in making nice on this side of the border, they might wanna make sure they’re matching offers, or else you’re gonna be over here a lot more often.”

Vincent doesn’t twitch or stiffen or anything like that, but he gives her a look, and for a moment…that chicken doesn’t seem so stupid to Yuffie. He wouldn’t hurt her if he didn’t have to, but…Yuffie remembers her mom telling her, there’s just no point in making someone like Vincent make that kind of choice, because they’re never going to be enough for him. He wants something no one sitting in a clan can ever really have: his own way.

And she doesn’t mean any harm with what she’s saying. She’s just telling him what she knows, the way she knows it. He sees that, when he looks, and when he smiles at her, she smiles back without even thinking about it because him being that way, that means they actually are friends. Because she can’t really be friends with anyone who’s attached to one of the clans, and that’s all she honestly wants from him.

“Noted. Give your father my regards,” he says, before taking off across the roof-tops.

She watches him go till she has to blink, and when she does, she loses him even though he was in an open stretch, no gables or water tanks or A/C units in the way. But she doesn’t try to find him again. Just gets up, dusts herself off, and then starts thinking about what she’s going to do with this dead chicken.

Chapter 37: Side-Story: Genesis Has Reasons (and Some of Them Are Reasonable)

Genesis is very familiar by now with the warning signs for another recurrence of degradation in his shoulder. Proper treatment requires a good week in SOLDIER medical, trying not to stab the staff hooking him up to bags of precursor material that the injections he’s given need to rebuild his DNA, but he and all the Firsts have emergency kits with a single-dose injector of some drug Sephiroth’s mother came up with that simply blocks the key enzyme for degradation. Of course, that enzyme is also needed for regular metabolic processes, so if Genesis doesn’t check into medical within twenty-four hours of injecting the blocker, the consequences are just as bad.

But twenty-four hours is twenty-four hours, and given he’d been six hours away from his entry point and two from the nearest exit from the Midgar sewers, it was a fairly simple tactical choice. Arrive at medical twelve to fourteen hours later, when he’d already be showing the negative effects of the blocker and be lucky if they didn’t have to induce a temporary coma, or finish the fight, continue to the planned exit, and start treatment while he’s still capable of his own mobility.

“It’s not as if either of us is enamored of the idea of you heroically carrying me to safety, and wouldn’t that look marvelous on the news. First-Class General faints during routine sewer purge, are SOLDIER and Shinra hiding secrets from us?” Genesis snaps irritably as he yanks on his boots.

The world spins lazily as soon as his head drops below knee-level. He wants to reach for his sword and skewer it in place, but one, he’s currently unarmed and two, he knows—he knows it won’t make things better. He knows the only thing to do is to submit to treatments that, no matter what they do, disclose to at least a small group of individuals the price he continues to pay for biological meddling he neither asked for nor consented to.

But unleashing his anger would, he thinks, let him prove to them that his payment on their behalf isn’t forgiveness. He thinks, longing for that storm of fire, and then he draws a deep breath, pushes off the palm he’s slapped against the floor, and straightens up.

Sephiroth is still waiting on him. Waiting on him, the great General himself, with an expression as if this is little more than another of Genesis’ temper tantrums over coffee, or forms, or any other petty indignity Shinra’s decided to foist on top of their existence, but still waiting on him. Honorable or not, it’s some sort of badge, and Genesis…Genesis is too tired today for fire. So he’ll sit here, panting, in this icy tomb of a hospital room instead.

“He’ll come back,” Sephiroth says once he apparently thinks Genesis is ready for conversation again.

Genesis snorts. “Hopefully without that nonsense about checking both of us into medical for exams. There’s nothing wrong with your senses—unless you think so little of me as to believe I can’t act.”

“I have some questions about where you gained the skill to hide your change in scent, but that can wait for the blood work-up,” Sephiroth says after a moment. His brows are slightly pulled together, but overall he’s being rather muted about this. Almost disturbingly so. “I think you could have made your point without defending me.”

“Is that what you’re going to take offense to?” Genesis says with a half-laugh, dry and bitter. “And here I thought you’d appreciate the token of friendship, given Angeal’s switch in sides.”

“Angeal hasn’t switched sides any more than you genuinely thought I needed your input to convince him I’d acted correctly. And I don’t think he is convinced,” Sephiroth says in that crisp, level commander’s voice of his. He knows it’s going to grate on Genesis at a time like this, but only doubles down on it as he goes on; his coolness in the field is a wonder in and of itself, Genesis isn’t so much of a fool to say otherwise, but he also makes one wonder whether this is the real man, or the occasional scrap of humanity is. “I don’t think he disagrees with your choice either, but he wanted to know before we surfaced. For that matter—but I can discipline you later, and for me, if you accept it, that’s the end of it. For him it’s personal.”

“For him it’s a slight if I don’t keep him updated on every damn thing that happens to me, as if it’s anything more than an excuse for him to worry himself into the ground,” Genesis snarls before he can help himself. He’s forceful enough that even Sephiroth in unflappable mode straightens up, hand sliding off one knee towards Masamune…but Sephiroth keeps his hand a few inches away, simply staring at Genesis as if this is in fact a new piece of information for him. As if they don’t go through the same rigmarole every time. “And then I have to coax him out of it, because he can’t fret my DNA into repairing itself, and he can’t take me out of your mother’s doctors’ hands before they’re done, not if I want to keep the shoulder. And he can’t do anything except worry so much anyone with half a brain would look at us and decide he’s the First to approach for—for backdoor dealing or political traps or whatever they’re looking to lay at our feet today. Is your direction to put up with that, General?”

Sephiroth’s brows twitch again, and so do his fingers, curling towards Masamune again before he deliberately lifts and places his hand back on his knee. His gaze when Genesis looks up at it is knowing but not coy, cool as a Nibelheim breeze, and he lets an unusually long silence play out before he speaks again.

“It’s a good point, Angeal’s vulnerability when you’re indisposed. I’ll address it,” Sephiroth says. Then raises his brows as Genesis bridles. “Genesis, you cannot reveal that and expect me to ignore it. At the same time, I recognize that there’s a—personal dimension. And I do think if you want that addressed, you’ll have to do it yourself. Inviting me into it is only going to prolong your argument with him, and then neither of you spend as much time listening to each other as trying to explain it to me.”

“And I’m certain you prefer other ways to spend your time. I’m surprised Vincent hasn’t already stopped in,” Genesis says, knowing very well it’s an injudicious barb but unwilling to stop himself. If he has to accept the truth, he will, but he sees no reason why he can’t show its deliverer the kind of edge it carries. “Fine. I’ll deal with him, as I always—”

“If you want a different setting, I can do that,” Sephiroth adds rather abruptly. Not accidentally, clearly, but his form is less than graceful even as he finds the target. “I don’t mind that. But it’s still between the two of you to actually settle it.”

“Vincent’s been quite the influence on you,” Genesis says after a second. He’s still angry, but he has to admit that sheer surprise has knocked him off-kilter, leaving enough room for genuine curiosity to creep in. “A different setting? Somewhere where we can control the PR better, and be certain no one will hear our screaming?”

“Somewhere you’re more likely to direct his attention where you want it, rather than at whatever ways you’re trying to make him lose his temper. He can’t think well in that mood, you know that,” Sephiroth says. Still a little stiff, but his ever-present self-belief is carrying him forward well enough. “If you do actually want him to hear you.”

“I want him. Make no mistake about that,” Genesis snaps, hearing the implied question behind Sephiroth’s words. Coolheaded strategist that the man is, he’s not above baiting when he thinks it expedient, however settled he is with Valentine. “And far be it from me to refuse a direct—”

“It’s an offer, Genesis. A personal one. I’m still going to deal with you both as our ranks require,” Sephiroth says, finally sounding exasperated. He gets to his feet, then half-turns to move the chair he’d been using back against the wall. “But I want you two to—work. To work it out. I know the treatments are…what they are. I wouldn’t order you to keep having them if there was no point, and the point is not solely to keep you as a First. I’m not my damn mother.”

“No more than you are Hojo, or Heidegger and Hollander,” Genesis says slowly. This is an interesting mood for Sephiroth, he thinks as he studies the other man. He’s still not quite trusting in its reality, and if he can’t trust that it’s real, to try to determine his feelings about it—but he finds it interesting, and that is not how he usually finds the man. “I recognize that.”

Sephiroth doesn’t resort to platitudes, something Genesis genuinely likes about him, and merely nods. “You’re on medical leave for the rest of the week. Zack’s already messaged your unit,” he says, as if divining they’ve both had too much of his unusual thoughtfulness. “Try to spend some of the downtime thinking and then let me know.”

“Try not to spend it indulging Angeal. It’s not helping him to know he can always retreat to you, when he wants to hide in his own head,” Genesis snipes.

But Sephiroth actually pauses and seems to take in the comment. His lips tighten, but he nods again before he walks out.

Genesis reaches for his coat, then hisses as dull, scraping pain blossoms within his shoulder and then feathers out over his upper back. He drags his arm back to his side, cradling it against his ribs as he gets up and then throws the coat one-handed over himself. Then he drops back onto the gurney, catching his breath and trying to think about what has just happened.

But everywhere he looks, he sees something to knock his thoughts out of it: the IV stand with its spent pouch, then the fresh injector kit waiting for him on the counter. His sword leaning against the wall, promising fruitless mayhem. He could make the world feel what he feels, he thinks, but he doesn’t actually want to spend all his time feeling this way.

He misses that idiot already.

He ends up saying so, hours later over the dinner table, when, after he’s been released to spend the night at home provided he checks into medical promptly at six the next morning, Angeal shows up. Usually the man doesn’t stumble in till just before the workday starts, guilt-ridden and seething at the doctors when he’s not trying to fumble Genesis like a glass ornament in a child’s hands, but then, usually they are doing this in a hospital room.

“Seph said he got you on outpatient basis for this one, since it doesn’t look too bad so far,” Angeal blurts out over the takeout containers he’s piling onto the table. “I know there’s no food in the fridge.”

“I have a tablet and a working knowledge of how to find a delivery option,” Genesis mutters, and then finds his temper flaring when Angeal flinches. “It’s all well and good for you to show up now, after hauling yourself Goddess knows where, but I’ve already been home for hours and I could’ve used you, you fool.”

Angeal blinks. “I thought it wasn’t bad.”

“It’s not crippling. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt,” Genesis snaps, exhausted already, before he flops back in his chair. He presses his hand over his face, wondering if he should have stuck to the hospital room, where any kind of altercation brings a team running with the option of tranquilizers. And Sephiroth in their wake, with reprimands and more on his lips, and his mother’s presence always promising to make itself felt, but…that reminds Genesis. “What did he say to you?”

“Just to go home and see you. Vincent’s in.” Angeal looks guilty again, but it’s a different shade, a lighter one. “I don’t think they want to be interrupted.”

“Well, it wasn’t a pleasant trip through the sewers even when you take my attack out of it,” Genesis has to admit. He looks at the food. His stomach is rumbling and he rubs an absent hand over it; he could have ordered something long ago, and should have with how the therapy jumpstarts his appetite, but he’d been barely able to muster the energy to wash the hospital stink off of himself. “You went crawling to stay with him again while I was twitching on the shower floor.”

“I didn’t think—” Angeal’s jaw hardens, and then he glances at the food. He gives the nearest container a shove as he starts to turn away. “Look, I don’t want to make this worse so if you—”

“Angeal,” Genesis says before he thinks about it. And perhaps that’s why he sounds as he does: sharp with pain, not anger, and his voice breaking at the end.

He still doesn’t have much expectation of Angeal stopping, based on how they usually handle this, but…the other man does. Sighing, wary, but he turns towards Genesis.

And the world can go burn on its own, without any help from Genesis, because sometimes all Genesis wants is one man to stop and wait for him. One man, to know that he has one man on his side, against everything that can be thrown at him.

“Angeal,” he says again, and then he slumps in his chair.

“What do you want, Gen? Because you have to tell me—I can’t guess without thinking I’m going to set you off,” Angeal says, quietly harsh. “You tell me, I’ll do it, but I can’t—if you want me to stay, I can’t—”

“I need you,” Genesis admits. It hurts—he hurts. He reaches for his shoulder but ends up digging his fingertips into his chest a few inches away, exhaling through a vicious spasm. “I need you—I need you where I can see you. It’s not a bad one, but…don’t make me deal with this and have to worry about what mess you’re making without me, Hewley. I’m not Sephiroth, I can’t pretend my lover doesn’t exist when he’s not in the same room.”

Angeal hesitates, gaze searching Genesis’ face. Then he rounds the table. His hand floats towards Genesis’ shoulder, but then detours even before Genesis has to twist away, choosing instead to smooth Genesis’ damp hair back behind one ear. “He’s not that good at that, and I’m not that bad,” he says as he finishes opening food containers with his other hand.

“Really,” Genesis snorts. “I’m the undisciplined one, but Sephiroth still calls me ahead of you when he needs someone to go for the throat.”

“Stop picking a fight, Gen,” Angeal says. He sounds tired, and for a moment his fingers move as if he’s going to…but then they go back and slide more firmly into Genesis’ hair, pressing him against the other man’s side as Angeal starts to fork up some food. “I’d take care of you if you’d let me, so let me. That what you want?”

Genesis shifts against him, and Angeal goes very still, very intent on him. It…is, but to say so, when he’s having one of his episodes and his deepest, truest fear about them isn’t his own bodily state but the fact that he might have to deal with some other disaster while he’s like this, might have to rise and find the energy to save Angeal from some well-meaning idiocy, weakened and dependent on the very organization that has made them this way. And things could be worse for them—he has thought about what SOLDIER would have been like if Heidegger had gotten hold of it, now that the man’s dead—but even as they are, he needs all his strength to be able to match it. He needs Angeal to match the world as it is, and not as any of them, including Sephiroth, wishes it to be.

“Okay, later,” Angeal says. Tired, disappointed, but the next thing he does is hold the fork to Genesis’ mouth. He’s not leaving now, at least.

He’s not, and whatever the reason for it, Sephiroth’s doing or Angeal’s guilt—Genesis isn’t too principled to refuse it simply for the sake of knowing. He can bide his time as well, and in the meantime…he leans against Angeal, and accepts the food.

* * *

Sephiroth’s a stunning man in any condition, but on his knees, slowly rubbing his leather-muzzled mouth against Vincent’s thigh, he’s a gorgeous plaything who barely seems real, as if Vincent pulled him straight out of some feverish fairytale.

White silk slip, the straps of its halter top laced back over his neck and dangling tempting little tassels down his bare back, playing peekaboo with the long, smooth braid that hangs to the waist. Its sheen frosts over the lines of his body, with silver lace edging and silver-embroidered brocading just begging fingers to trace along them, to slide into the slits up each hip or to tickle the muscles flexing tightly within a set of snug black leather straps. Collar on the throat, then a criss-cross of a waist harness that starts just below the pectorals and wraps Sephiroth to the tops of the hips, keeping all that silk taut, making the diamonds between the straps shimmer whenever Sephiroth shivers. The harness connects to arm-cuffs, three on each side, which keep the limbs pulled straight down the sides and slightly back.

More cuffs link wrists and ankles, restraining the man while making it as easy as a nudge of a foot to spread him open for anything. He responds to it as well, twisting his head against the hand Vincent has cupping his jaw and moaning against his gag, a shiver running up and down him so that the hem of his slip flirts over his buttocks.

“You marked him already,” Angeal says, as dark lines shade through the white silk.

“For a foundation,” Vincent says, and then grips Sephiroth’s braid to make the other man slowly shuffle about, throwing his body out against the harness as he moves. He puts his own foot between Sephiroth’s legs from behind, splaying the man as he likes, and then drags Sephiroth’s head back against his hip as Angeal lifts the front of the slip. “No, on his chest.”

Underneath the silk Sephiroth’s cock is harnessed too, pointed up along his belly and then laced in place with black leather. Angeal brushes along it as he smooths the slip back down and straightens a little, and Sephiroth’s hazed-over eyes stare past him at the ceiling, green bright but clouded, jade rather than hard, clear emerald.

Vincent undoes the top of the slip and lets the straps fall forward over the waist harness as Angeal runs his fingers across the bruising. Perfectly straight lines, equally-spaced like a ladder down the chest. The nipples are swollen too, and when he catches one between two fingers, Sephiroth arches for him, eyes closing and jaw bobbing into the hand Vincent’s caressing under it.

“Think I’m going to try the first one here,” Angeal says.

Sephiroth doesn’t react. Vincent only nods, smiling in that amused, secretive way of his, as Angeal steps back and gives the crop a practice swing.

There’s a muffled hiss from the foot of the bed. Angeal gives it a second to die away but doesn’t look back before he starts striking Sephiroth. Four quick blows, as Sephiroth jerks against his bonds, and then a break to let Vincent settle him with soft strokes at his throat, the sudden coiling of the man’s tail out of the bottom of Sephiroth’s slip. Angeal tries to ignore that, just concentrating on checking the half-formed pattern on Sephiroth’s left pectoral before he starts the next set of blows.

When that side is finished, he goes and gets a glass of ice cubes from the kitchen for Vincent, who plucks out one and lets it melt skating over the fresh bruising. Circling it about Sephiroth’s nipple, bouncing under the man’s suppressed whimpers, before he nods. “Perfect.”

“Pretty on him.” Angeal studies it for a second. “Gen’s not as broad, though. Dunno that it’d look good crowded together.”

Vincent shrugs. He wipes water off Sephiroth’s chest and then pulls the other man against his leg again. “Try the other one.”

Sephiroth’s squirming when they’re done with that, even his gag unable to hold in his cries. Angeal looks at both pectorals, new welts crisp red against the older, darker marks, with the untouched flesh in between made even more inviting for a rough touch, a bite. They’re both good suggestions on Vincent’s part but in the end, Angeal shakes his head and Vincent pulls the front of the slip back up. Ties it in place, and then pulls out a bundle of silk cord that he then stretches and knots over the bodice, pulling Sephiroth’s nipples through slits in the bodice so that they can serve as centerpieces for the lacework.

“Must hurt whenever he breathes,” Angeal can’t help saying, watching the nipples flush redder and redder in their ties.

“It does.” Vincent uses a ring hanging off the front of Sephiroth’s collar and rings attached to the sides of the waist harness to anchor the taut netting. When he’s done, he moves around so that he’s standing in front of Sephiroth. Still with the man’s braid wrapped around his hand, serving as a leash as he pushes them flush, forcing Sephiroth’s chest to ride up against his legs. As Sephiroth shudders and whines, nuzzling his gagged mouth with helpless desperation at Vincent’s crotch, Vincent moves his hand down to splay between Sephiroth’s shoulderblades, pinning him there. “He likes it.”

“I can see that,” Angeal snorts. He catches himself digging the heel of his hand at his erection, then pulls it away so that he can fold up the back of Sephiroth’s slip. He tucks it into the harness as Sephiroth pulls at his cuffs, long, elegant fingers beating at the soles of the feet rocking under them. Then he snorts again and uses the crop to push first one, then the other buttock out of the way. “That’s clever. So you can take that out and fuck him without unstrapping his cock.”

“I think I’ll sit with him on the bed once you’ve chosen which one you want,” Vincent says. His tail’s disappeared and Angeal tries not to think too hard on it as the other man keeps Sephiroth twisting in place, plucking the silk cord harness he’s made with one finger as if Sephiroth’s a string instrument. “Do you want to try one on either side, or—”

“No, I’m just gonna lay it down on both, and then see. But I have a feeling. Gen’s always been kind of partial to that one, and he’s gonna be wearing it for a couple days. I just want to make sure I like looking at it, too,” Angeal says.

Vincent nods, and then stands by as Angeal proceeds to cover the spaces between Sephiroth’s existing bruises with fresh marks. Sephiroth bows himself up against Vincent, then straightens, shuddering, making soft noises that barely penetrate his gag. He’s sweated through the slip by the time they’re done, rivulets of it tracing over his welted buttocks so Angeal has to wipe at them to get a good look at how the pattern is shaping up.

“Here,” Vincent is saying when Angeal gets back on his feet, over a suddenly-sharp gasp from Sephiroth. Who’s ungagged now, but still mute as he gratefully sucks the ice cubes Vincent feeds him.

“Yeah, this one,” Angeal says. He steps back over to Genesis, who jerks up against his leash and then folds himself about Angeal’s leg, urgently enough for Angeal to glance down at him.

Genesis isn’t as dressed-up as usual, with just a collar, the cuffs holding his hands behind his back and his cock sheath. He’s passed all the tests but there’s still a dark, irregular shadow over his shoulder, one that Angeal can’t help touching as he and Genesis look at each other. There’s a flicker of something in Genesis’ eyes, something not arousal—but not irritation either. And then Genesis sucks Angeal’s finger into his mouth when Angeal would’ve expected him to come out with a tart comment.

Maybe there’s still a little of that lurking in Genesis’ eyes, with how boldly he’s staring up over Angeal’s hand, but he keeps on sucking at Angeal’s finger, rendering himself quiet. He’d asked Angeal to make this good for him, to make them both see that the episode was well and truly over—that if he had to keep taking sick leave, it’d be for a reason medical wouldn’t want to log, as he’d put it. And it’d been mostly a demand, but for Genesis, that was truly begging, and not what they do here.

But this—this is what Angeal wants out of him. The begging is over, and now Angeal gets to treat the man as he sees fit, without any complaints. “Yeah,” he says, pushing the knuckle of his thumb against Genesis’ chin. “Yeah, the last one. That one’s gonna work.”

Vincent makes an acknowledging noise, and when Angeal looks over, the man already has Sephiroth half-on the bed. Angeal shakes his hand free of Genesis, making himself ignore the needy noise that results, and goes over to help Vincent. And his friend, since whatever Sephiroth had said to Genesis, it’d made this happen, and that’s the least Angeal owes him.

So he gets Sephiroth set up right too. Plug out so they can get him onto Vincent’s cock and then strap his legs in place, leather belts keeping them thigh-to-calf. Vincent lengthens the straps between his wrist- and ankle-cuffs, letting him lie back against the other man, which he does as soon as he’s allowed. Moaning openly, rolling his hips as Vincent grips them and leans over one shoulder for a kiss.

“Do you have the clamps?” Vincent asks as his tongue coils out of Sephiroth’s mouth.

Sephiroth starts, groaning, and then continues to lap and nose at the side of Vincent’s jaw as Vincent turns forward. “Vincent, please,” he begs in a raspy, breathy voice. “Please, I’m sore—”

“You promised them you’d take leave too,” Vincent says, lifting his jaw for Sephiroth’s caresses. He’s clearly not giving into them, and Sephiroth knows that too from the way a desperate, broken noise drags out of the man. “You and Rhapsodos both, so medical doesn’t pry into why without coming to you.”

“I really appreciate it, Seph. Honestly, the double-shift’s gonna be the best thing that happened to me this month,” Angeal says, with genuine sincerity. Enough so that he has to laugh at the small, irritated noise from the foot of the bed. “After what I’m gonna do to Gen. So you just sit here and enjoy the show with Vincent.”

Sephiroth starts to say something, but then lapses back into mewling as Vincent moves his hands up to push the man forward by the shoulders. He jerks a little upon seeing the clamps in Angeal’s hands; Angeal holds them at eye-level, toothy jaws open, before lowering them to their intended level. Sephiroth’s eyes try to drop with them and then Vincent tugs on the silk cords from behind, making his eyes roll back up as they tighten across his chest. He whines louder as Vincent nudges him into the clamps, then sucks his breath across his teeth as Angeal slowly lets them close over his nipples.

“Hot,” Sephiroth gasps, jumping in place. Then he twists more sluggishly, shudders going through his chest and making the clamps wink in the light, as Vincent draws him back to slump his head over the other man’s shoulder. “Hurts. Vincent…”

“Want his gag?” Angeal asks.

Vincent drapes his arms around Sephiroth’s waist. Then moves one up to rub just below the left nipple while keeping the other angled down, using the lower hand to hold up Sephiroth’s slip. His tail comes back out and around, slithering under the front of the slip to wind against Sephiroth’s cock as Sephiroth shivers and groans.

“No,” Vincent says, looking at Sephiroth. “But another glass of ice would be helpful.”

“Sure.” Angeal gets him that, and then, after handing it over, he goes to the end of the bed and unclips Genesis from his leash.

The other man comes up willingly for the kiss, and then even more eagerly goes limp with Angeal flips him belly-down onto the bed. He moans, cupping his buttocks with his hands, their red-leather cuffs riding prettily above the white curves, and then humps up onto his knees as Angeal starts strapping his arms more tightly to his back.

“Let’s make you pretty, Gen. How would you like that?” Angeal asks. He sounds rough, and has to swallow hard.

“I want it,” Genesis gasps. Face buried in the bedding but he’s still audible, the want in his voice is real. “Make it show. Make me show how much you own me, and then keep me here.”

Angeal has to stop for a moment, half-buckled strap in his hand, because of how that hits him. How much he wants that. “I’m going to keep you, all right,” he says when he can breathe again. “Keep you the way you’re supposed to be, you fucking brat, if I have to do this in the hospital next time. I’ll keep you.”

“Yes,” Genesis groans, his arms pliantly moving with the additional bonds. “Goddess, yes.”

* * *

Genesis has long since devolved into a voiceless, quivering heap, with only the rare stray sob as Angeal continues to fuck into him. He’s covered with welts, from shoulderblades well down the thighs, and even if the pattern is quite beautiful, enhancing the man’s natural leanness, it’s going to make it impossible for him to lie on his back for at least a day.

But then, Sephiroth’s little better. Lolling on Vincent’s cock, muscles long since exhausted of any energy, and yet unable to keep himself from twitching whenever Vincent caresses him. And Vincent is very fond of that: flicking at Sephiroth’s cockhead with his tail-tip, coiling more of that around Sephiroth’s aching, come-weighted ball sac, while his mouth leaves stinging bites all over Sephiroth’s shoulders and throat and shoulderblades. And his hands—his hands won’t stop playing with Sephiroth’s nipples.

The clamps came off a while ago. The rush of blood wasn’t painful so much as a complete reset of everything, mind and body, leaving Sephiroth little more than a prettily-packaged collection of whimpers. But Vincent’s drawn him back into himself, enough so that he can’t simply float on the boundary between pain and pleasure but feels himself constantly re-aligned on it. Ice on his poor chest, chips tucked into the silk cords to dribble soothing coolness on him while fingertips massage the pain blunt, only for the sudden sharp edge of a nail, or even the teasing almost-cut of a claw tip to bring his nipples back to fiery aching.

“Please, Vincent,” Sephiroth whispers, dragging his lips against the man’s jaw not out of coyness but because he has no strength for more. “Please. I need to come, please, I’m burning—”

“And then what do you want me to do with you?” Vincent asks. Licking playfully at Sephiroth’s mouth, tongue dancing about too quickly to be caught. Then he kisses Sephiroth’s temple, his hands finally moving downwards. “So used…you can’t serve SOLDIER like this.”

“But—you, you,” Sephiroth murmurs. “You can use me—but let me come. Let me come and use me all you want, please. Use me—”

“He was good,” Angeal grunts suddenly. Pausing to catch his breath, and overhearing them. “I think he deserves it.”

“He always deserves it,” Vincent says. Warm, not taunting, as his fingers deftly loosen the leather bindings from Sephiroth’s cock. “He can be a cockwarmer, if nothing else. So go ahead, come. You’ll still keep serving me.”

Sephiroth comes, violently enough that even after he’s been freed and Vincent has helped him through a shower, they end up having dinner with Angeal and Genesis rather than going home as planned. Curaga would wipe out what they’re relying on to justify their sick leave, and anyway, Angeal’s quite a good cook himself, if not with Wutaian cuisine.

“That was useful,” Genesis says just before the meal, when Angeal and Vincent are out of the room. Consulting on something, Vincent interested in a Banoran recipe he’s apparently never come across, and he and Sephiroth are resting on a blanket on the floor. “Thoughtful, even. You’ve never been your mother but you weren’t so intelligent about personal and professional boundaries before.”

“Is that supposed to be an insult?” Sephiroth has to ask, given the circumstances leading to their current setting.

Genesis looks at him for a long time. The man is generally not difficult to read at all, in Sephiroth’s opinion, with his inability to suppress any feeling even for the sake of a strategic advantage. But every so often that inner restlessness seems to dampen, and when it does, Genesis can be almost savant-like in his insights.

“No,” he says, before putting his head down on his arm and closing his eyes. “If I had told you, would you have let me fight next to you? You wouldn’t have backtracked either, but would you have sent me to the rear?”

“In the sewers?” Sephiroth says, and then, when Genesis nods, he considers it. The mission had been strenuous but not anything he’d consider challenging, not to Firsts of their level of experience. But Genesis’ episodes are never easy to dismiss, even the less severe ones; there’s always the possibility that they’ll throw up a new development and then Sephiroth’s mother will have to be brought in to consult on it. And she dislikes Genesis.

She values him enough to not argue with Sephiroth about continuing to refine the degradation treatments, but in addition to the flawed genetic work, she sees him as a less biddable option to Angeal. And she doesn’t understand at all that removing Genesis will not let her keep Angeal. So Sephiroth doesn’t take the possibility of having to consult her lightly, even aside from his own interests in her research.

But Genesis knows this too—neither he nor Sephiroth’s mother hide their antipathy for each other. He underestimates Sephiroth’s ability to handle her, but that’s a different matter. “When I can trust that you’re accurately assessing the potential impact on yourself. I would rather have you fight in the front, Genesis. You’re wasted on the rear.”

“You don’t think I know the signs of my own body?” Genesis says. Irritated, but a little less than he’d normally be. And while his eyes briefly slit open, he then turns his face back into his arm with a huff. “Well—let’s not spoil the evening. We’ll take this up some other time.”

“I’m looking forward to it,” Sephiroth says, to another huff from Genesis.

He’s not being entirely sarcastic. They do need to keep this from turning into another grudge, and he won’t shy away from that. But at the same time…he’s grateful, when Vincent returns and helps him to his feet, and they find that he’s capable of limping his way to the door.

“No more than that,” Vincent observes, as he lets Sephiroth lean on him in the elevator to their floor.

“Then take me home, and put me to bed,” Sephiroth says. He sighs as Vincent curls an arm more closely about his waist. “I have what I want for the night. Take me home.”

Chapter 38: Interlude: Zack Cares, Even When You’re a Dick (and Vincent Is Interested, Even When He Doesn’t Say)

“So look, I’m all about SOLDIER sticking up for SOLDIER, all right? I mean, voted most likely to be a recruiting poster boy three years running—”

“You are on the posters,” Angeal says, surreptitiously checking his phone. No urgent flags on his messages.

“—and you don’t get that if you are not one-ten-percent trying to look after your teammates one-ten-percent every day, all day, from the second these baby blues are locked and loaded for all your daily questions, just throw ‘em at me and Commander Fair will make sure they get nailed down—”

And they’d just come back from lunch break, so Angeal can’t excuse himself for that either. “Zack, that makes no sense.”

“I know, I know, I mean, if you point out that hey, those orders don’t actually look like orders, I think your standard reaction would be oh my God thank you so much, you just saved me hours of work I could’ve spent spit-polishing my bike and also probably a court-martial, but is that what I got?” Zack declaims to the framed photo of Angeal and Genesis in their newly-promoted First uniforms that’s on the wall in front of him. He waves his arms a little, with some flicky motions at the fingertips, and then spins around to dramatically collapse into the nearest chair. “No! No! He was pissed at me, Ang! Pissed off because I called his ‘official’ orders for the stupid private message they were, and Gen didn’t even say ‘do it,’ he—”

“‘How interesting’ period,” Angeal says, letting out a long sigh. “Yeah, look, leave that. I’m taking it up with Gen—”

“Okay, well, good, because I know the handbook just as well and that thing about improvising in the field is an exception, not a career motto,” Zack says. He kicks his feet out with more than his usual amount of irritation, which does make Angeal pay more attention; both of them know better than to hope Genesis will stop the self-defeating antics, but Zack normally takes that as much in stride as he does Sephiroth’s inability to let another department criticize his officers, even when it’s valid, go without a response. “But you know what really, really gets me about that asshole?”

“That he’s not actually going to realize how much cover Gen’s giving his bullshit, because Roche just expects that Gen thinks he’s that good under the hair?” Angeal says dryly.

Zack starts to rant on, then coughs sharply as he actually hears what Angeal had said. His lips quirk up at the corners, but then he coughs again. “Good one, Ang. And yeah, that, and also, again, I did not have to break it down for him, but no, good ol’ Zack’s gonna go out of his way to explain how your sword there is kind of stabbing straight in your foot, even though you have the actual balls to ask when my guy Cloud’s coming back to town so you can have your ‘heavenly rematch,’ add all the sparkly hearts—”

Angeal snorts before he can help himself. “What?”

“Oh, Roche has been asking about Cloud since that beatdown in the training room. I told him to his face I already have an interest there, and he just—” Zack’s eyes bulge, and for a moment he’s unable to speak out of sheer paralyzing indignation “—he reminded me he has a higher simulator score than me, even though that’s just totally irrelevant and also—just one attack stance, and his overall scores are shitty because he can’t defend worth a—anyway. No. Cloud thinks he’s a dick anyway.”

“So nothing to worry about, now take a sec and breathe before I gotta put you on my knee and smack air back into you,” Angeal says.

He pushes up and starts to reach out, only for Zack to bat his hand away. “Yeah, look, I know, I shouldn’t let him get to me. But the thing is, Ang—I went and checked it out myself. Properly, I set up a mission in the system and took the actual team you’re supposed to when you get a weird spike on the still-recovering-from-hurricane sensors, and…it wasn’t, well, anything, but also, R&D was lurking around.”

Angeal stiffens. “R&D?”

“Yeah, I mean, two labcoats, a water sample kit, and a camera drone, so maybe it’s just to check for mutagens like they said,” Zack says. He’s calmer now, but the lack of flailing just accentuates how sober his mood has suddenly turned. “Except we had that spot marked already, and it wasn’t exactly near residential areas so didn’t need to be prioritized, and Roche was only over there because everyone figures keep him away from civilians and I don’t know, it feels set-up-ish. I mean, not with Gen. Gen was just—”

“Gen’s still sore he’s not getting to handle Roche’s discipline, he wasn’t paying a damn bit of attention to what Roche was actually messaging him about beyond the fact that he can still fucking talk to the guy off-duty,” Angeal mutters, his stomach sinking. He glances at his phone, not looking for an excuse, and then grits his teeth. “Fuck. Well, even if you’re not sure, Seph should know.”

Zack grimaces. “Yeah, I’ve got it lined up for our briefing in an hour. I just…you think it might be a good idea to, you know, get Vincent around? I know he’s in, I walked past him while trying to find Reno’s ass to kick it earlier, and you know how Seph gets about this.”

“He’s not going to charm Seph into not tearing R&D a new hole, Fair,” Angeal says, but he nods too, so Zack doesn’t take it as a complete dismissal. Which it isn’t.

“Yeah, we want him to do that. But also, we want him to not break a whole room of simulators right before budget reviews because of his mom,” Zack reminds him, looking unhappy. “Lazard caught me about that, he said she’s been bitching again that she doesn’t get enough field data to work with for upgrades. I…have no reason to say it’s unrelated, but I still feel twitchy.”

“Yeah. Yeah.” Angeal pushes his face against his folded hands for a few seconds, thinking. Genesis is still deep into unburying himself from his latest medical leave, so Angeal probably has to get to him sooner rather than later, before he and Roche get into another stupid round of messaging. He and Angeal are in a better place at the moment, but Angeal doesn’t kid himself about how much that’s going to tax his diplomatic skills, which are not his strong point, and Sephiroth…Sephiroth’s going to need to be on top of this. “I was going to chase Tuesti and Scarlet down for those ballistics reports, but I’m gonna need you to do that and free me up.”

“On it, sir,” Zack promptly says, and then he cocks his head. “So you’re gonna chase Vincent down too? I just saw him, I—”

“I’m just going to ask Tseng, Zack. No point in you running your legs off for that,” Angeal says, pushing himself up from his seat. “Wouldn’t be surprised if Tseng’s already looking for one of us, to be honest. If it was a set-up, it wasn’t a very smooth one.”

Which Tseng agrees with when Angeal finds him. If R&D’s trying to lure people into mutation hot spots again just for brownie points with Sephiroth’s mother, the Turks are as likely as disobedient SOLDIERs to be targets, so Tseng’s got no reason to let them know and plenty of reasons to reassure Angeal his teams had had no idea. “But I should ask Vincent,” he says without Angeal even prompting. “He handles most of the comms with Dr. Crescent for us.”

“That isn’t awkward?” Angeal says without thinking.

Tseng doesn’t answer, merely slides his eyes to a point a few inches left of Angeal’s head. Because of course he’d already called the other man, and of course Vincent’s standing right there when Angeal turns, looking entirely unruffled.

Not just about the comment, but also about what Angeal’s come to ask about. “I’d noticed a few similar incidents when I was in the area,” Vincent says as Angeal walks him back to Sephiroth’s office. “Low-level, possibly accidental, or coincidence. R&D does have a large team down there, and they weren’t able to work because of the storm. Scientists do tend to try and keep themselves busy.”

“Speaking from experience, huh,” Angeal says. He’s a little put off by Vincent’s reaction, to be honest. Not that he thinks Vincent is ever going to side with Sephiroth’s mother, but he’s seen enough interactions between them at this point to wonder if contempt might breed too much familiarity. Vincent also hasn’t spent nearly as much time around her as the rest of them, and he’s gotten to make that a choice.

“Speaking as someone who’s spent a good deal of time learning how they prefer to operate,” Vincent says. He pauses so Zack can let them into Sephiroth’s office—Sephiroth’s still in another meeting, but Zack says it’ll just be a couple minutes and to wait inside—and then turns to look at Angeal the same way he does when they’re talking about having Sephiroth and Genesis together for a scene. Calm and attentive and always, always with that impression that he knows Angeal’s going to come around on the idea; it’s not charm, Angeal doesn’t get anything remotely like flirtation off him, but like he can see the future. “They want results, not reactions. So if they’ve set up a test once, they’ll set it up again.”

“Okay, point, it’s not like they’re going to stop trying before we catch them at it. But I think the point we’re going to make is that they should,” Angeal mutters as he drops into his usual chair.

“Then that is SOLDIER’s point to make, and I have nothing to say about it,” Vincent says. He takes his own seat, then gives Angeal a slightly different look, one like he can see straight into Angeal’s head and knows what Angeal is thinking and knows why. Not sympathetic or pitying, he just knows, and he’s going to leave it at that. “But I’ll tell you all what I’ve seen, and what Lucrecia has told me about it.”

Angeal straightens. “She already blew you off?”

“I wasn’t discussing it with her,” Vincent says, brow rising slightly. “She’s only said a few things.”

“Were you even asking? What does that even mean?” Angeal says, and then catches himself. “Never mind, let’s wait for Seph.”

Vincent nods, and doesn’t say anything else. Seems fine with that too, and again, Angeal…Angeal doesn’t think the man would sit around and just let R&D dick with them, if only because Sephiroth would care. And Vincent very much cares about Sephiroth, behind that stoneface of his—Angeal’s seen enough to be convinced of that. The man just doesn’t operate in a way that Angeal completely understands.

But then, that’s why they’re going to Sephiroth, and at the end of the day, it’s Sephiroth’s mother and his organization, so he’s going to have the final word. And if he wants to involve Vincent or not, that’s his call. Angeal just has to do what Sephiroth needs him to do, and—try to get Genesis to stick with it. Which reminds him, he thinks with a grimace at his phone, and then he takes a deep breath, does his best to ignore Vincent for now, and starts putting together a note to Genesis.

Chapter 39: Seventh Vacation: Staycation

Notes:

Trigger warning: Miscarriage, though it's not a human one. I maxed out tags on this story a while ago so putting here.

It’s the fact that the life-form is not humanoid that makes its death stand out for Sephiroth.

He can’t hope to be a successful military leader and allow himself to be entirely callous to the treatment of those under his command, although he doesn’t pretend that his teams have the same loyalties to him as they do to family and friends. But they do have loyalties to him, built up over many years of him proving his ability to secure their safety and employing them in a way that allows them to take some measure of pride in their work. His mother views those loyalties as transactions—socialization is only another currency system to her—albeit high-value ones that allow him to order someone into the face of potential death with a high degree of confidence that they will follow that order. He doesn’t entirely share this view, but he also can’t disavow it as completely baseless. Nor can he disavow the fact that he does routinely issue such orders, and that he has long since forgotten how to be uncomfortable with that bare fact.

His opponents owe him no such loyalties, of course, and while Shinra is hardly an impartial organ of justice, humans generally have the ability to think through and make decisions for themselves. And when he runs into humanoids that lack that capability, it’s in environments where the only reasonable decision is to put them out of the misery someone else has engineered around them. His mother has also taught him how impossible it is to code intelligent consciousness into another being, and without that, the test subjects he kills can only stare in blank, all-encompassing pain back at him. He doesn’t think it’s a stretch of imagination to suggest that the first true relief they feel is death.

Most deaths that Sephiroth personally causes involve humans or life-forms that were human at one point. SOLDIER is well-resourced enough that it’s rare for a First, let alone him, to be called out for an incident involving a wholly-inhuman antagonist, but this happens one day on the outskirts of Rocket Town. A monster has been incubating in the pits of a long-abandoned launching pad, its three heads and odd number of limbs hinting at origins in chemically-driven mutation long before R&D can run any samples.

It'd been clever, keeping to picking off wildlife left shellshocked in the wake of rocket launches and the odd drunken fool who’d decided to relieve themselves outside of the fences that surround most of Rocket Town, and its cleverness had allowed it to grow nearly as large as the smallest airship. By then its appetites demanded more, and so it had begun raiding the shantytowns that cluster about the town. So SOLDIER had been called.

The monster has skin thick enough to shield it from common-caliber bullets, and enough agility and intelligence for it to sniff out the traps that have been set for it. Given the delicate engineering projects in the area, heavy artillery and remote targeting are not an option. So essentially Sephiroth has little more than his own physical abilities to rely on for the initial part of the fight.

Once he’s wounded the beast, it retreats rapidly enough that he calls for aerial views before he follows, wary of any traps. But the monster isn’t clever enough for that, and its only trick is to burrow itself into the loose soil at the side of a pit, masking its bulk with the shadows thrown off by the rim. It’s no great challenge at that point to bait it out, detect a place for a mortal blow, and then deliver it.

The beast screams at him as it twists in its death-agony, screams and then convulses sharply, near its hind end. Its mangled, blood-mottled tail lashes in an oddly-contorted fashion, and then a span of flesh on the underside abruptly bulges forward, before retracting in a wet gush around some sort of glistening, membrane-wrapped bundle.

Fetus. It’d managed to reproduce somehow, despite growing far beyond the specifications of its base species. The monster screams at Sephiroth again as he takes a sideways step to view the fetus, then swings its head around till it’s almost touching its nose to its tail, wrenching its entire body about the smaller form. This does nothing for the beast’s wounds, which flood more blood onto the ground, and Sephiroth holds his distance, seeing that its struggles will bleed it out soon enough.

Its clouding eye fixes on him. The iris contracts, and he has the sense that this is not merely involuntary, but that there is still some kind of comprehension behind the focus.

Then its head drops dully to the ground, still curled about to tend the fetus. The beast is dead, and so is, Sephiroth discovers when he walks over, the fetus. Stillborn, and when he’s cut away the membrane and the unmistakable stench of gangrene arises, he suspects that that was the case long before his arrival.

Saving the beast was never an option, and the facts that led up to its creation had nothing to do with him, but Sephiroth finds that last glance persisting in his memory as SOLDIER secures the site, initiates biohazard removal protocols, and otherwise goes about necessary duties. He thinks about it again once he’s met with local leaders and accepted their thanks for cleaning up what their disregard for sensible environmental controls caused, and then again on the flight back to Midgar, after a call with his mother, who thinks him overly sentimental for keeping the corpses together for disposal.

“Efficiencies of scale,” he half-snaps at Vincent, who’s done nothing to deserve it, and who as usual, understands this and only waits for him to recover his temper. “If the press wants to put a palatable spin on it, I am not going to object, nor will our PR team. But it’s hardly out of a personal whim of mine. There’s no point in expending additional resources to keep them separate when there’s an entire launchpad under biohazard remediation for the next five years.”

“Did she want either body preserved?” is all Vincent asks.

“No, of course not. The samples will be an interesting side-project for her junior researchers, but it doesn’t merit devoting that much of R&D resources to special storage,” Sephiroth snorts. He leans back in his chair and stares irritably at his tablet for a few seconds. “She wanted a team member on the ground. I denied the request, because there was no reasonable way to secure them without compromising the containment strategy, and she resents that. The samples were fresh enough. I took them myself.”

“If she’d intended you to be a scientist, she wouldn’t have taken issue,” Vincent posits after a moment’s thought. “But that isn’t your duty, even if you know it as well as her team.”

Sephiroth exhales, remembering the dispassionate look on his mother’s face as she’d questioned his apportionment of duties in exactly that way. And then manages a wry, if bitter, smile at the other man, since when Vincent says it to him, he doesn’t feel as if the man is only measuring all the ways he does not conform to expectations. “Of course. She intended me to be intelligent, but never to outstrip her.”

“Would you have wanted to work in a lab?” Vincent asks.

“No,” Sephiroth says without thinking. Then he picks up his tablet, but his mind is on the other man’s question, not on the blinking messages on it. “No…no. I could intrude there more than I do, but I don’t. I don’t mind leaving that domain to her, so long as she leaves me to my own. But she always thinks she has the right to question my decision-making, no matter the sphere, simply because I’m her son.”

Vincent listens, and when Sephiroth drops the tablet back on the desk with a sharp clatter, the man…doesn’t startle, but he takes in the gesture with an intentness that makes Sephiroth swallow back the rest of his rant. Swallow it, and merely look on as Vincent rises from his seat, comes around Sephiroth’s desk, and then puts two fingers under Sephiroth’s chin.

“You have work to get through,” Vincent says, just over Sephiroth’s hopeful, needy inhale. His fingertips press up slightly, then draw off Sephiroth’s skin as he smiles. “Do that, then come home. I did have something waiting.”

“I’m canceling my last meeting,” Sephiroth says after a moment. “Mother has her samples, she doesn’t need an in-person debriefing at this point.”

Vincent nods. He goes back to his seat, taking the coat he’d draped across the back of it, and walks out of Sephiroth’s office. It’s not a dismissal, not with the warmth of his fingers still ghosting under Sephiroth’s jaw, and it’s enough for Sephiroth to resume working.

At home, in their bathroom, freshly-washed and kneeling on the floor with his wrists bound to a bar on the wall, Sephiroth takes in a deep breath and then exhales so that his shoulders sink under the hands placed on them. Vincent’s thumbs roll across his muscles, tracing along his shoulderblades, pushing just enough for him to feel the knots there begin to loosen. Then the man combs his hands up into Sephiroth’s hair, gathering the still-damp strands together.

“You left early, and it was noticed,” Vincent says, with a sharp tug timed perfectly with Sephiroth’s shift. He waits for Sephiroth’s gasp to die away, then continues arranging Sephiroth’s hair, dividing it into sections. “There are people looking for you, and I don’t care. They’re not going to find you where I’m going to have you tonight.”

Sephiroth breathes in again, deeper, and feels a shiver deep inside of him. Still too deeply-buried to work itself into his muscles, little more than a tickle at his diaphragm for now, but he can feel the promise of it. “Are you taking me somewhere?”

“Yes.” Vincent starts a braid near Sephiroth’s temple, his long fingers stroking the strands back so they’re tightly but not painfully worked in. “I’ll dress you appropriately.”

“For a kidnapping?” Sephiroth says. A light haze is starting to scatter his thoughts, but he’s still not quite settled into it, still trying to think.

He half-expects a slap or a pinch, some sort of sharp blow to remind him of his place, but Vincent only laughs, a low rumble that puffs over Sephiroth’s scalp as Vincent’s hands cradle his head. “A pretty captive. You can think about how I came to have you in the first place if you want, but it doesn’t change that I have you now.”

That shiver comes again inside of Sephiroth, and this time it’s strong enough to spawn a quiet moan. He does think about it, think about all the ways he could have ended up here, in this position: taken from his office, on the way in the front door, in the bedroom. In the shower, caught off-guard and vulnerable without weapons or clothes…but Vincent is right. They always end here.

His hair sleeked back into an elaborately-braided knot, its weight tipping his head back as Vincent jackets his cock in white silk cord. Blindfolds him, then touches him with something that falls in a generous handful of whispering strands, light enough that the dampness of his skin makes them cling, but heavy enough that when Vincent flicks the flogger, they leave sinuous trails of prickling heat behind. Then he’s stroked again, the strands running over him like fingertips as he arches and presents himself.

He's struck and he moans, sinking under the blow. It’s not nearly enough to rock him if he wanted to resist it, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t want to think about what happened before, why he’s here, if he should be—he only wants to think about what he’s being held for. Tied to a wall, teased and then struck, a biting lacework taking shape across his body, warming it from the chilly shower. His cock tries to swell against its bonds but the silk cord is strong enough to hold him back, make him pant as he tugs at his wrists.

Vincent works him from tops of the shoulders down to the backs of his thighs, with particular attention to his buttocks and shoulderblades. When he’s urged to turn around, the tile against his back feels like plates of ice sliding over fire-tipped needles set in his skin, making him arch and splay himself. Then the flogger ends dance up the inside of his right thigh and his knee quivers inward.

“Spread,” Vincent says.

Sephiroth jerks his legs apart, panting, and then groans again and again as Vincent strikes him. Chest and belly and thighs, overlapping waterfalls of leather thongs that leave him densely flushed with stinging spots. He can see them in his mind, bright in the center and fading to a pretty tea pink at the edges—pretty. Vincent’s making him pretty.

“Sensitive,” Vincent replies in response; he hadn’t realized he’d spoken aloud. A hand comes down and pets him, moving in a snaking line down his breast and abdomen till it can toy with the burning marks across his groan. “You’re going to be sensitive for this. But not the heavy marks.”

“Vincent, please, I want—” Sephiroth feels a thick, wanting noise catch in his throat as Vincent cups his balls, nails digging into mostly-untouched skin “—see, can I see?”

“When you’re dressed.” There’s a soft flutter near Sephiroth’s hip, and then, while he’s distracted, Vincent loops silk cord about his scrotum. “When you’re pretty enough.”

Sephiroth gasps and moans, but Vincent pays his noises no attention. Because the man’s that certain of holding him—holding him captive, not as a pet that needs to be trained. His needs can be disregarded as the man wants.

Or bound up if that pleases Vincent better. Cord knotted about his balls to keep them stretched and the blood pushed to the surface, making his skin feel as hot as boiling water as cool, silky panties are worked up his legs and then nestled smoothly, torturously over his genitals. His cock is tied but not in place, and can roll a little in the panties as Vincent unties his wrists one at a time from the wall, their clingy fabric flirting with the arousal pooling in it and in his balls. When Vincent makes him rock forward on his knees, the tug of the panties across his cockhead makes him muffle whines into Vincent’s leg.

Vincent chuckles, but pushes him back. Something’s dropped over his arms and head, and then pulled into place: a silk slip. He expects it when his nipples are nudged out through holes in the bodice, but even expectation can’t prepare him for how the slip’s gossamer scrapes rather than floats over the lash-marks on his torso, spawning prickling wave after wave no matter how he squirms.

Fingers wrap around his throat, pulling his chin up into a long moan. “Don’t tear this,” Vincent says, as his other hand gently and mercilessly strokes the slip down over Sephiroth’s welted abdominals. “Tear it and I won’t show you.”

“It’s all over, it’s too much,” Sephiroth groans.

“Wait,” Vincent says. His hand rises, pinches sharply at a nipple—a single starburst of pain, a north star amid the duller sea of needling heat that had been threatening to take Sephiroth’s mind away.

It hurts, and Sephiroth settles in alignment with the hurt. Wincing a little, shifting on his knees, but waiting, as more silk cord wraps about his throat and shoulders and chest. Feeling how the knots and pressure of intersecting cords gradually draw him back out of the sea’s amorphous embrace, giving the stinging a form and a foundation. When Vincent draws loops tightly about each nipple, he sighs into the rising ache. Captive now, bound into an elegant cage no matter how his body moves.

His wrists are untied, but the dreamlike haze is thick enough in his mind now that Vincent has to push his arms down and off the wall. Push him onto his hands and knees, as more silk is drawn up his legs and then smoothed tautly against his body. Slightly more substantial than the slip, but not by much, and this has—embroidery, brocade, something like that. Rougher patches to it, done in what Sephiroth is certain is thread as smooth as glass but which against his whipped, highly sensitized skin feels like the scrape of a dull knife. Peeling off the layers between him and the heat Vincent’s set to blossom in him, so that he’s burning as he digs his nails into the floor.

Vincent spots that soon enough and addresses it by pulling his arms behind his back. Lacing each forearm into a snug leather sleeve, and then strapping them together. A cuff goes around each upper arm, and then a collar is clasped about his neck, with straps tensioning each against his bound arms. He’s pulled to his feet, so Vincent curves, warmly possessive, against his back, and then the blindfold is pulled off.

White lace. Vincent’s sheathed him in ice-white lace, palm-size stretches of it connected with silvery silk thin enough for the silk cords underneath to be visible. It’s a sleeveless dress but it completely covers his torso down to the waist, with no cutouts: his reddening nipples are trapped behind the filmy panels. Sephiroth watches as Vincent reaches up and brushes one, then rubs slowly at it as Sephiroth’s reflection in the bathroom mirror whimpers and twists in the black collar and cuffs, the lacework shifting tantalizingly to offer glimpses of an equally red cockhead, a blush of welts on the right ribs. And then a fresh, unhindered red mark, as Vincent cranes over and languidly sucks at Sephiroth’s throat just above the collar.

Captive, in a fragile prison spun about his body that nevertheless will go wherever Vincent deigns to take him. He whimpers again, breathless, as Vincent toys with both nipples, the searing ache in those nubs echoed where the dress scratches his thighs, belly, shoulderblades. Vincent’s erection is nesting between his buttocks, tugging the skirt again and again across the lashed skin there, and making the folds flip up in the front to show a damp stretch forming across the front of the panties.

“Quiet,” Vincent says, as a plea wriggles in Sephiroth’s throat. He pushes both hands down to grip Sephiroth by the front of each thigh; when Sephiroth tries to move them apart, he pushes back. It isn’t a true test of strength, only enough to direct—and Sephiroth follows the direction, swallowing down his words to leave only a ragged whimper spilling out, as Vincent finally does push his legs apart. “You’ll speak when spoken to.”

Sephiroth nods, feeling the way that it changes the flow of the sweat trickling down his nape. He sucks his breath in as Vincent pushes him up to the counter, then whimpers again as the back of the dress is lifted and two fingers stroke ever-so-lightly down the panties, fluttering the silk against his buttock cleft. Captive, unable to speak or act on his own. He understands, and he allows himself to drop into the thought, to let it rise up and envelop him rather than taking it and picking it apart.

“But you’d like to be fucked,” Vincent adds, in a low, savoring voice, as his fingers draw back up to hook into the top of the panties. He closes in against Sephiroth, his mouth working up along Sephiroth’s spine as his other hand comes around to reach under the dress and put a thumb just atop Sephiroth’s cockhead. He catches Sephiroth’s stuttering shiver against himself, then laps sweat off Sephiroth’s throat as he goes on. “Pretty captive, long enough that you’ve gotten used to this. That you like it, like being held. You’d like me to spread you and fuck you, make you wet.”

His thumb curls over and over Sephiroth’s cock slit, making it stick to the precome pearling out of it. Sephiroth couldn’t speak now if he wanted to, his throat far too tight with want, his limbs too heavy with desperate lust to even test the frail wrapper of a dress he’s wearing. He aches under the other man’s touches, and yes, yes, he wants that.

Vincent sees that in him. Smiles, a mouthful of Sephiroth’s skin blushing under his teeth, as he pushes down the back of the panties. Leaves the front to cup Sephiroth’s cock and balls, its silky nuzzle an exquisite torment, as he stretches Sephiroth on oiled fingers and then, casually, belt unbuckled and trousers open but still hanging off his hips, fucks Sephiroth against the counter.

Halfway through, he loops a piece of white cloth around Sephiroth’s eyes and ties it off, then makes another loop of it between Sephiroth’s teeth. Then he finishes in Sephiroth, who, blind and muted, can only tremble as Vincent swipes a finger about his hole, pushing in a few streaks of come before sealing him with a plug. The panties are smoothed back in place, Vincent’s thumb snaking with lovingly brutal pressure down the length of Sephiroth’s cock, and then Vincent cups Sephiroth’s ball sac through the panties as Sephiroth, unable to help himself, bucks into the warm invitation of the man’s palm. Uselessly, his prick well-tied and sore but very much soft.

Vincent slings the other arm around his waist and holds him for a few moments, till his balance is steady again. He needs that, since next Vincent straps his legs together, one thick leather belt at mid-thigh and another below the knees, a third at his ankles. They’re leaving now, Sephiroth knows rather than thinks, and he goes obediently limp as Vincent swings him up over one shoulder.

He's carried out of the bathroom like that, tied into a dress that wouldn’t look out of place in one of Rufus’ soirees, gagged and blindfolded and with no idea where they’re going. He could think about that—could count steps, sense direction—but Vincent guesses not only his thoughts but his potential for thinking, and keeps caressing his calves. With the left hand, its claws tickling their points along the tendons, an affectionate threat of crippling, and so Sephiroth doesn’t think at all except to think he might not want them to ever reach their destination.

They eventually do. In another room somewhere, on a different floor—he does remember the brief hitch and hum of an elevator—where he’s pushed down onto a hard chair. His gag is untied, and the rim of a glass is leaned against his mouth.

“Water,” Vincent says softly, as Sephiroth pants. He’s behind Sephiroth, his free arm draping over Sephiroth’s shoulder so he can trace the lines of Sephiroth’s chest harness through the lace as Sephiroth tentatively sips at the glass. “Fruit next.”

Sephiroth moans, and a trickle escapes his lips that Vincent cleans off with the back of a finger. Then that finger is slotted under Sephiroth’s jaw, holding his chin up as slivers of fruit are passed over his lips. He eats, occasionally gasping as Vincent’s petting plucks a sharper shade of ache out of him.

“Do you have any idea where we are?” Vincent asks, as his finger rubs back and forth on a cord leading down to Sephiroth’s right nipple, always stopping just short of the bound, throbbing nub.

Speak when spoken to. “No,” Sephiroth says, rasping despite the water and fruit. He squirms as Vincent flicks the cord, then feels another piece of fruit at his lips. He’s had enough—he isn’t hungry for this, and he finds himself tipping his head back into Vincent’s belly as Vincent rolls the fruit along his lower lip. “Are you keeping me here now?”

“I might,” Vincent says. He doesn’t seem irritated by Sephiroth’s refusal; the fruit sliver disappears, but Vincent’s fingers remain to tease Sephiroth, drawing away just as Sephiroth tries to lip them. “There aren’t any windows, and the walls are very thick. It’s not on the official floor plan either. Very few people would ever find you, and I know who they all are.”

Sephiroth’s breath catches for a moment. When he finds it again, it drags out of his mouth, the air feeling like taffy between his teeth. “Please—”

“Would you like to know how many messages you’ve had between now and when you left?” Vincent asks. His voice drops closer, and his hand closes over Sephiroth’s mouth as Sephiroth, briefly jarred by the reminder of duties, jerks against the chair. “I know how many. I know who’s looking for you. I have your phone, right here.”

The molded edge of the phone grazes at Sephiroth’s jaw as Vincent pulls Sephiroth’s head back towards him. Sephiroth feels the clamp of the leather cuffs and collar, the persistent taunt of the lace-and-silk clothes, the tingling of his skin under the tight cords, and all of these things tie him here. Here, not out there, where he thinks about such things. But he’s teetering on the boundary, knowing that there’s a boundary…knowing can slide very quickly into caring, and for some reason Vincent is making him aware of that line.

“I have your phone,” Vincent says, calmly, as he turns it to lean its long side against Sephiroth’s jaw. Lets it slip a little down onto Sephiroth’s throat, like the edge of a knife. “And…”

There’s a small, soft beeping, and then a pair of dings. It’s a chime Sephiroth knows well—the signal that the phone is on crisis mode, where only very specific people can even send him a message. If anyone else tries, their messages are automatically populated with the contact information of whichever First is next in line in their crisis protocol. It can’t be remotely overridden by anyone, even Rufus.

No one is going to reach him here. Sephiroth gasps a little, swaying against the chair, feeling as if some leash somewhere has been unexpectedly unsnapped…but it’s quite the reverse. He’s very bound, very much at Vincent’s mercy, and he couldn’t be more grateful to the other man. If he knows that something exists outside of Vincent, it’s only another way to see how everything has to go through the other man first. Everything.

“Vincent, please—please, please—touch me,” he begs, as Vincent gets rid of the phone and then moves around to stand in front of him. He arches his body, tries to open his legs even though they’re still bound, offers himself up to his captor. “Please, anything—anything—”

“Not like this,” Vincent says, but his tone is warmly contemplative, not dismissive or scolding. Then cloth is tied back into Sephiroth’s mouth, stopping him mid-plea, and Vincent’s hands smooth over his cheeks as he subsides into helpless moaning. “Better, but…”

Sephiroth’s lifted out of the chair, pivoted on his feet and then tipped onto some sort of bed only a few feet away. The mattress is a hard one, not absorbing much of the impact, and he bounces twice, ending up on his side with his feet still hanging off the edge. He hears Vincent walk up to the side and then whines against his gag as his ankles are lifted.

Vincent folds his legs onto the bed, but then goes away. He hears the chair legs scraping once against the floor and thinks the man is taking it somewhere else, but he doesn’t hear a door. Several minutes pass as he lies there, wondering and waiting—then Vincent’s footsteps somehow return, coming towards him as he tries to twist over onto his back.

“No. No, I don’t want you like that,” Vincent says, catching him by the shoulder.

He’s pushed back onto his side, then onto his belly, Vincent’s weight pushing across his legs as the other man climbs over him. Then he’s dragged down a few inches, the pressure and the rubbing of his dress making fiery points out of his nipples. He’s so busy mewling at their aching that he almost misses his ankles being freed.

Then his knees, then his thighs, Vincent unceremoniously hauling his legs apart even as the last belt is still flopping away from him. Sephiroth bows himself up to relieve the press on his chest, but has to abandon that, shuddering, when Vincent roughly nuzzles at his buttocks. His legs slide bonelessly apart as the plug in him tweaks and corkscrews with the nuzzling, and then he feels Vincent strap each thigh into a tight leather cuff, holding him splayed open.

“Like this,” Vincent says, before pulling the back of his panties down. He licks and sucks at each buttock till Sephiroth is shaking, nudging and flicking the end of the plug with one finger as he teases. Then he pushes himself up, pauses, and sighs contentedly. “I might keep you like this. Pretty little toy, locked away for my own pleasure.”

Chains clink as Sephiroth shivers against the bed. His gag is sopping wet in his mouth, and the front of his panties feels just as wet, stuck to his cock as it tries and fails over and over to rise in its bonds, dribbling sticky precome with every caress Vincent gives him. And Vincent rapidly escalates them, pulling the plug out and teasing Sephiroth with a single finger that dips in and out. Then plunging it in and hooking it to the side, holding Sephiroth open as his tongue lavishes attention on Sephiroth’s hole.

Sephiroth is rocking mindlessly at this point, but not struggling. He’s far too enveloped in sensation to struggle, unable to even conceptualize the idea. He only moves because he needs to, because all the pent-up need in him needs something to do and he’s not allowed to do anything else. So he rocks in place, spearing himself back onto Vincent’s tongue as it thoroughly explores him, leaving no inch untasted. Till he’s raw with it under the wet, raw and burning-hot and desperate.

When Vincent finally pushes up and then reaches over to each of Sephiroth’s thighs, Sephiroth feels as if he’s being drawn out of the deep, deep ocean, so deep the pressure is hardly registrable until one rises again. He gasps, then mewls and whimpers as the chains are unhooked. Without their tension, his body sags, but his knees still sprawl open. They stay open as Vincent hauls him over onto his back and then rehooks the chains.

“You asked to be touched,” Vincent says, hands traveling up from the thigh cuffs to Sephiroth’s skirt. They linger a few seconds, playing with the fabric as Sephiroth drinks in air through his nose, and then push up the dress. One hand cups Sephiroth’s cock through the soaked panties while the other comes up and cuts away the blindfold. “I’ll touch you, but I’ll only untie you in one place at a time. So where?”

Sephiroth blinks and blinks and the world never quite comes into focus. Except for Vincent, but even then, the sharp angles and smoothly-molded planes of his face seem to rise out of longing imagination rather than reality. The gag’s wetted enough that he can move his mouth around it, shaping muffled words. “What?”

Vincent smiles. It’s a little indulgent, as he applies precise, vicious pressure with his thumb to Sephiroth’s perineum. He is very real, very present, as Sephiroth futilely bends against the chains, and Sephiroth suddenly cannot see how he ever could have dreamed such a man. Dreams are for unreal, ungrounded perfection; Vincent and his knowledge of Sephiroth are perfect, yes, but perfect in the most visceral, practical way. “Where do you want to be untied?”

Not free. Captive still. “Please,” Sephiroth groans into his gag, as Vincent continues to circle his thumb, and now also curls his finger over the panties to just graze at Sephiroth’s cockhead. “Please—chest—”

There’s no surprise in Vincent’s face. Only approval, as he leans down and drinks the breath from Sephiroth’s mouth before proceeding. With Sephiroth limp and breathless, laid out before him as he loosens the chains enough to cant Sephiroth’s hips up. He slides his cock into Sephiroth, brows pinching a little—Sephiroth isn’t quite so dazed as to miss how Vincent needs a few seconds to catch his breath. But then he continues without hesitation, reaching up and undoing fastenings along each of Sephiroth’s shoulders so he can peel the front of the dress down as if he’s unwrapping a long-anticipated gift.

He stops again, but to savor, his hands running unhurriedly over Sephiroth’s chest, toying with the silk cords bound over it as Sephiroth twists under him. When Sephiroth’s moaning rises, Vincent reaches up and cuts away the gag. The end trails back into Sephiroth’s mouth as Vincent plucks it away, tickling it enough for him to cough, and so he’s distracted when Vincent’s claws slide under the cords.

They snake apart when cut, leaving the silk slip underneath sticking to him in great, clinging swathes as he drags as much of the room’s air into his lungs as he can and still doesn’t have enough cushioning against the sudden, focused burn in his nipples. He gasps again, and then again, half-registering Vincent’s increasingly urgent movements in him, and then a breath somehow both long and shallow shakes out of him as Vincent abruptly pushes him down against the bed. Fingers and then a warm, curling tongue draw the edge from the pain, soothing him even as their toying with his nipples sends electric jolts down through his body.

Unlike the other man, he hasn’t climaxed, his tied cock still weeping in frustration, but Vincent pulls enough out of him that his shivers ebb little by little, till he’s a weak, slack thing against the bed. Only trembling now, small broken sounds tipping out of his open mouth as Vincent leans over him, strokes the sweat and hair out of his eyes. The man’s breath seems enticingly cool compared to the hot rasping heaves coming out of Sephiroth’s own lips, bathing him in a much-needed breeze as Vincent dips forward—Sephiroth closes his eyes, lets his head fall back, offers himself up without reservation.

Lolling under Vincent’s attentions, the man taking his pleasure as he pleases from Sephiroth. A lick at Sephiroth’s mouth, another at the curve of his throat, while firm strokes push the remnants of silk cord off Sephiroth’s breast and to the side. Vincent keeps kissing him, swallowing his noises as the man’s hands travel lower, lower, their cool fingertips scorching through the slip, till—

Vincent makes Sephiroth arch. Sephiroth doesn’t have the strength for it, but when Vincent touches him he has to respond, and he’s touched—there, right over his cock, pressed there, so that the throb that goes through its bound flesh rises up through him and curves him over his arms in a straining, longing groan.

“Please,” he gasps. Without being spoken to, but he’s beyond thinking of consequences. “Please, I need to come, please—like this—”

“No.” Vincent laps the word into Sephiroth’s mouth, then noses at the desperate groan that spills up into his face. He caresses Sephiroth’s cock over the bindings, through the wet panties, letting the silk stick itself into the cock slit and then tugging it free with a fingertip as Sephiroth writhes. “Untie one, the other needs to be tied back up. Like that.”

Sephiroth moans a little, but he can’t protest in truth. He can only lie there on the man’s softening cock, shivering, as Vincent reaches into a pocket and draws out a pair of nipple rings dangling from a silver chain. As he’s fitted with them, his sore, abused flesh immediately hot and swelling against the rings. As Vincent, humming to himself, finally reaches between them and deftly slices away the panties, then the silk cords around his cock. The other man watches him with lazy appreciation as the drift of one finger up his prick makes him fully erect, panting in between the moans that the nipple chain swinging across his chest spur from him. And then Vincent touches him again, saying: “Come.”

He doesn’t lose consciousness in the strict sense of the term. His vision wavers but never fully goes, and he is at least aware that he’s awake at all points, but he does enter that soft, floating state where thoughts don’t seem to exist and actions are more like observations, things known to happen but without a concrete impact.

Vincent frees him of all his trappings, and he twists his arms and shoulders back and forth for a while, as the other man massages his legs. Then he manages to crawl off the bed with Vincent’s help, and they go into another, smaller room, with a floor drain that Sephiroth badly wants to rest his cheek against. He’s prevented from doing so by Vincent, who holds him up as his hair is taken out of its braids and his body is washed off. When Vincent catches him putting his tongue out for the water drops, they stop and Vincent tips a bottle of salty-sweet fluid down his throat.

He swallows a little short, and the fluid sprays into his windpipe so he coughs. The rough grating in his throat cuts through the haze like the lingering aches in his joints do not, and he truly looks around.

It’s a very small room, with a drain and a spigot that’s been fitted with a spray attachment, and nothing else that doesn’t fit into a bucket Vincent carries out with them. The next room is equally bare, and the bed and the items around it have a new look to them…Sephiroth twists around, looking at the odd proportions of the room, the old scars where fittings used to be. He slips a little as he does and Vincent slides a hand under his arm, steadying him, but then stands silently as Sephiroth comes to his own conclusions.

“Someone built this into the building to take people to, at some point,” Sephiroth says. He’s looking at a squared stretch of the wall, where some sort of opening clearly used to be. It’s too small and too low for a window, and this room is clearly deep within the building. “Not surveillance, it’s easy enough to remotely monitor in a Shinra building…”

“We’re not on any systems,” Vincent says. He starts to move again, helping Sephiroth to the mattress, which is placed directly on the floor, and then lowering himself next to Sephiroth. He’s cleaned himself and done his trousers back up, but above the waist he has only a shirt, half-buttoned with its sleeves rolled up. “This has been a residential building since my time, for SOLDIER officers. There were experiments even back then. You weren’t the first, only the first successful in vitro one.”

A chute, Sephiroth decides as he stares at the wall. “Mother told me, and I’ve read the files. Hojo had absolutely no conception of testing controls, couldn’t bother to rule out environmental contamination, never had a result he could trust as a result. And he chewed through good officers, to the point they didn’t want to take the bodies to the morgue because of the PR—so they’d sneak the bodies out this way.”

“Back then, yes,” Vincent says, pulling out his tins of food.

He opens one, and then catches Sephiroth by the waist as Sephiroth, lost in his thoughts and absently reacting to the inviting aroma, leans too far forward. Then shifts his arm as Sephiroth settles where he’s tipped, curling against the other man. Thought has returned to Sephiroth, but while his mind is piecing clues together, Vincent’s presence keeps them from gaining a true edge—though he can feel the potential in what he’s thinking, what he’s being shown and told. He rests his head on Vincent’s shoulder, little ripples of pleasant ache still moving through him, and doesn’t feel guilty or distracted by the fact that he can both enjoy them and listen intently to the other man.

“A little later, they repurposed this as a temporary holding site,” Vincent goes on, as he spoons up food from the tin for Sephiroth. “It’s nowhere near your floor—we’re well below them. But they thought it was wise to have somewhere to put people quickly and safely for a few hours, when the side effects were too disturbing and they had to be disappeared. Sedatives took too much time to work on the enhanced, and sedating them in front of their squad wasn’t sensible.”

Sephiroth swallows his mouthful. Hojo had continued his haphazard experimentation for some time after losing his position as head of R&D, as much out of habit as anything else, though his reduced resources and influence had made him resort to raw recruits. And after he’d finally been run out, personnel he’d trained had still populated R&D and Sephiroth’s mother hadn’t been able to get rid of all of them at the same time. Some of them she’d never even tried to dispose of, despite their cavalier attitude towards finding test subjects—Sephiroth had had to step in, when he’d had enough power to do so. She’d supposedly understood his reasoning but she’d still resented his intrusion into what she deemed her world, and never mind that their intrusion had come first. He’s wondered at times whether that was her way of testing him.

“R&D set this up,” Sephiroth says. The spoon grazes his lips, but he needs a moment. Vincent waits for him, not pushing till he opens his mouth on his own. He eats slowly, thinking. “So they’d know to look—”

“They wouldn’t these days. This room was shut down during one of Lucrecia’s purges, trying to cover up tracks when she had enough to terminate them for other reasons,” Vincent says. His tone alters, subtly but enough for Sephiroth to hesitate at taking another bite. Vincent turns his head a little, then puts the spoon down and turns further, so that they can look fully at each other. “They did well enough at hiding it. She only found another room, a Turk one, and stopped there—that one was remodeled out of existence. This one I knew about because I killed one of the people who set it up.”

“At her request?” Sephiroth asks after a moment.

Vincent’s lips twitch, his humor palpably darker than usual. “I don’t like owing her a debt for very long. I needed to clear accounts with her, and at the time I was indifferent to Shinra internal politics.”

“You’re generally indifferent to anyone’s politics,” Sephiroth points out. Then finds himself relaxing as Vincent’s smile loosens, and the other man dips his head towards him. “Then I’m still in my own building, but in a room that’s only yours. Still yours.”

“A little less pretty at the moment,” Vincent says, and then rumbles amusedly in his throat as he traces one finger down Sephiroth’s back along fading pressure-marks from the harness. “But still captive, yes. As for the room…”

Vincent’s tone changes slightly, enough to catch Sephiroth’s ear but not to raise any warning instincts. Sephiroth moves his head on the other man’s shoulder, watching, but Vincent only gazes back at him. Thoughtful, considering something, but he seems in no particular hurry to reveal it.

He moves the food tin to the side, and when he does, the shift of his shoulder under Sephiroth’s ear tips Sephiroth forward. Either he tips back to accommodate it, or he…chooses instead to let the motion guide his head down Vincent’s front, slowly sliding till he’s pillowing it on the man’s thigh instead. Above him, Vincent’s breathing ripples not quite into words; he turns his head to look up and Vincent is still considering whatever it is, as his hand comes over to wrap around the point of Sephiroth’s shoulder.

“I thought originally I’d take you a little further, to one of the Turk safehouses, but I need to stay close. Nothing alarming but it’s family,” Vincent says after a moment. His fingers don’t restrain Sephiroth, they merely ride Sephiroth’s twitch and then deliberately resettle. “I’m expecting a message.”

“When do you need to leave?” Sephiroth asks. With a fleeting sense of frustration, as he’d been expecting both of them to have this weekend, but that won’t mitigate anything and he knows Vincent already arranges what he can around their free time.

For some reason his question makes Vincent arch a brow. Then the other man smiles, his thumb rubbing gently along Sephiroth’s collarbone. “I don’t. But I need to be here for the message. It’s…there’s a potential change of leadership with the Iga. If it’s in my favor, I may be able to drop in on your border inspection next month. If it’s not, I still need to be in town so I can coordinate with Tseng on the power shift.”

Sephiroth’s trip is going to take him to a section of border falling within areas Vincent has told him are…it’s hard to say dangerous, with someone like Vincent, but the man doesn’t like taking unnecessary risks and a noncritical trip would be an unnecessary risk. And it’s scheduled to last nearly three weeks, so for him to be able to drop in and break up some of the incessant politicking…

“I thought you’d appreciate that,” Vincent says, still smiling. He lifts his hand as Sephiroth twists around, grunting a little at the aches that stirs up, then straightens his fingers so Sephiroth can nip at their tips. “You needed this too, and this room was what was available on short notice.”

That change in tone again. Sephiroth pauses, lips half-closed around Vincent’s index finger, and looks up at the other man. He lets Vincent curl the fingertip, pressing lightly at his lower lip, before sliding his head back. “You’ve taken me to stranger places. Did you think—”

“I didn’t think you’d mind, but I…” Vincent pauses, not hesitates, clearly going to speak but just as clearly careful about choosing his words “…I found this room when I first moved in with you, and I’d been thinking about shutting it up permanently. They only hid it, after all—I suspect they thought they could outlast your mother, and would eventually be back. I’ve only cleaned it out and upgraded the security.”

“Did you find anything of interest?” Sephiroth asks after a moment. He assumes there was, and that whatever information Vincent has been processing from it merits the care.

But Vincent shakes his head. “Nothing that the history I’ve just told you didn’t already reveal. It wasn’t an ops center, or even a true detainment cell. It was only a room where they could put people long enough to figure out where else to take them. Even so, I’ve been thinking somewhere like this shouldn’t be where we live. I may have been taking too long over that.”

And as Vincent says that, there’s something in the man’s face, something in his eyes, that reminds Sephiroth of the dying beast. Not in the emotion—Vincent isn’t outraged at all, and that would be entirely out of character for a man who, like Sephiroth, has long since internalized how useless rage is on its own, without a mind and focus and timing behind it. But in the unhesitating certainty of it, Sephiroth thinks. That beast had known it was going to die, and had decided that its last act was going to be turning its back on its killer, and gazing instead on its child. Whether the beast was sentient enough to know it was stillborn, or to have what people consider ‘maternal’ feelings is irrelevant to that observation—the point, Sephiroth now realizes, is that it could and did decide what was most important to it, and that it did so against simple self-interest.

“You had other priorities,” Sephiroth says, and then leans forward to kiss the back of Vincent’s hand, the left one, when the fingers start to move. They still and he moves his mouth to lay down another kiss, lingering over the intersections of the plating. “Because you haven’t always had the same ones, and you’ve reordered them since. I’m not going to fault you for your timing, Vincent. You have your reasons.”

“Which is why I think I’ve left this a little late,” Vincent says, his voice deepening. His hand flips sharply about, its claw-tips skittering over the exposed, open underside of Sephiroth’s chin, the front of the throat. If he wanted to gut that open, he could have—Sephiroth lies under it without even thinking to flinch because they both know what Vincent truly wants these days, even if the man’s reasons still take time to come to light. “It was convenient for this, but I hope you’re not that attached.”

Sephiroth smiles, and then rubs his cheek against the other man’s knee as Vincent cards some hair back behind his ear. Then bends back his head, pressing it into Vincent’s hand as it hooks behind his neck and pulls him with calculated roughness up from Vincent’s lap. “Then shut it up,” he says. “You have hold of me wherever you put me, it doesn’t truly matter. But keep me—”

“Oh, I haven’t let you go yet,” Vincent murmurs as their lips near each other. “Captive.”

“Please,” Sephiroth breathes into the man’s mouth. “I liked it, Vincent. But you don’t have to take me away—just take me. Take me, and keep me ready for you.”

Vincent laughs. Laughs, and takes him. Takes his mouth, for only a few seconds, but in truth he’s not released at all. He’s still very much under the other man’s direction as Vincent tosses him a spare uniform coat, just enough to get them into a maintenance hallway and then up a freight elevator. Still under the man’s eye as they step back into their quarters, and he goes into the bedroom while Vincent disposes of a few items in the utility room and then goes back out. He's not truly on his own, as he stands in their closet and dresses himself in a black silk slip and black leather collar. And when he lies down on the bed to wait for the other man, he’s bound there more securely than after Vincent returns, when his forearms and lower legs are strapped with leather and he’s cradled back against Vincent, tucked under one arm while Vincent teases him through the silk with the other hand.

“When are you expecting this message?” Sephiroth says, eyes closing even as he groans under Vincent’s touches.

“Late,” Vincent says. He nibbles along the top of Sephiroth’s shoulder as his cock cushions itself comfortably between Sephiroth’s buttocks. “Late enough I can nap first. Then I’ll do a little work, with you on my cock. And then I think I’ll have you wet again.”

Sephiroth rubs his cheek against the other man and shudders softly, his eyes closing. He has no other plans for his time, no other reason but the other man’s pleasure, and it’s more than enough.

Chapter 40: Interlude: Vincent Teaches Sephiroth a Little More Spycraft

The brush’s bristles are as soft as down, and Vincent swirls them over Sephiroth’s skin as lightly as dust wafting in the breeze. Nevertheless each stroke goes down to Sephiroth’s very core, slitting through his flesh with a heat that makes him shudder to forestall simply melting in place.

He’s been sensitized nearly to the point of insensibility, little awareness of anything beyond the languid flirtation of the brush and the traces of deceptive coolness it leaves behind on his body. Sitting on Vincent’s cock for nearly an hour now, on his knees with his hands and wrists laced into a leather binder that hangs them in front of him, just at the right height for his forehead to sag against when he groans. Vincent’s wound his braided hair around his neck to soak up the sweat, to keep it off his back where the other man has just finished writing a line of Wutaian script with the brush.

Vincent’s using only water. The bowl he dips the brush into is nestled into the sheets by Sephiroth’s right knee, clear but trembling too much to reflect more than the occasional blurry shadow as Vincent leans forward. Lays his hand on Sephiroth’s left buttock, just firmly enough to push it up and tighten Sephiroth’s aching, stretched hole around his cock, and drops his other arm around Sephiroth’s waist so that the brush tip deliberately flicks over Sephiroth’s own steel-beringed cock. “Well?” he says, lips grazing at Sephiroth’s shoulderblade as it rises, shivering, to meet him.

“Poetry,” Sephiroth manages to gasp out, before the air burns away and he’s left dry, dry and dazed even as Vincent chuckles and smooths the dampness down his spine. He shakes his head, groping for his thoughts through the weaving, bobbing haze. “A line from the—the epic—historical epic—”

“Wutai has those in plenty. You’ll have to be more specific.” Vincent moves his hand up Sephiroth’s buttock, his fingertips shockingly cool as they tease into the cleft and nudge a broken groan out of Sephiroth.

The wrist binder creaks as Sephiroth rubs his forehead against it. Ache rocks back and forth between his shoulders and elbows; he can feel his tendons trying to release so hard that they only wind themselves tighter. His prick is desperate in its cage, weeping precome, and when Vincent tilts the brush to sweep a few beads away from its tip, it feels as if the wooden handle has stabbed straight into him. “The farewell speech—the last line, the Pearl Queen’s lament, but you left off—you changed the character for ‘sea.’”

“It’s the same character, only the archaic form,” Vincent says. He makes another amused noise as Sephiroth whines and hitches his hips, anticipating a—a consequence, but only drapes his chin over Sephiroth’s shoulder. Watching from there as his hand drops the come-tipped brush into the bowl to soak, then reaches to the bundle of silk cords next to it. “We’ve gone a little longer—”

“‘Success but do not retrieve,’” Sephiroth gasps, and then rolls his hips again, forcing himself to curl his toes under himself for better leverage as he feels Vincent’s hand close involuntarily over his buttock. “It means that. Please, Vincent—fifty, you said fifty, that was forty-eight…”

“Greedy for my cock,” Vincent murmurs, but he nestles his face into Sephiroth’s throat. Kisses the pulse there, hinting at sharp teeth, before craning further around so that Sephiroth’s searching mouth can meet his own. His outstretched arm shakes out the cords so that they patter lightly across Sephiroth’s thighs and then he catches the resulting moan with his tongue. “But a good student. You probably know the classics better than I do—I don’t remember the titles sometimes, only the lines.”

The now-familiar glide of silken cord across his skin draws a deep, restorative breath out of Sephiroth and he relaxes into his bonds, into the other man. “Tseng said something like that to me once,” he says. “They don’t seem to teach the whole poems anymore, only the famous parts.”

“That wouldn’t surprise me. They insist on being more Wutaian than anything, but they’ve let a good deal of the old arts die out in trying to keep up the wargames.” Vincent nips at Sephiroth’s jaw, then nuzzles behind the ear as he knots and loops the cord over Sephiroth’s chest and about the shoulders. He lets his fingers skim distractingly over Sephiroth’s nipples several times before finally trapping them in the web. “My father always made me learn the whole poem. He insisted the context was critical, but even my mother thought that was excessive. But then he never did know why she learned them.”

Silk pinches Sephiroth’s nipples and he feels it pulling deep into his groin. He shifts on Vincent’s cock, then sucks the air over his teeth as Vincent flicks his nails just under the bound nubs, letting the vibration transmit up through the cord. It’s less intense than an outright tweak but lingers longer, makes him feel as if the stir of his own breathing will endlessly replicate the torture. “She only taught you?”

“She taught me emergency codes. I picked up the rest in the course of my work.” Vincent resumes tying the harness. He’s not concentrating the ropes about Sephiroth’s chest as much as he usually does, but stretching them well down Sephiroth’s torso. They bypass the cock cage but still cross over Sephiroth’s back and sides, tickling as they tighten, as Sephiroth tries not to rock in place. “I did freelance for a few of the clans. One-time missions, never anything that’d put me in the middle of a feud. But sometimes there wasn’t much else on offer.”

Sephiroth tips his head back as he feels the harness near completion, letting the chain keeping his arms hanging take his weight so that he can push himself into the ropes. They dig deliciously along his muscles, squeezing prickling flushes across his body, and he’s tempted to simply luxuriate in it, to let himself be the mindless toy. But…it’s rare, the mood Vincent is currently in. He thinks to ask, and asks because he thinks he may not find another chance for weeks. “You didn’t want to compromise your mother?”

“Not that I knew where she was, but yes,” Vincent says. He’s matter-of-fact about it, but his hands slow a little. Pressing their tips and then their palms against Sephiroth’s waist, his breath coming in one long, soundless wash across the top of Sephiroth’s back. Then he shifts back. His claw-tips just nick at Sephiroth, splayed out at the edge of nape and back, before he tickles them down the spine. “I think this’ll sharpen your senses for the last two.”

The touch wobbles on a razor’s edge, so fine that when Vincent’s claws meet a rope and skate up over it, Sephiroth can feel the infinitesimal sweep of air under their tips, and yet so—so brutally intensified that Sephiroth finds his gasps piling up on top of each other. He thought he was sensitive before, but now it’s as if Vincent has turned him inside out and is stroking him from the inside, stroking his nerves so perfectly that he wonders if the only answer is madness.

“Forty-nine,” Vincent’s voice, smooth and low and effortlessly quieting, says.

Sephiroth makes a ragged, helpless sound, trembling all over, as he waits for the first touch of the brush. The clink of Vincent tapping it against the bowl’s rim to shake off water makes him cry out and Vincent runs his free hand down Sephiroth’s back, palm-first this time. Triggering burst after burst of shivers, till Sephiroth’s teeth are rattling, but there’s reason to it—the man is burning off the initial rawness of the nerves, removing that so that when he does raise the brush to Sephiroth’s skin, it comes down on a docile, receptive canvas.

The strokes are easier to discern this time. They still flare white-hot against the backs of Sephiroth’s closed eyes, but with enough space between them to easily make out the characters. For the last few before this, they had layered directly on each other, bleeding into a throbbing mass no matter how hard Sephiroth tried to pick them out. “‘Smokescreen. Ignore what you see,’” he says after a moment’s panting.

Vincent makes an approving noise. Then wraps his arm around Sephiroth’s waist, pulling them flush even as Sephiroth arches and moans from the way the man’s cotton robe rasps over his rope-wrapped flesh. That’s the consequence this time—the reward, his mouth and his hands roaming where they please as Sephiroth feels the cock cage crush down another attempt at climax. “Could you quote the whole verse if I asked?” he muses, rolling Sephiroth’s ball sac in one hand as he laps sweat off Sephiroth’s collarbone. “You didn’t have to memorize them as part of your opposition research.”

“No, but I—it would’ve been harder to not, Vincent. I was reading them anyway,” Sephiroth groans. He feels Vincent’s hand close over the cock cage and lets his needy cry drop him back into the other man, into the unending shiver on Vincent’s cock. He’s so hot right around it, gloved so tightly onto it that he thinks Vincent will have to peel him away when they’re done. “And they—there’s skill—skill in them—”

“Which you admire, no matter the field.” Vincent’s voice dips enough for Sephiroth to go silent, but then the other man pushes his cheek against Sephiroth’s ear. He’s thoughtful, not ironic. “I could have you recite them back in that case, while I practice my brushwork—” he zigzags the bristles up one of Sephiroth’s inner thighs “—and see if my father was right about that after all. I like this better than just a way to teach you the codes.”

Sephiroth moans wordlessly. He’d enjoy that as well, but Vincent already knows—and so he has nothing more to add to it than that. And more that he wishes to learn, when Vincent relaxes this much and ponders what to revisit from his past for Sephiroth’s benefit. So he kneels and shudders under possessive caresses, the hand now wrapped over the cock cage, the mouth sucking under the point of his jaw, taking what he can as the other man takes all he has.

“Fifty,” Vincent whispers, and for this one he abandons the brush and uses only his tongue. Licking and snaking across a straining patch of Sephiroth’s back, characters few enough that he runs out before he hits the bordering ropes. And then he raises his head again, fits it to the other side of Sephiroth’s throat as his fingers drag back and forth, back and forth just behind Sephiroth’s scrotum, pressing from outside as his cock presses from within. “Fifty, and it’s—”

“Not a poem, it’s not one of them. It’s too short and it—” doesn’t make sense, Sephiroth almost rasps, twisting against Vincent in expectation of some sort of torturously pleasurable trick, some way that the other man makes him know his place; no matter how much he bends to Vincent’s will, there’s always more of him to shape. Except a thought darts out, somehow, from the haze. “A name?”

“The last one my mother taught me,” Vincent says, and then his fingers move away from Sephiroth’s perineum. Not off Sephiroth—on the contrary, they curl over the tops of Sephiroth’s thighs, then the sides. Gripping them tightly as Vincent inhales deeply into the hair coiled about Sephiroth’s neck, inhales and savors but also, a small part of Sephiroth thinks, braces. “Her clan name, her real one.”

His hands loosen a second later, and then his exhale, loose and unhurried, comes next. By then Sephiroth is whimpering, sensing the man’s intentions as Vincent pushes up into him, moves to grip his hips. His arms swing from their chain; he’s sore all through the limbs and well down into his back, but doesn’t make any move to resist as Vincent gathers him back and fucks roughly into him. Uses him, uses him to wrench a release hard enough that the other man is left gasping for several seconds afterward.

Then Vincent reaches around. He unlocks Sephiroth’s wrist binder from the chain and helps work stiff arms down, then moves the bowl out of the way so he can take them down onto their sides. His leg hooks over Sephiroth’s twitching own, pinning them till the ache of denial moderates into something that allows Sephiroth conscious thought. And then Vincent puts his palm up in front of Sephiroth’s mouth.

“Do you remember?” he asks, and when Sephiroth manages a nod, his smile can be felt through the sweat-sodden hair at the back of Sephiroth’s head. “Then show me. Lick.”

Sephiroth groans, and when he opens his mouth, his tongue more flops than comes out. But he pushes it to the other man’s hand, and then, slowly and with several false starts, traces out a copy of the characters against Vincent’s palm. Vincent loosens the braid from his throat as he does, and when he’s finally done, moves that wetted hand down to his cock. Sephiroth had been about to settle into a comfortable stupor, but the touch draws his need back into sharp relief, and he whines.

“Yes, I know,” Vincent says as the cock cage loosens, unyielding metal replaced by knowing fingers. “Fifty. So come.”

His thumb presses just behind the head as Sephiroth’s orgasm rips out. Then, as Sephiroth lies in a shaking, deflated heap, it moves up to stroke gently, mercilessly, at the last trickle of come beading out.

“It’s a dead clan. Declining even before the last war and that finished them. You’re not going to see that name outside of history books,” Vincent says. He continues stroking over Sephiroth’s cock head, leaning to kiss the back of Sephiroth’s shoulder as Sephiroth lets out a thready sound. “Not really Shinra’s doing, it only was an accident of timing, and I don’t care, I don’t think my mother did either…but she might use it. If she’s still alive, and ever has reason to speak to you.”

What do you want me to say and what would bring her to me pass through Sephiroth’s mind. And he should think about those, and other questions, but not like this, not with so little energy in him to do them justice. Vincent knows that, of course, and this is his way of ensuring it’s a separate conversation. But Sephiroth does think he should acknowledge this too, in some way, and so he pushes out his chin and stretches his tongue till he can just touch Vincent’s other hand, which is still lying near his head.

It curls its fingers as if to push off the bed. Then twists around instead, dropping under his jaw and then rubbing over his windpipe, intimating affection as well as the possibility of silencing him. The caress pets a sigh out of Sephiroth, and he lets his head sink into the bed as Vincent kisses his shoulder again.

“You’ve already memorized it,” Vincent observes. His hands move, one down and the other up to meet at Sephiroth’s waist. Then he chuckles as Sephiroth makes a weak noise, protesting as Vincent begins to unwrap the cord from around him. “You can sleep, but I have to untie you.”

“Stay in me, then,” Sephiroth murmurs. Another protest slips out as he feels more of the cords loosen, but Vincent rubs the resulting tingles out of his skin and he can’t bring himself to resist. “Please.”

“Demanding,” Vincent says affectionately, but he makes no move to pull out, and only continues to unravel the silk cords.

Then he says something else, something in Wutaian. Sephiroth’s half-asleep at that point, and only knows that he recognizes it but can’t work out then what the reference is. But he remembers it—he’d have had to have been fully awake and trying to not.

So it’s simple enough to look it up later, when he’s rested and Vincent is occupied elsewhere. Vincent had said it in Wutaian but it’s a quote from Midgarian literature, a speech in a historical poem from roughly the same era as some of the Wutaian epics used for coded messages. Not a farewell, but a greeting, from the protagonist to his closest ally.

Sephiroth looks at his tablet for a few seconds, and then puts it down. He dips his finger into the cup of coffee sitting on his desk and then translates the line into Wutaian, writing the characters out on the back of his other hand and forearm as he thinks through them. When he’s finished, he lets the characters sit for a moment. Then wets his finger again, changing two of the characters to alternatives.

Satisfied, Sephiroth wipes his hand off and takes his tablet back up again. And the next time that Vincent’s late returning from a trip, he’s unsurprised to see the very line he’d worked out on their private channel. He can’t call it entirely reassuring, not when he still has no insight into the delay, but…it’s a signal, and he can read the intent. It’s something he can hold onto, until he has the chance to ask Vincent when the man learned Midgarian epics. Until then, he thinks, and forces himself back to his work.

Chapter 41: Interlude: Sephiroth Helps Vincent Out with Work (and Is Duly Rewarded)

Vincent’s working when Sephiroth awakens. Half-propped against a pillow, tea-scented steam rising up over the arm he has bracing his tablet, in loose cotton trousers and a sleeping robe. His gaze lifts as Sephiroth slowly rolls onto one arm, then lingers along the curve of Sephiroth’s back and buttocks as lazy rivulets of sore warmth begin to work through Sephiroth’s body, but when Sephiroth makes for the edge of the mattress, he doesn’t shift to prevent it.

He knows Sephiroth’s only going as far as basic bodily functions demand. To the bathroom, limping, the aches pulling deeper into muscle as Sephiroth leans over the toilet. The marks from last night have lost their raw burn but in return they’ve steeped deeply into his body, marinating him until he can hardly move without feeling their heat sweep over him.

Sephiroth looks at himself in the mirror as he washes his hands and then his face: scratched and welted, garlands of red about his limbs and bruises dappling across his torso. His hair fluffs haphazardly on one side but lies flat on the other, the side he’d slept on after their shower. He gives the untamed side a stroke, then sighs as the strands cling to his fingers, but it’s only an unthinking reflex, the irritation. In truth these moments are what comes to mind now, when someone speaks to him of peace.

Nothing in the mirror that tells him he needs to leave, nothing that requires his immediate attention. His belly notes that sustenance would be desirable, but even that feels muted, and when he walks out of the bathroom, he’s not yet decided whether to make for the kitchen or to simply cross the room and fold himself back on the welcoming bed, nestling himself under the hand he knows will lift for him.

What tips the balance is when Vincent, looking not at Sephiroth but at the tablet, pulls a mug towards him and then pauses to glance into it. The level is farther down than the man had been expecting; Sephiroth anticipates more than reads the gesture, rather like he would a shift in stance in the training ring, and without thinking too much about it, turns towards the hall.

The electric kettle is still half-full, and Sephiroth identifies the specific tea by smell out of the tins racked on the counter as he eats breakfast from a plate he finds in the fridge, which Vincent must have readied at some point after dropping Sephiroth in bed last night. He makes up another pot, lets it steep as he drinks half a bottle of water, and then takes it back into the bedroom.

“Are you planning to nap all day?” Vincent asks as Sephiroth sets the pot down on the table by the bed. He doesn’t sound opposed to the idea, only curious, with a hint of indulgent humor. “Fair said something to me the other day about wondering if you’d figured out a way to sleep standing up.”

“It’s possible, but not very effective. It doesn’t allow for the REM phase, and the shorter recovery time isn’t offset by the degraded quality of rest,” Sephiroth answers as he lowers himself back onto the bed. Then he pauses as he hears himself; Vincent’s words had brought that particular experiment to mind but he hadn’t thought to speak about it—he hadn’t realized he was speaking aloud.

He’s still very much short of full waking state, for all that he’s physically left sleep behind. He can feel the sharp edges of irritation start to form, which will push him closer, but—he doesn’t think he wants to—

“I may have to be at this for a few hours,” Vincent says, interrupting the debate trying to seed itself in Sephiroth’s mind. A finger flicked into the coalescing thoughts that dissipates them as easily as a child can shake a bowl, and when Sephiroth looks over, Vincent’s intent gaze tells him that was deliberate. “Not that I had plans to be elsewhere, but…”

“Did you have plans to occupy yourself?” Sephiroth says. He runs his hand over Vincent’s bare foot, which has slipped out from under the blankets, and then, as Vincent’s eyes continue to trace over his body, over the marks on it, bends down and leans his cheek against Vincent’s raised knee, facing the other man.

Vincent’s lips curve upwards. “I had some thoughts along those lines, but you need a little more rest yourself.”

“I have tomorrow,” Sephiroth says, but it’s selfish pettiness rather than a true protest. Something is brushing up against his back, pressing just enough at the scratches there to make them spark lightly. Vincent’s tail, its furred loops dropping to hug against one buttock as Sephiroth shifts his legs back, drops to half-lie between Vincent’s thighs as he brushes one hand up Vincent’s leg. “You could make me rest.”

“Needy,” Vincent says, amused without being reproachful. But then he glances at his tablet, and his expression shifts to as close as he ever comes to regret. “Distracting. I need to put some thought into this, and even locked away, you always take some of mine.”

A flush warms through Sephiroth, not suddenly but with the perceptible creep of a sunbeam. He can’t bring himself to stop petting Vincent, not when the other man is still caressing his back, but he can’t bring himself to properly reply either, and ruin the simplicity of Vincent’s statement.

“Work?” he asks instead, as he slides onto his elbows and parts his legs for Vincent’s tail-tip to roam up against his perineum, letting his stance welcome instead of his words. “Should I request Tseng find a better meeting time?”

Vincent tilts his head, just as his tail twists with unexpected precision across Sephiroth’s hole. It’s still sore and the fur, soft as it is, makes Sephiroth gasp and arch, one knee nearly jerking off the bed as he tries to flatten and spread himself under the touch.

“I think we’ve been at him too often lately. He also needs some recovery time, or he might start to reconsider his vices,” Vincent says. He catches Sephiroth’s knee against the side of his foot and presses it back onto the mattress. Then shifts down the pillows as Sephiroth regains his balance, but so he can move his tablet out of the way to catch at Sephiroth’s hair, rather than pulling away. “It’s not his matter anyway, and if I need a professional opinion—”

“Family?” Sephiroth guesses. Then moves so Vincent, spooling him in by the hair, can brush the back of a claw across his mouth. “Asking Tseng’s professional opinion seems more likely to draw him in.”

“I didn’t say it was his I wanted,” Vincent says, mild, and then he traces Sephiroth’s lips again, the smooth coolness of his claw effortlessly filing down any sting of correction. “To be honest…I could use a general’s.”

Sephiroth is silent for a few seconds. He’d heard, and comprehended, but…he is surprised. That the words come so easily out of Vincent, when another man would have weighted them with all of the time Sephiroth’s spent swallowing the urge to simply put his services to work for the other man, and so devalue the independence he appreciates about Vincent. Or would have extracted some payment for it, in exchange for the lessened pride…but Vincent has never functioned like that, and Sephiroth would never allow himself to force such a change in the man.

“But not too brilliant, or it’ll give it away,” Vincent adds. Watching him, relaxed against the pillows but careful not to miss a detail, or to miss a read. Anticipatory, yes, but not manipulative—this is why Sephiroth takes the time, because to talk from a basis of understanding and not exploitation is rare for both of them. “That is what I’m having to put thought into.”

“Do you want a particular general’s opinion?” Sephiroth finally settles on.

He sounds a little tight, even to himself. He doesn’t mean to—very much to the contrary, but the care he wants to take in this is flattening his voice.

Vincent senses this, and tugs at his hair before he can toss it in annoyance at himself. “You’re supposed to be resting,” he says, but then, before Sephiroth can be annoyed at him, he lifts his foot and nudges Sephiroth with it. “Go put on the red dress. Nothing else.”

Sephiroth blinks then, surprised and also puzzled at Vincent’s intent. But his body is already rising; he’s used to not immediately understanding the other man, and to simply trusting that that will eventually resolve. Understanding when and where Vincent will take advantage gives him enough to know when the man will not, even without all Vincent’s reasons laid out.

So he gets off the bed and goes into their closet, and dresses himself in red silk. The panels of the skirt flirt along his legs as he walks back into the room, then drag up against his cock as Vincent reaches out and takes his arm to pull him onto the mattress. The bodice whispers over his chest, gentle enough but persistent, even silk raising enough friction to tease his nipples.

Vincent has other items to dress him in, of course. Tablet put aside for now as he laces up the back of a black leather collar, snug enough for Sephiroth to feel the tug of each swallow, and then a forearm binder, keeping Sephiroth’s arms straight down in front of him. “Tender?” he asks, as Sephiroth is reduced to rolling his upper arms to try and push the clinging folds from his nipples.

“Not yet,” Sephiroth says, which makes Vincent laugh. He ducks in and presses his mouth to the other man’s, being allowed that—or so he thinks, until Vincent takes advantage of the moment to haul him off his knees, against the other man.

His arms can still fold up and they instinctively do, his hands going to scrape at Vincent’s shoulder as Vincent twists him on his side. Soft silk billows up against his cock, making him rock, and then is pushed away as Vincent laces leather over him there, too. Not painful like the cock cage, but more than enough to keep his prick in check, and to stretch his ball sac out so the rustling folds of the dress start to send ripples of hot-electric frisson over his sensitizing skin. Sephiroth moans and drops his head against Vincent’s chest, no longer struggling as Vincent curls one hand over his bound wrists, pinning them under his chin as the man’s other hand dives into the skirt. A fingertip noses between Sephiroth’s buttocks, then laps at his hole as he squirms.

“I can’t,” Sephiroth pants, and then rolls his hips as Vincent catches the ring dangling at the front of his collar. The tweak of the leather about his throat seems to tighten him all over, all the way down to his hole, which lips at the fingertip Vincent keeps circling over but not into it. “I can’t—I can’t be a general like this—”

“No,” Vincent says, voice honeyed over the hungry rumble in it. He dips and takes Sephiroth by the mouth, takes all the air from it, and then lifts his head as Sephiroth’s droops to his chest. “But you make a lovely consort. You need me to touch you, don’t you?”

Sephiroth responds to the hunger in his voice rather than the words, mewling wordlessly as Vincent teases him. Vincent’s fingertip drifts away and he arches uselessly, trying to press his buttocks after it in the tangle of the dress and Vincent’s robe and the sheets…but he’s lost it. And he slumps against Vincent, gasping, as Vincent’s hand reappears at his belly to languidly smooth down the front of the dress.

It moves up under his bent arms, high enough to graze one of his nipples. Which is not tender now, but which remembers how tender it’d been last night, how swollen and hot, and that memory is not that hard to refresh. Not as Vincent slowly pinches the nub through the dress, making him moan and stretch in the man’s embrace. “Please—please—touch—”

“Consorts do have to be tended to,” Vincent says, breath sweeping over the top of Sephiroth’s head. He moves his hand off the nipple, its fingers dragging out till they’re splayed widely as he drags the palm down the middle of Sephiroth’s belly. “Petted.”

“What do you w—want, Vincent,” Sephiroth groans as the first of Vincent’s fingers starts to stroke along his groin. Not over his cock, not yet, but close enough that the silk carries its warmth. Like wires strung between them, little jolts running down through them till yes, he’s petted. Slow, firm strokes over the dress and cock sheath, and then, as he gasps, the sudden huff of cooler air as Vincent pulls up the silk and then hauls him onto his back, kneeing open his legs so that they slide off to either side of the other man’s thighs. “What…”

“I want you to look at something for me,” Vincent says. He doesn’t reach for the tablet yet, but only adjusts Sephiroth’s legs where they’re draped over his own, trembling as he pushes at the thighs. He tucks the dress’ panels safely out of the way, winkles a fold of his robe out from under Sephiroth, all to leave Sephiroth’s hole bared and available. “Tell me what you think. Not because you’re responsible for it, but because I’d like you to.”

Sephiroth shudders. Yes, he’s held that way, open and vulnerable, but he shudders not because of the expert way Vincent is playing his body, but—almost in spite of it. In spite of the fog of lust in his head, and yet it’s not a fight either, to see the man’s real meaning through that. Somehow they coexist, the way Vincent makes demands on him and the way Vincent asks him, and in that space, in this embrace, he feels as easy in his answer as he would a perfect sword-stroke.

“Yes,” he says. Then whimpers, as Vincent strokes a finger across his hole. “Yes, but—please—touch—”

“I wouldn’t indulge a general like this,” Vincent says, laughing, as he rims Sephiroth with lubricant. Then, grip tightening as Sephiroth tries to hike himself, he starts to work his tail-tip into Sephiroth. He lets Sephiroth’s weight bring Sephiroth back down, then dabs lubricant about the stretched edges of Sephiroth’s hole, so that the slow, steady push of his tail drags it in. “But a consort as lovely as you can deserves to be indulged.”

“If I’m useful?” Sephiroth half-pants, half-moans.

Vincent’s thumb slips between Sephiroth’s hands where they’re rubbing against each other and against Vincent’s breastbone. It caresses the hollow of Sephiroth’s palm, just as his other thumb drifts up from Sephiroth’s hole to stroke down the strain in the surrounding flesh. “You’re already useful,” he says, nipping at Sephiroth’s throat. “So I’m indulging you. But I can only do so much, if I need this hand—”

He pulls away the one holding back Sephiroth’s skirt. Ignoring Sephiroth’s protesting whine and canted hips, he reaches over and returns with the tablet.

“—to work. I could be using it to play with you. I could make your nipples tender again, the way you like them,” Vincent says, with unimpeachable logic as his tail twists sharply in Sephiroth, and his arm presses Sephiroth back down as rough shivers result. “But I can’t till I’m done.”

“You indulge me with—without mercy, Vincent,” Sephiroth says, voice cracking as he finally sags back into place. He pants a few times as Vincent, tail no longer moving and simply filling him, lets him recover. “What do you need from me?”

“This is a compound in western Wutai, near…yes,” Vincent says, moving the tablet to where Sephiroth can see it and then nuzzling Sephiroth’s ear when Sephiroth, glimpsing the coordinates, sighs and then quivers around his tail. “A minor clan affiliated with the Date. They have a feud with their neighbors, and it would only take a little encouragement for it to break out again. This compound needs to be attacked during that.”

Sephiroth looks at the tablet with only cursory thought behind it, and then makes himself look again, more attentively, as Vincent gently rubs his thumb across Sephiroth’s palm. “It seems ripe for a remote strike, with its positioning. One landslide—”

“Which is the problem. If there’s a landslide, everything will be buried, and no one will find what’s in this part,” Vincent says, tapping the tablet to zoom in. He brings up interior layout views as well, and then rests his cheek against the top of Sephiroth’s head as Sephiroth studies them. “It’s a lab. They have people who have studied with Dr. Kusakabe, and they’re not as mindful of ethics as she is. Not as skilled either, and they have too many supply-chain challenges to do anything very sophisticated.”

In the back of Sephiroth’s mind, part of him is very much alert to the nuances of this. It would be a difficult mission to carry out, with how far into Wutaian lands this clan is based—discovery would likely mean an immediate declaration of war—and he’d be as hamstrung by his own concerns as by Shinra’s, since anything recovered would go immediately to R&D. And he can see what Vincent means about the lab’s capabilities. The limitations would keep them well short of human clones, probably even human test subjects, but would still allow them to dabble in serious enough monstrosities.

It's all important, all deserving of careful consideration. And he is considering the matter, but without the usual…anxiety. Which is a strange word, but as he thinks, he believes it to be the correct one. Now that he can think about it, and somehow, here, not feel as if he has to personally see to everything lest it end in resurrecting even worse horrors. He is thinking about how to deal with this, and he feels more certain and secure about his ability to do so while sitting in Vincent’s lap than in his office with all of SOLDIER at his beck and call.

“Their neighbors strongly adhere to the old customs, and would shut down the lab if they discover it, probably better than anyone else would. They know each other so well, they’d know exactly who to look for and where to chase them down, and they won’t save any of it for their own use,” Vincent goes on. He starts to pet Sephiroth again, rearranging his arm so that he can toy with a nipple. “But it’s very far out there. I don’t even know that area and those clans very well.”

“So an attack that’s clever enough to breach the place, but not so clever they realize how much more work that is than a well-placed missile or bomb,” Sephiroth says. He tips his head to better fit it under Vincent’s chin, then lets himself sigh in pleasure as Vincent’s tail moves slowly in him. “I…think that is not so hard.”

“Not as hard as being a general?” Vincent teases.

Sephiroth snorts, then sighs again, more deeply, as Vincent moves his knees to press Sephiroth’s legs further apart. “I can think about it how Rhapsodos would, I’ve fought with him this long…they sound like they might have some personalities like him, if the feud is so…old…”

“Yes,” Vincent says, dipping down. He kisses Sephiroth’s jaw, then temple, and then withdraws. “So, how should it be done?”

It takes a moment, as a shudder works its way out of Sephiroth first, but…thoughts draw together, and Sephiroth provides an opinion. Vincent pulls up a few more diagrams on the tablet, verifying some obvious things and then looking at others that are not so obvious—but Sephiroth tucks those away for now, for mulling over later, and only lets himself be cradled by the other man, offering an occasional refinement on the plan. Cradled and caressed and yes, indulged, as Vincent briefly props the tablet against Sephiroth’s thigh to pull something out of a bedside drawer.

Silver pressure rings, adjustable, twisting slowly on a chain over Sephiroth’s face as he hitches on Vincent’s tail, the man’s prick hard where it’s pillowed against his buttock, and then shivers, anticipatory, as Vincent unfolds his arms with one finger. Cups his hands down over his bound, aching, soft cock and holds them there with that finger across their backs as the chain is hooked to his collar and the rings slipped under his dress.

“A lovely consort rewarded,” Vincent mouths against his arched throat as the rings close about his nipples. “Decked with jewelry.”

“So—tight,” Sephiroth groans. He jerks as they squeeze even more, then whimpers when Vincent brushes one nipple with the tip of a claw. “Tight.”

“You need to rest, and I need to finish this,” Vincent says, with another kiss to Sephiroth’s jaw. “Like this.”

Curled against him, silk-wrapped and firmly secured, with the occasional languorous turn of Vincent’s tail inside of him to keep him just this side of that dreamy haze, just aware enough that he can nose away Vincent’s robe and lip the man’s chest as Vincent rumbles with lazy appreciation. “How did you learn about them?” Sephiroth asks as an afterthought.

“Lucrecia,” Vincent says, with only a slight pause. He strokes one hand over Sephiroth’s shoulder as the haze clears a little; it’s soothing only, and isn’t an attempt to keep Sephiroth too hazed over to pay attention. “Though it’s not because she asked me to clear them. They’d destabilize the entire region if left alone, and if that happened Godo may ask things of me I’d prefer not to have to consider. He might also ask things of you, but more likely he’d only ask you to stay out of it.”

“My mother…doesn’t think they’re important enough, does she?” Sephiroth says after a moment. Soothed—and thinking, neither detracting from the other. If anything, he thinks as he glances up, Vincent seems to be the more cautious one of them in this.

The other man was watching him, but as their eyes meet, Vincent’s expression relaxes. Then shifts into an appreciative smile, as Sephiroth cranes about to kiss and lick at the back of his hand, lapping the edges of its plating as the man likes. “She thinks their work is too crude to ever amount to anything significant, but then, she’s never been as interested in the non-human ones. And they’re entirely homegrown Wutaian, they aren’t relying on her work—perhaps some of Hojo’s very early work that’s gotten out, at most. But nothing of hers. She mentioned them in passing, complaining about something else to me. About the one you just rooted out, which, I reminded her, is SOLDIER’s business and not mine.”

“Very like her,” Sephiroth snorts. But then he wants to drop it—he can drop it, he thinks. Drop it, and turn his head back, and nuzzle up along Vincent’s collarbone till Vincent, indulgent but firm, tugs him away by the nipple chain. “I want you to touch me.”

“When I’m done,” Vincent says. He chuckles, finger twisting in the chain, tail twisting in Sephiroth, rubbing his cock shamelessly against Sephiroth’s back as Sephiroth groans and writhes against him. Then he pulls Sephiroth back against him with one arm, firmly settling them in place. “I’ve indulged you enough for now. Hold.”

Sephiroth moans, but in longing, not rejection. Moans, and shivers, and then lies where Vincent wants him, waiting.

Chapter 42: Interlude: Three Views of Vincent’s Extracurricular Activities

Sephiroth’s mother is a geneticist without parallel, a once-in-a-lifetime genius, and anyone who disputes that is even more of a fool than those few followers who still believe Hojo had any kind of originality rather than being an egotistical grifter of others’ work. That still doesn’t mean that Genesis can stand the way she speaks about his DNA, as if it’s no better than the dirt on her shoe soles, when it wasn’t his meddling that ruined it.

“She treats you like that because you can’t hold your temper, and then you only prove her theories about you right,” says her coldblooded son, right before he takes off to deal with some political issue he deems more pressing than his own mother’s dissection of Genesis’ inferiority.

“Your condition is chronic, not unmanageable. Subpar sensors for an entire city block indicates an institutional failure at testing and maintenance, not fault at the individual level,” Vincent points out as he takes out a short stack of those food tins.

Genesis laughs not because he’s at all mollified by the offering, however delicious it is—or because he credits Sephiroth with even thinking to let Vincent try to manage him—but because the flaw in Vincent’s logic is so glaring. “Well, to hear our esteemed Dr. Crescent tell it, you’d be mistaken to not equate the two. She can’t mend my DNA any more than our damned company can control its vendors.”

“If she wanted you destroyed, she would have done that years ago,” Vincent says. Calmly enough, but something in his deliberation makes Genesis’ instincts prickle. Vincent lets him narrow his eyes and look the other man over before going on. “She reached out to me around the time they first learned of Hollander’s work.”

“Had you on stand-by in case Angeal and I turned out to be unrecoverable, I take it,” Genesis says after a moment. He can’t say he’s particularly surprised. Or that it changes his opinion of Vincent—he doesn’t share Angeal’s lingering discomfort at the man’s malleable physical attributes but he does retain certain reservations about Vincent’s motivations.

None of which have anything to do with the man’s indisputably glorious skill in the kitchen, or expertise in the bedroom. He wouldn’t consider himself disapproving of the man either, only very aware Vincent is no more an altruist than any of the rest of them, and unlike them, has had enough independence to make up his own mind about Shinra R&D. And Vincent’s made it clear enough that he’ll partner with even those he dislikes when it comes to rogue mutants.

“In the sense that she didn’t want anyone else to have you if her faction of R&D couldn’t seize you, yes,” Vincent says. He doesn’t take out any utensils for himself, and waves off Genesis when Genesis, still raw from Lucrecia’s examination, mockingly tilts a tin towards him. “I’ve been thinking and I think she’d already made up her mind to keep you if she could get to you first.”

“Oh, do you?” Genesis says. He pauses, staring at the other man, and then slowly lowers the tin. He’s a little more considered with his next statement. “Well, I try as little as possible to understand that woman, so I defer to your longer intimacy with her.”

Vincent smiles, close-lipped and unoffended. He’s unlike either Sephiroth or Sephiroth’s mother in that his knowingness always seems to come from a place of…he might not condone, but neither does he appear to judge. “Sephiroth had shown an interest in the matter, and his abilities were already outstripping Shinra’s ability to keep him confined.”

This time Genesis intentionally swallows down the anger. He doesn’t want to matter to Vincent, not truly—it’s his pride that wants him to matter as himself, to be more than a mere foil to another. And if he lets that override his intelligence, it’s because all the wit he possesses hasn’t yet made a difference to his position in Shinra, and so he sees no point in wasting it. But this is—this is a strange move on Vincent’s part. “Of course we’ve been useful as leverage over him. But you must not know his mother that well, if you think that was her initial goal. She’s always wanted the science to win out, not the person. She had that in common with Hojo.”

“She did. But she’s always had better long-term sight than he did,” Vincent says, watching Genesis without blinking. “She recently suggested to Lazard that SOLDIER should push Tseng to formally assign me to liaise with him.”

“Sephiroth mentioned that, and that neither he nor Tseng were supportive of it. She has no right to determine your duties and you’re more useful elsewhere,” Genesis says after a moment, only slightly sarcastic. “Besides, the entire point of you is to not be visible, and if she’s uncomfortable with that, she can suffer along with the rest of us.”

Vincent’s brow rises, and not, Genesis thinks, because of the sarcasm. “Is that what you think her motives are?”

“I suppose that depends on whether I’m your backdoor channel in your lover’s tiff,” Genesis snorts, pulling a tin over again. He eats a few mouthfuls, then looks up at Vincent, who, while still not disapproving, also clearly doesn’t buy Genesis’ attempt to rile him. “Sephiroth thinks that’s what she—”

“I know what he thinks, and I know what Lucrecia thinks about me,” Vincent says, quietly but pointedly. “I don’t spend that much time thinking about her, but I can tell when she’s changed her mind about something.”

“And you’re curious about what I think, of all people?” Genesis has to ask, intrigued despite himself.

“Better you than Angeal,” Vincent says, and then smiles again when Genesis reflexively bridles. “She values your imperfection as a goad to Sephiroth to do better. Hewley, she wants as a way to keep Sephiroth bound here.”

“And you were an odd little hobby of her son’s, but you’ve been here long enough for her to see some changes in him. And in spite of herself, she thinks you’ve made him better,” Genesis says, once he’s calmed himself. The food helps for that, giving him a simple physical action to perform while his mind catches up and then outlasts the emotions, and oh, yes, Vincent is very good at what he does. “For her purposes. As you’ve asked what my opinion is.”

Vincent doesn’t reply. Doesn’t say that he agrees, or that Genesis’ suggestion illuminates the situation, or anything like that. He merely sits and waits as Genesis finishes off the tins, and then puts his hand out to take them back.

“Angeal would have insisted on making some sort of counterplan, right here and now,” Genesis finds himself saying, holding onto one.

“He would have,” Vincent agrees then. He gives the tin another tug, and when Genesis finally releases it, tucks it away as he rises. “Better you, in that case.”

Sheer irritation at the man’s confidence almost pushes Genesis to jibe at the other man, but—he drops his hand to his sword, only gripping the hilt as Vincent walks away, patently unconcerned about turning his back. Because in all Genesis’ time, which has been most of his life to date and which will, based on the latest tests, continue to be his life, no one else has come close to getting the better of her. Sephiroth shields against her, but can never quite strike the final blow, no matter what she does. And yes, some part of Genesis blames Sephiroth for failing at that no matter what Genesis does to make the man see.

But it won’t be him in the end, he’s long since realized. His reconciliation to that is another story—but there needs to be someone to do it in the end, if it’s not him. And so yes, better Vincent than him, Genesis thinks with gritted teeth.

* * *

It’s a debacle. Moreover, it’s a preventable one. Sephiroth doesn’t pretend that his authority extends to the entirety of the world—although occasionally, he considers whether that is truly a constraint or merely forbearance on his side—but he does expect that, when the knowledge is present and accessing it only requires basic observational skills, people will think.

“You know as well as I do how poorly a normal person does on a multi-tasking test,” his mother says, over the crisp tapping of her fingers against her tablet. “Add to that the inability to properly prioritize and even the genetically-enhanced aren’t guaranteed to have good judgment.”

“Are you giving up on your theories now?” Sephiroth says before he can help himself. He knows better; he has never and will never be able to bait his mother more successfully than she can him on matters of genetics.

“Oh, of course not. Unlike Hojo, I always did acknowledge that modifying the gene is only half the battle, and you still have to see how it ultimately expresses itself. But changes to the genome are a matter of verifiable fact—you’re the one who keeps thinking Rhapsodos can be coached to overcome his deficiencies,” she says as she continues to scan the readouts on the screens mounted in a half-circle around her. She highlights a row, adds an annotation to it, and then resumes scrolling. “He’s too temperamental to be trusted with delicate matters, and if he hadn’t flooded the entire area with toxic waste, I might actually have information for you. As it is, it’s going to be near-impossible to establish a baseline simply to screen out future germline mutations.”

“If he hadn’t flooded the area, we would have lost half the team. The fault wasn’t with him, it was with the erroneous pre-mission readouts,” Sephiroth grates out. He only just manages to stop himself from also pointing that, as much as Tuesti and others are screaming about the clean-up too, Genesis had done that while risking another episode; several of the toxins are known triggers for him. “My focus is on how the environmental sensors could have been so badly miscalibrated.”

“R&D doesn’t control those contracts, that’s Tuesti’s team. If you’re looking for someone to vent your anger on, I do not serve that purpose, Sephiroth,” his mother says dismissively. Then she moves one hand to pick up her coffee and actually turns from her screens to look at him. “Keep going in that line and I’ll tell Tseng to recall Vincent to calm you down. You do seem to be more rational when he’s present, even if your targets are still poorly-chosen.”

Sephiroth feels a surge of rage in him and has to look away from her to tamp it down. It does help to be reminded that Vincent is, in fact, in the city this week and his mother doesn’t yet know it. “R&D sets the calibration parameters, Mother.”

“R&D can set them but I have no control over whether they’re properly maintained, or over who is hired to do that. Again, you’re looking for a scapegoat rather than identifying the problem.” His mother continues studying him with cold eyes. “Vincent would tell you the same.”

“I am,” Sephiroth starts, and then he takes a deep breath. “I am not speaking to him right now, Mother. But if you have nothing to add, then I will wait for the official report.”

His mother sighs, as if this is no more than validation of her disappointment, and turns back to her work. “You know, I had my doubts when you first latched onto him, but he’s a better moderator of your moods than Hewley ever was, and when he’s not stealing my files, he at least can competently read them. Start sending him for these talks and we might get somewhere.”

“Vincent does not report to me, Mother. Nor to you. So I don’t think either of us are best-placed to discuss his duties,” Sephiroth spits out.

Then he leaves before she can rile his temper further. Rhapsodos unfortunately chooses that moment to fulfill every expectation Sephiroth’s mother has for him, and despite Vincent’s presence, Sephiroth finds he has to abandon work entirely for a half-hour and thrash a simulator to pieces before he’s sufficiently restored his composure.

“I’m not entirely sure I report to Tseng these days,” is all Vincent says when Sephiroth finally goes to him and relates the conversation. It’s far too late for dinner together, but while Vincent has already eaten, he reheats his cooking for Sephiroth and then sits at the table, sipping at some tea. “I have the impression at times that he’s only relaying from Rufus.”

“Rufus doesn’t own you either,” Sephiroth mutters.

Vincent smiles. He didn’t take offense at being abandoned and he doesn’t take offense now at Sephiroth’s manners. “I think he knows that, and he doesn’t seem infatuated with R&D’s output. It’s not quite in keeping with my agreement, but I don’t see any reason to object for now if that is the case. And he’ll certainly be interested if R&D’s too distracted by some new initiative to keep up their normal duties.”

Sephiroth snorts absently, and not in disagreement. The simulator hadn’t truly laid his frustrations to rest, only worn them down enough for him to clamp a mask over them, but this simple conversation is doing more to soothe him than real fighting would have. Which his mother had pointed out—then he jerks his head, irritated at himself for even referencing her. She may be right on the facts, but her opinion of said facts is entirely separate. He’s going to keep it separate. She will not, he tells himself, spoil one of the few parts of his life she has no influence over.

“I think she’s happy with how things in Wutai have been going,” Vincent remarks, and when Sephiroth startles, Vincent merely gives him the space to recall him, to unclench his hand from around his bowl. “They’re still exploring genetic engineering, but veering away from her areas. And several of the rivals she was worried about have lost their labs and funding.”

“Through your good offices. I don’t think I’d ever characterize her as capable of happiness, but she does seem to have a slightly higher opinion of you now,” Sephiroth says after a moment.

His voice still sounds sharp rather than dry, but Vincent doesn’t turn a hair. “I’ve become useful to her, not only to you, at least in her eyes,” Vincent says, and smiles again when Sephiroth sighs. “Tseng and I will have to make me less visible for a while, and she will have to understand that. A covert operative can’t be used for that purpose if they’re well-known.”

“Less visible?” Sephiroth says, putting his chopsticks down. He knows Vincent too well to immediately think the man means their relationship as well, but the earlier conversation with his mother has made him sensitive about it.

“It might actually mean I spend more time in Shinra facilities. There are questions leftover from my time that Tseng hasn’t gotten around to settling,” Vincent says, intuiting of course what’s on Sephiroth’s mind. “Lucrecia might think that’s helpful to her, but then, she has no idea what you truly think these days.”

“She knows enough to be a damned goad,” Sephiroth can’t help saying, but some of the tension starts to ease out of him at Vincent’s words. He would like the other man around more, and to hell with his mother’s way of looking at it. To Vincent’s point, it still doesn’t mean he’s become more like her. “I’m glad you think Wutai is more settled. I might be able to reduce the amount of cleaning supplies I order for the bathroom.”

“The shower’s seen more of your blood than mine lately,” Vincent says, mildly enough, but his gaze drops to Sephiroth’s left side.

“It’s healed,” Sephiroth says automatically, and then he blinks at Vincent. “It was healed when I stormed away from you and Genesis, I only hadn’t had time to change my uniform.”

“I don’t see many get past your guard,” is all Vincent says, again in that mild tone. Not reproachful, and not fearful in a way that would make Sephiroth dismissive either.

It’s only an observation, and then he pushes back from the table and goes to the sink. He wets a dish-towel there and comes back, lifting his free hand to Sephiroth’s right shoulder. Sephiroth twitches and Vincent immediately stops, watching him as he grimaces and bites down at the irrational mix of embarrassment and irritation that wants to rise up. Waits till it’s fallen away, and he’s breathing in, turning his head into the other man as Vincent carefully picks a few hairs off his neck, tugging them free of the dried blood still on it.

Sephiroth sighs as Vincent rubs him clean with the towel. This is not, he thinks, the same effortless command that sends him to his knees as easy as breathing, but…there’s some relationship. Something in how, for this man, he doesn’t mind turning his weak spots outward—and there is a weak point here, for all that the wounds he’d taken in the mission were too minor to even bother with medical. A point that Vincent soothes with his fingers curling over the newly-cleaned spot, cradling Sephiroth’s head against his hip as Sephiroth finishes a few last bites.

“I want to see the rest, even if it’s healed,” Vincent says as his fingertips drift under Sephiroth’s coat-collar. “You can have my cock once you’re clean.”

“Yes, Vincent,” Sephiroth murmurs, closing his eyes and letting the other man steer him, without any other thoughts on his mind.

* * *

It’s a dive, but the rice noodles are damn good and close enough to the real deal that Reno knows Tseng sometimes comes here just to have them and not just to meet his Wutaian expatriate informants. And it’s also been around forever, for long enough that there’s graffiti scratched into the long low wooden counter that dates back to Rufus’ granddaddy’s time, so it’s not that surprising a guy like Valentine would have it on his list of go-tos too.

“But it’s kind of surprising you’d treat a lowlife like me to your oldtimers meet-up,” Reno says as he flops down on the other side of the booth from Valentine. “Even Tseng’s pretty protective of it.”

“You still knew where it was,” Valentine points out.

Reno ignores the elbow Cissnei tries to throw into his side and just grins lazily. “Yeah, well, the boss doesn’t always know who’s got his back, but somebody’s got to.”

Valentine doesn’t seem bothered. Of course he doesn’t, and of course he just has to raise a finger for one of the interchangeable old ladies who waitress here to bring him his order. The woman pauses to get Reno’s and Cissnei’s orders, then scurries back behind the counter to the knot of steam and cursing from the cook behind the dingy curtain separating it from the kitchen, and Reno gets down to it.

“So R&D’s being R&D. You know, we’ve been keeping an eye on them since before you rolled into town,” he says as Valentine digs into his bowl. “They’ve always got some shit going on under the radar, that’s nothing new. And I guess you’re worried about the General, but he can take care of himself, can’t he?”

“Gaia, Reno,” Cissnei mutters, kicking his ankle under the table. Then she leans forward. “It does seem to have just been an oversight. The calibration team wasn’t up to scratch, and that area’s not exactly…attractive, so they wanted to get in and get out. But we are keeping an eye out—Tseng doesn’t like it either. It’s not like R&D minds if they get a Turk instead of a SOLDIER.”

“No, they don’t seem to,” Valentine agrees, raising his head from the bowl. His gaze lingers briefly on Reno’s chest, not on the part enjoying the air the unbuttoned portion of Reno’s shirt lets in but the part that’s covered up, the part that makes Reno twitch his hand towards his electrorod even though he’s pretty sure Valentine’s plated hand is nonconductive. “They must be used to it by now, if you’ve been watching them that long.”

Cissnei bridles a little. She’s always thinking about the job in terms of professionalism, even though half the point’s they go where the white-collars don’t want to get dirty. “We’re very—”

“Yeah, I get you,” Reno interrupts, looking at Valentine, who lets him do it. Cissnei’s also the kind of pro who doesn’t really get how you could ever make a side-deal with the people you’re supposed to be watching, but where Reno comes from, happens all the time. Cops and criminals both have their quotas to hit, and sometimes it just makes more sense to work together—and sometimes it just makes you a little comfortable. It’s fair of Valentine to point that out. “I get you.”

“Then don’t let R&D,” Valentine says. He raises that hand with its claws and gives it a meaningful look. Doesn’t look like he hates having it, but that scar on Reno’s chest itches again, the one from the last time R&D fucked with the Turks. “Because they don’t mind, I assure you.”

Which pretty much kills the conversation, though the lady brings over Reno’s and Cissnei’s noodles a few minutes later. At least then there’s another reason to not bother chatting: these noodles, they’re perfect when scalding your lips and disgusting when lukewarm, so you just have to get in there.

Valentine’s not shy about that, though he’s as neat you would expect a sniper to be. He finishes and pays for all three of them, then wanders out into the night to do whatever he does when he’s not keeping the General company. Reno still enjoys his meal, but it’s not as great as it could have been, and when Cissnei mutters that they should get back to Shinra campus, he doesn’t argue.

“We’ve got some work to do,” she tells him. “We missed something. We missed something.”

That wasn’t really Valentine’s point, but it’s going to make Cissnei feel better so he just lets it go, and helps her down one of those Turk-only trapdoors to a handy maintenance tunnel. The real point is, there is a damn project going on again, and it’s not about how distracted R&D is by it, it’s about what the fuck that is. Because yeah, they’re not getting one of them again, Reno thinks. Thinks and touches that scar on his chest, and then shakes it off and heads on after Cissnei. Whatever R&D’s started, fuck it. He’s happy to make sure that happens.

Chapter 43: Side-Story: Cookie Season

“This is the most important thing you’ll ever do in your life, Angeal,” Zack says, eyes tuned to maximum puppy, voice dropping even though they’re the only people in the First lounge. When he presses the tablet into Angeal’s hand, he acts as if he’s handing over his firstborn. “There is nothing more important to do right now, this instant, than make a little girl’s dreams come true, and this year you can do it for the low, low—”

“It’s Gaia Scout cookie season again, isn’t it?” Angeal sighs, glancing at the date blinking in the top right corner of the tablet.

“Once a year, Angeal. Once. No more, no less. Just six short weeks before the window closes and you have to wait out in the cold for another forty-six, counting down the days before you can get your hands on those sweet, sweet treats,” Zack says. He tries to guide Angeal’s hand to the order form on the tablet, and when Angeal shakes him off and then swats him, he grabs Angeal by both shoulders. “Oh, come on, man. I know you love those lemon shortbreads, and you’re helping a whole troop of kids learn critical life skills! Supporting this year’s drive to bank enough cash to take them all on a very educational trip to Fort Condor!”

“Look, I’m buying some, but you need to turn off the damn sales spiel. You’re spoiling my appetite,” Angeal says. Elbowing Zack for a little breathing room, and when the man just twists around to hang off him from behind, sighing and pecking in an order. He does like the shortbreads, and Gen will sometimes put off a rant for a box of fudge blondies, but sometimes he thinks he should’ve let basic training grind more of that bullshitting tendency out of Zack. “See? Ordering.”

“You sure you don’t want to up that by five, and take advantage of the bulk shipping rate?” Zack says, frowning over Angeal’s shoulder.

Angeal looks at him. Zack looks back, the guilt-trip amped up, if anything. “Kid. I’m gonna order what I can eat, not what’s gonna put your other girlfriend’s Scout troop on a glamping tour of the desert.”

“Hey, Aerith would only choose one-hundred-percent certified ecotours, you know that,” Zack protests. As he ‘accidentally’ bumps Angeal’s hand to try and make that box count go up. “Which doesn’t come cheap. Doing what’s right and not what’s environmentally bad costs money, you know. Investing for the future, that’s what we’re doing.”

“Investing for your next goddamn PTO stretch. Gaia, just sell a bunch to Cloud and Tifa, they can hand the extras around Nibelheim,” Angeal grumbles as he tries to complete his order before Zack can mess with it.

“I already did, okay? So the day trip is covered but if they want to get in an overnight, they’ve gotta stump up extra and—”

Zack breaks off, and slides away from Angeal’s back while he’s at it. Angeal, knowing better than to assume the puppy’s come to his senses, hits the ‘order’ button and then looks up at their approaching commander, ready to let Sephiroth know the latest on their little Procurement snafu so he doesn’t think they’ve just been sitting on their asses in the lounge the entire time.

Except Sephiroth’s eyes flick down to the tablet, and then he puts his hand out. “Are you sponsoring a troop?” he says, looking at the form.

“Uh, well, I’m sort of sugar-daddy to the sponsor,” Zack says, and then coughs at Angeal’s elbow. “I mean, it’s Aerith’s troop, I’m just passing it around to a couple friends. Totally not going to spam my division, sir, I know the rules against…kickbacks and…oh…”

Sephiroth is tapping at the tablet. He inputs an order, then nonchalantly hands the tablet back to Zack as he asks Angeal whether Lazard’s gotten in touch with the Junon warehouse yet. Angeal blinks hard—Sephiroth’s not really big on sweets, as far as he knows, but maybe their friend is giving Zack a break, and Sephiroth does do the occasional charity thing for PR reasons. So he starts to explain why they actually had to go terrify the Mideel supply hub instead, and then Zack starts choking.

They both stop and look at him. Zack shakes his head, then waves his hand to signal them to ignore him. “Sorry,” he mutters, hastily putting the tablet away. “I’m good, really.”

Which, he tells Angeal once they’re alone again, is actually the truth.

“Seriously, look at this,” he says, wide-eyed as he stares at the number on the tablet. “That is like, an entire pallet of cookies. Literally, Ang. A pallet. I have no fucking idea what Seph is going to do with that many, but Gaia Troop Yellow Lily is getting that desert tour and then some.”

“Yeah, well, just don’t do something stupid like repeatedly bring it up to him,” Angeal says, and for once, Zack seems to listen.

Not that Angeal isn’t curious himself, but Sephiroth wouldn’t take it well. That mother of his has made him think anyone noticing non-work details about his life is trying to get something on him, and Angeal wants his friend to do more things just for the hell of it, not less. So he doesn’t bring it up either. If Sephiroth just throws the cookies out, well, he bought them. He can do whatever he wants with them.

* * *

“I’m told they freeze quite well,” Sephiroth says as Vincent continues to look at the pile.

It is rather sizable. Sephiroth hadn’t put in the order he did out of thoughtlessness; he knows what Vincent’s metabolism is like and he calculated a year’s supply for each flavor, since Vincent’s previous allusions to cookies hadn’t indicated which one he preferred and all the flavors on offer are ones he’s seen the other man eat. But working it out on paper and seeing the concrete reality are different matters, and he has to admit to a little uncertainty, given Vincent’s silence.

“They do. I once killed a man who had a rotation system for dating and storing them in his freezer,” Vincent finally says. He picks up a box—the mint-cream wafers—and opens it, then gives the end a sniff. Then, a slight smile on his face, he tears open the end of the packet inside and pulls out a cookie. “There’s enough here that we could take some to the cave.”

Sephiroth feels himself relax, and then gradually slip into the warmth of amusement. “Banking a reserve?”

“If we keep them all in Midgar, I doubt they’ll last a full year,” Vincent says, without any trace of exaggeration; he’s likely not speaking off-hand either, given how he’s internalized the same sort of metabolic calculations Sephiroth has. He nibbles at the cookie, then makes an almost-inaudible noise of pleasure. “They taste exactly the same. I haven’t had one since that mission—four years ago.”

And before that, he may not have had them since his childhood. Which is how he’d mentioned it to Sephiroth, a passing reference to the way his father had become friends with Gast despite their very short time as colleagues by buying a few from Gast’s niece. But he’d also smiled when he’d said the cookies had tasted good enough he’d forgiven his father for forgetting to buy groceries that week, and Sephiroth had remembered that when he’d seen the form in Zack’s hand. Remembered, and had had an impulse of a kind he rarely indulges.

“More dependable than some of our mission-critical suppliers,” Sephiroth says, also recalling the reason why he’d been looking for Zack that day.

“Still, better to have enough to save,” Vincent says.

He polishes off his cookie, still with that rare, relaxed smile on his face, and then turns to Sephiroth. His hand comes up and Sephiroth tilts his cheek into it, and Vincent kisses him, slightly minty from the cookie and languidly sweet. There’s no need for a verbal thank-you; when they part, Sephiroth both feels well-repaid for following that impulse and is making a mental note to put in a calendar reminder for next year.

“Once these are put away, you can get on your knees and wait for dinner,” Vincent murmurs. He tugs his curled hand about Sephiroth’s nape, whispering their lips together again as Sephiroth makes a low, anticipatory noise, and then steps back so that Sephiroth can help him clear the table.

Chapter 44: Interlude: Turk Breakroom Time

“Someday that’s going to stop working, and then my son is going to start a pointless war over you,” Dr. Crescent says to Vincent. She knows better than to reach for the swabs and syringes at her elbow, and only shakes her head as she closes out the window on her tablet. “I’ve told Tseng that if we’re going to make saving you from your family a priority, he should put some actual effort into it.”

“What were you expecting him to do, provide me with a security detail so it’s obvious to everyone?” Vincent asks. He advances the next set of photographs for viewing, watching her fingers rather than her face or what’s on her tablet. “My family is in hand.”

Dr. Crescent makes a skeptical noise, but she’s absorbed enough in the evidence to be distracted. “You said that the first time we spoke after Sephiroth was born, and then I nearly lost half my funding to Hojo that quarter, because that mess with your cousin or whichever relative of yours made you late.”

“But you didn’t lose the funding,” Vincent points out. Tone dry and posture unruffled, even though the reference is almost certainly to something no one else in the room is authorized to know about.

Still unimpressed, Dr. Crescent uses her finger to scribble an annotation on one photo. “It’s not as if I don’t notice when my son raids SOLDIER medical supplies, Vincent. You can keep trying to handle it on your own, but you’re not a geneticist. And I don’t think either of us want him wrecking what he’s built for your insanity.”

“I do try to stay sane,” Vincent says, and then, when she gives him a sharp look, all but smiles in her face.

Dr. Crescent gives the photos a last onceover, then pushes herself back in her seat and looks dismissively away from them. She turns towards the large glass window that opens from her office onto the lab outside, her eyes floating from table-top to monitor to hunched subordinate back as if none of it is satisfactory. “Fine. I know better than to pour resources into a bottomless pit. Just remember, Vincent, it’s not as if you haven’t gotten caught out before. You’ve needed the help.”

Compared to all the other things that Dr. Crescent’s said to Vincent since he joined, this seems pretty mild, but for some reason it makes Vincent go still.

He didn’t do anything else, and it’s just for a second. Cissnei’s pretty sure that Dr. Crescent missed it entirely, with how she was frowning at the lab outside, and Cissnei only caught it because…“Well, that thing you said you overheard the guide say, about if you see a monster but you can hear birds and things, it’s still fine, and you only need to worry if everything is dead silent? It was just like that.”

Reno cracks a wide, lazy grin from where he’s flopped on the couch, shoes and socks off and feet propped on the opposite end. “Look at that, couple city kids learning the ways of the urban jungle,” he says as he squints at a gun part; the rest of the gun is disassembled on the table by him. “Can’t say that that trip to the zoo was completely worthless, then.”

“It was still seven hours squatting over that stupid monkey house,” Cissnei mutters. Not the worst assignment ever, but she had to throw away that outfit because she couldn’t get the smell out and usually she doesn’t have to do that when they’re just updating their records on which board member’s having an extramarital affair. “But anyway. Think I should tell Tseng?”

“Tell him what, that Crescent’s finally gotten around to pissing off Valentine?” Reno mutters. Then pushes himself up and reaches over for another gun part, only to stop and shake his head to cut off Cissnei’s reply. “Listen, the guy’s not dumb. He’s not gonna assassinate Crescent just because she made a crack at him.”

“He might because she’s gearing up to make Sephiroth version two in a test tube,” Cissnei has to point out.

“Okay, but one, Tseng definitely knows about that. We all know about it, Cissnei, she’s got a goddamn budget proposal pending for it,” Reno says, rolling his eyes. He slouches back in place on the couch, clicking the two gun parts together and then separating them. “You gotta learn, sometimes the bureaucrats kill things for us.”

“But—”

“Two, if Valentine’s gonna assassinate anybody and he wants Tseng to know, Tseng’s gonna know without us. And he’s dating the General, I’m pretty sure if somebody needs to know if Crescent’s gonna take a dive, it’d be him first, not Tseng,” Reno goes on. He puts the parts back together, frowns at them for a second, and then sighs. Then, in a rapid blur, he flips upright, collects the rest of the parts, and has a fully-assembled gun in the time it takes for Cissnei to decide she might as well throw her lunch trash away and get back to work. “Look, you can tell Tseng if you want. I’ll go with you. I’m just saying, I don’t think we need to stop anything.”

“Because there’s nothing to stop, or because you want Valentine to do it?” Cissnei says.

Reno slides his gun into its holster and then gives her a lazy grin. He’s not nearly as laidback as he looks, she knows, but he does make it easy to think so. “Cissy, that’d mean I’d actually have to pick a side. I just think if you’re gonna go tell Tseng Valentine was scary because Crescent was scary…well, what’s new?”

“I still think Tseng should get a heads-up,” Cissnei says after a moment. But she’s biting her lip, and from the way Reno saunters over to her, he knows he’s convincing her.

“Yeah, well, let him have a nice, peaceful lunch. We’ve gotta spring that shit from Sector Seven last night on him later anyway. Right, Rude?” Reno says, leaning on her so that he can lean out the doorway and see around the corner. When a corresponding groan floats back, Reno cackles. “C’mon, let’s see if we can clean that one up a little before the boss gets to it. Sometimes that’s all you can do, y’know.”

“Yeah, true,” Cissnei sighs as she checks her phone. He’s probably right and she’s overthinking this again.

Even so, she makes sure she can make that meeting with Tseng later. It might be nothing, but she’d rather Tseng know than not.

Chapter 45: Eighth Vacation: Legend-Tripping

“I need to tell you about that place,” Vincent says.

There isn’t any perceptible change in his voice or posture, but the same preternatural instinct that makes Sephiroth the swordsman he is also makes him come to attention. Reluctantly, because he’s very comfortable and relaxed with where he is, how he is, and in whose company—he and Vincent are sitting in his private conference room, a few feet apart and fully-clothed, with work materials strewn around them and the end of the day still hours away, but nevertheless it’s a quieter, calmer moment. And he does have the pleasure of knowing that once he has settled matters for the day, he will be going home to a full weekend with the other man, with absolutely no reason to expect it to be ruined.

But he is the man he is, and he cannot neglect important matters for personal inclinations. And he cannot ignore Vincent when the man raises something to his attention; he knows very well that Vincent would never do that for a trivial matter.

“The old Nibelheim facility?” he repeats, hearing his own voice stiffen. “We decommissioned it years and years ago. But it’s—”

“Sealed off, not gone.” Vincent is looking at Sephiroth over his half-lowered tablet, steady and unblinking. “What I know about it won’t reactivate it. It’s not a live issue either. But you don’t know, and you should.”

Sephiroth starts to ask, but then catches himself. He presses his lips together and glances at the tablet at his elbow, with the reminder that he’d merely sighed at just a minute before, when that had only been an annoyance and not…

He doesn’t want to accept the thought of foreshadowing. The old R&D building at Nibelheim is still standing, and with how Hojo had intentionally avoided documenting even a quarter of what he’d done there, they run checks on the place every so often. It's a three-year cycle now, with not even an anomalous Mako-radiation reading coming up in the last two, and before Vincent had spoken, Sephiroth considered the matter only an unwelcome fossil from his biological father’s era. He’d have liked to have ordered the place torn down before this, but for various reasons including budgetary, that is not feasible.

But it’s an artifact, not a shadow. Hojo is dead and while the scars he left on various people and places still can cause trouble, they don’t change that fact.

They do not, Sephiroth thinks to himself, and then looks back at Vincent. This man, of all the people who have fallen into Hojo’s orbit, would know the importance of saying otherwise, and he is not. He is counting on Sephiroth to know that, and to know him.

It’s been several minutes at this point. Sephiroth draws another breath, studying Vincent, and then says, “Not here.”

Vincent slowly tips his head. Then moves in his seat, a deliberately minor adjustment of one arm to drape more loosely over the chair—he’s not a fidgeter and it’s a nonverbal sign that his reticence isn’t due to some sort of eavesdropping fear. “I don’t think this is the right place or time, no,” he says, which is an unusual clarification for him to add. “None of it is related to current security, and I think it was probably reasonable for it to not come to your attention before. The context—you need the right context, because you should understand.”

Curiosity springs claws-first into Sephiroth’s chest and he can’t help a sharp intake of breath, but Vincent continues to be as outwardly unruffled as before. But he has that way of watching, with that intensity that had struck Sephiroth as animalistic when they’d first met…which it is not. The man is always rational about how he’s reading a situation, even if his actions are not immediately understandable.

He makes Sephiroth think, even when giving in to mindless instinct seems attractive, and so Sephiroth reruns the man’s words in his head. “It’s never been your duty to seek me out and explain what others knew,” Sephiroth says, and then, in spite of the tension he feels, smiles when Vincent’s eyes warm. “But you want to tell me now.”

“You should know,” Vincent says again, simply, and then he shows a rare sign of hesitation when he purses his lips. “But it is…where to start.”

“You usually find an approach to that,” Sephiroth points out, and then raises his brows when this response seems to surprise Vincent. The tightness in his neck and shoulders is easing, and when he reaches out for his tablet, he doesn’t feel as if he’s being reckless in briefly turning from the other man. “If it’s going to be a difficult story, find a way that I’ll like it.”

Vincent makes a quiet noise. Appreciative, but with a distinct note of surprise. It’s hard to ever label him as rattled, but he is still being cautious. “I can’t say you will. I can say…I can say you’ll agree that you should have been told, and I can say that I want you to know solely because of that. Not because of personal reasons I have.”

For a moment, the tension surges back into Sephiroth, and he thinks—he thinks in a different time, an earlier one, he would have jumped on this, would have demanded or forced the truth and then taken it as yet another weapon in his drive to make this world the way he thinks it should be. And he still may very well find a battle here. He’s found and secured more paths to private satisfaction but he hasn’t forgotten his general environment.

But…he looks at Vincent, taking in the level of care the other man is putting into merely being present, and he…doesn’t need the reminder that Vincent is an ally and more. Vincent is willing to call him a partner and he doesn’t simply know that. He feels the weight of it, and that feeling is his actual instinct now, he thinks, while the old urge to leap out and attack is merely an old habit, which he pushes aside with another breath.

“Then tell me, in the way you think I’ll understand it best. You know me,” Sephiroth says. He holds Vincent’s gaze for a few seconds before looking back at his tablet. “I was going to handle the inspection myself this year, with a small team—I mentioned it because I thought you could meet me there afterward.”

“I know,” Vincent says. He’s only silent for a few seconds this time. “I’ve been in there—I know what your protocols are testing for.”

“Do I need the team?” Sephiroth asks, looking back up.

Vincent’s gaze has moved slightly away, but in thought, not fear; it moves back almost immediately. “Have them follow you, there’s no point in disturbing arrangements, but they’ll have little to do. Come early by yourself and meet me there. I’ll talk about the rest then—it’ll make more sense.”

In the building itself, he means. Sephiroth opens his mouth to—ask, to reject the idea out of hand, to protest that every inch of that place was once Hojo’s and has never truly been made anyone else’s, and Vincent shakes his head. Once, not sharply at all, but it’s still enough to give Sephiroth pause.

“In there is nothing to challenge you. He’s dead and it’s not his ghost, Sephiroth, I promise you,” Vincent says, and for the first time a thread of emotion flicks through his voice. There and gone, quicksilver like a fish glimpsed at the surface and thus unreadable, but still there. “You killed him long ago, and no one has never changed that. Nor would I allow it myself, now. But that is where I think you need to hear it, if you want to hear it as I think you do.”

Sephiroth has to inhale and sit back. He has his obligations to work, to those who look to him for leadership and protection to consider, but…he’s already assessed this. He already knows what the answer will be, he only needs to feel it settle in him. And it doesn’t take that long. Not when Vincent is coming as close to a heartfelt request as he’s ever heard from the man.

He nods. Vincent takes the acknowledgement with a moment of respectful silence, and then changes the subject to some surveillance reports on the Wutaian border. They’re ambiguous enough that discussing how to interpret and then how to frame them for Rufus and the rest of the board genuinely engages Sephiroth without him feeling as if it’s merely a distraction. It helps.

Then Sephiroth leaves for a few meetings, and when he returns, Vincent’s there to come home with him, cooking dinner and then taking him savagely in the shower. He’s reduced to a shaking, wanting mess by the time they roll onto their bed, and this also helps. Whatever Vincent wants to tell him, it isn’t about what the two of them have—that has rooted far too deeply at this point to come loose because of a history neither of them originated. Vincent wants him, and wants him now, with and despite whatever knowledge is in the other man’s head, and this is all Sephiroth needs to know about him.

So Sephiroth can wait. His temper is perhaps a little shorter in the following weeks when Vincent isn’t in town, but Angeal tells him he’s better than the last time they sent an inspection team. “I’d like to say it’s because you’re getting to go yourself and don’t have to rely on your mother’s word any more, but then, I don’t know what you did to get her to back off,” Angeal adds.

He’s concerned under the wry tone. “I did nothing. I told her it should be assigned to SOLDIER given I don’t have a war theater to run this time, and she failed to protest. Probably because it’s been so inactive,” Sephiroth says, and then sighs at Angeal’s startled look. “Yes, I know, but I have kept an eye out and there haven’t been any backdoor maneuvers. I truly think she’s lost interest. There’s simply nothing left for her to excavate.”

“So she stuck you with the grunt work of caretaking that asshole’s leftovers,” Angeal says after a second. “Actually, I guess that does make sense for her. Which is probably as good a confirmation that it is going to be a milk run, and then you should get an actual vacation afterward.”

Sephiroth’s expression must shift because Angeal grimaces and then apologizes for sounding flippant about it, while also telling Sephiroth he should do his best to relax while he’s out there. Angeal becomes so insistent about it that it’s clear his guilt issues are resurfacing, and it’s all Sephiroth can do to convince the man to drop the subject by tasking him with convincing Genesis to have Roche permanently reassigned to his command while Sephiroth is gone. Which should keep both Angeal and Genesis adequately preoccupied, but it also is a mental link back to Midgar and to the careful balance of considerations necessary in that place. Sephiroth goes to Nibelheim to leave those behind, and he already…

He already has Vincent’s words nestled in the back of his mind. He is leaving it in the other man’s hands, but he cannot forget about it, and that means that all through the last few days and even onto the transport to the mountains, a prickling, restless energy keeps stirring through him.

“I see now why you used to insist on not speaking at all, or seeing anyone, when you came up,” he says when he and Vincent finally meet.

Not at their private air strip—Sephiroth flew into Nibelheim on the Shinra transport, checking in at the tavern to let the locals know no search party should be sent out for him unless it’s a direct order from one of the other Firsts. Then he’d hiked up a different trail to coordinates sent by Vincent, who’s been out here for several days already and who presumably has already prepared the cave. But they’re nowhere near that. Instead they’re in a small glen not too far from the old mansion Hojo had appropriated and then converted for his purposes.

It's a pretty little spot. Fall here can be a matter of days rather than weeks in some years, but a few of the trees still have their brilliant colors, and the rocks jutting up around them both break the increasingly chilly winds and keep them from seeing the building Sephiroth knows is just over the ridge and a little over a mile away. If Sephiroth closes his eyes…but he’s not in the state of mind to pretend away his cares.

Not yet, he thinks, twisting his hand about Masamune’s hilt. He likes Nibelheim now, likes the isolation and the fact that here of all places, there’s no reason to have to remember—

“Vincent,” he says, turning, with a sharp edge to his voice that makes him tighten his grip on his sword.

He says it into the other man’s mouth. Vincent’s come up soundlessly by him, and let him position himself so that warm lips can catch and distract him, that a smooth, sun-warmed glove can close about his wrist and draw it down to his side, away from his weapon. The tension in him doesn’t immediately leave, it’s too tautly-wound for that, but like a muscle pressed under a knowing thumb, he feels it start to release.

He takes a half-step back and Vincent swings forward with him, then pulls their bodies flush again as Sephiroth shudders, drops his shoulders. Lets the other man start to take him on, and remind him why he comes here. Not why others think he should come.

“Don’t talk,” Vincent murmurs, as their mouths pull apart barely enough for the words. “I’ll talk this time. You don’t have to.”

Part of Sephiroth, the part that always needs some sort of firmness, draws itself up against that statement. But it’s feeble these days, its push less recalcitrance and more an excuse to invite a push back. Which Vincent provides, with hands that come up to work his coat off his shoulders, and then to put him down on his knees. A sigh drags out of him as his face slides down Vincent’s chest and then hip. He presses his cheek to the man’s thigh, his hands going slack against the ground to either side of him; when Masamune’s sheath clicks against a rock, it’s Vincent who stoops over and twitches it out of the way, not him.

A palm rests on the top of his head for a moment. Light but firm, telling him where his place is. “Good,” Vincent says after a moment, words still barely riding his breath. “Camping here for now. The weather is fine tonight, and I want to start tomorrow morning in there.”

Sephiroth nods slowly, the tension in his body starting to drain away as Vincent’s fingers begin to pet his hair. There are bags set down near them and he can see the stack just past Vincent’s leg. And it’s a good spot for it, with a stream within hearing distance. But the camp hasn’t been set yet.

“I’ll set everything up,” Vincent says, predicting Sephiroth’s train of thought as accurately as always. His hand slides under Sephiroth’s jaw and pushes it up, so that Sephiroth’s gaze moves from the half-outlines of the bags to Vincent’s calm expression, intent eyes. Vincent knows what he wants to do—there’s no uncertainty now in him. “Including you.”

Sephiroth takes in a deep breath, looking up. The cold mountain air sweeps into his lungs and then feathers out into the rest of his body, pushing away the tension and replacing it with a constant—but far more pleasurable—tingling.

He sits where he’s been placed. His clothes and sword are taken away, packed carefully into a canvas sack tied to Masamune’s sheath, and then Vincent slings the sack high in the air from a set of wires he’s anchored to opposing boulders and a tree. From a second sack Vincent takes out a few foodstuffs that he sets aside. Then the man hangs that sack up next to the first.

Sephiroth finds himself staring at them, plain brown lumpen things that they are, as they slowly turn in the breeze. Necessary provisions, but not required to be at hand now. So they’re put up out of anyone else’s reach, reserved solely for Vincent’s later use.

As is he, after Vincent’s packaged him up just as securely. His arms strapped across the middle of his back into one of the leather binders, tightly enough that he’s curving out his chest even before Vincent takes him by one shoulder and gently, inexorably pulls him down onto his back. His legs temporarily sprawled, an open invitation, before Vincent laces them together into another binder that runs from his knees to his ankles, while his head lolls backward as the wind brushes chilly, teasing caresses up his belly and chest to his stiffening nipples.

The grass under him is yellowing and half-dried, its tips scratching more and more of a distraction between his thighs as Vincent winds rope over the leg binder and then pulls it up to a hook dangling from the wires above. His feet are lifted off the ground and the force of it, though slow, is sufficient to drag him a few inches over the grasses. Then a puff of air flutters them against the backs of his thighs, just above where the rope is currently knotted. It’s warm and moist, and after it the bone-dry tickle of the vegetation makes his skin twitch with uncurling tendrils of sensation.

Vincent puffs at his thighs again, and he feels the faintest hint of a tongue-tip flick between his legs. He arches over his arms, twisting as the weight of his body starts to strain his shoulders, and the first moan crams up against the roof of his mouth.

More rope is knotted up his hips and about his waist. He’s half-hanging off the ground now, the wires overhead starting to bow as they take on his weight, his buttocks grazing over the rustling grass. Then Vincent moves behind him, running another rope down and weaving a harness about his torso that pulls it up off the ground. An adjustment to the leg ropes lets his feet down but keeps his knees up, and then—then he’s hoisted that way up into the air, helplessly slung into a half-reclining position, bent-legged with his chest pulled forward, his buttocks plumped between ropes that very clearly make his hole accessible from below.

“Like this,” Vincent says softly, as he strokes his hands across Sephiroth’s body. Leisurely and not only possessive, but intentionally provoking sensation. The ropes are well-placed to distribute Sephiroth’s weight, but they still bite—they press and compress, pushing nerves from the initial sharp ache into a deeper, broader sensitivity, one that makes even the lightest touch between them burn like wildfire. “You’ll wait like this. I’ll make dinner, and you’ll wait for me.”

Sephiroth has been panting for what seems like ages, and as Vincent’s fingers travel over his skin, the streaks of heat that cling to them spur whimper after whimper from him. He doesn’t even think to beg, too wrapped up in—too wrapped up to think of anything beyond the cradling wash of pain/pleasure Vincent has ensconced him in.

Palms cupping his shoulders, buttocks, heels of his feet. A claw-tip flirting about the rim of his hole as the ropes turn his squirming into an enabling rocking, and then the sudden, rough plunge of two slicked fingers into him. Two more fingers in his mouth to stifle his groan, which become three as he’s worked open and then held that way with a thick plug. He doesn’t want to talk, but he doesn’t want to have to hold himself from it, either. Being gagged removes that decision from him, lets his throat loosen into muffled cries.

Oiled fingers are wiped with studied carelessness across his twitching belly muscles, each stroke pushing little spasms into his thighs and calves that tempt him into flexing in the ropes, spreading the way they’re squeezing him into compliance till even the hair on his scalp feels warmed by it. But Vincent also ties his hair up—making it a thick knot at the base of his neck, heavy enough that he needs the support of the man’s shoulder against the back of his head.

Something glints in the sunlight. He whimpers even before the metal touches his nipples, guessing Vincent’s intention, and then lets out slow, deep moans as the rings are gradually tightened. Flowing their pressure into the greater vise of the rope cradle, keeping it not a smashing wave but a simple, constant drag that keeps his mind well under and drowns out anything else.

Anything but Vincent’s voice. “Open,” Vincent lips at his ear, and Sephiroth parts his lips for the soft, thick cloth that’s wound between them. “Now suck.”

He sucks. Vincent ties a knot over his mouth, big enough to keep his jaws open, and he nurses it with loving need as he watches the end of the strip be tied to one of the ropes running from his chest harness to the suspending wires. Then another strip blinds him, its knot pressing gently at the top of his nose. It tugs a little and he lifts his head, then goes slack back into the support of his bonds as Vincent moves away. He’s tied in place, even his head kept upright by the sling, and it aches, it aches badly and all over, but at the same time…it’s a kind of security he can’t fashion for himself.

“Good,” skates over his left shoulder, the word almost tracing itself out in the way his bare skin dances under it. He hadn’t realized Vincent was still so close, had assumed he’d been left alone and had been very at ease with it, in the way he’s been gathered up. “Like this—” lips brush at him, then move to allow the harder, sharper press of teeth “—like this I know you’re not afraid to hear what I say.”

Something pushes up out of Sephiroth and against the knot in his mouth. He moves in the ropes a little, feels his head drag back against them as the patterns of burning under his skin shift hypnotically with the change in pressure, but that push in his tongue doesn’t leave. He doesn’t have to speak—doesn’t have to think like this, but when Vincent talks to him, even when he knows it’s not necessary, he—he wants to.

“I didn’t choose this to keep you from being afraid,” Vincent goes on. His palm comes over Sephiroth’s breastbone, resting briefly at the top before gliding slowly down Sephiroth’s torso. At every twitch, it stops, fingertips gently stretching out against Sephiroth’s muscles till they still. “This is how you show you know me—if it wasn’t already true inside your head, wrapping you in chains from head to toe wouldn’t make it true. But I need the show myself sometimes—I want it too, but I was on my own for a very long time, Sephiroth. It can be hard to believe this is as simple as it is.”

He wants to ache for the man. He does ache for him, listening but also feeling. Bundled up like this, unable to do anything else, and he is infatuated with that, he admits this. But he’s also aware of how rare this is, how unlikely he’s ever going to find something or someone like this ever again, and that feeds into the ache. He’d thought this was only something in himself, but Vincent is telling him that this too is shared, and—this ache, this is for himself but also for the other man. Because there are always other things to be done by one of them, and this much, at least, he can keep for them while Vincent attends to those chores.

So he’s quiet. Shivering, yes, shivering and often working his mouth about a stifled whine as he hangs in place, doing nothing while the sounds of camp life rise up around him, but this is what he’s here for. A keepsake, listening silently to the thwap of unfolding canvas, the thud of firewood being stacked, the endless clicks and clinks and clatters that go along with ordering a camp. He’s quiet and still and patient.

When the smell of cooking food begins to swell the air, Sephiroth’s body can’t help responding, hitching and arching as different hungers braid into one knot of need. Vincent returns for a few minutes, petting him from shoulder to buttock, nipples to cock, till he’s dribbling precome over himself, and then tells him to come. He arches viciously enough that the ropes sway his dazed body back and forth for minutes afterward, making him pass from dizzy to soothed to quiet again, covered with his own spend. And then he’s quiet for a little longer.

Fingers trail over him, flaking up the dried come in their wake, and when he stirs, a mouth latches onto the side of his neck. He feels it knead at him, making the spot tender and bruised, and as he strains the little he’s able into the marking, Vincent flicks open the rings on his nipples.

“Good,” Vincent says as he’s gasping against his gag, his second climax jittering through him. The other man steadies his shaking body with an arm slotted between the ropes to curl about his abdomen, and another hand nudging up between his buttocks, where he’s clenched himself to tingling soreness about his plug. “Open, here.”

Sephiroth is tired, his limbs trembling with exhaustion for all that he’s merely been swinging from the wires, but when Vincent tells him, he musters up the energy to flex apart his buttocks. The plug slides out and the familiar furred rasp of Vincent’s tail slides in; as he gasps, the knot in his mouth is pulled out. He’s still blindfolded, cradled back against Vincent as the other man spoons something delicious into his mouth.

Three swallows, each one rewarded with a deliciously deep twist of Vincent’s tail in him, and then Vincent rids himself of whatever utensil he’s using and drops that hand to Sephiroth’s half-erect cock. “Hold,” he says, and then waits until, groaning, Sephiroth has settled himself. “You know Hojo came here because it’s remote and people don’t talk. He also came because of the old history of the Jenovan cult.”

Sephiroth does. One of the man’s fruitless pseudo-scientific ambitions, to scrape up enough to resurrect this alien with the intriguing folklore around mind control. But the locals had been very thorough about their purge a generation before, and he’d never found enough, and eventually Shinra had stopped believing in its relevancy for a viable SOLDIER program. Sephiroth’s mother had always told him it was a research dead end, and had discontinued all such efforts once she’d taken over R&D.

“Jenova is gone. But it left traces in people’s DNA,” Vincent goes on. His fingers hold Sephiroth’s cock loosely, without any sort of tease, and the way he leans his head against Sephiroth’s throat is similarly unprovocative. “They profiled a few locals, Hojo and your mother, and noticed odd mutations. Some of those were included in SOLDIER’s enhancements, and also in mine. He—was able to examine me for himself.”

The knowledge about SOLDIER is not new, but that about Vincent is; Sephiroth has always had the impression that Vincent had been an independent project of his mother’s, and any involvement Hojo had had with Vincent had been secondhand and after the fact. He hadn’t thought Vincent and Hojo had directly intersected in the labs. And he has to acknowledge that this is a revelation but he doesn’t…he’s listening, and he understands, but the usual rush of urgency that fills him whenever Hojo’s name is paired with new knowledge is absent. He’s still in that quiet space, still very much grounded there and so able to understand without reactive emotion clouding his mind, and as Vincent inhales against his skin, it almost feels as if the other man is drawing on him for this quality.

“He didn’t have me for very long, but it was long enough for him to suggest a few changes,” Vincent adds. He shifts to nose behind Sephiroth’s ear, but again, it seems devoid of teasing. “Your mother wasn’t impressed and she didn’t think Hojo should make them, on me or on you. It was the final reason she turned against him, I think.”

“Final?” Sephiroth finds floating out of his mouth. Raspy, barely audible, but he knows Vincent catches it from the way the other man stills.

“She made up her mind about him later than she’s led you to believe,” Vincent says. He’s silent for a moment. “She did genuinely turn against him, and she hasn’t changed her mind since. She sided with you when you killed him.”

But Vincent is right—she’s always told Sephiroth that she had rejected Hojo’s ideas before she learned that the embryo had successfully implanted. And she’s always been unwavering about that, despite their other differences, since that decision, but that decision was—and if she’d waited on that, then the entire timeline he’d thought he’d known…Sephiroth feels the shiver, the place where the quiet is starting to tear open as his mind struggles, and he—he struggles.

Vincent’s still holding him. If he truly tried, he could free himself—but the man is only holding him, not forcing him. Warm mouth, warm hand, steady support against his back as the awareness of the world bites more roughly into him than the ropes are, and…he’s listening to this for a reason. Vincent wants him to know this for a reason, and more…more importantly, he thinks as he calms, Vincent is still here with him. There’s no struggle with that, no fight. He knows that.

But it’s not the same calm as before, and Vincent senses that. His mouth runs roughly along Sephiroth’s throat, and then again, teeth scoring across Sephiroth’s skin as fingers pull with similar intent along his cock. If they can’t have the calm, then they’ll take the roaring wild.

Heat builds in an instant in Sephiroth as all his suppressed arousal catches fire at Vincent’s touches. He writhes and bucks to squeeze himself around Vincent’s tail as it pumps in and out of him, arches into the hand pulling at his cock. “Come,” sounds in his ear and he empties himself, crying out, for a third time.

Afterward Vincent lowers him to the ground, but keeps him bound in the ropes for a little longer. He takes the man’s cock down his throat, then a little more food. His legs are untied after that and sprawl like unformed clay as Vincent gives him water. Then more food, as Vincent slowly unravels the ropes and gives him time to readjust.

It’s still hard, and tiring; the meal levels out his hunger but doesn’t truly restore his strength. He’s sluggish as Vincent helps him to the stream to wash up, and then clumsy-limbed as he’s allowed to crawl into their tent. He lies there for a while, watching the light fade through the canvas while his thoughts nose about in the shadows, as Vincent deals with a few last chores.

But when the other man comes into the tent, Sephiroth rouses himself to welcome him. Nuzzling between his legs, and then, when Vincent hauls his head up with a suppressed laugh, at Vincent’s wrist, licking at the joins between the plating. “I want you in me,” he says.

Vincent pauses, though Sephiroth still senses amusement from him. But he’s studying Sephiroth again, when Sephiroth looks up.

“You’ve told me only some of it. You’ll tell me more, I can see that, and there’s no point in guessing with only some of the facts,” Sephiroth says. He was thinking as he was resting, not only indulging in the pleasant, self-satisfied ache that comes after sex. “You want to see how I’m going to react as you go—this is your approach. So I’m providing my reaction.”

“Waiting to see the lie of the land, like a good strategist,” Vincent says after a moment. Not rejection, but his body stance is neutral as Sephiroth pushes himself against him. Neutral…but then he sighs, and raises his hand to stroke back Sephiroth’s now-loose hair as Sephiroth slides up his body and kisses him. “Which is what I wanted, but I have to tell you things most people don’t have to tell their partners.”

“But you are telling me. You’ve thought about the why as much as the how and when, and beyond that, you are telling me,” Sephiroth says. He lets the kiss linger, even as he tips his head to make the space for speech. Lets his hands curl over Vincent’s thighs as the man shifts further into the tent. “You don’t have an obligation to be here. You’ve chosen to anyway, and I am a strategist. I can appreciate this for strategy, I’m not viewing it as a lie on your part. Mother probably would, but then, she’s always had only one strategy with things she doesn’t want me to know, and that, I do call lying. I know her too, Vincent. She hasn’t changed.”

Vincent returns the kiss this time, when Sephiroth leans down. Returns it with interest, and soon enough they’re twined together on the bedroll, Vincent’s cock tucked snugly into Sephiroth as he lips at the back of Sephiroth’s neck. It’s a common enough position for them, but something in the way Vincent folds around Sephiroth, some trace of tension, makes Sephiroth press back into the other man rather than let himself be lulled into complacent exhaustion.

“I understand your timing,” he finds himself saying, even though he’s on the point of sleep. “You wouldn’t tell me now if I wasn’t fit to be your partner.”

Vincent laughs quietly. His fingers stroke lightly along the cock cage he’s put on Sephiroth, then come to rest at the very tip of Sephiroth’s cock. “You’ve always been fit, I only had to convince myself I could honor that,” he says. “And you do know her differently than I do—she shouldn’t convince you to view yourself otherwise…but this is for tomorrow. Sleep.”

That part of Sephiroth resists for a moment longer, wanting to—to delay merely for pride’s sake, merely because to listen and not to respond seems as if he’s doing nothing when the other man does so much. But he knows better, and so it’s only a moment, before he listens.

* * *

In the morning, he washes himself in the stream while Vincent is packing up camp. The rope burns and other marks are gone from his skin, but he can still feel how they’ve imprinted his nerves. When he rubs himself, both to dry off and to warm up after his icy dip, he finds his fingers tracing out their ghosts across his flesh.

He shudders once, then again, and has to press both palms against a nearby rock and bow himself against it to stop. Vincent knew what he was doing, putting the cock cage on him last night. He wouldn’t be able to hold himself without it today. He’s dripping already, cloudy beads of watered-down precome seeping from the tip of the sound buried in his prick as he makes his way back to the camp site.

He keeps dripping as Vincent combs and braids his hair, making a neater knot at his nape than yesterday. Then oils the rest of him, flicking at his nipples to make them pert and swiping a finger into his hole to work him open enough for the plug that comes next. He stands facing a tree, pushing himself out with his arms so Vincent can inspect him. The slow, languid trail of Vincent’s gaze runs over him like honeyed sunburn, stinging and then smoothing out to a heat that pools deep in his gut.

“Turn around,” he’s told, and when he does, Vincent has the piercing kit out.

The pinch and then flash of pain in each nipple sends surges of anticipation through his cock. Vincent smiles without looking down, it’s that familiar to them both, and then steps forward to lay the backs of his fingers against the top of Sephiroth’s left pectoral.

“You haven’t been in there since,” he says. His eyes are still warm, but there’s an unavoidable tinge of care to them. “Lucrecia transferred to Midgar before you were born, and never let you come see it.”

“Not in person, but I have seen the place,” Sephiroth says, and then, keeping Vincent’s gaze locked with his own, he sinks down onto his knees. His fingers twitch to reach for the other man, but as he’s not been told to, he keeps them at his hips. But he does let himself tilt his head and brush his lips over Vincent’s hand as it rises up his body, and when the fingers curl, he gladly lets them trace over his mouth. “Studied the reports, the layout, the videos, the photos…everything. Everything to be certain it…has nothing left of Hojo, but you told me this wasn’t going to bring him back.”

“He’s still part of the story,” Vincent says. His upper lip curls—only briefly, but still, it’s a rare betrayal of his hatred for the man. He usually lets Sephiroth think his feelings about Hojo are no different than how one treats a natural disaster. “I’ve been in there since it was decommissioned, to see for myself. It’s a shell. If you were there before, you can still deduce where things were, but if you haven’t…I need to tell you in there, if you’re going to understand.”

“But you’re going to bring me,” Sephiroth says. He tips his chin against Vincent’s leg, half-closes his eyes as Vincent softly fingers his lower lip. “I’m only going in with you as company. It’s not how I thought I’d finally see the place, but it’s better.”

Vincent’s lips twitch up at the corners. “This isn’t solely to satisfy my own fantasies, Sephiroth,” he says, and while it has the quality of scolding, it’s also meditative. “What was done in there was not—right. I am not very particular about my morals, but I would still say that. And you were—they made you in there. You have been in there.”

Sephiroth flinches before he can help himself. He isn’t a mere creation of another, isn’t only the sum of decisions made long before he had any agency of his own, but is his own person, made out of his own thoughts and drives. He’s had to fight for every inch of that, he thinks as he sees how closely Vincent is watching him.

Vincent said it that way on purpose. Not to injure, and not to test Sephiroth. He said it that way because this is something people think but never say, at least not to Sephiroth’s face, and Sephiroth’s response is something he always wants to say, but never is given the chance to. That’s what the man is doing for him. “They started me, but that was a long time ago. I’m responsible for being here now, and for the fact that you…” he does touch Vincent then with his hands, folding them over the man’s boot-tops “…are going to be the one bringing me in there. But I want to know before we go, how are you bringing me in there?”

“My partner,” Vincent says, so quickly that the word almost slips from Sephiroth’s ears. Almost, but for the way that Vincent’s hand curls about his right one, catching the echo from the rising breeze and drawing it down. “Always that, even if I dress you like a prize, if I treat you like a slave—I stay with you for that. I keep very little consistent company in my life, Sephiroth.”

Words tremble on Sephiroth’s tongue, but they’re—unfit. He swallows them, and lets his head drop in a nod as he does. It shapes better into the hand that cradles his face, even if part of him still thinks he could improve. “Then take me,” he breathes.

Vincent pulls him back onto his feet. He’s allowed boots for the walk, an easy mile once the intervening ridge is surmounted, but otherwise he’s naked. The plug rubs up inside of him, and his cock throbs about its sound, inside of his cage, and his nipples prick hotly whenever the silver rings that now decorate them flip against his chest. He’s panting by the time they reach the back door.

The locals refer to the building as a mansion. It is much larger than any house in town, and although it’s been shorn of most of its ornamentation, here and there the odd fragment remains: arched windows, a bit of scrolling ironwork above the door, some molded cornices. But it was not a place for idle luxury, even in Hojo’s time. And Sephiroth can see that too, in the plainly functional bars over the lower-level windows and the numerous vents and other outlets punched through the exterior walls.

But he’s surprised at how little he feels as he studies the place. This is where the idea of him was conceived, where the biological necessities behind his birth were put into motion—where all the decisions that still try to frame his life were made. He’d railed against his mother for guarding its oversight so jealously, because he had to—because this is also the origin of all the information he’s had to scrape and trick and claw out of her in order to have any sort of free will. But he can admit now, as he stands in front of it, that he had also felt a grudging, bitter kind of gratitude for her taking that out of his hands. He hadn’t been certain of how he’d confront this place.

As if it’s its own entity, and not merely walls and a ceiling that once housed the real people with whom he’s struggled. An irrational approach, and one that she’d very much cultivated in him, he can see now. Yes, she had opposed Hojo as well, but that did not and does not put her on Sephiroth’s side. She has her own agenda, and she always has.

And this is only a house, a skeleton on which she’d draped certain shadows that no longer blur his vision. He sees that now too.

So he turns to the one who’s brought him here, who’s let him see this, and when Vincent takes him by the wrists, he comes to the man as easily as he breathes.

Vincent clothes him now. The morning chill means goosebumps and no sweat pebble under Vincent’s fingers as he slides a dress over Sephiroth’s head. Not flimsy silk but wool just as soft and clinging, a fine, deep-green knit that wraps closely about his waist and hips before flaring just low enough to cover the tip of his caged cock. It’s strapless, the bodice cut so low that his piercings flirt over the silvery fur trimming it as Vincent does up the back; the fur trimming does loop out over his upper arms to keep the top from sliding too far, but its plushness against his nipples make them even stiffer.

He’s seen this kind of dress on some of the local women when they congregate for Nibelheim’s few social events, and now he can see it on himself, reflected in one of the house’s windows. Bared shoulders and throat, curves as vulnerable as they are pretty, and the neckline inviting fingers to push through the fur to the skin beneath. And for a final touch, Vincent laces him into a broad black leather belt, missing a corset’s boning but still enough to slim his silhouette and make him look even more like a plaything, with his low bodice and high skirt.

“Inside,” Vincent says, breath warming the back of Sephiroth’s right ear. He hasn’t bound Sephiroth’s arms but he holds them straight down and slightly between their bodies, so Sephiroth’s nipples rise ever-so-slightly from their ticklish fur nests. “Inside I’ll sit you down, and tell you more. We’re going to the Turk area, not anything Hojo claimed.”

“Your area?” Sephiroth has to ask.

Vincent’s reflection shows amusement, but also something darker, something not quite sharp enough to be called bitterness, but certainly not welcoming of the memory. Then he turns and, still keeping their eyes locked, slowly sinks his teeth into the side of Sephiroth’s jaw, until Sephiroth can’t hold back his shivering hiss.

“Your mother knew about it too,” is all he says, and then he leads Sephiroth inside.

They go to a room on one of the upper floors. It’s windowless, probably carved out of what were originally larger rooms to either side, and Sephiroth idly notes that it’s aligned along a load-bearing beam that gives the steel chair bolted to the floor in the middle extra stability.

Vincent puts Sephiroth in the chair. The metal is still free of rust, but a greenish patina over it speaks to its age, while the black leather straps coming off it are supple as Sephiroth’s dress. Installed just for this, Sephiroth thinks as he’s tied into place. Straps at his ankles and knees to keep his legs aligned with the chair’s front legs, open to whatever Vincent pleases, and more locking his arms down the back legs. There’s a flat-screen TV on the wall across from him, which makes him arch in surprise when it suddenly fritzes to life.

He jars the plug in him, and then falls back against the chair, panting, as Vincent’s hands come to rest on each of his shoulders. They start to move in slow, massaging circles as the picture on the TV resolves to show…himself, bound to this chair, openmouthed and hazy-eyed as Vincent’s long fingers dip towards his neckline. “Closed-circuit, no recording,” Vincent says, and then lets out a soft chuckle. “The wiring wasn’t as chewed-up by animals as I thought it’d be. Most of this is actually original.”

His hands are only an inch from Sephiroth’s nipples now, and Sephiroth sucks his lip between his teeth as they lazily crawl the intervening space, fingertips pulling at his pectorals so the fur trimming flutters across his chest. “Vincent,” he says, voice thick already. “What did she—”

Vincent’s fingers catch his nipples. Only to hold them at first, as he shudders anyway, a whimper escaping his teeth, but then they begin to roll and pinch, making the nubs redder and redder against the silver fur. He watches them swell under Vincent’s attentions, watches how his hips start to roll and rock as well against the hard metal chair, how the edge of his skirt rides up to let his imprisoned cock peek out. The TV shows him all of that.

“Not yet,” Vincent says, bending down. He kisses along the tops of Sephiroth’s shoulders, mouth as gentle as his fingers are not. “You’ll want to talk this time, I thought, but not yet.”

Sephiroth’s right nipple corkscrews against Vincent’s thumb until its piercing catches the flesh, keeps it from twisting any further, and so it can only shoot tendrils of lightning through him as he twists in the chair. “Vincent—Vincent, it hurts…”

Soft, soft kisses caressing his nape, warming it against the room’s chill, as Vincent briefly abandons his left nipple. But only to return with a bundle of black silk cord that makes Sephiroth whine on sight, whine and jerk his thighs up against the leg straps as his cock tries to rise in its cage. “You like them this sore,” Vincent says, speaking like a considerate lover, even as he shakes out the cord and then starts to loop it over Sephiroth’s left nipple. “I don’t know that I can make you like this, Sephiroth, but I want you to have as much of what you like.”

“Vincent…Vincent, please,” Sephiroth moans, pushing himself up into the man’s hands. “Please…”

He does like them like this, and he can see on the TV screen why Vincent likes him like this. Trembling and unable to control himself but for the bonds holding him, strings of precome flipping out from the tip of his sound to dangle over the edge of the seat. His knees twitching outwards every time a new length of silk cord is stretched across his chest, doing what his nipples can’t as they’re carefully and snugly bound in place. Their piercings even more prominent against the black cord, constantly swinging and pulling up bits of fur from the bodice trimming to keep brushing against his hot, tender flesh.

When Vincent’s done, he gives Sephiroth’s right nipple a hard flick with his thumbnail. Then drops down to catch Sephiroth’s hips as they jerk off the seat, forcing them back down as Sephiroth gasps through his ragged cry. His mouth cups over Sephiroth’s right shoulder, sucking at it. A steady, firm caress, as firm as his grip on Sephiroth’s hips, something to collapse into as the arousal flaring up all over Sephiroth slowly subsides.

Sweat is running down Sephiroth’s face and jaw now, trickles of it finding their way through the lacework of cords spanning his shoulders and chest to drop dark marks on the fur trimming. He watches himself pant for breath, eyes wide, nipples popping dark-red against their restraints, white thighs shivering as Vincent begins to pinch up his skirt.

“This was a comms and op room. It was tight here in here—the chair was bolted to keep it from being shoved back into equipment that used to be behind it, not for torture,” Vincent says, and then chuckles as he rubs his nose against the top of Sephiroth’s shoulder. He continues to draw up the skirt as he moves to lip at the other side of Sephiroth’s neck. “Any detainees went into the basement. Up here there was shielding, but we’d joke we were getting the treatments for free from all the radiation that came up through the floors, even before I agreed to help your mother.”

Sephiroth gulps air one last time, and then finds that delicate balance between strain and ruin, where he can let the pain just edge superfluous thoughts away but his mind won’t fully detach from reality. So he remembers the question that had come to him yesterday, that he hasn’t dwelled on, true to his word, but that rises now and that he can’t lay aside again. “When was that? She’s always—she always said, you helped her before Hojo caught you.”

Vincent’s face is hidden in the curve of Sephiroth’s throat, but Sephiroth can feel the man’s breathing pause. And can see how his fingers flatten out along Sephiroth’s legs, just before they flip under the rucked-up skirt and clasp over the damp, sticky, sensitive inner sides. “We had a bargain—she gave me my enhancements, I helped her pull what she needed to sink Hojo’s program. And she did that as much because she truly believed the science was bad as because of politics. She told me at the time she didn’t think there would ever be enough to reconstruct Jenova’s species,” Vincent says quietly, calmly, as he strokes Sephiroth’s thighs. “But there was still enough to interest her, when Hojo caught me at it. She didn’t want to completely destroy the program, only to take it from him.”

The screen shows Sephiroth how a caress smooths the tension down from his face, makes his shoulders drop against the chair back. He can see how his body sags downward from Vincent’s head into the petting of the man’s hands, how his head tilts unconsciously back and his chin lifts in a sigh. And he sees…he sees how Vincent’s strokes grow longer, slower, as he bends back into the man. When he lets his cheek graze over the man’s brow, Vincent’s fingertips drag far enough back to start tracing over his cock as well, and the expression on Vincent’s face isn’t only devoted to teasing. He sees how this soothes both of them.

“The science that went into you was as much hers as Hojo’s,” Vincent almost sighs into his throat. “But she wasn’t certain it would be successful yet, and Hojo didn’t know she and I were working together. And to keep that quiet when he caught me made sense. I don’t blame her for that—exposure wouldn’t have freed either of us from him. So when she found out he had me, she pretended my mutations were from exposure to this area, not from her work. Hojo bought it and wanted to use my DNA in his work, but she pointed out my mutations were unstable outside of me. I couldn’t be replicated the way they wanted.”

Sephiroth listens. And he can hear what else Vincent isn’t saying, but that his own knowledge fills in. His mother had always planned for him to be the proof of concept, but of an ideal SOLDIER who could be replicated over and over, and the fact that he has turned out to be so unique is a perpetual irritant to her. He’s always thought this was because it implies her base theory wrong, because his own contribution has made more of a difference than all the genetic tampering she’s thrown her life into—and because she still thinks she can prove otherwise, with enough time and the right test subjects. She doesn’t see Sephiroth himself as replicable, but she hasn’t given up on finding a reliable method to make a SOLDIER. He’s her proof, but not her goal.

He can see it being the same with Vincent. An earlier experiment, and one that had proven certain techniques could be successful, but still ultimately a dead end because of the inability to duplicate results. But at the same time…her pride wouldn’t have allowed Hojo to perpetuate a dead end.

“You were still her work,” Sephiroth says, leaning his head against Vincent. “She might not have been happy with you, but she wouldn’t have let him take her work apart. She was never in love with you, I never thought that—so is that what changed her mind?”

Vincent is silent for a moment. Then he inhales, sharply enough that Sephiroth expects more, only to find his mouth seized in a deep kiss. He’s left utterly breathless as Vincent shifts back, presses more kisses to his shoulders, circles the sound in his cock with a thumbpad.

“Hojo never did use my DNA in your work, but he used some of what she told him—her theories, without telling her,” Vincent finally says. He shifts behind Sephiroth and Sephiroth hears two thumps as Vincent kneels on the floor. “She realized what he’d done, and she needed me to help her take the resources she needed to have before you were born. She wanted to try and salvage—”

“She wanted to salvage her pride and take the credit,” Sephiroth breathes. Not fighting the touches, or the reactions they stir in him, but letting those carry him through this. Letting them be what makes him stiffen against his bonds, letting them be the reason he tries to struggle, and only because he’s tied far too tightly to have Vincent touch him like he wants. He understands what he’s being told well enough that he doesn’t want any of that to touch him—only Vincent, and only because he truly does understand now what the man had meant by having the context for this. He needs it this way, to see that what had been done in the past led to this, but it isn’t the reason why Vincent touches him, and why he responds to it. “So what you’re saying—she only freed you because she needed you—”

“She only ever helps because she needs something herself.” Vincent eases back a little. And then smiles against Sephiroth’s throat when Sephiroth whines a protest. Smiles, and scratches his claws down the inside of Sephiroth’s thighs, just deeply enough that they sting without bleeding, catching Sephiroth’s breath mid-whimper. “And I only needed the chance, so once I could, I left. I did make another deal with her, and kept it—I kept both bargains, but with the second I didn’t make the mistake of thinking she’d protect me again.”

And that is what Sephiroth cannot overlook in spite of everything. Hojo might not have had Vincent for very long, but whatever the length of time, now he knows it was with his mother’s acquiescence. And that she’d let him be misinformed. His mother had mentioned Vincent only obliquely for years, until Sephiroth had come across Turk records that proved beyond a doubt she’d had assistance in pushing Hojo out of Shinra. And even then, she’d let him misinterpret them. He had thought she’d broken with Hojo earlier, and that she and Vincent had always been allied against the man. But it had all been lies.

“You can’t kill her,” Vincent says, his voice suddenly sharp as he never is with Sephiroth. He doesn’t doubt Sephiroth listens to him, and yet there’s that note of urgency in it, as if he thinks he needs the extra force to be convincing. “Not yet. I told you this because you can’t. You’re not in position for it.”

“I want to.” Sephiroth closes his eyes, and for a moment it doesn’t matter where he is, how he is, or why. It only matters that the woman he calls his mother is everything he’s ever suspected her to be, even if he hadn’t known all the reasons for it, and that he wishes he could erase her existence.

Something touches his jaw. A finger, and then another, cupping his head as Vincent presses a kiss to his temple. Leather sweeps over his shoulder and upper arm, Vincent’s coat grazing him, and when he opens his eyes, he finds that the other man has moved around to kneel in front of him. Looking up at him, smoothing palms down the still-raw scratches on his thighs as he draws a breath and thinks about what he must, and…then puts it aside. Because he knows about her now, yes, and he will account for her.

But he accounts for it because of the man in front of him, and this man matters far more than any of his mother’s reasons. “I want to,” he says again, canting his hips forward. Twisting his arms in their straps to support himself in the effort as Vincent, pleasure and surprise flickering in his eyes, bends forward. “I want to, but you don’t—you don’t have to keep me here to protect me against my—impulses, Vincent. I know what I still need her for, and I—I think she knows, too. And she knows—she knows it’s less since you. Much, much less.”

“I never think I can protect you,” Vincent says, voice so warm that Sephiroth doesn’t look down and he can still feel how its resonance flushes up the length of his body, how it runs over him as he lets his head fall back and his hips drop forward. “But I want to keep you. I left this place before thinking I’d have nothing to do with it ever again. I came back because this is how I keep you. If I’m going to stay with you, this is what you need to know.”

Sephiroth cries out wordlessly, even though he hasn’t been touched. Nothing above the hands Vincent has laying against his legs, the slight puff of air drifting down over his bared, caged cock, and yet—and yet it’s almost enough. Almost enough, even with how tightly he’s bound, to release everything.

“Not yet,” Vincent says, but it’s a promise rather than a taunt.

He kisses Sephiroth’s scratched thighs as he draws the sound from Sephiroth’s cock, unlocks its cage, and then lifts it. His mouth comes down over its head, lapping precome as Sephiroth shudders with increasing violence, and then rises just enough.

“Come,” he says, and Sephiroth does what he wants.

He drinks Sephiroth dry. After the second orgasm, Sephiroth slumping in the chair and barely able to recognize the ravaged, limp figure on the screen as himself, Vincent pushes up and unties his nipples. Pulls the front of his dress down and suckles at him, while milking a third orgasm from him with one hand. And when every drop has been wrung from him, Vincent moves behind the chair and holds his chin up so he can watch Vincent stroke his own cock, gather up the resulting come, and carefully feed each smeared finger between Sephiroth’s feebly-twitching lips.

“I brought you here so I can take you out with me,” Vincent says, stooping down to Sephiroth’s ear again. He’s starting to undo the straps, but when Sephiroth groans at the sudden, painful rush of blood into his arms, the other man stops to grip them and help ease the transition. “As pretty as we’ve both made you, the only thing from here I ever wanted to carry away. Everything else I learned to live with.”

Sephiroth slurs some sort of acknowledgment, then hikes his head around with the last of his strength so he can nuzzle at the other man. Vincent pauses to brush a few strands of hair from between them, then resumes untying him.

He totters up from the chair, then drops gratefully against Vincent as the other man carries them into the next room. There is a small stock of provisions, electrolyte-enriched water and a few protein bars, which Vincent breaks into chunks and further squeezes with his fingers before placing them on Sephiroth’s tongue. It revives him enough that he can stagger with Vincent downstairs, where he’s stripped of the dress and folded into Vincent’s coat.

Vincent leaves him curled into a corner, looking out the propped-open back door while the other man goes to clean out the house. The weather is still fine—very fine. The sky, Sephiroth thinks, seems strangely clear, as if somehow every other sky he’s ever seen had had a thick plastic lens between it and him that distorted light and collected dust, and now that is gone. And it’s very calm, and very quiet, as he sits in this place where terrible, unforgiveable, irreversible things were set in motion.

“No,” he says, finally rousing when he glimpses the Cure pill in Vincent’s hand. “No—not yet. I don’t need it.”

The other man flicks his gaze over Sephiroth, then tucks the pill away, with obvious reluctance but without any hint that he truly is concerned. “You can call your team now,” he says as he scoops up a bag by its strap.

He stops, still on one knee, as Sephiroth rolls away from the wall and onto his own knees. Hissing softly, twisting aching joints and flexing tired muscle, as Vincent’s gaze travels over him again and then fixes on his face as he crawls up to the other man. He’s naked under the coat but for his piercings, naked and free and very much aware of what he’s doing, what kind of reaction he’s trying to elicit. And from the slight tilt to Vincent’s lips, he’s succeeding.

“Where were you going to have me call them from?” Sephiroth asks. “Here?”

“I was hoping farther from this, but wasn’t going to rush you,” Vincent says after a moment. He lifts his hand and pushes the hair from Sephiroth’s face; Sephiroth’s braid is half-unraveled at this point, and more strands loop free as Sephiroth presses his cheek against the man’s palm. “There is truly nothing left here, as far as I can tell. Do you know why she keeps the place?”

It’s a genuine question, not a rhetorical one, and Sephiroth considers it carefully. “I do not,” he finally says. “But whatever the reason, it’s not so important to her now. She didn’t care that I came, and she knew—she knows these days, when I come here, you come with me.”

Vincent’s expression cools, as the touch of his hand does not. “She does not know I’ve been here without you, I assure you.”

“Tell me about it,” Sephiroth says without thinking. Instinctively, although then, as Vincent’s gaze warms again, he picks his words more carefully. “Tell me what you’re thinking. You think I need to know because you think we need to watch for something—for her. That’s why it’s now.”

“Not here,” Vincent says after a moment. But his smile is fully unfurled, and he continues to smile as he helps Sephiroth to his feet.

Sephiroth’s given back his regular clothing and Masamune. It’s necessary, because they have to make their way across rougher ground than this morning, but the garments feel like a costume. His body shifts uneasily under them, more uncomfortable from the ill-fitting feeling than from the physical toll Vincent’s extracted from him so far, and when they finally stop again, he strips himself without being signaled to.

“Eager,” Vincent says, fingering one of his nipples. Giving its piercing a tug, and then, when he groans, letting the ring flick up and hit his chest as it slips off the man’s finger. “Eager and needy.”

“Make me call them,” Sephiroth murmurs, dropping to his knees. He lets out another groan as Vincent winds one hand in his hair, pulls his head back by it. “Make me shut it up again.”

They’re in one of those huge, hollowed-out stumps. This one may not have been used by the Jenovans, since the walls inside are smooth and lack graffiti except for a few crude markings at one end. The end Sephiroth isn’t facing, when Vincent sets him on the other man’s cock. Still on his knees, his folded legs neatly bound with leather straps, and his arms slipped into a binder that keeps them flat against his belly, forearm-to-forearm. Vincent’s tail curls out from behind them as Sephiroth shivers about the other man, ache blossoming about the prick he’s seated on, and winds itself securely around his own cock. He’s still too depleted to have an erection but the longing for it, for that nearness of release—that has no trouble arising to gnaw at him, to make him squirm and hitch as Vincent picks up the satphone.

“I truly don’t hold it against her, that she waited to decide I was worth more as an ally than a test subject,” Vincent says. Tone smooth as always, but the subject is volunteered without any warning. He dips his head and lays his cheek against Sephiroth’s shoulder, his arm coming up to tug Sephiroth firmly back against him. “She weighed up her options and she made a decision that gave me time to remake myself. And she did keep him from using my DNA, even if it was for her own reasons. I chose to let her experiment on me, but I didn’t want any kind of descendent—I can’t make that sort of decision for someone else, and her choice let me uphold mine. It doesn’t mean I still owe her anything.”

“But you kept in touch with her,” Sephiroth has to say, even as his body softens and molds itself to the other man. His eyes flutter half-shut as Vincent’s teeth rake heat out of his skin, but his thoughts don’t similarly drop. This one has been flitting about the back of his mind since before they left the mansion. “Even after you’d gotten away.”

“She was head of Shinra R&D by then, and she still is. Not a useful enemy,” Vincent says dryly. He bites Sephiroth a second time, a little higher up the shoulder, with a delicacy that belies how fiercely the resulting bruise throbs after he lifts his head. His tongue flicks out, swirling over both bites, and then tickles at Sephiroth’s lip as Sephiroth turns his head. “I’ve kept in touch. I’ve watched her. I didn’t have any reason to do more than that before you—I did not hold what she did against her, but I have no debt to her either. I cleared that a long, long time ago.”

Sephiroth rests his brow against the other man. “Does she agree?”

He just glimpses the flash of Vincent’s teeth. Then Vincent takes him by the hips and tips him, shifting him on the man’s cock in ways that leave him shuddering helplessly as he watches Vincent’s wings spring out around them.

The stump’s big enough for them, though they have to curl forward and nearly scrape tips together. Sephiroth rocks on Vincent’s lap of his own accord, then whines as the other man stills him with fingers hooked through his piercings. “You need to rest before we go to the cave,” Vincent says, humor deepening his voice to a near-rumble. “I can smell it on you.”

“Like this?” Sephiroth half-murmurs, half-pleads. Head tipped back against Vincent’s shoulder, looking up as the wings slowly fold down around them so only their heads protrude. He arches a little, mewling when Vincent’s fingertips drag at his nipple rings, and then settles when the man starts to rub soothingly around them. “I can’t come again, not yet…”

“No. No, you’ll sit a little, and keep my cock warm while you recover enough for me to have you wet,” Vincent says. Nosing at Sephiroth’s throat and jaw, before he works up the hand with the satphone. “Make your call, I don’t want you to put it off any longer. You aren’t resting when you’re working.”

Sephiroth nods, and then unconsciously hitches at his hips when he tries to steady his breathing. The way his body wraps itself around Vincent’s cock rocks a deep, flushing ache throughout him and he ends up gasping a few times, losing breath rather than catching it. Vincent has to cover his mouth with one hand, keeping him sucking on the man’s fingers and inhaling only through his nose, to help him.

By then the call has connected. Sephiroth swallows roughly, and is mildly surprised when his normal voice reappears. He speaks to the team leader, advising them to come out to the house and re-set all the seals now that he’s concluded the inspection. When they have the paperwork for that done, they can send it to him and he’ll handle completion of the rest.

Vincent keeps close hold of him throughout, with a hand curled over the front of Sephiroth’s throat and its thumb resting just under Sephiroth’s lower lip. His mouth behind Sephiroth’s ear, unmoving but with that hint of damp, sharp canine touching the delicate skin there, and the long warm strokes of his breath over Sephiroth’s shoulder. And his other hand resting against the center of Sephiroth’s chest, holding the phone just out of sight so that Sephiroth only hears his subordinate like a voice coming across different worlds to them, because Vincent’s wings enclose them in their own small, quiet space. It’s only his own voice that’s keeping them from being fully shut off.

“All set, sir. Should have no trouble meeting the deadline, but that does mean we have two days before the next flight out,” the team lead says. Instead of simply signing off, and Sephiroth would be annoyed, if Vincent at that second hadn’t lapped his thumb over Sephiroth’s lower lip. Just skating it over Sephiroth’s tongue, pressing lightly, only enough to remind him he could be quieted, if the other man wants. “Anything local to do, sir? If not, we can just catch up on paperwork. Always plenty of that.”

If Vincent thinks Sephiroth wants it. They read each other now that well. When Vincent says he wants to keep Sephiroth…he may dress Sephiroth like a plaything, trained to pleasure the other man, but at the bottom of it, he means he sees them together, on the same path. A true plaything would be as disposable as all the lives Vincent undoubtedly moved through before their first encounter.

“If you think you have time, then do a teardown analysis while you’re there. I will want one anyway, but I don’t want this to prolong the inspection,” Sephiroth says. Flicking his tongue free of Vincent’s thumb, but then twisting his head back and pressing into Vincent’s slightly-open mouth to feel the man’s teeth digging into him. He lets out a studied exhale, listening to the team lead’s acknowledgement and final farewell. “Yes, see you in Midgar, Captain.”

The moment the satphone buzzes its disconnection, Sephiroth shudders from crown to toes, arching as much as he’s able on Vincent’s lap. Vincent’s arms go around him, pulling him snugly backwards as the wings curl down around them to cover even their heads.

“Mark me,” he groans, and then shudders again as Vincent’s mouth works up a bruise on the side of his throat. “Please—please, more. I’m not—I’m not free of her yet, but she can’t—she can’t find any new ways to hold me, I swear—”

“She thinks I may be a new way,” Vincent says. He pauses, and then lets out a low laugh, a little sharper than his usual one. But the edge isn’t directed at Sephiroth, not with how he’s continuing to mouth down the length of Sephiroth’s throat. “For years I was an experimental dead-end to her—a useful contact, at a distance, but…I think she’s reassessing. And I think it may be useful to let her think that, at least for now. She still thinks I’m like her. I was more like her, when I was working with her.”

Sephiroth breathes in and feels how the sting of Vincent’s bites pulls down into his flesh as his windpipe expands. It’s dark in the cocoon, but not completely black, as a little light does come through the wing membranes. He could strain for it…but doesn’t, and instead he turns his head away, seeking out Vincent’s face by feel and then closing his eyes as the man’s hair floats over them.

“But I know you now,” he says. He exhales roughly as Vincent’s teeth sink into his shoulder. “I agree, she thinks like that. And when she’s foolish enough—”

“Not yet,” Vincent says. His tail has been relatively quiescent so far, but now its coils twist about Sephiroth’s cock, sluggish but still more than enough to torture sore flesh. Then his hands pet down Sephiroth’s trembling body. “Later. You understand now why I’ve been willing to wait, and that’s enough. Rest.”

For a moment Sephiroth stiffens in his bonds. He can’t peak, not like this, but he needs some sort of—break, something to close off the last few fragments of rational thought swirling about him, trying to call him back. He wants to listen to the other man, but he needs more than—

“Rest,” Vincent repeats, and as he does, he gives Sephiroth one last bite, just on the point of the right shoulder.

The pain of it snaps through Sephiroth. He shivers, bouncing himself up against Vincent’s teeth, and then his muscles quietly fail one by one. Going slack and soft, as Vincent gathers up his slumping form into their dark, peaceful place.

* * *

When Sephiroth wakes, he’s curled on his side, unbound and alone. There’s something thrown over him that keeps out the light and smells like leather, but when he pushes it away, he finds that it’s his SOLDIER coat and not Vincent’s wing.

He sits up, grimacing as joints crack and bruises twinge, and before the confusion seeded in him can sour to something worse, something falls out of his hand. He picks it back up and blinks it into focus, and then understanding melts away the nascent concern.

It’s one of the leather bracelets Vincent stitches onto him whenever they’re at the cave. He wraps it back into his hand as he looks around, taking stock: Masamune and the rest of his clothing are in a neat pile a few feet away, while all of their other gear is gone. But there are fading footprints outlined against the floor of the stump, a set of rations for him to eat and drink, and he’s still wearing his piercings. Vincent’s only gone ahead, and he’s left clear traces behind him.

Sephiroth rises and dresses himself, then climbs out of the stump. He knows his way to the cave from here, and when he arrives, he’s not particularly surprised to find it empty. But prepared, with firewood ready to be lit and freshly-fluffed furs in the sleeping area. On top of the furs are the other three bracelets, and also a new item, a matching collar.

Once he’s naked again, Sephiroth tends to a few personal needs, including a quick dip in the hot spring, and then he returns to the sleeping area. He has all of the bracelets stitched on by the time Vincent comes in, but the collar is providing to be slightly trickier, as it’s so snug that once on, he can’t easily twist it about his neck.

“The seam should be in the back,” Vincent says as he finishes the work for Sephiroth. After putting some meat to roast on the fire, and settling Sephiroth’s head on his knee. “You won’t be reaching for it very often.”

Sephiroth’s ankles are chained to the spikes hammered into the stone at one end of the furs, but his hands are still free for now. He only uses them to brush his hair away as he nuzzles Vincent’s thigh. “Then we don’t have anything else to talk about?”

An amused rumble drifts down from Vincent, and then the man tugs Sephiroth away from his cock by the hair. But leaves his hand in afterward, as much playing with the strands as he is checking that they’re all free of the now-stitched collar. “You’ll eat before you have my cock again.”

Sephiroth moans a little, not displeased by this answer, although it wasn’t what he’d been asking. He lies docilely as Vincent moves his head to the furs and then tugs his arms forward to chain them to the other two spikes, keeping him spreadeagled on his belly. But he does raise his head, twisting to offer his throat as Vincent swings a leg over to straddle him and then leans down to add a fresh bite to the collection already bruising his shoulders.

“I don’t think she’ll try a move for a good while yet. She…doesn’t understand my hold over you well enough,” Vincent says, tracing the bite with one finger. He laughs again at the snort Sephiroth makes. “But she’s curious, no matter how she tries to hide it. She thinks I’m making you more receptive to direction.”

“You are, but no, she’s never going to understand,” Sephiroth murmurs. He tips his head back for a kiss, then cants his hips and mewls as Vincent lowers himself to drag his cock along Sephiroth’s buttocks. “She’ll come to you sooner or later, and try to have you make me do what she wants. You wouldn’t be the first, Vincent…and you’ve kept clear of her like Angeal and Genesis and I haven’t…”

Vincent’s finger stills, and his head stops where it’s hanging over Sephiroth’s shoulder. Then he draws back, with both hands sliding over Sephiroth’s shoulders. “I may hear what she has to say, but I am never going to listen to her. But it may look otherwise.”

“I’ll know it’s otherwise,” Sephiroth says after a moment, and he’s glad of how Vincent’s hands are already there, pressing subtly back, as his shoulders try to tense. “This is the context. You took me away from that house, but she wasn’t the one who did the same for you, and you haven’t forgotten.”

“No, I haven’t,” Vincent says simply.

He beds himself down on top of Sephiroth for a few minutes. Nestling his head against the back of Sephiroth’s neck, lipping along the collar as Sephiroth tries to squirm the man’s cock a little deeper between his buttocks, with his hands kneading gently across Sephiroth’s shoulderblades. They both relax that way, slowly, before Vincent pushes himself back up.

“Now you don’t talk,” he says, as he carefully ties a piece of cloth into Sephiroth’s mouth. His fingers linger afterward, stroking under Sephiroth’s jaw as Sephiroth sucks in the cloth, learns to fit his lips around it. “Not till we go back. We’re here now, and here, you don’t talk.”

Sephiroth moans, but it’s an absentminded action, not a protest. Only the last dregs of his concerns lying down to rest as he settles into his place for now, where he doesn’t have to think of such things. And it’s easier—it’s as easy as that, one last breath, because when he does return to where he has to think about them, he’ll still know who is truly with him.

And for now it’s only them. Vincent drops behind him and then starts to lick teasingly about his hole as he squirms. He closes his eyes and buries his face against the furs, letting everything else fall away.

Chapter 46: Interlude: Personal Emergencies at Work

“Something pressing, Commander?” Rufus sighs, when Zack persists in fidgeting in the doorway.

“Sorry, but yeah,” Zack says, head dipping and hand going up half in a salute, half in a nervous tug at his hair. “For the General.”

Sephiroth suppresses his irritation as he looks over. He’d made it very clear to all his officers that this meeting wasn’t to be interrupted for anything short of a city-level threat, and even Zack on his thoughtless days understands how important that is this late in the budget cycle.

“Yeah,” Zack says again, eyes flicking towards Sephiroth and then back down to the ground. “I did bring up those additional reports you messaged for, sir, but also if I could just borrow you for a second…”

“Send it to my inbox and I’ll review it later,” Sephiroth says.

“I can’t.” Zack’s gaze comes up again, and as apologetic as it is, it also is firm. He does understand, and he’s acting contrary to Sephiroth’s orders anyway. And this is what makes Sephiroth pause in spite of his growing annoyance. “Sorry, it’s not really something I can just put in a message. But it’ll just be a second.”

“Well, we’re almost done here anyway, General,” Rufus says, with the faintest hint of curiosity under his aloof graciousness. He gestures at Zack. “I’m still not fully convinced on this last one, but I’ll admit I also haven’t had the chance to read all the supporting material. Let me do that while you settle whatever is troubling the Commander.”

“Thank you,” Sephiroth says, knowing Rufus is going to take the favor out of SOLDIER one way or the other later.

Though once he and Zack step into an antechamber, that immediately drops in priority. “I hope you really are almost done because Vincent accidentally got dosed with coffee,” Zack says in an urgent whisper, flashing his phone to show they’re off the in-office surveillance. “He locked himself in a storage room—”

Sephiroth hisses between his teeth, then stops himself mid-step past Zack. It takes nearly as much willpower to stay in place at that moment as it does for him to strike down an enemy—but if he doesn’t tie things off properly here, he won’t be as free as he needs to be. “The only point left is staffing for Corel. Rufus is still questioning why we want to have patrols if we cleared the area, as if killing all the underground mutants we found is the same as—”

“Look, I sat through all the meetings where you and Lazard hashed that out, and you know Laz is really on our side on this, he was just repping what Rufus would say and I think he actually did good at the roleplay and that’s all to say I have this, I can close it out,” Zack says earnestly. He reaches out and gives Sephiroth a quick pat on the arm, then swivels his body to leave a clear line to the door. “Coordinates on your phone, already hit Ang for cover besides this, R&D’s out of the loop but I don’t know how long we can keep it that way so—”

“Message me where Rufus lands on it,” Sephiroth says, already striding past Zack.

Who makes an assenting noise as he turns away, cheerful enough that it jars Sephiroth. He slows briefly, thinking a thousand different things—and then speeds up again. Zack has his orders and the man understands the gravity of the situation. Sephiroth won’t forget his efforts, but for now they aren’t the priority. He needs to go where he’s needed more.

* * *

It takes far too long for Sephiroth to arrive at the storage room in question. The room is within SOLDIER’s premises and he passes SOLDIER teams on the way, most of them ostensibly loitering in the halls. Part of him notes that Zack was thoughtful about the deployment, relying not only on technical controls to disable monitoring by other teams but also simple playacting to avoid attracting unnecessary attention. Part of him wants to order every person he sees to go track down what suicidal idiot put coffee in Vincent’s path.

And part of him is making his hand tremble. He stares at it, the way his fingertips quiver as he reaches for the lock on the door, and for a moment his rage is all at himself. His inconsiderate, weak flesh—this isn’t one of those times when Vincent has mastered everything so well he can indulge himself. This is a time when he should be master of himself, and he—

He pushes that away. He’s a soldier. He understands this, this moment when all your hopes and fears and hates do not matter so much as your clarity, and he is clear on why he is here and what he means to do.

Sephiroth unlocks the door and kicks it open, swinging his body to the side in the same moment to minimize his profile to anyone inside. Then, as a second’s glimpse reveals nothing in the way, he slips into the room.

The walls are thick enough that he hadn’t heard very much on the outside, and all surveillance is cut so there wasn’t any footage to review—he has to guess at what he might find, guess and risk as well. But coffee doesn’t interfere with Vincent’s mind, only his control over his transformations, and even with only partial control of himself, Vincent is like Sephiroth in how he’ll fall back on sheer willpower when physical abilities fail. So Sephiroth guesses that the man will not have exposed himself, and when he goes in, he’s proven right.

The lights are off. Vincent is across the room and behind a tall stack of crates, at the end of a trail of scraps of cloth and one ripped-open shoe. There are bloody smears as well, and when Sephiroth’s eyes adjust to the darkness, his instincts more than anything else note the position of Vincent’s left hand to thigh; it’s not a conscious calculation of the length of Vincent’s claws, and how much of them aren’t visible, but a gut-level one that makes Sephiroth suck his breath.

“Not—done,” Vincent grates. He’s hunched over that thigh, pressed against the wall with haphazard streaks of fur crawling up and down the portions of his back and shoulder that show through his shredded clothes. His wings must have come out at some point, Sephiroth thinks. “Five—six—”

Minutes or hours, Sephiroth doesn’t try to guess. He comes up sideways, careful to stay within Vincent’s direct line of sight. Vincent’s head turns a little to follow, but then snaps to the side and down as a violent spasm overtakes the man. Sephiroth hears the slow, wet slicing of flesh; blood is already in the air but the scent freshens as Vincent’s claws dig further into his own leg. From how knotted-up Vincent’s arm muscles look, Sephiroth isn’t certain the man can pull away his hand on his own.

Vincent lets out a raspy breath, then another, more uneven one, as if trying to say something. Sephiroth marks where the man’s attention is as he unclips the sword from his belt, angling it in his hand to cross in front of him, and then, quickly, goes to one knee and slews himself about so that he can catch Vincent by the crook of the arm and drag the other man out of his crouch.

They skid away from the wall, then back against it as Vincent twists in Sephiroth’s grip. Sephiroth manages to slide his sheathed sword between Vincent’s left hand and himself so that only his coat suffers a few cuts—but when Vincent transforms he has claws on all his limbs, and his other hand rakes through Sephiroth’s sleeve as Sephiroth tries to hook that arm about Vincent’s torso. It hurts, yes, but Sephiroth grits his teeth through it and burrows his head under the other man’s jaw, ducking a suddenly-fanged muzzle and pressing himself so closely that Vincent’s spasm-locked limbs can’t curl to get at him.

“You,” Vincent gasps, in a low, gravelly voice, as if the word is meant to be a shove at Sephiroth. And then he shudders again, teeth clacking against pained growling, as Sephiroth keeps him pinned to the wall, stretching his arms against it so his claws won’t bury themselves in either of them. “Wait.”

“Not in the damned hall, I could smell the blood from there,” Sephiroth mutters.

Vincent exhales as if it guts him from the inside, and as if, under all that pain, he has still, somehow, found something amusing. But then he wrenches up against Sephiroth’s hold again, and neither of them have any time for the next few minutes for more than pure physical exertion.

They do at least benefit from an accelerated metabolism. Five minutes later—Vincent’s ability to estimate with precision persists—the spasms start to die down. Vincent slumps, sweat so thick on him that it’s crusting up into waves of white near his hairline, and Sephiroth is finally able to take a few breaths himself.

When he does, he finds himself gasping more than expected, and has to release Vincent to brace his hands against the floor. He drops his knees and leans his head against Vincent’s shoulder, trying to recover more quickly, and that is when he feels a shaky touch on his arm.

“It’s healing,” he points out, as Vincent’s trembling fingers trace the cuts on it. “Not deep enough to reach a major tendon. You’ve made me bleed more.”

“Still.” Vincent’s voice still hasn’t recovered its usual timbre; his transformed state keeps the depth but harshens the resonance. He sounds angry and raw, as he never does. “I didn’t mean to do this.”

“Of course not, you were—” Sephiroth starts, and then fails, because not yourself is an inaccurate platitude and weak is a fool’s opinion. He purses his lips, frustrated with himself, and then looks up in surprise when Vincent lets out a rough laugh. “Someone did give you coffee. I’m going to find out who, Vincent, and why you didn’t smell it ahead of time—”

“Cookies,” Vincent says. He laughs again, dropping his head over Sephiroth’s shoulder so that the puff of his breath stings the cuts on Sephiroth’s arm. When Sephiroth twitches without thinking, Vincent quiets. His hand moves to the edge of one cut and he slowly runs a fingertip along it as if to help seal the lips together. “Cookies. There was a tray, someone’s birthday party, and I thought they were chocolate but there was just a little coffee in it—just little enough that it wasn’t in the smell. I didn’t ask, I ate one, and then I realized when I saw the fur coming out on my hands…”

Sephiroth presses his lips together. Then pushes himself up on his knees. When a torn part of his coat flaps in the way, he grabs it and tears it loose, then drops it to slip his hand under Vincent’s arm. Vincent wouldn’t have simply taken a cookie from anywhere, even on a whim, he thinks; whoever brought it in, Vincent knows them, and this is his way of telling Sephiroth there is no issue. It was an accident.

It’s possible, of course—Vincent isn’t sensitive to trace amounts, and he’s told Sephiroth if the situation requires it, he can tolerate a few sips without immediately losing control. But he’s normally so assured in knowing his setting that the idea of him misjudging himself seems…like madness, Sephiroth almost wants to say. Like a madhouse view of a world that owes them both more care, and if it’s not going to provide that, then someone should make it—

Vincent’s breath passes across his cheek, and from its touch alone Sephiroth knows the other man is no longer amused. “You aren’t going to ban people from bringing in cookies,” Vincent states.

“I’m not a fool,” Sephiroth says tightly.

“No.” Vincent’s tone changes, enough warning so that Sephiroth lifts his chin and finds it nestling naturally in the cup of Vincent’s hand.

He breathes in sharply and Vincent presses their foreheads together, the weight steadying him till his breath regulates. But then that jumps again as Vincent slides his head away and down, dipping even though Sephiroth can still feel the shake in the other man, dipping to press his mouth over Sephiroth’s cut arm. Then again, lower—there’s the warmth of Vincent’s tongue against the prickle of injured flesh subjected to pressure, warm and soft and wet. It’s not hunger that’s driving him to taste Sephiroth, not that at all. And when Sephiroth pulls him up and deliberately presses their lips together, it’s not because Sephiroth has a perverse desire to drink his own blood from Vincent’s mouth.

It was an accident, what Vincent ate without knowing, but this is intentional, the way that they share the consequences of their actions. They understand, both of them, when they are and aren’t in control, and for what reason. At least, Sephiroth does, and he wants Vincent to know that—as much as Vincent wants him to know the man always means to take only what Sephiroth wants taken, and no more. And this is enough to keep the failings of the rest of the world at bay, at least for now.

“I need to rest. Somewhere else,” Vincent mutters. He helps Sephiroth loop his arm over Sephiroth’s shoulders, then sighs. “Somewhere you can take your calls from, and still keep an eye on me.”

“If you weren’t so impossible about it, I might feel less of a need to keep an eye out,” Sephiroth can’t help saying.

Vincent’s snort is a gentle cushion of warmth against the side of Sephiroth’s head, softening the guttural grunts that follow as Sephiroth, noticing that the puncture wounds in Vincent’s thigh are still bleeding, uses strips of Vincent’s trousers to bind them up for now. Sephiroth pauses when he finishes to wipe his fingers off against Vincent’s hip and his phone buzzes in his pocket. He glances down at it, then shakes his head and moves his knee so that he can brace against it to lever them both to their feet. Whatever it is, he can deal with it once he’s gotten Vincent settled.

Chapter 47: Side-Story: Reno’s Nostalgia Trip

“Because Tseng wasn’t around then, so he’s gonna have to go visit Verdot or something like that,” Reno says, flopping onto the couch. He kicks his feet up onto one end, ignoring the way Cissnei swats his ankles with the folder in her hand, and then lets out a relieved sigh. “So you can go run around if you want, I guess. Something to do while we wait on him, but he’s not gonna pull the trigger till he’s done that.”

“You’re such a bum sometimes, Reno,” she scolds. She turns the folder sideways and sticks it under his feet, and then looks almost like she’s going to toss her coffee at him when he just uses one heel to scooch it under his shoes. “You could at least see if there’s anything in current files. Even if it really was that old, and I’m still not sure about that, the analysis says it should’ve been coming up on scans for the last five y—”

“Look, I’m all for the boss, but if it’s gonna ruin my afternoon nap and give him a headache, I don’t really see the upside,” Reno says, folding his arms behind his head. “Analysis-shmanalysis, you’re counting on R&D actually sharing and—”

“I’m counting on being able to give Tseng as much as we have before he has to use up outside capital. But thanks, Reno, I’m fine with you staying on call while I go look,” Cissnei says as she stalks out of the room.

The wind chill on that could freeze out better men than Reno. Him? He doesn’t even bother hiding the shiver, just gets that over with, and then heaves another sigh when the door clicks—Cissnei’s too much of a pro even in her rages to slam it—behind her. Counts to five, then twists around and tugs the folder out from under his foot just as Elena wanders in from the other breakroom door.

“Poor Cissnei, she’s really worried. I’m sure Tseng’s got it all under control, I can’t imagine that he doesn’t. But that did sound pretty serious,” Elena burbles. She should be just starting shift so it’s a little early for her to be putting on that act. Reno cocks a brow at her and she twitches all over, then reaches up to tweak her hair as she sits down on the seat facing him, looking both rueful and wary. “Pulled a double yesterday because Lazard’s date ended up taking him to Sector Five.”

“Get any good angles?” Reno asks, wiggling his brows.

Elena flushes, but she’s been around long enough that she’s learned to use those reactions as covers and not tells. “You know, Tseng didn’t even say he was going to have to check that far back.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t pretend to read the boss’ mind but even a slum kid can read a date-stamp,” Reno mutters, opening the folder.

“But we didn’t get that report back till after you were already heading back, so it really does look like you can read his mind,” Elena chirps. “Cissnei was in the room with Tseng so she saw it at the same time as him, and then she called you to let you know he wanted the field search cut short.”

Reno pauses. Then looks up at Elena, letting his stance stay loose and relaxed even as curses run through his head. She looks straight back at him; her fingers are rippling over each other around her coffee but hell, at this range you don’t really need a steady hand so long as your sight is clear. And hers is.

“Look, I don’t want to get in the middle, especially if Tseng already knows what he wants to do, but Cissnei’s going to have to debrief Vincent for him if he has to make a trip out, and you know how she is around him,” Elena says. She giggles nervously, her gaze still leveled at Reno. “I mean, I don’t mind him, really, but she does. But then I haven’t been around that long.”

“Long enough to pick up a few things,” Reno drawls. He snaps the folder shut, watching as Elena flinches all over without blinking. “Yeah. Yeah, okay, I get it. I’ll take her dinner, how’s that sound?”

“Good!” Elena smiles at him, then drops one hand back to pull her phone out as if looking for a distraction.

Then she sees the time and her expression crumples. She bounces up, throwing off half a dozen apologies and enough of an explanation for Reno to get she’s missing a meeting with Fair, then runs off. She does let the door slam behind her; Reno grimaces, then rubs at his still-ringing ear as he gets up.

There’s nothing he can really do till Tseng’s checked in with the last head of the Turks, except make the rounds and try to keep the bullshit to a minimum. Which he does, because don’t get Reno wrong but he knows when a little grease keeps the gears from seizing. He just has never thought a lot of grease was better, when all that does is just drip down to stain things and leave trails. So the folder, he doesn’t show it to anyone, given the information inside is already being tracked down by Tseng and Cissnei. In fact, he makes a point of ensuring it stays somewhere nobody is going to get its hands on till Tseng gets back, and then that does free him up to check on one thing.

“I doubt it. Her mother did clerical work and wouldn’t have ever been near the labs,” Vincent says. Answering right away, though there is the faintest hint of curiosity in that cool gaze of his, like a hawk not on the hunt but still considering whether it’s spotted prey. “She never would have met Verdot either.”

“And how would you know? Guy got around, especially where the old President was sticking his dick,” Reno says.

Vincent shrugs. “I didn’t know Elena’s mother, but I did occasionally speak with Verdot. She never came up.”

Reno snorts to cover up the dumb, annoyed question that first comes to the tip of his tongue. “Yeah, okay, I figured you two had a connection.”

Anyone else who’s been around Shinra, even if not officially part of it, would react to that, if only to point out to Reno that since he was coming to Valentine in the first place, obviously he figured. Vincent just smiles that close-lipped smile of his, and then pushes over a tablet with his completed report to Reno. “I don’t think this one has anything to do with Elena or you. That was simply not a good year for the Turks, from what Verdot told me.”

Reno catches himself again, badly enough he knows Vincent wouldn’t have missed—for fuck’s sake, he thinks, the guy wouldn’t have missed the first time either, and then relaxes into as close to his regular laze as he can. He’s not good at being nervous, he knows that, so he doesn’t try to practice it. “Yeah, well, thanks. You’re good to go, enjoy that extra half-day and don’t thank Tseng for it because he’s not in anyway.”

Vincent nods and gets up and sweeps out to go find Sephiroth, if Reno’s got any luck, and keep SOLDIER happy for a little while. As for Reno, well, he takes the report and hands it over to Rude to start getting into the system, since like he said, Tseng’s out of town, and Cissnei’s using the time not checking Vincent off her to-do list to double down on her research. Which isn’t going to go anywhere, but given Reno and she just made up, he doesn’t feel like telling her that.

“I don’t think Elena’s going to say anything to her. Elena just wants you two to get along, she doesn’t want to make trouble,” Rude observes.

“What, she buddying up to you these days?” Reno mutters.

Rude ignores him. Reno rearranges himself on his chair, then does it again, and then he kicks his legs straight out in front of him and tips his head back over the headrest and sighs.

“Elena doesn’t know how old you are.” For a guy who looks like he spends his evenings benchpressing concrete barriers, Rude types so quietly that Reno has to look up to realize he’s stopped. “I don’t know how old you are, and I wiped that for you.”

“Yeah, I know, and I owe you.” Reno puts his fist out and bumps Rude’s shoulder, genuinely. He listens till the whisper-soft click of keys starts up again, then exhales a second time. “That year was pretty bad.”

Rude waits a few seconds. “Is Tseng going to be able to get—”

“Yeah, yeah, look, he’s still Verdot’s little baby Turk, he’s going to get what he needs. So leave Verdot’s pension alone, he needs it,” Reno says. He digs his toes into the floor and twists in his chair. “I probably should have fucking thought before this about Valentine knowing Verdot too.”

“Did you ever—”

“No. Fuck, no, if I’d met that guy before, I would’ve had a fucking opinion on whether he was going to turn out to be the General’s type before that all went down,” Reno says. He runs his hand through his hair, then pushes himself up in his chair. “Verdot kept his dirty secrets closer than Tseng does. Good guy, good at finding that kind of thing, but Tseng’s the guy when you want to clean house.”

The computer screen next to Rude’s is reflective enough for Reno to see himself in it, a little. His features aren’t crisp but he gets the generics: red hair, clammy-pale skin, as Cissnei likes to call it, cheek tats under vague dark eye-shaped smears. He could be any age—he’s like one of those CGI base models, waiting for someone’s input. That’s what some parts of Shinra had been aiming for, back then.

“So you don’t want me to tighten your stuff up a little?” Rude is asking.

Reno turns away from the reminder, back towards his friend. “Nah,” he says, slouching that way in his seat. “I’m good, man. If Valentine knows what Verdot did, it’s nothing Tseng hasn’t heard before.”

“He probably knows more,” Rude says, though he’s not pushing that hard.

“Yeah.” Knows, and Reno’s gonna remember that now. But he didn’t show up back then, even if he was talking to Verdot, and Verdot could have afforded to hire Vincent—but Tseng’s the guy Vincent actually signed a contract with. And Tseng’s the guy Reno calls the boss. Nobody remembers what Reno called Verdot these days, and Reno knows that’s not what Verdot and Vincent would have talked about. “But I still think I’m good. Just had a moment, like Cissnei on Wednesday.”

Rude is quiet. He probably isn’t totally buying it, but he’s going to leave it and that’s just fine with Reno. No reason to put effort into something that’s long since expired, he thinks. No reason at all.

Chapter 48: Interlude: Sephiroth Reminds Vincent about Work/Life Boundaries

“Are you planning to join my call?” Vincent asks, voice faintly bemused, as Sephiroth nuzzles at the hand Vincent cups under his jaw. The other man strokes his thumb across Sephiroth’s mouth, then pulls it away as Sephiroth tries to curl his tongue around it.

He doesn’t appear irritated at all, though next his fingers slip into Sephiroth’s hair, both carding it back from Sephiroth’s face and lifting Sephiroth’s head enough for their eyes to meet. Sephiroth lets the tug twist a whisper of a shiver out of him, and for a moment the warm soreness that slides all through his body distracts him.

For a moment. “I should,” he mutters, with a careful toss of the head to rid himself of a hair in the eye without shaking loose Vincent’s hand. “He could wait till Monday, and he’s not, because he wants it set before I’m supposed to meet with him.”

“He thinks it’s important to have a plan to present. And Tseng probably did give him the impression I wouldn’t be home till the morning,” Vincent says.

His fingers run through Sephiroth’s hair, sweeping most of it over one shoulder, and then drop down to drift over that shoulder. A couple of Vincent’s claw-tips skate over a healing welt, then pause just on its periphery as Sephiroth lets out a long, low noise. Then they lift and the finger pads press lightly down, further testing the bruise. Sephiroth moans again, more full-throated, and then drops his head back to Vincent’s lap as Vincent teases the still-healing flesh. “You want him to be surprised you’re home.”

“Is it a bad idea?” Vincent asks.

Sephiroth considers it, with the part of his mind that reluctantly is weighing up work matters, and then shakes his head. Then sighs, rolling himself slightly so that Vincent can pet more of his back. “No, but…”

“Do you want to listen?” Vincent asks. Then, before Sephiroth can answer, his hand comes up to curl under Sephiroth’s jaw again. He urges Sephiroth up till Sephiroth props himself on his elbows, cool air rushing under his chest and belly to drain away the warmth of Vincent’s body as above, Vincent restores it with the press of his mouth to Sephiroth’s. “Does my pretty consort want to know what Rufus is planning?”

The chill of the room as the sheets drop away is momentary at best, but it’s still palpable, a smart slice all through Sephiroth that clears out any lingering lassitude. But in its place comes not exasperation but a delicious tingling anticipation, a breath caught tight in his throat as he shakes his head. Not thinking, and yet not feeling at all as if he’s been tricked into it, or made careless—it’s only he and Vincent both know already, whatever Monday brings, which side they’ll be on.

And so he doesn’t have to think before he dips his head, lets his lips run pleadingly along the line of Vincent’s jaw. “No. But I want to stay.”

Vincent’s mouth curves before Sephiroth’s caress reaches the end of it. The man turns a little, enough for Sephiroth to part his lips, trembling, as Vincent’s words flick seductively in and out of them. “My lovely reminder, waiting next to me. Bound and quiet…”

“Hooded,” Sephiroth breathes, shivering. “Please.”

“Blind and mute and deaf,” Vincent agrees, voice warming as he reaches up with his other hand, runs it quickly but firmly over the bruises dappling Sephiroth’s torso. “Go dress.”

Sephiroth moans wordlessly, and despite the order, Vincent keeps his hands on him a moment longer. But soon enough he’s pushed to the edge of the bed, and he knows what to do at that point.

His hair plaited to the side, the red silk dress on, he returns and kneels with his hands flat against the side of the bed so Vincent can lace up the black leather belt. Then his arms are strapped behind him, gripped in place with leather, while silk cords are knotted about his chest, stretching his pierced nipples through the holes in the bodice. They’re already tender from earlier, and slowly blush in irritation as Vincent presses him over the bed, working his hole open enough to receive a thick plug and making the nubs rub against the sheets in the process.

He's somewhat relieved when Vincent twists him over, pushing his back up against the headboard as he spreads his thighs, but then Vincent pushes away the front skirt panel and wraps a black silk ribbon about his straining cock. Tight enough to keep him from coming, tight enough to keep him helplessly hard, his balls twitching against the loops constraining them, as Vincent folds his thighs back together. Demurely straight, bound that way with more leather so Vincent can smooth down his skirt and chain his ankles to the other end of the bed.

“So red,” Vincent murmurs, leaning over to puff wetly at each nipple.

The graze of mere air makes Sephiroth try to arch, dropping his head back to grind into the pillows. Vincent rises higher, tasting lazily at his whimpers, before binding his mouth and eyes with another ribbon. He’s aching more badly than ever, but the ache is starting to envelop him, holding him so close and warm that he can’t help but sink into it, and so he quiets even before the earplugs are tipped in, the leather hood is stretched over his forehead and cheeks.

Tied and waiting like Vincent promised, in silk that clings caressingly, distractingly to his straining flesh. He breathes slowly, feeling every particle of air in how it presses his chest that much more into the cords, draws that much more aching heat into his nipples and cock. Vincent hasn’t left, he knows that from the dip of the bed on that side, but as for what the other man is doing—

Hands come down on his shoulders. They hold tight as he startles, then rub their thumbs into the hollows of his clavicle, tweaking dress and cord so that the surge of aching in his nipples makes him bend upwards. There’s the soft pressure of something against his gagged, covered mouth: Vincent kissing him through the hood. And then again, just under its edge, teeth scraping at his windpipe, making Sephiroth shudder in a heady mix of helpless anticipation. Two kisses down the breastbone, while Vincent’s hands drop to hook fingers into each nipple ring, tugging sharply at them as his mouth lovingly wets the silk, and finally, one lavish kiss to each nipple, sucking it roughly against its piercing while the other is tormented between thumb and forefinger.

Vincent leaves those nubs burning white-hot spears down into Sephiroth, pinning him like a mounted insect in a museum case, and moves downward. He lifts the front panel of the dress again, his fingers encircling the tops of Sephiroth’s thighs. He strokes lightly at their insides, then presses them apart so that a hot, tenderly brutal mouth can anoint the small part of Sephiroth’s cock that swells past the enveloping ribbon, so sensitive that that touch feels as if Sephiroth’s being gutted alive. There’s a laugh at Sephiroth’s muffled whine, a laugh and then a pair of sharp bites on the inner side of either thigh.

Then Vincent lets go. Lets the strap around Sephiroth’s legs push the bitten parts together to rub even hotter, pushes the skirt back in place. He returns to his side of the bed and settles in place, and when the flexing line of his tail slides under Sephiroth’s back and then loops forward to encircle Sephiroth’s waist over the belt, Sephiroth knows the man has started his call.

It aches, how much Sephiroth needs him. Need—but the man is there, and Sephiroth knows this almost more by the way he leaves Sephiroth than by the weight of his tail. The way he’s bound and shaped Sephiroth into a perfect, pure being of need, poised precisely in the thick of that without any feeling that oblivion will decrease it. And Sephiroth doesn’t want that anyway. He wants to be needy. He wants to lie here, in the snug dark silence of the hood, and feel all over the rest of him how much he needs, how much he can do nothing but need. How much he is allowed, without any distractions, to need.

He drinks it in, lying there and waiting, and so when he’s touched again, it’s like being shocked with one of Scarlet’s experimental guns. Tearing through him, upsetting the fragile equilibrium he’s found, punching the air out of his lungs and then making him suddenly, acutely aware of the closeness of the hole in the hood that just permits him to inhale.

Heavy weight smoothly presses over his shoulders and across his thighs, forcing him out of a threatening spiral. He breathes more steadily, body relaxing back into the cushions, and that other touch comes again. Still shocking but now the shock transmits all over him, not into him—a shivering wave of sensation every time that thing moves across his nipples, tied and agonizingly tender as they are. He lets it drag his body flat, lets it turn his breathing ragged, barely noticing as his cock is unbound and then taken up into a hot, welcoming hole. When his climax comes, it truly blindsides him from the dancing torture of the toy.

“A feather,” Vincent says once he’s unhooded. His eyes and mouth and ears freed, though the rest of him is still bound, lying under Vincent as the other man lifts the item to his bleary eyes. “It worked out of the pillow by your head when I was on the call.”

Sephiroth stares uncomprehendingly at the small, white, fluffy object, already crumpled on one side even though Vincent is pinching it as gently as he is Sephiroth’s right nipple. “I thought—I thought you were using a—a claw.”

Vincent smiles. Flicks away the feather, and then retrieves some water from the bedside for Sephiroth’s raspy throat. “If I had, I think it would have been too much for you, and I am free the rest of today.”

“You could have me anyway,” Sephiroth had to say, between gulps of water. “Like that.”

“I know,” Vincent says simply. He puts the glass away and wipes Sephiroth’s mouth with a finger, then stoops to lay his mouth against Sephiroth’s forehead. His hands drift down to pluck the cords knotted about Sephiroth’s chest, and then, as Sephiroth whimpers, move lower to loosen them near the nipples and then slide fingertips between cords and flesh, rubbing soothingly. “But I like you with me.”

Sephiroth gazes up at him, watching as Vincent’s outlines blur and sharpen in time with the flashes of pleasurable pain the man’s hands coax out of him. He’s smiling himself, he knows that even without looking for his reflection in Vincent’s eyes. “So what would you like from your consort now?”

“Please me,” Vincent murmurs, mouth descending to claim Sephiroth’s own again, as if it would have been anything else.

Chapter 49: Side-Story: Reno’s Coffee Breaks

First Cup

It’s not the best cup of coffee Reno’s ever had. They say right after you’ve almost died, anything tastes amazing, but how many people actually fucking get close enough to know if that’s right, he thinks as he tips the rim against his lip.

Something runs down from his nose, then plops into the coffee. Reno figures it’s not going to make it that much worse, and keeps drinking, but the guy across from him grimaces and pulls out a napkin from the plastic dispenser beside them. He folds it against the table and pushes it across, pulling his fingers off it before Reno reaches out. Keeps that stoneface going while Reno rolls his eyes and uses the napkin to dab at his nose: the tissue doesn’t come out red, but clear threaded with faint green, like the tap water in the slums near a reactor.

“All I got for you this week, man,” Reno says, dropping the crumpled napkin onto the table. He slouches back in the booth, then cracks a laugh as Veld silently waits. “Listen, you seem busy anyway, probably better if we have another date next week. I think you’ve got enough to go—”

“I’m paying you to keep me informed about this Sector, not to serve as your insurance fund when you decide to overindulge,” Veld tells him. “If you have something to tell me, you should tell me. Holding it back does more harm than good.”

Fucking Turk, Reno thinks under the fake-startled grin he puts on. With the nice suit and the fancy weapons and the goddamn copters to pull him out whenever it gets too grimy, trying to lecture Reno on not letting things get too bad in the ghetto. “Hey, I told you what you asked me about. You got something else on your mind, sir? Because we don’t get those Mako enhancements down here, we can’t turn on the laser eyes and read your thoughts. So you want to know something, you’re gonna have to be more specific.”

Like those people going around and offering good hard cash if you take a couple pills and then let them watch you get high, and take notes on all the crazy nonsense you spout about the veins of the Planet and promised lands. And everybody knows Shinra wouldn’t be dosing people up just out of the goodwill of their heart, not if they weren’t trying to keep the Sectors quiet while some other shit goes on, but getting shot up with drugs is better than getting shot up with bullets. It’s just bullets are what Veld’s interested in, so bullets are what Reno gives him.

“That’s all you know about someone trying to traffic arms. Enough to slaughter an entire Sector,” Veld says flatly.

And Reno raises his chin and looks the guy in the eye and says yeah, with a clear conscience, because it’s true as far as all that goes.

Of course, what Veld and his Turks really want to know is who’s threatening the goddamn establishment, and it’s not really the gangs, even if one of them’s gotten big enough to enforce affiliates in Corel and Costa del Sol. It’s good ol’ R&D, dicking around in the slums because they don’t have enough fucking people to play with in their labs or some shit like that. And when they send in their notes about Reno’s drug-facilitated trip into the clouds, apparently it's interesting enough for him to get a callback. Unsolicited, unwanted, and absolutely nonconsensual.

Later, when he’s got the access, he does spend one late, late shift, so slow on work that he should’ve just played hooky and gone drinking with the others if he knew what was good for him—but he’s not a different guy in his Turk suit—looking into Veld’s informer accounts. Meticulous as shit, obviously, and here’s Reno down for each cup of coffee and little sweetener on the side, and over in the other column is the list of successful missions he contributed to. A damn long list, too. People get kill orders for less, he should know.

Those fucking dates, is all Reno thinks as he looks at them. Down the whole list of them, all those fucking dates, and when he gets to the last one, the one that didn’t happen because of R&D, all Veld has is no-show. Just a cup of coffee, a lowlife snitch, toss both out when you’re done. Veld was good to his people, sure, Reno’s heard that a lot since he joined up. And here in black and white is the line that guy drew around ‘his.’

Don’t get Reno wrong, he’s wearing a Turk suit himself now and he remembers what he thought when he didn’t. It’s always better to be in than out, and R&D didn’t fuck up his memory: he remembers his own lines back in the day. In or out, there are always lines.

Second Cup

Tseng makes Reno drink coffee because fucking R&D has that around but doesn’t have plain goddamn water, not in what’s left of the lab where anyone can be certain the corpses being carted out didn’t dose it just in case a stranger got thirsty. Well, okay, this isn’t official R&D according to what Reno’s been overhearing, this is some unauthorized team some Shinra asshole set up on the side, but fuck if Reno cares right now. He can’t move anything besides his left toes and he’s still bleeding from where that other Turk asshole stabbed him with a needle, and they’re still standing there holding that fucking thing like they’re ready for dose two.

“Orders say clean-up,” the asshole tells Tseng, brows raised.

“I read it,” Tseng says. He leans back and puts down the mug he’d been using to dribble the coffee into Reno’s mouth, studying Reno. “Clean-up with as much preservation of any test subjects as is possible for Dr. Crescent. This one is still responsive.”

The asshole snorts. “If you’re feeling merciful again, Tseng—” and this is how Reno’s introduced to him “—putting this slum kid to sleep’s the way to go. Especially if there’s a reason he’s muttering Turk codewords. You want to give us up to R&D?”

Tseng drops his head as he wipes his fingers off on whatever the hell they’ve tried to wrap Reno in—a bodybag, maybe. His jerkass sidekick can’t see his expression but Reno can, not that it gives Reno any comfort. He just looks like his little reflex to verify life when Reno had spasmed and then hissed something vaguely English is starting to be too much trouble. “I checked, he’s not undercover or anyone on roster. And that’s a stale code, if it wasn’t just coincidence. It’s also a place in Sector—”

“Look, fine, just don’t say I didn’t try to save you from bad choices when Veld asks,” the other Turk says, turning away. Taking that goddamn syringe with them. “Gaia, don’t know why you want to make nice to Crescent, but I guess you have your reasons.”

“Fucker,” Reno manages to grunt, because he does not want to die but he knows Dr. Crescent and R&D and that way is worse. That damn syringe hadn’t delivered its full load but it’d been enough, the chilly numbness, for him to know what it was for and he’d rather—he hates it but he’d rather—“Could’ve fucking—told Veld but he—”

Tseng hears him, but doesn’t turn a hair. The other one’s too far away now, making enough of a racket on the other side of a lab bench so that only Reno seems to hear how the zipper of the bag closing over his head sounds like a sword slashing down. He will do absolutely fucking anything, he wants to say, anything to get out of here.

Except he can’t do anything. Except he ends up going to R&D, and getting the full work-over by Crescent on top of whatever this Heidegger fucked him up with. She doesn’t like Heidegger’s work, it’s sloppy, it’s not even science, and anyway it didn’t take except for one, apparently curing Reno of his drug addictions and two, he hasn’t died. Twenty-two test subjects and twenty-one stay in their bodybags while him? He could make a full recovery if someone actually thinks he’s worth spending the medical supplies on.

“I didn’t think the Turks were taking charitable projects on now,” Crescent sniffs when Tseng shows up to pick up Reno, and makes it clear it’s not for delayed ‘clean-up.’ Her eyes scrape over Tseng like a scalpel. “This is certainly no treasure trove of insights into my work.”

“We are not scientists, Dr. Crescent,” Tseng says. “If there’s any side-effects you’ve missed that are critical to the company’s mission, we’ll bring him back.”

Crescent sniffs again, clearly pissed at the idea that she might’ve missed something, and then turns her back on them. Reno’s clearheaded enough now to not mouth off about how long this reprieve is, not then and not when Tseng hooks him up with Rude to get an identity valid enough to put in the HR system. Not when he gets his first suit and gun, not even the first time he fucks up on the job—because he’s still the same guy but if he’s gonna be on the side he thought had the upper hand to begin with, he’s gonna stay and let you tell the other side of his bullet he’s a hypocrite. And he didn’t tell Veld everything he thought back then and he doesn’t tell Tseng everything now.

But he asks, when him and Tseng have enough of a track record that he gets Tseng wasn’t just desperate for a body. “So when are you going to start buying me coffee?”

“You can buy your own, you have an expense account,” Tseng says without even looking up from his tablet.

Reno lets his mouth twitch towards a reflexive grin. Wasn’t really expecting more, he thinks, as his eyes wander over the ceiling towards the door, and then Tseng taps his tablet so Reno’s phone burrs that extra security measures are now up.

“There are plenty of eyes in Shinra, Reno,” Tseng says, still working away. “Less—”

“Outside?” Reno drawls, thinking of all those cups Veld passed him, all those missions on Veld’s accounts and zero credit in his.

“Even the ones outside are looking at Shinra,” Tseng says, and doesn’t look up when Reno looks over. “Everyone looks here. SOLDIER, Public Safety, R&D…Crescent didn’t see anything she could use in you, so she didn’t care if we took you. But she only looks for what matters to her objectives, and those aren’t the same as what matters to the company.”

“Thanks, boss,” Reno faux-chirps. “Real ringing endorsement.”

“I don’t endorse. I just try to think where no one else is going to look,” Tseng says, and finally raises his head. “You can go get your own coffee and tell me how you like it.”

It’s not comforting, but that’s not Tseng’s deal. It’s straight across from him to Reno, not flipping a couple coins over to avoid the germs sticking, and it makes the kind of sense where Reno doesn’t have to know what’s on Tseng’s mind to know what the man is looking for. Maybe it’s the lack of drugs these days, or the way Reno’s eyes do weird, strobe-y things in head-on flash photos now so he’s gotta literally keep his head down—or maybe it’s the way he still twists over in the middle of the night and feels the icy cut of Crescent’s eyes through phantom lab windows. But he shrugs his way to sitting, and then to his feet, and he thinks the suit they’ve put him in is something he can live in.

Can’t lie, he misses being able to get high. But if he’s got no choice but to see the world now for what it is, he’d rather do it along Tseng’s lines.

“Then if you’ve got nothing for me, I think I’m gonna go for one,” Reno says, heading for the door. “Tell you later if anything fun happens in the meantime.”

“Good,” Tseng says, letting him go.

Third Cup

Reno’s not blinded by gratitude, and trauma’s been lending him change since he could remember. He has to learn the lay of things in Shinra first but he figures out eventually that Veld was so busy defending the realm he was missing the obvious insider problem, and Tseng picked Reno up in part to get a read on that. Part because, well, indestructibility isn’t a bad thing to have when you’ve got super-soldiers to compete with. And maybe Reno doesn’t come with the ability to slice ‘n dice monsters one-handed with a carving knife the size of a car, but whatever you throw at him, he’s still gonna fucking make it back to report.

“You wanna, I don’t know, shower off before you…and the answer is no,” Fair mutters, looking half-concerned, half-disgusted as Reno smears fluids R&D’s going to have to prioritize identifying all over the console. “Already reported it. I guess if you’re in trouble with Tseng or whatever, I get it, but it’s already getting escalated.”

“Fuck off,” Reno says, typing in what he’s got to. It’s less for the details, more because he knows Tseng wouldn’t have been able to pull anyone off Rufus’ detail today—Rufus is doing press conferences all day—so the sooner he checks in, the sooner Tseng knows the field teams he does have don’t have to pull double-shifts.

Fair huffs a sigh like not responding to his puppy-dog sympathy is the crime of the century. He hangs around the station, even as he has to keep shifting to avoid the gobbets of whatever dripping off Reno, and when Reno’s done, he offers coffee from his thermos. First-Class coffee is brewed to make normal people’s eyeballs do a blitz around the room and so is not to be turned down, even if it comes with a side of condescending small talk.

“Sure, fine, I’ll just go save somebody else the trouble,” Fair says, looking away. He checks his phone like maybe the General’s going to swoop in with an order custom-tailored to restore his ego, then visibly wilts when he doesn’t get it.

Says who’s really on trash detail as punishment, Reno thinks. Thinks and drinks his coffee, while he gets the reply from Tseng acknowledging and telling him to stay put. Which he’s fine with; he just hauled his ass out of yet another R&D layoff coming back to bite them with mutant jaws situation, and given how involved Crescent’s probably going to be in the solve, he doesn’t mind staying under the radar. Sometimes babysitting duty is the best job.

“Seriously, though,” Fair has to say. When Reno turns, Fair holds out a pack of sanitizing wipes. “At least clean up. You leave that stuff on much longer, I’m gonna have to report it to R&D.”

“Do that and Tseng’s gonna be up your ass so fast,” Reno shoots back, but he takes the wipes and tears the pack open.

“Look, nobody wants to, but this shit is going to be off the charts, I can tell already,” Fair says. He digs around in one of his pants pockets and comes up with another packet that he sets down on the console between them. “You’re on your own with a fresh set of clothes.”

“Like anybody’s gonna touch your cut-rate SOLDIER camo. Gives me hives just looking at it,” Reno snorts as he wipes at his left hand, then his face.

Fair wants to engage, it’s all over his face and the way his hands twitch, but he juts his chin out and doesn’t. He’s such a fucking newbie, Reno always thinks, no matter how many heroic missions the guy racks up and how hard Hewley tries to stuff some political sense into him. Standing there and taking it on the jaw and probably thinking the whole time he’s being the man, helping Reno duck R&D interest. Of course, he doesn’t know R&D’s not interested in anyone whose genes just won’t take what they’re cooking up in those test tubes, not like anyone who passed SOLDIER screening.

Reno pitches a wad of used wipes into the trash, then picks up his cup again. His slurp makes Fair’s cheek muscle twitch, but then the guy offers more from the thermos, looking annoyed the whole way about it. “You might want to check in with medical anyway,” Fair says like it’s coming up the wrong way. “Not that I know what they input into Turk models at the factory, but SOLDIER medical’s already raising some flags.”

“Great. Let me know what the General’s mom thinks and we’ll look into it for you,” Reno says through his next slurp.

Fair starts to get his back up, but then catches himself. Maybe Hewley’s finally drummed some brains into him. “Fine,” he grates out as he turns around.

Fucking newbie, Reno thinks again, with the tingle of coffee still spreading over his tongue. The SOLDIER stuff is good enough he does wonder how R&D hasn’t snaked it yet—Sephiroth does the best job of any that Reno’s seen at keeping them contained, but even he isn’t flawless at it. Though since he’s got Valentine at his back now, he should know that too, but doesn’t seem like he’d told Fair yet. Which is a boss for you—Tseng gets what makes Reno tick, but it’s not like Reno has ever thought or will ever think that the guy has only Reno’s interests at heart. It’s just Reno does feel like he earns his coffee with Tseng rather than pays for it. And here’s Fair, just handing the good stuff out like he’s never had to call in a favor, ever.

Reno checks his phone again, then raises his cup to his lips. Then grimaces and lowers it, and clears his throat before Fair can exit the room. “Valentine’s gonna drop in for a look, if you want to phone that up the chain.”

Fair’s head whips around. “I didn’t think it was that b—okay. Got it, thanks.”

To which Reno tips his cup in a sloppy chest-high salute. Fair snorts but doesn’t let it stop him from swinging out into the hall, phone already glued to his ear. Reno’s already regretting the impulse as he takes his own phone and makes sure the eager fucking beaver’s routed the call through max encryption. But he’s learned a couple things at this point, even if he’s the same guy, and one of them is whoever your boss is, they’re still not the boss of everybody else you’ve gotta worry about. And he still has those nightmares sometimes about getting put down.

Tseng can keep tabs on Crescent but he’s never going to put her down. Valentine has, to Reno’s mind, been thinking real seriously about it lately, and Sephiroth? Sephiroth is a loaded gun Reno wants to be across the Planet for when he goes off—whoever ends up aiming that one, he’s happy to just find out from the news.

So it’s not the most a cup of coffee has ever cost Reno, talking to Fair, because sometimes even when you think you know where the lines are, it’s good to check and make sure they’re still where you left them. So Reno thinks, watching on his phone for when Fair’s call to Sephiroth ends. Then he tosses back what’s left in the cup, rolls his shoulders, cracks his neck, and starts gearing up for the party.

Chapter 50: Interlude: Vincent Has a Rough Work Day

The mission hadn’t gone to plan, badly. Sephiroth knows this even before he and the other Firsts are called into an emergency briefing with Lazard and Tseng, simply from the toneless way Vincent returns Angeal’s greeting. There’s nothing rude about it and they’re certainly in a setting that would preclude unnecessary familiarity, but even so…Vincent can be calm and this is not calm. His tone lacks any hint of life to it, and Sephiroth knows that that is not because he’s uninterested or uncaring; on the contrary, this is Vincent devoting all of his energies to something that has mortally offended him. Until it’s been handled to his satisfaction, the man has and will spare none for anything else.

He hadn’t been part of the field team, but he had been intimately involved in the planning. The cause of the mission failure isn’t directly due to Vincent’s suggestions but to an intel blind spot, compounded by some bad decisionmaking by the field team. It isn’t unsalvageable but parts of the aftermath have become public, and so SOLDIER will be needed to maintain a perimeter.

Sephiroth has no objection to his personnel being used in this way, and doesn’t resent the Turks for creating the situation any more than he resents any other department who requires this kind of SOLDIER assistance—the mission was important, and all missions run this sort of risk. Remediation measures will need to be implemented but he trusts Tseng will see to that, and so for him this seems routine enough.

But Vincent is unbroken ice all throughout the crisis management, even after they’ve received confirmation that the last stray lab specimen has been tracked down and contained. He’s professional, of course, but he stays like that as they disperse from the meeting room they’ve taken over for the day and head their separate ways. Silky-silent as he turns to follow Sephiroth down the hall, silent but raging.

Sephiroth admits to slowing his step for a moment. He and Vincent naturally head out together now, but the man’s mood—and he happens to catch Angeal’s gaze across the way. The other man has his arm slung over Zack’s shoulder, expression as if about to tell a joke but eyes concerned as they hold Sephiroth’s for a moment, then flick towards Vincent’s head.

“Tseng would rather brief Rufus first,” Vincent says, and when Sephiroth drops his eyes towards the other man, Vincent is regarding him with a knowing look that’s unusually tight around the edges. “I can find somewhere to wait.”

If he’s too disturbing for Sephiroth, he means. “Come home,” Sephiroth says, low and sharp and unthinking, and then he takes a breath; he can do better, he will do better, when Vincent is always perfect for him. “There’s no need to wait in someone else’s lobby.”

Vincent’s expression doesn’t change. But his step after Sephiroth is sure enough, and gradually, as they put more distance between themselves and the office, the nature of his silence shifts.

By the time they reach their quarters, Vincent has calmed down. But still knotted into his thoughts, enough so that when Sephiroth leaves him in the kitchen, he’s standing at the counter with one hand resting on the top of a tea canister and the other caged over his phone. Motionless, clearly not yet ready to push work aside.

Zack had said just before they’d broken up that there was nothing in the SOLDIER queue that couldn’t wait till Monday, and despite his bouts of ridiculousness, he’s developed enough Sephiroth decides to rely on those words without independent confirmation. So he’s free, he thinks as he strips off his uniform and washes the day’s strains off in the shower. He can deal with the fools in two days, and do as he likes in the meantime.

And so, washed and changed and prepped, he kneels at Vincent’s feet. The man has brewed some tea but the cup on the counter is largely untouched, and cold enough that it is no longer sending up tendrils of steam as Vincent turns to him.

Looking over him, gaze warming above frigid for the first time all day, even if there’s still a banked reserve of cold behind it. His damp, smoothly-plaited hair draped over one shoulder, silver strands echoing the delicate embroidery of the white silk slip he’s wearing. Brushing past his right nipple, still warmly pink from the shower, as it rises out of the bodice slit, and then down his front like a caressing hand, over the soft slope of his belly and the rounded tops of his thighs where his loose fists are resting over the gauzy midnight stretch of silk stockings.

“Pet,” Vincent says, but even as Sephiroth sighs and leans forward to rub his brow against the man’s opening hand, Vincent’s mouth twists sourly. He still cups Sephiroth’s jaw, curls his thumb over Sephiroth’s bottom lip. “I just told your mother she was right. We did leave that one too long.”

Sephiroth can’t help the twitch. But the push of Vincent’s thumb against his lip is a firm wall against the cold steel that always runs up through his spine when she’s mentioned. “R&D’s request was fully addressed, and she’s not owed a full briefing before Rufus.”

Vincent’s smile remains lopsided. But his thumb slides back and forth across Sephiroth’s lip, and when Sephiroth tilts his head closer, lets his mouth tease at the digit, he can feel the way Vincent’s fingers loosen and spread to better cradle his chin. “True. And her predictions about the potential security challenges were entirely off. I’m still going to have to meet with her Monday.”

Sephiroth twitches again, but this time is prepared for it, and turns the motion into a nuzzle along the hollow of Vincent’s palm. Kissing it open-mouthed, letting his lower teeth catch on the edge of a plate and then pressing his lip to the plate’s center so he can feel the warm pulse under it. “Monday,” he emphasizes.

“Such a pretty pet,” Vincent says after a moment. His voice lower, more relaxed, but not quite lazy. He lets Sephiroth lave at his palm for another second, but then flips his hand around and up, removing it from where Sephiroth can attend to it and brushing a stray few strands back to Sephiroth’s temple, where his fingertips then rest just threaded in at the hairline. “I don’t punish you for others’ idiocies.”

His gaze is tied to Sephiroth, not to the phone on the counter. It stays there as Sephiroth tips his head against Vincent’s hand, far enough that if Vincent doesn’t push back, he’d lose his balance.

Vincent pushes and he smiles. “I don’t kneel for idiots, Vincent,” Sephiroth says.

And that is what carves away the ice from the man’s eyes. Not crack or dissolve—it’s cut out as if with a heated blade, and behind is warmth and humor and appreciation. That way Vincent has of looking at him, of looking over and through and then taking it all up as if the man means to lock every particle of it for his own personal pleasure. “My lovely, lovely pet,” Vincent says softly, rich and deep, tone flowing along with the shudder it provokes in Sephiroth. “Come to serve me, no matter what.”

Sephiroth’s breath hitches as Vincent’s fingers twist deeply into his hair, sparking little prickles all over his scalp. Then loosens as his face is pushed into Vincent’s thigh, as the tension he hadn’t realized was lingering in his nape and shoulders is forcefully rolled out by firm, mastering fingers holding him.

“What are you wearing?” Vincent asks him.

Not meaning the slip. “The—the latex briefs,” Sephiroth murmurs, breath still shaky. He pushes at the tops of his stockings with the heels of his hands, just barely remembering not to use nails so as to not rip them. “And a vibrator inside.”

Vincent lets out a warm, amused noise. He gives Sephiroth’s nape a last squeeze, thumb dragging forward over the side of Sephiroth’s neck to dangerously near the carotid, and then pulls Sephiroth to his feet.

“You’ll serve till I’m ready,” he tells Sephiroth. “I have a few things to clean up first.”

Who is wordless but not voiceless, moaning and whimpering as he’s positioned. He brought silk cords with him, expecting a chest harness, but Vincent instead ties his wrists together with the frail things. Drops his bound hands against the top of a kitchen chair and then has him standing over it, straddling the seat with each ankle tied to the front legs. Making him work at being the docile toy, working to not break free as Vincent fastens clamps on a long silver chain to his nipples, then loops the chain through the chair back and about his wrists to force him to bend over.

He's already covered in a fine layer of sweat, sticking the slip to him as Vincent rolls up its hem and strokes his buttocks. Squeezes each lovingly, rocking the vibrator in him as he tries not to jam his knees into the edge of the chair; he can feel the silk cords around his ankles straining. “You were careful,” Vincent murmurs approvingly, leaning over him as hands fondle between his thighs. “You’ll keep your pretty slip clean while I use you. Because I am going to—I’ll use you tonight till there’s nothing left.”

Sephiroth digs his nails into his own flesh rather than the creaking wood his hands are resting on, and forces himself to take back in every tremble, every spasm as Vincent teases him over the tight latex briefs. His cock is strapped soft in them, soft between his legs but Vincent shapes and molds it against the latex till he can remember the feeling of hardness, can feel it trying to press up against the man’s tormenting fingers. He moans and moans, and forces himself to merely absorb it, to not take it out on the chair.

Not even when he’s whipped, stinging bands across his buttocks and down onto the tops of his thighs. His chest jerks each time, despite the way that brightens the bite of the clamps at his nipples. Because of, he thinks as he sinks into a dazed, shivering heap.

Untied from the chair, but with the clamps still bobbing their chain with each staggered breath. Vincent pushes him to his knees and then uses long leather belts to tie his arms to his sides, his thighs to his calves. His wrists are straightened against his hips and then cuffed to his ankles; when he moves, when he thinks to move, he only spreads himself helplessly for the other man’s attentions, buttocks still burning as rivulets of sweat seep out from under his soaked slip and then trace webs of fire over his welts.

Fingers at his cheek. He opens his mouth, and then sags gratefully under the grounding fullness of Vincent’s cock. Sucking a little, until he’s told to only hold, and then he does that even as the vibrator suddenly comes to life in him, burring away all his self-control otherwise. He’s a mewling, shuddering mess on his knees between Vincent’s legs, holding onto the man’s cock with his mouth because he has nothing else to hold to, nothing else in the scratch of his nails against his jittering soles, the winking heat clamped to his nipples, the flexing silk-and-leather cage of his bonds. Nothing but his needs and he’s not allowed to satisfy them, not yet, so all he can do is hold, a cock in his mouth.

Vincent does something at the kitchen table. Sephiroth doesn’t pay attention till it’s done, and another caress at his cheek tells him he can suck. He does that mindlessly, barely feeling the change in Vincent’s cock, too submerged in the way the vibrator’s tip seems to drill straight through him, straight down through his flesh to tickle right where his own poor, strapped cock’s head is bundled against his perineum.

He's wet under the latex, as wet as an ocean, even as Vincent pulls his head back and the air of the room rushes in to parch out his still-seeking mouth. “Lovely,” Vincent says, kissing the taste of come out of his lips, and he can only whine because with that stripped away his tongue feels even drier. “But I’ve still something to clean up.”

“Please,” Sephiroth rasps, finding words somewhere. “Please.”

“Not yet,” Vincent says, pressing the hard rim of a glass to his lips.

He knows better to refuse. He drinks, the vibrator briefly stopped, and then cries out, bumping away the glass with his jaw when the buzzing starts again. A thumb wipes spilled water off his cheek and throat, and then deceptively soothing hands run down his body.

His wrists are unchained from his ankles. He’s scooped up by the waist, still tied otherwise, and taken into the bedroom where Vincent props him astride the other man, slumped against Vincent’s chest as wrists and ankles are rechained. Then plays with him, flicking his throbbing nipples till their clamps feel as if they’re dipped in electric fire as he hikes his knees uselessly back and forth; it’s the only thing he can do, spread his legs, and when he does Vincent’s hands wander down to pinch and tease. Pulling at the belt-marks till the welts extend up about his inner thighs, forcing him to spread even wider when even the touch of Vincent’s trousers against them makes him flinch.

Molding over his crotch, lavishing attention on his aching bound cock even as Vincent’s prick is free to harden up against his back. Vincent traces his balls through the latex, pressing roughly at their tenderest places, and then crushes a thumbpad against his cockhead as he throws his head back over Vincent’s shoulder, shuddering.

“Please,” he moans.

Vincent kisses the side of his open, trembling mouth. He moans again, turns blindly towards it, but though Vincent returns the clumsy attempt at a kiss, the man doesn’t press his advantage. Something needles through Sephiroth’s haze, some sense of the shift, and so he catches Vincent’s low mutter: “You worked enough today.”

Sephiroth whines. He can hear the man, can hear that trace of cold returning to Vincent’s tone but he can’t—he hasn’t the words. He can’t tell the man, he’s too bound up, too needy—but he needs. He needs, he says with his whine, with his heavy arch back into Vincent, with the way he puts himself into the man’s hands. He needs, and Vincent’s always seen that, always, and…

There’s a chuckle. Rough, a little disbelieving—but warm, always warm. The laugh, and then the demanding, sucking kiss at the side of Sephiroth’s throat. “And you still want to be used—such a greedy pet.”

Yes, Sephiroth thinks, relaxing. Going limp, only half-aware but that’s fully enough to know the difference, to know the lack of ice in the other man.

And then Vincent digs out the other vibrator and presses it between Sephiroth’s legs and Sephiroth is fully lost. Squirming as long as he has the energy, his mind nothing but staticky pleasure as Vincent runs the vibrator over and over his bound cock. Then slumping to trembling, gasping jelly as both vibrators jolt him, unimpeded by even a participatory effort on his side. He’s utterly voiceless when, one hand firmly cupping the vibrator to his crotch, Vincent uses the other to release the clamps from his nipples.

Sephiroth’s mind snaps out and into the air, floating in a beautifully incoherent fog as below, his body is manhandled off Vincent’s lap and then onto its back. Wrists uncuffed again from his ankles, but his limbs still bound, arms to his sides and legs doubled up. All used up, a lolling plaything, only letting out the occasional weak whimper as Vincent finishes his cleaning. Gently relentless sucking at each nipple, till their soreness spreads from brilliant points into soft, pectoral-wide pulsing. Then lapping between Sephiroth’s thighs, first along the edges of the latex briefs and then under them, licking up every trace of the mess that’s revealed when Vincent peels them away.

The idea of a climax at this point is absurd. There’s no peak, no end—no relief Sephiroth wants like this, cocooned as he is in as much sensation as a conscious mind can withstand. Only…a little motion to his drifting. A little pressure to ease the lightheadedness, to help him slip back into his own body. Taking on the flush of aching as he lies under Vincent, eyes closed, head still lolling as Vincent pushes into him and then fucks the air back into him, washing hoarse breath in and out of his slack lips.

He shudders after Vincent’s come in him. A few minutes after, when Vincent’s breathing has steadied and the man has brought his hands up to cradle Sephiroth’s face between them. Tracing his lip with one still-shivering thumb, then stooping to press another breath into him when he gasps.

“You should rest,” Vincent mutters. Differently than before—less reserved but more determined. And he’s tired himself, Sephiroth can tell in the way the man sags over him.

“Can stand it…if you want to sleep,” Sephiroth manages to croak out. Still half-dreaming, tucked on Vincent’s cock and in Vincent’s bonds. “Will heal.”

Vincent makes one of his amused rumbles. “I’m not that careless,” he says, as his thumb loops about Sephiroth’s mouth again. “You know that, or you wouldn’t make that kind of offer.”

Sephiroth whines, which makes Vincent chuckle again. Levering himself out of Sephiroth, and then stripping them both and dragging them into the bathroom despite Sephiroth’s drowsy protests. Though they’re little more than mumbled whimpers; Sephiroth drapes himself over whatever part of Vincent is in reach as he’s tended to but otherwise doesn’t resist.

Vincent’s still indulgent enough to put a collar on him once they’ve returned to the bed. A thin, snug leather one, tightening nicely with each breath, as Sephiroth curls his hand over Vincent’s shoulder and shifts his thighs so that Vincent can run his tail between them, pressing fur firmly up against Sephiroth’s still-raw hole. “Better if you were in me,” Sephiroth can’t help saying.

“Needy.” Vincent drifts the word across the top of Sephiroth’s head, and then follows its trail with his fingers, petting down Sephiroth’s hair before closing his hand loosely over the collar. “Better.”

Sephiroth senses the change in tone, but as he moves, Vincent’s fingers stroke across to his cheek. They press lightly, until he subsides, and then return to the nape of his neck. There’s no tension in Vincent’s body, and they’re far too entwined for Sephiroth to have missed any, even without the man’s cock in him; there was a change, he was certain of it. But not one that needs addressing, he finally thinks.

“Better,” Vincent says. Pauses, then settles his mouth against the top of Sephiroth’s forehead, right at the hairline. “Better.”

Chapter 51: Ninth Vacation: Working Vacation

Sephiroth smooths his palms down his body, cock twitching in its silken sling as his slip tickles pleasantly against his skin. Deep green silk with black lace trim, hitting to mid-thigh but with side-slits back to the waist that gap open as he arches himself, showing the tops of his black silk stockings. The panties hidden under the slip match the stockings but he can’t help imagining them as warmly pink, as warm as his nipples pebbling out through the customary slits in the bodice.

Those seem to flush more as his gaze drops to them, and almost unconsciously he pulls his fingers back up himself to catch them. Playing very gently with them as he backs up against the wall and looks at the mirror across from him, looks at the heavy-lidded eyes and lips rounded against breaths that come quicker and quicker, because in truth they’re not his to toy with. He teases them anyway, pulling his lower lip between his teeth and thinking about how far he might be able to take himself, with that sticky, warm dot where his cock head strains against the panties growing and growing.

There’s a creak beside him. His fingers tighten reflexively on his nipples and he shudders, backing up rather than stepping out, and so when Vincent comes in Sephiroth is already ready for him to take.

Wrists immediately caught and pushed up over his head, thigh pinned firmly against his groin as he finishes his lust-slowed hitch and promptly segues into a moaning squirm. “And what are you doing here?” Vincent asks, completely rhetorical, as he rocks his thigh upwards. “Hiding?”

Sephiroth twists at his hands, not to free himself but to feel the firmness of Vincent’s grip. He’d braided his hair back but loops of it are already falling out in front, splitting his pants into warm strips that flick into his face as he arches. “I have—I have an appointment.”

Vincent smiles. He continues to rub his leg against Sephiroth, precisely angled to press up rolls of arousal, each one doubling the preceding one in urgency. When Sephiroth hikes himself to relieve the pressure, Vincent makes an amused noise in his throat and tips forward, long tongue snaking out ahead of him to curl like a finger under Sephiroth’s chin. “And what are you here to ask for this time?”

It’s an old building, one of the oldest in Corel. Sturdy enough to have survived rebellions and coups, and combined with its central location, the obvious choice for Shinra’s local offices. Most of the original fittings are still present and Sephiroth knows that’s more due to Heidegger’s lack of interest in spending money on anything besides his personal aggrandizement, but he has to say they suit the man. Scarred, outdated and crowding in from all directions, acting like a frame for the trophies Heidegger likes to steal and then set up as his own.

Sephiroth hates coming here, but outside of Midgar SOLDIER doesn’t handle security matters within city boundaries and only has prevailing authority in the countryside. Within a city Public Safety has precedence, and any operation SOLDIER needs to conduct must have its department head’s consent. And Heidegger knows it’s not just operational assistance Sephiroth is asking for this time. The way the man’s small, beady eyes look over Sephiroth makes Sephiroth want to reach up with one hand and wipe it off his skin.

“And what brings you here, General?” the man asks.

“What do you want?” Vincent murmurs, unyieldingly solid as he slides his thigh along Sephiroth’s cock. His fingers draw Sephiroth’s wrists into crossing over each other, bowing Sephiroth up as his lips just graze Sephiroth’s mouth. That tongue of his flicks in to interrupt Sephiroth’s groan, and then he laughs. “Never mind. Pretty little toy, I can see for myself.”

Then his mouth comes down in force, not mere play, driving Sephiroth’s head back against the wall as he grinds his leg over and over against Sephiroth. Who eats his own whining as he twists helplessly, every attempt to escape only making it easier for Vincent to turn it back on him, make him move to the other man’s will. Vincent sucks his breath from him, then releases his mouth to let it pant hollowly as the other man bites down the side of his throat, each new pain reaching into his flesh to wring his pulse into racing faster and faster. He moans and whimpers, his knees spreading now, his whole body opening itself to the other man’s victorious siege.

“Come,” Vincent directs, and the word yanks him against the wall like a puppet.

“Please,” Sephiroth sighs as he slumps. His head falls forward to find a surprisingly soft landing on Vincent’s shoulder, as the other man pulls down their arms and takes him into an embrace. “Please—I need more.”

Vincent only chuckles in his ear, it’s Sephiroth’s own imagination that shapes the low, assured needy and of course from the noise. That runs a shiver up and down his body as Vincent takes a soft step back, another, and then deftly, mercilessly twists him around, pushing him up to the sink counter. “Hold on.”

Sephiroth wraps his fingers around the counter’s edge. His grip feels weak, like it’s made out of softened rags, but he’s been told to and so he stands. Spreads his legs when Vincent nudges his feet, keeps his chin where Vincent lifts it.

“Watch,” Vincent says. Head over Sephiroth’s shoulder, hands resting on either side of Sephiroth’s waist like a gentle lover, with his eyes the hungry red of the inside of a predator’s yawning mouth. He moves, then pauses and moves back. Drops his eyes to the curve of Sephiroth’s neck and Sephiroth watches how his gaze warms as drops of sweat slide over the raw blooms he’s left there. “All you have to do in here is what you’re told.”

Sephiroth has no illusions about his standing with the other Shinra executives. He’s long since proved he is not merely his mother’s or Hojo’s pawn, but to most of them that doesn’t mean he can’t be theirs. He hates it but with an intellectual kind of hatred, because he recognizes—his mother made certain of that—they think that way because that is how one becomes a leader at Shinra. And he is looking himself to find appropriate leverage and then apply it.

Heidegger, on the other hand, doesn’t want pawns. Heidegger wants slaves. It’s one thing to see someone as merely a means to an end, another to relish the idea of owning their every thought and act. Sephiroth has killed his own biological father for that line of thinking, and he thinks about it every time he has to come here and meet Heidegger on the man’s own ground.

“But you need it, don’t you? That mother of yours can’t tell you how to save Rhapsodos, can she?” Heidegger says, with his gross, rubbery lips smacking with appreciation over every word.

“Neither have you,” Sephiroth points out icily. “And my patience is running out.”

“Oh, oh, your patience,” Heidegger sniggers. “Your patience, as if you’re in control here, General. Well, let me tell you, you can stalk around Midgar all you want but in Corel I say who goes in and who goes out. And if you want to leave with anything useful for SOLDIER, you’ll do exactly like I tell you.”

Sephiroth looks in the mirror and he sees the way his chest heaves against the thin silk as Vincent slides both hands down his hips. The way the slip’s iridescence mutes as his sweat dampens it, and then the shocking pale of his skin as Vincent pulls up the slip’s hem to his waist, shocking white shading swiftly to heated pink as long fingers peel down the black panties. His cock drops out of its sling and then bobs upward, already hardening as the stroke of Vincent’s hands works down his legs.

Vincent’s head drops out of sight, but Sephiroth feels the man’s breath curling down his back. He shivers, having to regrip the counter as Vincent draws the panties down over his knees; the effort of pulling his legs together enough for that leaves him feeling off-balance, lightheaded as he’s become. Then shivers again as Vincent noses forward and kisses the inside of his left thigh just above the stocking, teeth touching just enough for him to make out the outline of fangs.

“Please,” Sephiroth begs. He pushes his feet apart and bends over the sink, his breath misting the glass as Vincent’s mouth presses down harder, pulling the burning out of Sephiroth’s blood and up to his skin. Vincent reaches up and rolls down the stocking, then moves his mouth down a few inches and repeats the biting kiss, and Sephiroth cries out before he can help it. “Please.”

“Such a pretty, pretty toy,” Vincent murmurs. Marking Sephiroth for each word, leaving a row of bitten roses marching down the inner thigh. He strips the stocking down to the ankle, then caresses the joint with his claws as Sephiroth twitches onto the balls of his feet. One claw slides under Sephiroth’s instep and Sephiroth whimpers at the way its faint scratch seems to sear through the descending haze of arousal. “So very pretty and obedient.”

More bites along the other thigh, as Vincent removes that stocking. Then he rises up again and loops his arms around Sephiroth so Sephiroth can see what he does, tying one stocking around the balled-up panties. Sephiroth moans repeatedly, so that Vincent doesn’t even need to tell him to keep his mouth open.

The man simply slots the panties between his lips. He closes his mouth without thinking, then hitches as the taste of his own come soaks past the silk. Then again, shuddering, from the jerk of the stocking against the corners of his mouth. Vincent pulls that taut and then winds the ends around his head and across his lips twice before tying off the gag. Tight, with enough layers to keep his lips from closing. Keeping them open, him open as Vincent then takes him by the hip and presses two slicked fingers between his buttocks.

He whimpers. It’s rough, the way Vincent prepares him, rough and careless but he whimpers less at that and more for how it rubs the gag against the roof of his mouth. Makes the weight of it feel heavier, more than mere silk should be, the first piece Vincent’s set to hold him still.

Vincent fucks him quickly, then pulls out as he’s still arching from the feel of the man climaxing in him. Fast enough that Vincent has to pause, one hand on Sephiroth’s waist, to catch his breath. But the man recovers even faster, swiping a finger to push a tendril of leaking come back into Sephiroth with an easy assurance that makes Sephiroth tremble and hitch himself hungrily into it.

The slap Vincent directs to his buttock is so light it leaves only a hot prickling behind, but it stops Sephiroth as firmly as a bullet would have. He holds himself for now, trembling more, as Vincent drops a smiling kiss to his shoulder, then an arm about his waist. Drawing him back into an embrace as Vincent’s teeth bite deep into the unmarked side of his throat, as Vincent’s fingers press a long, thick toy into him.

One of their vibrators. Sephiroth mewls in recognition and Vincent swirls his palm carelessly over Sephiroth’s side, sucking another bruise onto Sephiroth’s throat. Then tugs down the wrinkled slip and steps back, with another smack to Sephiroth’s hip. Not punishment, direction—Sephiroth recognizes that just as instinctively at this point, well-trained as he is, and turns towards the door.

“I’m going to show you what you’re here for,” Vincent tells him.

The only saving grace Sephiroth has is that Heidegger is, at the end of the day, as dependent on Shinra for the trappings of authority as the rest of them. He can’t ask for anything that would publicly undermine Shinra’s image, but in private…

“He’s unimaginative,” Sephiroth tells Angeal. “Take his enemies to task for him and then kiss his boots for the privilege.”

“It still should get him a sword in the back, and fuck codes of conduct. That’s just putting down vermin,” Angeal snarls. But his eyes are guiltier than they are angry, because if Sephiroth hadn’t come back with the scraps Heidegger had dropped about Genesis’ enhancements, Angeal would have fallen apart and they both know this. “Look, it shouldn’t be you. I’ll lick his boots for now and just keep it in mind for when we can—”

Sephiroth closes his eyes. “Angeal, I handled it before I left Corel. He wanted me specifically to do it, that’s why he asked me to go there.”

Because that hadn’t occurred to Angeal, in between the initial panic over Genesis’ collapse and the flurry of figuring out a stopgap to stabilize the man. His realizing that hits like a stab to the chest, when Sephiroth opens his eyes and looks again at the other man, and then he slumps heavily in his seat.

“What do you need from me?” he asks.

He can’t be sent out, Sephiroth sees that at a glance. “Keep things in line in the office until Mother can review what I brought,” Sephiroth says. “I need to see to a few other matters and won’t be in for a few days.”

“Got it,” Angeal says. He raises his head and makes an effort to push his expression towards determined. “Seph, the moment we get the okay—the moment it happens, I’m bringing you that fat fuck’s head on a platter. I swear.”

Sephiroth would have expected no less, and so his nod isn’t dismissive, it’s only being efficient in his acknowledgment, given all that he still has to do. And Angeal will take it that way, he knows. The man understands.

But it’s Sephiroth who still has to deal with the fallout from Corel, and with Heidegger. Heidegger was insightful in seeing that, Sephiroth has to credit him—there wouldn’t ever have been any point in blackmailing Angeal. It always would have come down to Sephiroth, and this, in the end, is what he was made for.

Vincent shepherds him into the office adjoining the bathroom. Sephiroth’s vision is hazy at this point, with strands of hair sticking across his face—he would never think to lift his hands to pluck them away, never think as a toy he has a say in how he’s made up to appear—so he is several steps in before he truly sees the room.

Stripped down to the bones, all its past ornamentation gone and even its shadows erased by fresh paint…but even so, its size makes it apparent it belongs to a top executive. The desk at one end confirms that impression, a slab of black steel that seems ready to turn over and crush anyone who is foolish enough to think about not approaching it like a supplicant.

Sephiroth starts at the movement behind him, belatedly realizing he’s slowed, and then shivers as he finds himself in Vincent’s grip. Wrists caught against his hips as Vincent hooks one chin casually over a shoulder to close the vise from the top, too. “A pretty toy in a general’s office,” Vincent says, rubbing his thumbs along Sephiroth’s forearms in a deceptively soft caress. “Go ahead and sit. Let’s see how you look there.”

He nudges at Sephiroth’s back without releasing Sephiroth. Who stumbles forward, then shuffles himself across the room till Vincent pulls ever-so-lightly at his arms, stopping him just short of the chair. An executive’s chair, spare steel frame generously padded out at seat and arms and headrest with black leather that sinks into a deep cradle when Vincent pushes him into it.

Sephiroth twists as the too-quiet vibrator rocks up into him. Then twists again, slower, feeling the futility of it, the stretch all through his body as Vincent bends his arms behind the chair and then tapes them in place, forearm to forearm straight across the back. He sucks at his gag as the headrest cups the back of his skull, the chilly steel support just close enough to tease tingling whispers from the bruised places on his throat.

Once his arms are securely strapped, Vincent turns the chair, making Sephiroth move to him rather than the other way around. Sephiroth whimpers through the gag as Vincent pulls the armrests out as far as they go, then lifts and folds his legs to rest each calf against a padded steel bar. He’s blatantly exposed, his slip hiking around his waist to let the cool air brush down past his balls, down his perineum to lap about his straining hole. Vincent tapes his legs to the armrests as he squirms, hard cock brushing tantalizingly against his groin so the lace hem of his slip alternately scratches and flutters its heated skin.

When Vincent is done binding him, the man stands back for a moment and runs his gaze over Sephiroth. Tracing out every vulnerability, making its outline burn in the air between them as Sephiroth splays for the man’s personal delectation. Sephiroth hitches and jerks, almost ready—but he can’t yet, he hasn’t been told to come yet. He whines, the need for that gagging him more than the silk in his mouth, but Vincent only smiles.

Smiles, and then reaches over and turns the chair to face the door. His fingertips slide from the corner of the headrest to the side of Sephiroth’s head, pushing Sephiroth back when Sephiroth tries to turn to nuzzle them. Then further down, stroking along the cheekbone, the jaw, as Vincent moves to stand behind the chair. Vincent’s other hand comes around and he caresses the tops of Sephiroth’s shoulders as he leans down.

“This is the center of all the operations here. Everyone has to come here, and if that door is open, they’ll see you like this,” Vincent whispers. His hands rise with Sephiroth’s shivering twitch, then lap down over the shoulders to pet Sephiroth’s pectorals. “Tied up and open for use. Not their use, because none of them are going to come in here and touch what doesn’t belong to them. But they’ll see it. They’ll see you being used.”

His fingers search out Sephiroth’s nipples and pinch sharply. Sephiroth twists into the bright pain these days, seeking the hottest part of it, and Vincent laughs lowly as he gives first one, then the other a lingering twist.

“They’ll see how much you crave this.” Vincent rubs the hurt out of each nipple, only to flick it back to life. Then repeats it, till his words seem to swim through waves of shimmering heat to Sephiroth’s ears. “See how needy you are for it, see how you have to be kept. You can’t be let loose, you need to be kept and used.”

Sephiroth’s moan pulls out of him like the sound is a thick, endless string of molasses, too thick to even swallow, his throat and lungs burning as more and more pushes out without leaving any space for air to come in behind. His head sinks like a lead weight against the cushion, and when two hot jolts of pain go through his chest, he barely twitches.

Vincent flicks the clamps a few times after they’re set, until Sephiroth finally rouses enough to arch against the chair. The steel groans, but that dies away as Vincent’s hands move back to Sephiroth’s pectorals, drawing soothing circles around each nipple. The clamps with the teeth, not the pressure rings, Sephiroth thinks blindly. With a little chain—he whimpers as it swings against him, tweaking one nipple more than the other.

“I’m going to keep you here,” Vincent says, his shadow falling over Sephiroth’s face. Then another, darker shadow comes down and tightens to close out all the light: Vincent’s winding the other stocking over Sephiroth’s eyes, carefully pulling each round taut. “And use you.”

Sephiroth whimpers as his head is briefly pushed forward, then whimpers again as, blindfold now tied, Vincent lets him slump. Only for a second, as then the vibrator finally buzzes to life. A wonderful torture, both intensely centered against his most sensitive spot and also somehow diffusing the sensitivity throughout his entire body, so at same time he’s shaking uncontrollably, his muscles feel utterly unstrung and uncommanded.

He's pure sensation for a few seconds, overwhelmed and yet craving the oblivion of will, as Vincent had said. It’s a transition, the plunge under, and then he learns again, as he always does, the way to suspend himself in it and simply let how Vincent’s bound him hold.

Semi-awareness comes back. Footsteps away, and then the sound of a door—opening. It was closed before, Sephiroth vaguely remembers. Open now, but he can’t quite remember why that matters. Only that it does, that he was told it does and that he does what he’s told. So he keeps that in his mind, keeps the image of openness as his body hums through with pleasure. Opened up, kept that way, all he has to do is—

A finger lifts his cock, a voice tells him what to do. He comes, his gag soaking up his cry, and then shivers back into helpless arousal as the vibrator keeps that alive. Then a mouth comes down over his cock, nursing it through an aching revival and into another, far rougher orgasm.

He’s here to be used. He accepts that, mewling only a little as the mouth lifts but the vibrator carries on. His weak limbs held by their straps as his cock eventually rises again, wrung out but unable to ignore all of the demands made on his senses. The clamps bite at his nipples, sweat stings again and again at the raw places on his thighs and neck. He smells himself, the sex-smell of layers of come mixing with the deepening musk of damp leather, and he sucks his gag till the salt-taste stops coming and he’s left with only the sopping silk.

The mouth again, on his cock. Sephiroth groans low in his throat and a finger strokes along his perineum, pushing the vibrator around in him till he’s half-melted, his muscles no longer able to even twitch. He’s dry, he wants to beg, dry, dry even as his gag squeezes wetly between his lips, and still he comes.

Vincent turns off the vibrator, and a quietness as sudden as it is beautifully dense descends. Sephiroth feels the air slowly filter back into his starving lungs, then shivers weakly as Vincent’s breath patters over his limp, desperately-sensitive prick. The other man is on his knees, resting his head against one of Sephiroth’s thigh as he idly traces a claw-tip about the bruise-marks on the other thigh.

“You didn’t think at all about what I said, did you?” Vincent asks.

“You didn’t think at all about my warning,” Sephiroth’s mother snorts. Her write-up of Genesis is lying between them, but neither of them makes a move to pick it up. The science in that report is almost academic; the real disease lies elsewhere. “I told you when we picked them up from that lab that Hollander’s work was so shoddy it could take years to understand all of the implications, and—”

“Your prediction was correct, Mother. I don’t dispute that,” Sephiroth says, keeping his temper at bay only because he wants to win this—he has to win this encounter, and he will not if he lets her bait him before he says what she needs to hear. “But until we pinpoint the cause of Genesis’ condition, we cannot rule out the possibility that a form of it could appear in other SOLDIERs. And we cannot rely solely on Heidegger for information on this.”

“I’m surprised you went to him in the first place,” Sephiroth’s mother says. He’d been gambling that her intellectual pride wouldn’t let her ignore certain aspects of this situation, and the quickness with which she switches to a new basis to question his judgment confirms he chose rightly. “You put yourself in a very bad position, my son.”

Sephiroth still has to dig his fingers into his thigh under the desk to maintain a level tone. “Not if you can tell me what the cause is before Heidegger leaves Corel. He was so certain that he didn’t bother to put a tail on me, or to ask for confirmation. But once he leaves the city I can’t control all the comms he sees, and then he’ll know Gast only relocated and I didn’t actually kill him.”

His mother’s eyes widen briefly. He doesn’t think for a moment it’s due to her being impressed; she would have held Gast’s death against him, because in the end, Gast is one of her scientists, but for the interruption in research and not for any personal attachment to Gast. But she’s seen the opportunity Sephiroth has made and she at least understands its value. “He is a fool in that case. And I thought even a brute like him would at least know to check for a body.”

“You didn’t intend for me to pander to fools,” Sephiroth says, and as strained as their relationship is, he can’t help feeling a small particle of gratification when she nods in acknowledgement. “You have a week. He didn’t give us everything he has, but is it enough for you to—”

“Hollander was a hack. I could do this without his files if I had a year, it’s only the timeframe that necessitates looking at them,” she says. Her lips purse. “And your desire to keep Rhapsodos alive. I could learn enough to preserve the SOLDIER program from an autopsy.”

Sephiroth doesn’t think. This is what keeps him still and his hand gripped to his thigh rather than to his sword-hilt, he thinks when his mind finally re-starts, that his rage in that moment was so intense it paralyzed him till reason could catch up.

“But you’ve made your choices. I’m not going to waste my time on them,” his mother says. “I’ll tell you when I have something. It’d go faster if you keep Hewley from hanging around my—”

“I’ll deal with him,” Sephiroth grates out. He forces himself out of the chair and back towards the door.

He doesn’t thank his mother. Unlike Heidegger, she already understands that their lives are linked no matter what Sephiroth can ever do, and she doesn’t belabor the point. Sometimes, in less infuriated moments, Sephiroth thinks his mother prefers not to think too deeply about that because of her own distaste for reliance on others—but it’s irrelevant. SOLDIER is her career objective, and Sephiroth is SOLDIER. She has to preserve one to preserve the other, and Sephiroth knows he can rely on that. He doesn’t need more from her, he tells himself.

“Such a natural toy,” Vincent adds, with a caressing stroke and then a soft kiss to Sephiroth’s right thigh. Then he gets up and cuts off the stockings, pulling the wadded panties out of Sephiroth’s mouth. He has a towel ready to mop over Sephiroth’s face as Sephiroth slowly adjusts to focusing on things again. Vincent’s face, arranged in an indulgent expression, as he carefully cradles Sephiroth’s chin in one hand and feeds him sips of water with the other. “I could have marched an entire battalion past that door and you wouldn’t have heard anything.”

Sephiroth licks at a drop of water clinging to his lip, and then, when he feels Vincent’s thumb under his tongue, laps at that. Vincent moves the thumb up to let him suck it in, but then pulls it away, smiling at his disappointed noise. “I heard you,” he rasps, and then half-closes his eyes as Vincent runs a finger along his cheek. “I heard you.”

Vincent gets rid of the cup of water and the towel. He cups Sephiroth’s face in both hands, looking down; his expression is still warm but there’s more consideration to it now. His lips move as if he means to say something and Sephiroth tilts his head, attentive, only for Vincent to simply move one hand to take most of his head’s weight. The other drifts down the side of Sephiroth’s throat, tracing out the bite-marks with softly fiery fingertips as Sephiroth leans further into Vincent’s cupping hand to offer himself up for the touch.

“I remember seeing Heidegger in here,” Vincent says. Quietly, tone neutral and never staying long enough on a word to give it emphasis Sephiroth can’t ignore, because Sephiroth does always hear him—but he does always know what might cut too much for pleasure, even the heady edge between that and pain he guides Sephiroth along. He continues to stroke Sephiroth’s throat, dropping his hand to half-circle it as he runs his thumb up and down the front, and it’s possessive, yes, but also it feels as if he’d know the shape of any word trying to claw out of Sephiroth before even Sephiroth does. “I never worked for him, but there was interest in working against him. Never serious enough to take it on—I had no personal objection but I also had no personal reason to risk myself without sufficient cover.”

There is in Vincent’s words perhaps a…not an apology, but an impulse to give Sephiroth knowledge he’s previously been denied, and that is something the other man views as a basic obligation of partnership. Sephiroth still finds it surprising how easily Vincent accepts that as a duty, even now that it’s come up several times. Surprising and lasting, warming him differently from how Vincent can make his body burn. The difference between a permanent beacon and a bonfire, he thinks as he sighs and lets his reason have his mouth for a moment, just long enough to settle this.

“I dealt with him,” he says. Arches a little under Vincent’s hands, Vincent stoops down near enough to tempt him with a mouth he knows he’ll welcome. “Dealt with his—his leavings, and some day I’ll be through all of them one way or the other. I know that.”

“Yes. Little residual risk now that he’s dead.” Vincent tips Sephiroth’s head further against the headrest, using his thumb under Sephiroth’s chin. His other hand drops to brush just shy of Sephiroth’s right nipple, rises momentarily as the clamp there abruptly deepens its nip, and then comes down again to firmly take the clamp in hand as Sephiroth whimpers. “I swept the room and there’s nothing. Your team didn’t miss anything, everything has been cleared. Corel isn’t going to revert.”

Sephiroth opens his mouth but whatever he was going to say whites away as Vincent rolls the nipple clamp between thumb and forefinger, with a knuckle pressing just below to further heighten the tension. His breath collapses back into his mouth and he bows up against Vincent’s hand, gasping openmouthed, letting the arc of each electric string of pain Vincent plucks from his abused flush ride through him.

“And everything is going to stay clear. You’ve taken this place for yours and I’ve had you here, like this—” Vincent flicks open the clamp and then flattens his palm against Sephiroth’s chest to hold him down against the brutal, beautiful shock of it “—like this, I’ve seen you like this and no one else will ever. I’m too selfish for that—you I keep.”

The other clamp opens and Sephiroth jerks from side to side, his body willing enough to embrace the surging, searing release but too drained at this point to hold it in. Then flops limp in his bonds, his gasps feeling almost like—like playacting, for how much air seems to actually make it into him. He doesn’t seem to be in his body so much as floating in a lazy spiral overhead, floating and looking on as Vincent finally kisses his slack mouth.

Even with such a view he misses things. It’s as if there is an occasional fog between him and the other man—but he always knows Vincent’s there, and so no sense of alarm spurs him to clear it away. He only waits quietly, and then he’ll see: Vincent folding his freed arm against his belly, Vincent cradling his head against the man’s side as a stubborn cramp is rubbed out of the small of his back, Vincent gathering him like a ragdoll as he’s laid on something spread over the desk.

“Your coat,” Vincent tells him, and then makes one of those throat-deep amused noises at his reaction. “Still a toy, but this is a general’s office now.”

“The coat’s yours, you take it,” Sephiroth mumbles, then sighs and pushes into the touches as Vincent arranges him on his side. “You like—doing this to them.”

“It’ll keep you quiet,” Vincent promises. He cages Sephiroth’s wrists together in one hand while he runs the other along Sephiroth’s side. Smoothing the silk from where its soaked wrinkles stick to Sephiroth’s skin, then coming back up to help loop something about Sephiroth’s wrists. Thin and slippery-cool, not tape or leather but—a ribbon. A black silk ribbon, but Sephiroth is so devoid of resistance that he feels it tighten as securely as chains, feels it and lets it guide him to an aching groan. “Quiet now, and I’ll take you back. You asked for this and I’ll give it to you.”

“You asked me to find an alternative to relying on Heidegger and I provided it,” his mother tells Sephiroth coldly the second time Genesis has an episode. Strands of her hair flick up from the backwash of him slamming his hand down on the counter between them, but she doesn’t blink. “I found one.”

“You found a way to switch the leash,” Sephiroth snaps.

“Leash? As if I traffic in dogs,” his mother scoffs. She steps back, but not because she’s afraid of him. “The science that went into him and Hewley was faulty to begin with. I can only repair what I’m given, I can’t recreate them from the beginning. Unless—”

Sephiroth feels his breath hiss through his teeth, and is surprised when no warm blood runs down after from slivered lips with how sharp it feels. “You have what you need from us to duplicate it in others. If you can’t do it short of cloning, that’s no fault of ours. And letting you clone anyway won’t—”

“Won’t what, my son? Satisfy your irrational rage?” she asks with a disappointed sigh. “I’m telling you the truth, not lying to you. Rhapsodos’ defects can’t be healed, they can only be managed. And if you’re going to settle for that, you need to manage yourself and see this isn’t my preferred solution either but this is what can be done.”

She is correct. She always is correct, even though every time Sephiroth has to admit it, he feels as if he is being bent over so a razor can flay off another layer. That’s her power, to be correct no matter what he can do, and so to be unrefutable.

“You’re far too attached to protecting frivolities,” his mother adds. “But if this is what you want to waste your life on, this is how you’ll have to do it. And don’t think Gast will tell you any differently, or that you can throw some professional jealousy in my face—he’s good enough I don’t see the value in sacrificing him to Heidegger either but not that good.”

“I would never, Mother,” Sephiroth says, and then pauses to gather himself. Stripped and unarmed by her, but he’ll be damned if he lets that break him, any more than she would ever let him school her on her work. She is his mother, she has shaped him for better or worse, in a way Hojo never did. “I would never put another in your place.”

Because if she were ever to vanish from his life, he would do everything in his power to keep anyone else from taking her role. She knows that from the shrewd look she gives him—but it’s dismissive too, because she herself believes no one else would adequately measure up, and so there is no rival anyway. Sephiroth should take that step to avoid succumbing to mediocrity, is how she thinks.

“Heidegger’s still squatting on something,” she says after another moment. “We don’t need whatever he kept from Hollander now, but he can still use it to push out more defects like Rhapsodos. Shouldn’t you deal with that?”

“I am, Mother. No need for you to involve yourself,” Sephiroth snaps, unable to ignore the sting in her words. Then he turns to go before she draws any more blood.

It won’t only be her who he will ensure is never replaced, he swears to himself. He’ll need time, but he will see to it that everyone who thinks they can leash him regrets it.

“Please,” Sephiroth says as Vincent pulls the coat around him. “Please…”

Vincent ignores his thready pleas in favor of neatening him up. A tidy bundle, tied with ribbons at the wrists and thighs and ankles—tied at the cock as well, the ends of the ribbon flirting with the tender bites along his inner thighs as he squirms sluggishly. Then wrapped over with leather, and secured with his own uniform belts over the coat. He lets out a breathy whimper as his upper body is lifted off the desk and leaned against Vincent, something inside the coat rasping over his very sore nipples. Then again as Vincent loops an arm about his waist and deliberately tugs the imprisoning belts to rub nearer his nipples.

“My needy little toy,” Vincent says, kissing the curve of Sephiroth’s neck. Then behind the ear as Sephiroth twists in the coat to feel how the leather resists it, enclosing the aches in his body. “More?”

“A collar—you’re taking me back,” Sephiroth murmurs. He lets his head tip forward as Vincent nuzzles him. “You’re going to keep me out of the office for the rest of the weekend. I can wear it, I want to.”

“You could wear it here, with how empty it is,” Vincent snorts. As he draws Sephiroth’s hair back with one hand, then twists what’s left of the braid about Sephiroth’s neck. Not snugly enough, pushing his fingers between it and Sephiroth’s skin when Sephiroth tries to jerk it closer. “Wait till we’re at our rooms. I have one there.”

“Not here?” Sephiroth moans.

Vincent snorts again at Sephiroth’s patent disappointment. “I don’t carry them all the time,” he says, but then he pulls out something from his pocket: a second set of stockings. “Quiet. I’m going to keep you quiet.”

He gags and blindfolds Sephiroth with them, and it’s enough to sink Sephiroth back into docility, too surfeited on the ever-changing wash of aching warmth in the dark to mind as Vincent hikes him over one shoulder.

They go back to their guest quarters in Corel. Sephiroth doesn’t see how Vincent travels between the newly-renovated offices and there, and doesn’t care. He’s merely a package to be transported and then deposited to the side, waiting patiently as Vincent moves around the place and the smell of food soon fills the air.

Vincent unwraps him and then cleans him off in the bathroom. Then takes him back out and sets him on his knees in the kitchenette to be fed. Finally graced with a collar, a flimsy thing of elaborately knotted and woven silk cords, but the hard grip of the cock cage Vincent also puts on him holds him just close enough that he feels as if he can moan without his worn, used parts falling apart.

He spends the weekend serving the other man. Naked but for toys like the cock cage and collar, and if he isn’t on Vincent’s cock, he’s begging for it. They could be anywhere for all Sephiroth cares, anywhere Vincent’s been able to put enough in place that Sephiroth doesn’t have to think about anything but how much he wants something and when Vincent will let him have it.

“But it is Corel,” Vincent says when they’re in bed. Him sitting up against the wall, Sephiroth curled to his side and absently lipping his throat as he periodically dips a finger into the jar of ointment on his lap and then rubs it into the still-healing welts striping Sephiroth’s buttocks. When Sephiroth hitches and gasps into his neck, he lifts his chin to accommodate it and then curves his hand firmly to one buttock, pressing the light sparking twinges into a deeper susurration of pleasure. “They have long memories here in the mountains. I don’t think they’ll try to remind you of Heidegger’s regime, but it’ll be in their minds.”

“Then they’ll see exactly what steps I am taking differently,” Sephiroth says. He lays his head back against Vincent’s shoulder, closing his eyes as Vincent slips a finger between his buttocks and teases the rim of his hole. “I’ll see that whenever I walk into the office here.”

Angeal had asked why Sephiroth wouldn’t just take a new office, and when Sephiroth had looked at him, had made a few awkward feints towards discussing the past before backing down to a furrowed brow and concerned glances. His guilt so far hasn’t seriously hampered his effectiveness but Genesis, Sephiroth has to admit, is right to point out that it has to be addressed at some point.

Genesis himself had barked a sharp, humorless laugh upon seeing the new office floor plan. Then he’d told Sephiroth—not asked, but told—that reinforcing SOLDIER’s authority was all well and good, but if Sephiroth thought for a moment that he was ever intimidated by Heidegger, he’d be happy to prove otherwise in the sparring room. Which was never the point, but then, Genesis has never known the full details of how they’d brought him out of his first episode. The man thinks he does, and thinks he is right to resent Sephiroth for holding the secret of that over him—as he sees it—which only confirms that Sephiroth had to be the one to deal with Heidegger.

But he’d frowned when Sephiroth had merely replied that he planned a full gutting of the building and complete turnover of its staff. Frowned and then, uncharacteristically, had inquired whether the money was better spent elsewhere. New furniture and new faces have no weight with ghosts, if that’s what your intent is, he’d said.

“I see no ghosts here,” Sephiroth says when Vincent’s lips brush his temple, which is the same way he’d replied to Genesis. “No ghosts…only what I’m going to make of this now that we’ve cleared away the trash. And what you’ve made me see here. Which I asked for, I remember.”

Of course he hadn’t said that second part to Genesis. It provokes a chuckle to Vincent, but there’s still a thoughtfulness to the sound that makes Sephiroth open his eyes and look up at the other man. “Tomorrow you’ll walk in there a general, in undisputed command,” Vincent says.

He circles Sephiroth’s hole with his fingertip, then presses across, not into, when Sephiroth cants his hips. Sephiroth noses into his shoulder, making wanton begging noises, unbound hands lying neatly in Vincent’s lap against the man’s rising erection because he’d rather beg here than reach. He knows he’ll be given what he needs one way or the other.

“You can’t have marks like this,” Vincent chides. Catching at one with his teeth, just a light score across Sephiroth’s throat just over the collar, and then he leans back again. He pushes Sephiroth’s hands under the blanket, then scoops up a little salve to smooth across Sephiroth’s neck as Sephiroth obligingly starts to pet his cock. “You need to look like a general. I already know how you look as a pretty slave. And you want to be one tomorrow.”

“A general?” Sephiroth says, the word dragging a little on its way out.

Another laugh from Vincent, and then he reaches around and cups up Sephiroth’s chin for a kiss. “You want to be one, and I want to watch you. I want to see how you take them all in the same room I had you in.”

Sephiroth’s breath catches for a moment. He’s never found it appealing when others try to exercise power through him, even when they couch it in similar terms of appreciation—but Vincent doesn’t want that kind of power. Vincent genuinely wants only to see him wield his own authority, and the appreciation comes from how the other man recognizes the skill and effort he puts into it—and so he’s willing to put it aside with Vincent as he is with no one else.

But he does want to take it up again outside of these moments together. And he does take it up the next day. Dressed as the commander he is, the eyes of his officers reflecting back to him the image of a polished leader, no flaws to distract and make them question. He holds his first officer’s meeting in Heidegger’s old Corel office and tells them all that from this point forward, this city is going to be SOLDIER’s. “We’re here to maintain order and protect the civilian population. That is not our excuse—that is our mission,” he says. “And that should be what anyone local understands when they walk through our doors.”

A few of the officers have been with Shinra long enough to know what Corel was like under Heidegger, and although none contradict him, he can detect the faint skepticism in their eyes. They will try, because these are his orders, but they don’t believe the local population will respond.

He dismisses them anyway to go about their duties. Only time will bear out whether he’s right or wrong, but this much he already knows: when the door swings shut behind the last of them, and he’s alone in his new regional office, he can look around himself and all he sees is what his will and his decisions and his acts have brought to fruition.

A soft buzzing makes him look down at his phone. A message from Vincent, no words and only a photo, an outside view of his office window with the faintest silhouette behind the glass. He turns before he thinks, and then snorts as he looks out, remembering now that the office sits much higher than its surrounding buildings, so high that Vincent couldn’t have possibly shot that from a neighboring building. So close as well…Sephiroth looks back at his phone, finding himself smiling as the photo vanishes on its own. He has no idea how Vincent did that, but he’s content enough with the point behind it—he’s content enough that he doesn’t feel in the slightest way alarmed. No one else is going to be able to position themselves like the other man, and even if Sephiroth has his own resources, he appreciates the reassurance.

The next time he comes to Corel, he won’t be on his own.

Chapter 52: Side-Story: Lazard Catches Up on the Bills

A lot of people tell Lazard they would never want his job. He has mixed feelings about why most of them seem to feel so comfortable about telling him that, but otherwise he just chalks that up to their shortsightedness. He’s the first to say it’s not just the old President throwing his bastard a pension—that man never handed Lazard a single thing without getting paid for it or strongarmed into it—but it’s also not just about shoveling all the shit Rufus doesn’t want to. He’s been the Director of SOLDIER Operations since shortly after Sephiroth’s promotion to its commander-in-chief, and he’s very proud of being one of the few executives in the company with consistently positive reviews from the General. Not to mention he’s still alive, healthy, and potentially able to retire on that pension some day.

But he will admit that reconciling First expense reports is a terrible job.

“All right, all of these are overruns but they do fit into standard categories. So we’ll just handle through the usual process because if General Sephiroth says he needed twice as many coats this quarter, I’m deferring to his judgment,” he says to Angeal and Zack. He gives them a moment to review the list, then clicks into the next tab. “However, these are the custom categories.”

“Well, look, you know we always do the best we can to work with Procurement, but the whole point of us is we go where nobody has seen that shit before, and we deal with it. So we need a lot of unique stuff when we’re dealing with it,” Zack says, pulling one of his famed pleading faces. “I can personally guarantee that I went through the categories myself before any of these got filed—”

Lazard sighs. “Yes, of course you did, Commander. But let’s start with the fact that you’ve submitted fifteen new custom categories. That’s a twenty percent increase over last quarter, and last quarter already raised a number of eyebrows.”

“Because we were fucking cleaning up after R&D all the time,” Angeal grumbles. “How fucking hard it is for them to get approvals, I want to know. Seriously, what do you even put ‘replaced lab because forgot to lock assistant out after firing them so they couldn’t mutate themselves’ under?”

“Okay, okay,” Zack breaks in, glancing worriedly at the other man before gesturing placatingly at Lazard. “I know it’s a lot, but really, they break down into just a couple buckets. One’s weather-related and honestly, Laz, Finance just needs to get with it and make those permanent because flood-related damage and wind-related damage are totally different even if it’s the same storm, and I’m not gonna tell Seph we have to special-justify something just because it happened ten feet above the highwater line.”

“No, I agree, but that’s the low-hanging fruit, Commander,” Lazard has to point out. He moves down the rows in the current tab of his spreadsheet. “These items around specialty recon, on the other hand…first, are you sure they’re supposed to be allocated to SOLDIER and not the Turks—”

Zack and Angeal both nod firmly. Then Angeal knocks his elbow into Zack as the other man starts to wind up for what was probably going to be a masterpiece of non-explanation, taking this one himself. “There’ve been a lot of nonstandard missions, sir, you know that. And we do coordinate with the Turks, but if it’s an active fight zone, they’re not even supposed to be in it and we’re on our own. So we needed our own recon.”

“Technically you’re not on your own, but I understand,” Lazard sighs. He hadn’t expected much else, to be honest, but if he’s going to have to fight this fight, he wanted at least one First to tell him so out loud. “All right, field necessity can cover a multitude of…let’s not say sin, but unanticipated deviations from plans. The board might have questions but I think Rufus will get comfortable with it. But that still leaves the catering.”

“Team-building,” Zack supplies. “Impromptu. We gotta reload on the calories after a big mission and the General likes to make sure everybody who lent a hand is included, and so maybe that sometimes includes non-SOLDIER personnel, but hey, it builds inter-team bonds too.”

“That’s a beautiful justification, Commander, but it’s still enough tea-cakes to feed an entire battalion. And as far as I can tell, it also isn’t connected to charity,” Lazard points out. Then he raises his hand before Zack can try again. “Are you positive we can’t push this to a different department?”

“I…mean…did you have someone on your shit list to dump it on?” Zack says, looking a little uncertain for once. “Not that I’m saying another department should get it, but maybe they were, uh, not as good about the debrief schedules and that had knock-on effects and you don’t want anybody to starve, especially if they—”

Angeal doesn’t even blink. “Zack, stop. Lazard, listen, Tseng’s not gonna take this because he took Seph on that copter ride to get Vincent a couple quarters ago and didn’t chargeback. Okay? I know it’s gonna look weird, but just tell them we were testing new field rations and Seph is participating himself. Are they actually going to tell him he can’t eat a fucking tea-cake after missions?”

Which is, Lazard thinks, probably the most reasonable question he’s going to get on this entire batch of expenses. But at the end of the day, his job as Director is to ensure the smooth operation of his department. And part of that is unfortunately dealing with things like this so Sephiroth takes his warpath elsewhere, because damn it, he wants to be around to spend that pension. He’s earning every cent of it and then some.

“Just try and come up with a birthday party next time, would you?” Lazard sighs. “That actually is an approved existing category and then it’s just an overrun.”

“Oh, seriously?” Zack says, his eyes lighting. “Okay, noted, we will have all the birthdays next quarter. Thanks, Laz, I know this part sucks but believe me, you’ll have my gratitude and SOLDIER’s gratitude and Seph’s gonna appreciate the hell out of this, too.”

“You’re welcome, Commander,” Lazard says, and then braces himself for the next item on the agenda. “Now, moving from expenses to vendors…”

Notes:

I have this recurring tendency to succumb to the comedic potential of large bureaucracies. But to be totally clear, Sephiroth's not the one eating those tea-cakes.

Chapter 53: Interlude: Sephiroth Gets What He Asked For

“Show me my place,” Sephiroth mouths against Vincent’s neck, leaning against the other man as long, firm fingers froth up the soap streaming between his legs. He spreads his knees and digs his hands into Vincent’s shoulders as he starts to peak. “Make me learn it.”

“I don’t need to teach you that,” Vincent says. More of an indulgent tease than a provocative one, as he bears up under Sephiroth’s grip and strokes harder, faster over Sephiroth’s cock. “At this point it’s spoiling you to go over it again.”

Sephiroth moans, only half-hearing. The patter of the shower spray against their bodies washes away Vincent’s words, washes away anything but the movement of Vincent’s fingers between his legs, until it all blends together into a loose haze, as if his body has dissolved away as well and he only exists in the clouds of steam around them.

The feeling persists even as he kneels for the other man, flecks of water still coursing down his body as Vincent puts his palms up against the wall. The flip of his wet hair over one shoulder stings lightly over his torso, the very end of it swinging under his cock to lap at his scrotum. It makes him gasp absently, his mind still unfocused. He doesn’t need to here, with Vincent—it is spoiling him, to let him be so inattentive to even basic situational awareness as to what is up versus down. But he’s not corrected.

It's not correction, when Vincent takes a whip to his buttocks. He groans and drags his hands down the wall a few inches, canting his hips out into the burning that methodically ladders down his flesh. The ends of each welt tell him where he stops, so he doesn’t have to look up, and only falls deeper into the haze.

Drifting, mind utterly free of rational thought, only feeling. Being turned around and having his arms lifted. Pressing the backs of his fingers against the cooling tile as the whip sears across his pectorals, tracing out the boundaries of each shaking breath for him. He closes his eyes, he’s that clear about the outlines Vincent makes for him with each blow, and he doesn’t open them again till they’re out of the shower and in front of the sink.

Vincent tells him to, so he watches the pretty, helpless figure in the mirror, not as if it’s a dream but as if he’s a dream who’s forgotten the way to reality. The lovely rosette nipples rising and falling, a little quicker each time, as the blushing cock lower down is forced into unforgiving black leather. Strapped up against the belly, swelling out between tight bands as another band worms between sore buttocks and seals in a thick rubber cock. Then shimmering white-silver stockings up each leg, clipped to a thin black belt that seems to elongate his waist, make it delicate and easily-held by one hand as Vincent drops a slip over his head.

Pretty toy, clutching the edge of the counter as if it’s crumbling away, panting with the wet, shocking-red inside of his mouth trying to round even wider as he’s collared in black. Vincent tugs the front of the collar and his hands rise, releasing their desperate grip as lightly as a mist-illusion swept away by the wind. Then come back down again, gloved in black, folding the undivided diamond-shaped ends against the counter as a string of pearls drapes over his right shoulder.

Such a pretty thing, only here for decoration. Barely even present to suck his breath and tremble against the imprisoned twitch of his cock every time the pearls rub against his silk trappings. Little, little weights, but still enough to tug and twist when they’re slung from the front of the collar to a pressure ring on each nipple. Double—no, triple-stranded, their creamy sheen seeming to turn a sensuous blush just as Vincent slips a blindfold on him, as if they’re imbibing the warm heat they draw into Sephiroth’s nipples.

Vincent’s mouth presses, slow and languorous, to the top of each of Sephiroth’s shoulders as he stands behind, his hands lazily stroking over the pretty, pretty toy he’s made. Cupping over the pectorals as their still-fresh welts blossom anew with electric ache, smoothing silk against belly muscles so sensitive Sephiroth can pick out the individual stitches of the slip’s embroidery, finishing with a careless, possessive grip of the inner thighs just under the slip.

He lets Sephiroth moan in the dark, wanting, mitted hands flexing uselessly, and then pulls them away. Leading Sephiroth into the next room and then pushing him onto the bed. The sheets rumple up under the gloves, feeling strangely prominent through the leather; finding the edge of a pillow is like kneading stiff dough. And then Sephiroth is jerked off his hands and knees, pearls swinging wildly.

Falling onto his side, his exclamation of surprise stuttered short by the way the pearls twist and sway against his torso. He loses too much breath to push himself up and ends up subsiding into the mattress, the cooling impress of Vincent’s grip still palpable around his ankle. Silk slinks over his skin even when he’s still, and then, when he squirms, the way it transmits his shudder all over his body, as if a thousand fingers are feathering over him. It makes him drop onto his belly and press shamelessly into the bed to feel the strings of pearl pull his nipples sore.

They darken from rose-pink to the red of a cut fruit inviting a bite. He’s blindfolded but he can see that anyway—he doesn’t think about the logic of it because dreams don’t operate according to logic. They only exist, breathless and whimpering, until something else disturbs them.

A sudden grip at his shoulders, a yank and a twist and an upset so fluid that Sephiroth can’t resist it, as he’s captured. Can only hitch futilely, a strong grip around his wrists to pull his arms straight against him, a hand over his mouth to stifle his shocked whine. “Shhhh,” traces down the side of his throat, warm wet tongue paired with the sharp menace of fangs along the vulnerable artery. “Shhhhh…”

Sephiroth shivers, pliant and silent, as a strap is wound tightly around his forearms to buckle them together. Another is looped about his upper arms and chest, just above the elbows, and then he’s gagged with a piece of silk. He sucks at it, whimpering, as his captor is now free to fondle and stroke his legs before binding them too, unyielding straps around the thighs and ankles. And then leather is skinned down over his head—he’s hooded, his ears unplugged but the hood itself is thick enough to deaden most sounds, locking him firmly away from his senses.

But dreaming hazes require very little in that way. The slow, needy throb of his body in its bonds, the occasional twist of the pearls’ weight at his nipples, this is all he needs to distract him. So he’s lax about responding, unresisting as something’s wrapped around him and then used to roll him into someone’s hold. Lifted and carried off, like a jewel slipped into a thief’s pocket.

When he’s put down a little later, the thing around him doesn’t pad against the hardness of the floor underneath. No carpeting, no comfortable bed for the toy. Only a heavy, clanking chain fastened to his ankles, and then rough jerking at the pearls tangled over his chest.

Sephiroth squirms and the covering around him flops away, exposing him to more severe treatment. He’s pushed down, a hand shoved between his thighs and under his slip to rub tormentingly over his bound cock, while the other plucks and hooks the strings of pearls till he’s trying to arch his back off the floor. Then one pressure ring comes off and he drops, gasping under the hood, into the sodden gag with earthy leather backing it, at the sheer flash of pain slamming through him.

The hands don’t soothe the abused nipple. They leave it to burn in the chilly air as they unfasten the other end of the pearls, leaving the right nipple still locked in its ring, and then turn him over onto his side. Leather peels out from between his buttocks, a thin, white-hot line searing down where the strap had bitten, and then the plug is ungently removed.

He’s fucked into, and then fucked, unceremoniously and with the torture of a hand cupped over his cock, letting him share the pressure without any hope of relief. Then empty again, shivering with helpless, thwarted arousal, as footsteps circle behind him and then slowly fade away. His hole leaking, the edge of his slip sticking high up on the right buttock, and neither the cool air nor the come dribbling out of him enough to lessen how it’s burning.

But it still feels like a dream. It’s a dream’s body that suffers, the intensity too much to be anything but unreal. So when Vincent loosens the hood, the touch of air to Sephiroth’s sweat-soaked face is too much—too heavy, too close to real, too much.

“Shhh,” Vincent murmurs again, hand immediately dropping to push his fingers over Sephiroth’s gag. He leaves the hood still clamped about Sephiroth’s cheeks as he uses his other hand to stroke along Sephiroth’s arm, waiting till Sephiroth stops twisting. “I haven’t finished yet.”

Sephiroth mostly hears the tone, not the words, the minute but concrete trace of hunger. He whines and tries to suck at Vincent’s fingertips at the same time; Vincent slices through the side of the gag and pulls it out before he can choke himself, chuckling the entire time. Then moves his other hand up to tease at Sephiroth’s collar as he resumes stripping the hood off.

“Want to sleep,” Sephiroth rasps, and then lets Vincent mop his face with a towel. He resents the stab of light after Vincent takes off the blindfold; it’s dim in the practice room but not entirely dark. “When I can still feel—”

“You’re going to. I’m not taking you to bed like this—like I haven’t bothered to clean up after myself,” Vincent says, half-scolding, half-amused. He puts a glass of water to Sephiroth’s lips, and when Sephiroth exhales a little before sipping, he tightens his hand just a fraction about Sephiroth’s neck. Just enough to remind Sephiroth where he is, where and what and why. “You’ll be quiet, and tidy, and as pretty as I want you when I put you down.”

His place. Yes, Sephiroth wants to—not say, but to feel, to have it carved so that it shows on every inch of himself. And this is not a dream, not at all, but real, and he has it and he would always, always take this over the passing fancy of dreams.

Unbound and exhausted, limping back across the hall to their living quarters with his arm over Vincent’s shoulders. Then kneeling naked in the shower again so Vincent can wipe him down and rinse the crusts of dried sweat out of his hair. The water is lukewarm to ease the aches, and it works so well that when Vincent steps out of the shower and comes back with a steaming-hot towel, Sephiroth only blinks in complacent surprise.

The slap of it against his chest makes him jerk up off his knees. Vincent’s lips twitch, but he doesn’t reprimand Sephiroth as Sephiroth grabs for the other man’s hips, gasping and shuddering while the towel’s heat slowly retracts from white-hot blanketing to deeper, redder searing across stripes of his chest. Bringing the welts there back to life, despite his enhanced healing, letting him feel the way they frame his body for him. Sephiroth drags in another breath, then drops his head against Vincent’s thigh and loosens his hold on Vincent, letting his hands uncurl so that they’re splayed out over Vincent’s hips.

He keeps them that way as Vincent drops another hot towel over his buttocks, mewling a little as his knees rock against the floor. “My cock in your mouth,” Vincent directs, and Sephiroth obligingly takes that in. “Now come.”

Sephiroth curls his nails into Vincent’s hips for that, leaving red marks down them he tries to lick away once Vincent’s finished in his mouth. Vincent pushes his head to the side, but then lets him nuzzle while Vincent leans over and combs out his hair.

“Now it’s neat,” Vincent murmurs, letting a plait drop to Sephiroth’s back. He dresses Sephiroth in another slip, a green one tied over with black silk cords that press teasingly over the welts and knot about Sephiroth’s aching nipples, and then leads Sephiroth to the bedroom.

Sits him on the other man’s cock, his own tied to his belly with more silk cord, and Vincent’s fingers idly rubbing across his scrotum as he leans back against the other man, drops his head over Vincent’s shoulder. His throat offered if Vincent wants it, collared in green lace to match the slip, while his arms, strapped together across his front, hang in their leather sleeves.

“You’re going to take it off when I fall asleep,” Sephiroth sighs as Vincent fingers up to the cord about his cock.

“You’re too spoiled to know when you should stop,” Vincent says, his warm breath spilling down to caress the right side of Sephiroth’s breast. He shifts as Sephiroth tilts his head towards the other man, letting Sephiroth graze at his jaw while his thumb traces sluggish lines of need over Sephiroth’s prick. “Go to sleep. You don’t need this to know where you are—you know who has you.”

Sephiroth nods once, his head drooping as fatigue catches up with him. Then closes his eyes with one last, satisfied sigh—Vincent’s right, it won’t lead to oblivion. When he wakes, all he’s going to dream of is this.

Chapter 54: Side-Story: Lucrecia’s World

Shinra’s board isn’t quite as myopic as it used to be and Lucrecia does assign some credit for that to the presence of directors who are neither related to Rufus by blood nor compensated solely via his payroll. But the external directors were added because of the need for stabilizing funds in the wake of the last President’s sudden and scandalous death, and so their ultimate measuring stick still is whether or not something results in a positive return on their investment in Shinra. They’re simply more likely to actually evaluate the data in front of them rather than whether the data’s presenter has sufficiently groveled at their feet.

This does not stop them from complimenting Gast on his rare insight into the marketability of the new ancient Cetra steles he’s discovered, especially in timing the discovery to come just after Shinra has announced a controversial decision to relocate a nearby facility. “I can’t take credit for that, it was a complete coincidence,” Gast stammers, flushing and blinking as he fidgets with his tablet. “We actually were considering delaying the press release since the studies are still very preliminary, and we don’t know how large the site actually is—”

“Well, I’m glad you talked Dr. Crescent around on that point,” one director says, with a smile he likely thinks is indulgent but which only highlights his fatuous ignorance; a few minutes’ conversation with Gast should make it obvious who enlightened who about the political reality of ancient studies with little likelihood of leading to new inventions. “I always appreciate your dedication to the objective facts, Dr. Crescent, but the labor activists are getting louder about the job losses. Aren’t they, Rufus? Even if the site ends up being too small for it, getting the preservationists to counterprotest would help.”

Gast sends Lucrecia a sorry little glance. It’s heartfelt, but also, frankly, useless. “Actually, Dr. Crescent was the one who thought it could be help—”

“We’ll have to be careful. If you give any kind of activist a nod, they’re usually happy to take it as a perpetual veto right. But yes, we have some efforts in motion to rush out a potential archaeological heritage designation,” Rufus says smoothly, turning away from Gast and Lucrecia. He gestures to one of the interchangeable assistants standing against the wall and shiny brochures of a new field exhibit citing a local history museum’s name are distributed. “We’re still investigating but it looks like this specific site won’t have any commercial value, so that seems fairly safe.”

“You said we hadn’t fully traced that ore vein,” chimes in another director, as he absently runs his fingertips over the brochure. He looks from Rufus to Gast. “But you mean we at least checked for that before we’re going out saying this dig site won’t make us any money? It’s a cute story, I agree, but I also think there’s a risk in giving the history nerds a reason to ask us whether we checked our other sites for fossils too.”

Gast blinks hard, then catches himself mid-headshake to look urgently at Lucrecia. “My site doesn’t—but I can’t speak for the whole of R&D—”

“There’s nothing significant at the main relocation site or the fallback,” Lucrecia says. “I’ve personally verified the field team reports.”

Both the directors who’d spoken look at her as if they’d partly forgotten her presence. Neither of them seems skeptical about what she says, but it’s still as if they’d expected Gast to weigh in when his introduction included his job title and he’s clearly not assigned to the side of R&D supporting commercialization of mineral rights.

“Good to know, but how far off are we from having the full survey? Is there a chance of the vein cropping up somewhere the protestors are going to make a fuss?” the second director asks, now directly gazing at her. “What about residential? The labor activists want jobs and they also want everybody working for us to be bubble-wrapped safe from harm when they’re miners. R&D check that too, Dr. Crescent? I hope the Cetra rocks haven’t blinded you to what keeps the lights on around here.”

Gold glints at the far end of the table: Scarlet taking the opportunity to shift herself in her chair and let a sunbeam stray across her cleavage as she nods in agreement. She knows she doesn’t have the expertise or the spies in R&D to ever outright challenge Lucrecia at a board meeting, but that doesn’t mean she won’t do her best to remind them whose side the other woman in the room is on.

“We’re fully endorsing the current relocation plan, and I expect no major issues to arise,” Lucrecia says, because Scarlet’s endorsement has exactly as much substance as that sunbeam to her. “I put my name on that, as you can see.”

Rufus looks at her with a slightly-tightened expression. She thinks he personally is unmoved by Scarlet’s physical charms, but he warned her repeatedly in prep to calibrate her comments and not put the board off with any attitude. The director worried about the history nerds is in confidential negotiations to sell back part of his stake in Shinra, which Rufus wants, but not leaked to the public when their press coverage is still negative. Lucrecia understands that, as she told him, and if the directors can’t see the gift horse she’s bringing them to turn the PR around, she can’t see what that has to do with her making them feel smallminded.

But little to do with power structures is rooted in logic, and so she forces herself to provide a small, thin smile. She’s still good-looking, she’s been told by everyone who wants to ‘manage’ her presentation over her actual merits, and she needs the board to sign off on the budget increase for R&D.

“I still wonder if it’d be a good idea to have SOLDIER out,” says the other director, leaning back in his seat. He looks at Rufus. “Not to give those protestors a reason to get the brutality photo op they want, but just to stick a couple shovels in the ground and make it clear to everybody we took the environmental studies seriously.”

“That’s not part of SOLDIER’s remit,” Lucrecia says sharply. “R&D—”

“I take your point, but we’ve already told them we did the studies and I think it looks bad if we look like we’re second-guessing ourselves,” Rufus says, with the briefest warning glance towards Lucrecia. Then he’s bringing his charm to bear on the director; she knows he knows how furious she is but he’s perfectly comfortable leaving her to seethe in it as he does damage control. Which is what this is, not shielding her. “That said, SOLDIER also signed off on the relocation plan, so I think we can speak to General Sephiroth about making an appearance at the official site dedication. Not bad to make SOLDIER look like protectors of our heritage, now that you mention it. And I’m sure you wouldn’t mind the extra security, Dr. Crescent.”

“Might be nice to get the mother-and-son shot too, show people Shinra has families working for them and not just goons,” the director says, nodding along. Then he laughs and moves his hand arrogantly towards Lucrecia. “Remind them how great it is that your son’s saving them from the monsters of the world—raising him was still your best work for Shinra, after all.”

Rufus stares at Lucrecia from behind the director’s shoulder. She presses her lips together and says nothing, because she’s no fool. She says nothing, and she waits for her budget to come up and be approved, and then she and Gast walk out of that boardroom with what she wanted to get out of it.

As for the things she walked out with that she didn’t want, she’s never looked to Rufus or anyone else in Shinra to deal with those. Not since that first time she had to look on from the back of the room, forced to be silent as some other scientist put her key data, uncredited, into his presentation. She only had to learn that lesson once.

“He’s a sitting director,” Vincent points out when she sits down with him. “Rufus won’t sign off on it, and Rufus pays Tseng to pay me.”

“You only take that money for as long as you have an agreement with them, and your agreement isn’t actually a financial one. I know that, Vincent, so don’t pretend otherwise,” Lucrecia snaps. And then she makes herself calm down, because she also knows it won’t sway the man. “I’m not asking for it to happen now. When there’s no conflict on your side will work as well. I can wait for this—like I waited for the first name I gave you.”

Vincent never looks at her as if he’s looking through her to the men in her space, but he also never looks at her as if he’s considering giving her a free open hand. Even in those few, long-ago physical encounters they’d had, it’s always been more as if…he was assessing her wounds and her remaining capabilities, not as if he meant to heal them, with no contempt but no real sympathy either. She prefers that as a basis for interaction, personally, but it makes her wonder what her son with his ineradicable emotional dependencies sees in him.

“It might be that long,” Vincent finally says. He doesn’t blink. “I have no reason to speed up Rufus’ timeline with regards to that one’s usefulness.”

Lucrecia shrugs. “I can wait, as I said.”

“All right,” Vincent says after another moment’s consideration. He’ll keep his word, because that’s one of his very few principles, not because of some immature and potentially fragile personal attachment, and she’d rather have that than his sympathy. “Are you holding the files till then?”

“You can have them now. You’re not going to make heads or tails of them before his stake’s low enough, unless we find an ore vein three times as rich for Rufus to buy him out early,” Lucrecia says with another shrug. She does study Vincent as he nods, even though there’s no perturbation in his expression. “If this is for my son, he already knows how terrible Hollander’s work was, and you’re not the scientist your father was. So don’t blame me if he’s not satisfied with them.”

Vincent smiles without showing his teeth. “I understand I only asked for the files, not for a guarantee about their value. I’ll come next week for them.”

He doesn’t want to talk about a lost cause. Neither does Lucrecia, and she has better things to do than to try and manage where her son decides to waste his time, so long as it doesn’t impact her resources. She doesn’t think this will. But she can’t help herself, as Vincent turns towards the door. “I’ve already gone through them. There’s nothing that could help Rhapsodos’ condition and it’ll only trigger his sentimentality, that’s why I never bothered to share them with him,” she says.

“Then he shouldn’t read anything you consider damaging to you,” Vincent says calmly. He pauses and looks at a frame on the wall, then glances over his shoulder at her. “I can wait as well, Lucrecia. If you need the time for arrangements.”

She bristles, then snaps a time next week before looking at her calendar. After he’s left, she checks that and finds she has to move a meeting—but it’s less important and she wants this over with. There’s no reason at this point for her to fear Sephiroth learning anything from Hollander’s old files, and Vincent can and has charged her more for her requests.

He usually charges her more these days, since he needs her less to intervene with side-effects of his enhancements. No scientist, but he’s learned himself well. She considers that, setting up the revised meeting invite, and then she looks at the same frame on the wall he had: an old company newsletter containing the feature article memorializing the first time she’d been named to head her own team within R&D. The first paragraph also shoehorns in the latest SOLDIER physical-trials record Sephiroth had broken, as if that had any relevance, but she doesn’t dwell on that long.

Lucrecia looks instead at the small stub summary in the bottom left corner listing the casualties of an R&D accident in Corel, including the name of that scientist who’d first taught her how Shinra was going to treat her, long before she crossed paths with Hojo. The newsletter is dated six years after that presentation where her stolen data was featured, a testament to how she’d had to wait. And that time she’d ended up paying Vincent in some of the information that weaned him off her lab skills, but it had been worth it, she thinks. And it’s still worth it now, since whatever soft spot he’s developed for her son, it still doesn’t move Vincent to take her requests for free. Anyway, if he wants to indulge himself with Sephiroth, then they’re two less people who might indulge in questioning her initiatives.

So she clears her calendar, and sets that meeting next week with him.

Chapter 55: Interlude: Vincent and Sephiroth Discuss Being Romantic

They’re in between rounds, and while Vincent hasn’t used Sephiroth too roughly by their standards, there’s already a pervasive looseness in Sephiroth’s body. Shading his movements with an inclination to sluggishness, not so much fatigue—if Vincent wanted to stir it, the steady but low simmer of arousal in him would rise and devour him in an instant—as the feeling that he needn’t try for what he wants.

He has that already. Curled on his side against Vincent, forearms strapped together and tight against his chest, a short, clinking chain pulling his wrists up towards a collar that, while not a posture collar, is thick enough to encourage him to not look down, to not think he has any say whatsoever in what’s being done to him.

He looks only at Vincent, at slightly-lowered lashes and the closed but not thinned lips as the man reads something. There’s a tablet somewhere below, seeming to take up some of Vincent’s attention, but the claws casually caging Sephiroth’s throat over the collar belie that. And the tail—the tail pressed up through the tops of Sephiroth’s thighs, fur slipping back and forth in a constant tease as the muscle it cloaks nudges the plug keeping Sephiroth’s hole sparking with sore fullness. Then runs along the perineum, wiping the sweat away to keep the sensitive skin there tingling, before coming up to coil over the leather bands keeping Sephiroth’s cock soft and twitching with need.

One twitch suddenly twists into a dagger of fire down his prick, its white-hot tip digging and turning deep in him as Vincent’s tail bends itself to press over and over across his cock slit. He moans and hitches in the other man’s arms, but barely, slowed up by his lassitude even before Vincent’s claws tickle warnings along the top of his collar, before the leather cuffs strapping his thighs together click a reminder of his limits. Those cuffs are somehow the sharpest catch against his feeble struggles—tugging him back when his legs instinctively try to open for the other man’s caresses. Because of them he can neither invite nor deny, can only lie there for what Vincent decides he’d like to give Sephiroth, and that makes his head thick and slow, desiring the enforced patience with an intensity that seems wholly at odds with the easy way it engulfs him.

“Enough reading?” Vincent says.

The lilt in his voice could be a tease or a genuine question—could be both at the same time, knowing him. Though Sephiroth doesn’t need to guess as with others, since here the games they play never have anything to do with who wins. It’s only…pleasing to them, both of them. “You don’t sound that interested either.”

“I think I have to be in the mood. I do enjoy the epics sometimes—when my scores were available, people were always surprised how well I did in Literature,” Vincent says. His eyes draw across the unseen screen, slow and contemplative, as his claws close about Sephiroth’s throat. Still over the collar, still light enough Sephiroth feels only weight and not restriction, but they could cut through the leather like paper if they wanted to. And Vincent knows him well enough to loosen briefly, riding over Sephiroth’s gasp, before he tightens his grip. “Your mother…quoted this one to me when we first met—one of the riddling sections, not the speeches they usually put in the textbooks. It’s how she struck up the kind of conversation that made me think she wasn’t as in thrall to Hojo as the rest of the lab.”

Mentions of her are never what Sephiroth enjoys, but it’s a testament to how Vincent manages him that he only breathes quietly against the man’s breast for a few seconds. He doesn’t feel that icy stiffness seizing him, doesn’t feel as if he needs to fend it off even though lying here he’s an easy target. “She can play to a weakness, even if she can’t charm…but it’s not her preferred approach.”

“No, I’d noticed that, since she gained enough internal leverage,” Vincent says. He tips his head over without moving his eyes away, letting his lips drag over the hairline along the top of Sephiroth’s forehead. “I like to think I’m more aware of my weaknesses these days as well.”

He’s not seeing the Midgarian epic on the tablet, Sephiroth suddenly thinks. Looking at Vincent—he never stopped, but looking now with focus and sensing the changes in the man’s calm. Still comfortable enough that worry doesn’t spoil this tranquil, selfish bubble of theirs, but perhaps that’s why the thought that drifts through Sephiroth’s mind manages to have him voice it. “Do you ever see her in me?”

Vincent moves his head back, enough that Sephiroth can see the subtle shifts in the muscles around his lips. He thinks about it—not shocked or surprised at the question, but giving it due consideration in a way that somehow doesn’t draw tension out of the air.

Then his other arm moves. Sephiroth hears the slither of the tablet across the sheets, but doesn’t look; his head turns upward instead, falling back as Vincent dips one hand under Sephiroth’s thighs and pulls him up. Bending his head back over one shoulder, claws laced over his collar while the man’s other hand nests itself around Sephiroth’s scrotum, the other end of the—not a cage, not really, though it’s just as possessive. It’s not a cage if every fiber of Sephiroth wants to be closed in, to be confined to the other man’s wishes.

“I can see where she’s carved at you—her, and Hojo,” Vincent says. His voice rougher than usual, though it’s low, soft, its variation not out of anger—and neither is the firmness with which he holds Sephiroth to him. “I can see that. You like the marks I leave—”

“Yours, not theirs,” Sephiroth groans. Arching not to get away but to press himself against the man’s grip, to feel it as much as he can. “I want yours, only yours.”

“I know, but I don’t mark you to carve more away. I want what I have, I mark it to keep it,” Vincent says. Even rougher now, though his breathing stays even. His tail crushes over Sephiroth’s cock, pinning it to his belly as Vincent pivots him till he can just lip at the man’s out-of-reach mouth. “I can’t say you have nothing to do with them—that would deny who you are. But I can tell you, I see you when I see what I want. They didn’t shape that.”

Sephiroth sucks at the air, hearing the man’s words, and then goes soft against Vincent’s shoulder. He thinks sometimes Vincent has found his way into all the forgotten cracks of him, and then—he’s wrong, wrong because Vincent finds yet another break to fill, but he’s glad for it. He wishes he could tear himself open sometimes, in these times, so the man wouldn’t have to work for it.

He needs to be bound for this. He needs that, needs the stricture to keep him from falling to pieces when Vincent guts him like that. Twisting further over, snapping apart the thigh-cuffs and spreading him wide open so the other man can take him at will.

Vincent doesn’t let him come. He doesn’t think to beg for it, even as his cock aches. Burns where it’s dragged against Vincent’s thigh, the other man pulling Sephiroth back up against him. Tail filling him now in place of the plug, hand pushing down on one thigh to keep his legs from falling open against the freshened soreness between them.

“She called me a romantic later, for falling for that,” Vincent murmurs. Other hand cupped over the collar again as he nuzzles the bridge of Sephiroth’s nose. “I admit I am.”

“It’s not a weakness,” Sephiroth finds himself replying. Then he works up the energy, when he feels Vincent pause, to push against his bound arms and stretch to catch Vincent’s mouth.

Vincent’s pause lasts a second longer, and then he responds. Not demanding, oddly, but warm, reciprocal, enjoying Sephiroth’s mouth as much as he lets Sephiroth enjoy his own. “You know it could be,” he says, easing back.

Not reproachful, only truthful. And yet this is what makes Sephiroth bridle, what stings fiercely enough that even the pleasure of their bodies can’t hide it. “I won’t let it,” he says, kissing Vincent again. “I don’t—I don’t think I care how you were shaped, Vincent. You are who you are, same as I, and when we met you were already what I wanted.”

The other man’s mouth opens more, so open that for a moment Sephiroth feels as if he’s teetering on the edge of a precipice. But then a firm grip on the back of his collar pulls him back, puts him where he should be. Moaning, caught up, held down as Vincent sucks a fresh bruise on the edge of his jaw.

“But I read you my high-school textbooks anyway,” Vincent laughs. He kisses his latest mark, then bundles Sephiroth back against him. “I think I could read you the subjects I failed, and you’d still beg for it.”

“If you make me,” Sephiroth says. Tucking his head under Vincent’s chin, then shuddering pleasurably as Vincent’s tail rolls inside of him. “You always make me.”

Chapter 56: Interlude: DSL Season

“You know what time of year it is, don’t you?” Zack beams with a cheerful swoop into the room, holding up a coffee-cup tray as if it’s a medal personally awarded by Rufus himself.

They can all smell the difference, and Sephiroth doesn’t even have to look up from Vincent’s notes to know that that small clicking noise comes from Genesis’ boots sliding into the table support as the other man rolls his eyes and slouches down. “Fair, it’s not an actual season and I don’t care if Angeal thinks I’m destroying your childhood by telling you that. You’re destroying mine.”

Angeal makes a wheezing sound that vaguely resembles Genesis’ name being strangled in a tug-of-war between horror and amusement. Undeterred, Zack sets the tray down on the corner of the table and then starts pulling out the cups. He slides the first one in Genesis’ direction. “You can try but every year you need to get your DSL fix, the same as the rest of us. And I’m not gonna tell you this is anything like homemade dumbapple spice pie, but Gen, seriously, if you just take it as its own thing—”

“I’m taking this solely because our coffee machine is broken and I refuse to end up in medical because I’ve stooped to drinking that motor oil they’ve genetically engineered the rest of Shinra to tolerate,” Genesis snaps, as he picks up the cup and flicks open the small flap at the top. Sephiroth does find it amusing to watch how the man’s nostrils flare as the faint scent of the coffee intensifies, since it’s patently not in disgust. “It’s a matter of homeland security, and if anyone including our esteemed leader disagrees—”

“You can drink whatever you want so long as you don’t give R&D a reason to ask me for a blood sample,” Sephiroth says, taking his own cup from Zack.

Who proudly nods to Sephiroth. “See? Official General seal of approval. DSL season is—”

“They make a tea version?” Vincent interrupts.

He does that so rarely that even Zack blinks and looks over; in their planning meetings Vincent usually waits to provide his contribution at the end, and often will defer till he can provide it privately to Sephiroth. He doesn’t seem to have the need to stamp his mark on a discussion so long as the right ear hears what he has to say…but now he is looking with genuine curiosity at the cup Zack has just put in front of him.

“Yeah, new option this year. I mean, probably somebody somewhere’s done it before because you can DSL literally everything, I just wouldn’t recommend the DSL barbecue,” Zack says after a moment. He straightens up a little as Vincent continues to look at the cup without touching it, then gives Sephiroth a nervous glance. “This shop’s my go-to when the machine’s down, I know the owners and they’re coffeeheads but they wouldn’t offer anything that wasn’t at least decent, and—”

“I don’t smell anything else in it,” Sephiroth finds himself murmuring.

Zack gives him a grateful look, while across the table Genesis pricks up a little but doesn’t make a comment; Sephiroth normally wouldn’t have said that in front of others, but it’s only the five of them and Vincent also doesn’t normally balk at food offered by any of them. Though it’s not suspicion Sephiroth sees in Vincent’s face, and once Sephiroth’s finished speaking, Vincent nods and picks up the cup.

The other man still doesn’t drink from it, but he does take off the lid, more to see the drink than to smell it for toxins, it appears. “I’ve never had a dumbapple-spice drink,” he remarks.

“Pup—Zack, sit down if you’re going to stop breathing, don’t make me get up and catch you,” Angeal says after a couple seconds have passed. He’s starting to push himself up from his seat anyway, but then stops as Zack, still gawking, awkwardly flops into the nearest chair. “Well, there’s a lot of crap out there, most of the time you aren’t missing much.”

“It tastes nothing like actual dumbapple,” Genesis puts in, but his tone is far less biting than usual. He seems as fascinated by Zack by Vincent’s confession, albeit in an uncharacteristically muted way. “Nothing but an overload of spices.”

Vincent lifts the cup for a sip, holds the liquid in his mouth for a thoughtful moment, then swallows. “The full spice mix is usually only for when the dumbapples have soured, don’t they? When I’ve had the pies in Banora, they cut down on the spicing if the fruit is properly ripe.”

Genesis’ eyes widen and he stares at Vincent. His lips are slightly parted and twitching as if he intends to say something, and his expression has Sephiroth shifting his chair towards Vincent without thinking about it. When Sephiroth catches himself—because Vincent can and will fend Genesis off himself—he finds himself looking at Angeal, who seems similarly wary of Genesis’ reaction and who has in fact reached over to put his hand on Genesis’ shoulder.

“He reminds of us of that literally every year, and then drinks more of these than me,” Zack says. He hasn’t noticed Genesis’ slavering because he’s facing Vincent. “But come on, it’s not bad, is it?”

Vincent is taking another sip. “Drinkable,” he says in a noncommittal tone. “Thank you.”

Which Zack takes as a full co-sign, as Sephiroth warns Vincent later. Vincent shrugs and tells Sephiroth he’s happy enough to drink more of it if that’s what Zack happens to bring to the meetings, and that there’s no need to terrorize Zack over it. He’s right, of course, but Sephiroth noticed Vincent left the cup still a quarter-full at the end of the meeting.

And when a mission happens to bring Sephiroth and Angeal by a high-end tea shop later that week, Sephiroth finds himself pausing at the doorway. They have a little time to kill before the PR team Lazard dispatched can reach the area, and the shop-owner is enterprising enough to come out with a tray of little steaming cups as soon as the SOLDIERs on her doorstep sheathe their weapons. SOLDIERs as a rule prefer coffee, but in a pinch any caffeine source will do, and they’re all tired enough to welcome something besides their field rations.

Living with Vincent has also taught Sephiroth a little about tea quality, although he wouldn’t claim to be a connoisseur. But he thinks he can tell when someone else is, and judges this shop-owner to be one. So when he spots the colorful little pile of boxes in the front window display, he takes one home for later.

“I can give it to Zack if you don’t care for it,” he says as Vincent puts the opened box up to his nose.

He knows Vincent is never going to rail at him for something like this, even if the man doesn’t care for it, but he doesn’t take that for granted. And since he doesn’t take it for granted, he does always feel a little tension before the man provides an opinion on such things.

“Wouldn’t he then give it to Rhapsodos, purely for the joke?” Vincent says as he lowers the box. He reaches to the side for the teapot, then turns as Sephiroth, relieved, moves around him to start the electric kettle. His hand slides up under Sephiroth’s coat to rest its claws just at the small of the back, above the waistband. “It’ll be more balanced than his coffeeshop’s, but I still doubt it’ll live up to Rhapsodos’ standards.”

“Genesis does drink more of them than the rest of us. He’d never say, but Angeal once told me there’s no way to have that kind of fresh dumbapple pie up here. The fruits spoil too fast off the tree, and we can tell—preservatives,” Sephiroth says, with a hitch near the end as Vincent’s claws flick lightly along his spine. “Full spice mix or not, it’s still as close as they’ll ever have this far north.”

Vincent nods with his chin swinging over Sephiroth’s shoulder. He’s just finished measuring some tea into the pot and is putting the spoon back, while his other hand continues teasing under Sephiroth’s coat. “I probably will like this better than the first one, but…I don’t think I know this shop, and I thought I knew all the good tea shops in Midgar.”

“It’s not that far into Sector Four—I think it’s fairly new,” Sephiroth says. He feels his coat start to slip down his shoulder as Vincent’s chin drags at it and puts his hands on the counter, tilting his head as Vincent starts nuzzling the side of his throat. “I could show you this weekend.”

“You’d have to leave my cock alone to do that—it must have impressed you, this place, to merit that sort of sacrifice,” Vincent says, his smile outlined against Sephiroth’s skin.

Sephiroth half-closes his eyes and leans into the man’s lips as he feels the last of the tension melt under them. “Hardly a sacrifice if it earns me the whole evening on your lap, Vincent.”

Vincent rumbles low in his throat, warm and amused. He nuzzles along Sephiroth’s neck, then twists his head to the side so that he can reach for the electric kettle, which is beeping now. His mouth drops back to Sephiroth’s neck as Sephiroth leans into the other man, feeling for Vincent’s belt. “I suppose Fair will be bringing drinks regardless, so we might as well point him to a good supplier,” he says, pressing them up against the counter. “Take me to this tea-shop, then.”

Chapter 57: Tenth Vacation: Culture Night

Sephiroth wipes the water off his hands, then regards himself in the mirror. The welts have already faded from most of his body, though when he gathers up his hair and slings it over one shoulder, he still feels the tenderness of them ghosting across his flesh. He runs one hand between his thighs, inhaling a little as his forearm pushes along his soft cock and awakens a speculative, thready ache. Then, deliberately, he picks his cock up by the middle and strokes his thumb over it. His pupils widen and he can detect the smallest flush seeding in the hollows of his throat, the wet inside of his lower lip, but…he’s still not in any condition to harden again.

He isn’t dissatisfied with this. He’s woken worn and tired, yes, but the reason for that is making breakfast in the kitchen and won’t be leaving Midgar for another two days. And today is an off-day for himself, with not even any chores to do; he did them all yesterday because he’d expected Vincent to be in four hours later than the man actually was, and needed the work to preoccupy his mind.

So today, he has nothing to do, and so he releases his cock and wipes his hand again, then walks back to the bed and sprawls across it, exhaling pleasurably into the tenting sheets as his body aches, grows used to it, and then settles into rest again.

He’s still there when Vincent comes in bearing a plate and a coffee for him. Vincent snorts when Sephiroth merely turns his head towards the man, but doesn’t comment at all. Only knees aside some of the blankets so he can sit down where Sephiroth can lazily swing his head onto Vincent’s thigh.

These days speech sometimes is entirely superfluous. Sephiroth can detect Vincent’s good-humored spoiled in the way Vincent cards the hair out of Sephiroth’s face, ending each stroke with a tug just a little harder than gentle, and in turn obediently eats everything Vincent feeds him before he ventures to rub his head back against Vincent’s groin. Vincent hums lowly as he sets empty mug on plate on the bed and Sephiroth takes that as encouragement, stretching his hand over Vincent’s leg and pushing aside Vincent’s robe to start tracing out the thigh muscles.

He manages to persuade Vincent to slide further onto the bed and part knees so Sephiroth can work his head up onto Vincent’s belly, but then his wrist is caught. Sephiroth has his other wrist offered up before Vincent tugs at the first, crossing it over the second as the other man folds both into his grip. The press of Vincent’s thumb along his wrist tendons isn’t painful but it’s more than firm enough to make Sephiroth’s hips twist appealingly.

Vincent glances over as the sheets unsheathe more of Sephiroth’s body. Then puts Sephiroth’s wrists against his knee as he looks down at Sephiroth, considering. Factors Sephiroth can guess at, watching the way his gaze changes intensity and focus: the degree of marking that remains, the urgency in Sephiroth’s face, the distance of either from any necessary business they have.

“I had to spend a few hours in a movie theater on my way back because of the weather. They were running some old Wutaian classics—it reminded me,” he says, smiling close-lipped when Sephiroth blinks at the seeming non sequitur. “I haven’t practiced my calligraphy in a while.”

Sephiroth understands then, and arches expectantly as he drinks in a deep, cool draft of air. He watches as Vincent’s gaze runs down him, watches and shivers at the plans he sees forming in the other man’s eyes.

It’s all he needs to do for a response. He’s quiet as Vincent lifts his head and arms off and then rises from the bed, quiet and cooperatively still. Lying there as Vincent returns and laces his forearms into a familiar binder, well-broken to the shape of his limbs and seeming to grow only more snug as his arms are pulled straight to the end of the bed and then fastened there. More leather folds about his cock, then his balls, tight enough that his hips ride against the bed and Vincent has to pin him for a moment.

But he’s quiet. Not silent, admittedly—he starts to moan then, and continues to do so as Vincent turns him on his belly, then props him over pillows so his back and legs slope gently down from his buttocks, presenting those like irresistible sweets given how Vincent nips down each of their curves. Not hard enough to bruise fresh, though Sephiroth hitches himself in invitation, but only enough to set glowing sparks that linger on as leather cuffs spread Sephiroth’s thighs wide. Far too wide for him to push himself off the pillows for very long, not that he wants to make the effort.

Not that he wants to struggle. But the idea of it is planted, the idea that he’s being rendered incapable of it and once planted it unfurls long, shuddering tendrils through every inch of him. Keeping him more firmly pliant than the leather and chains, so by the time they flex and clink his mind already has him going soft and still again.

He’s quiet when Vincent passes one smooth palm over his back, sweeping away the hair and then twisting it up into a loose knot. Quiet when fingers tuck a few strands behind his ears, making room for the silk strip that blindfolds him. Quiet when Vincent runs that hand down his spine to just press into his buttock cleft, just into the rim of his hole so he remembers the way the man stretched him, reshaped him, and the memory of that is still so hot that he feels the warmth rushing from the press of Vincent’s touch into his boneless thighs.

“Such a pretty canvas,” Vincent says, his mouth warm against Sephiroth’s left shoulderblade. He traces a claw-tip around Sephiroth’s hole, too light to cut but still enough to carry that tantalizing possibility, and then tickles it down Sephiroth’s perineum as Sephiroth shivers. “Too beautiful to mark with whips…”

Sephiroth remembers the crack of one and for a moment there, splayed and blind, the vividness of its burn streaks hungry red across his vision, hungry aching red in his flesh. And he’s moaning with the memory of it scorching open his mouth, moaning so much that he almost misses what Vincent does.

The lightest, faintest touch, almost more of a breath, dusting across his right shoulderblade. So light and ephemeral that it should leave no mark, and yet—somehow it does. A lingering, deepening trace that seems to grow intensity, even though the thing Vincent is using to make it has moved on and is swirling close to his spine now. Sephiroth sucks his breath, twists on his arms, and the corresponding bend of the muscles in his back somehow seems to draw the trace even deeper into him. It’s not the flash-heat of a lashing but nevertheless it burns.

Menthol, Sephiroth realizes, and sags as he does. Menthol, Vincent’s dipping his brush in some kind of menthol solution. Lettering him with flowing script that burns quicksilver as he whimpers into the pillows, able to read every line, every character as perfectly as if he was writing them himself.

Vincent cups one hand over the nape of his neck. He arches against it, Vincent’s brush etching icy characters in between the bumps of his spine, and Vincent tightens the grip, pushing with fingertips till his neck muscles release. He shudders out a groan, then finds himself suddenly and irreversibly slack.

The brushwork still burns, but he’s been pushed over the initial shock of it, into the thick of its steadily-mounting wave of ice. Pushed and held, Vincent’s grip on him steady enough that he feels no concern at relaxing into his bonds, letting them be the wall against which the chill grinds. He doesn’t have to hold himself, they do, and so he whimpers, yes, but whimpers without resistance.

He's only the canvas, after all. There to take whatever Vincent deigns to apply to him, and this is a meandering line that scrolls off his spine near the small of his back and spirals over his left buttock. Then several short lines, each roughly the same number of characters, along his right ribs. Several more to parallel his left ribs, before Vincent briefly rises and then resettles himself between Sephiroth’s legs.

Vincent doesn’t speak any more, but he does start humming again. It’s a half-familiar tune, one Sephiroth’s mind sluggishly tries to place as the menthol starts to needle into the hidden places where last night’s welts haven’t quite lost their tenderness. Wutaian, he thinks, folk-Wutaian, something he remembers hearing snatches of from civilians, and just then Vincent changes the melody so he loses the reference.

The ice of the menthol is gradually reviving his old bruises. They’re warming into aching bands as Vincent letters a stanza up the back of Sephiroth’s thigh, his free hand idly massaging at Sephiroth’s buttock. When Sephiroth cants against his cuffs, the brush lifts and then unexpectedly swipes him along the perineum, rough enough that he feels the bristles through the liquid soaking them. And then—he digs his face and hands into the bed, burying a hoarse, aching noise into it as the chill rushes up into his groin and then pushes with sudden, urgent, fierce need into his strapped cock and balls.

Vincent rings his hole again with the brush, then pushes a thumb into him as he shudders and writhes. Whatever Vincent is using to dilute the menthol is oily enough to stick as Vincent rubs into him, that thumb an insistent, insidious caress that seems to build up a burning spot in the middle of an icy ocean. It makes Sephiroth hike his knees futilely till he exhausts himself, and then, as he’s lying there panting and helpless, Vincent leans over. Cleans the hair from his sweaty face, strokes it lovingly away, and then loops the ends of the silk strip that’s blindfolding him in between his lips to gag him.

Muffled and sightless, Sephiroth can only squirm as Vincent changes his thumb for two long, oiled fingers. No more of the menthol on them, at least, or on the man’s cock when Vincent seats himself in Sephiroth. But Sephiroth can still feel it all over his back and legs, all that lettering, as precise and elegant as when Vincent first wrote it even as Vincent releases his wrists and legs and pulls them backwards. As crisp as Sephiroth currently is not, with his limbs trailing to either side and his head lolling onto Vincent’s shoulder.

Vincent grunts a few times, but doesn’t rush or shove at Sephiroth as he arranges them to his satisfaction. Sephiroth sprawled on his cock, forearms still bound and folded neatly up so Vincent can clasp the wrists just under Sephiroth’s chin. And his cock is still tied as well, tied soft in firm leather as Vincent taps the end of the brush at the aching flesh between the bands.

He mewls from behind his gag. Vincent listens, head tucked against Sephiroth’s, and then runs the brush-end up and down his cock so it ripples over the leather bands and just grazes the flesh in between. Sephiroth feels his thighs try to flex instinctively but he’s so used at this point, he can’t—he can’t lever himself. The cuffs still strapped about his legs are enough weight on their own to drag him down, pinion him in place, with only his small, helpless noises making it up against Vincent’s caresses.

Vincent hums again, the first tune. “The popular version,” he says, as if musing only to himself, and hums a little more as he resumes writing along Sephiroth’s left inner thigh. “The version you’ve probably heard, that everyone’s probably heard.”

He’s using the menthol again. It is no less icy than before, its burn going just as deep and dragging up more and more of last night’s lashing, but Sephiroth doesn’t make any attempt to pull his legs together. His knees hang open, his body clutches and works itself on Vincent’s cock, and his fingers stay limp where they’re curled against his own collarbone. Vincent’s thumb smooths up into the hollow of his palm, a smooth point of pressure to help keep him steady and he whines in gratitude but doesn’t even try to nuzzle the man. He knows without being told he doesn’t need to reciprocate, only needs to accept, and he’s obedient now.

“I was surprised they used the older version,” Vincent adds. Putting one line of characters only on Sephiroth’s right thigh, before the brush suddenly switches to painting long zigzags across the exposed flesh of Sephiroth’s scrotum. He pauses to ensure that’s thoroughly attended to before, inhaling as if that’s how he best savors the broken noises Sephiroth is making, he puts his thumbpad just on the head of Sephiroth’s cock. “In the—in the movie.”

Sephiroth can’t help the gasp. He shivers violently, and then again as Vincent rolls his thumb languidly over his cock head; at this point there’s so much ache pent up in him that the touch should be unbearably intense, and yet, somehow, Vincent manages to tease out shades of unbearableness. Making him twist and whine till finally Vincent lifts the thumb, and he can breathe—one sharp inhale—

“My father actually taught me that one,” Vincent says. His voice is neither rough nor perfectly smooth, nothing that would draw Sephiroth’s attention away from what they’re doing. He sounds only as if it was interesting enough for him to remember, and then remember to tell Sephiroth, though that’s rare enough that Sephiroth should mark it too. “And I caught Tseng reacting to it when Reno played the trailer on his phone the other day…I didn’t think he had connections to that area, but…you don’t want to talk right now.”

Sephiroth has just finished his breath, and then Vincent swirls the brush over his cock head. He loses all the air he’s gained and then some, crying out into his gag as the ice runs lightning-quick into the slit and then down through his prick. His body seems to melt even as the chill grows, and Vincent doesn’t stop there either, but gives his cock head a few more strokes, until he’s utterly disabled, weakly sucking at his gag and twitching on the other man’s cock.

His own cock is leisurely freed, and then Vincent wraps one hand over it. Stroking him till, somehow, he climaxes, even though the chill never leaves him. If anything it seems to storm into him as his orgasm hollows him out so that he’s shivering as Vincent pulls them over onto their sides. It’s not till Vincent spills into him that the cold finally seems to reach its peak, and then gradually recedes as they lie together afterward.

Vincent cuts away his gag, then moves that claw up to near his temple. He’s aware enough to duck his head away from it, and after a moment, Vincent puts his arm back around Sephiroth, leaving the blindfold on. “Do you want to spend the whole day like this?”

“Did you have anything else to do?” Sephiroth murmurs. Then moves just enough to push his cock into Vincent’s grip as, not nearly as reluctant as his sigh sounds, Vincent drops his hand there. “Even if you have guns to clean, you can do it—”

“With my cock in you?” Vincent says, tone equal parts considering and mildly reproachful. He gives Sephiroth’s cock a light squeeze, and when Sephiroth hitches, fondles Sephiroth’s nipple with his other hand, pinching it so Sephiroth rocks helplessly between the two. “I don’t want to think that much about Tseng, to be honest.”

“He hasn’t been problematic lately,” Sephiroth says. Then waits till Vincent nods before he rubs his buttocks back into the other man. “But we should probably have him to dinner soon. You don’t want to leave him wondering too much about that. He’s better when he knows exactly how long of a leash he has.”

Vincent makes an amused noise. “You’re better when you know what kind of a leash you’d like to see me put on him.”

Sephiroth doesn’t disagree, but he…doesn’t truly want to discuss this either, he thinks. It can wait till dinner at least. “You did leave out the last stanza. Is that a code?”

From the way Vincent moves, he’s genuinely startled. He presses his lips to Sephiroth’s throat as the shudder works through Sephiroth, then lifts them to graze at Sephiroth’s ear. “No, not this time, I just decided I’d rather have you…perhaps I should have finished, if you were paying so much attention to the poetry. I didn’t realize you studied love songs too.”

“It’s considered one of the great classics,” Sephiroth points out, and then arches obligingly when Vincent bites behind his ear. “Finish it and finish me off, then…please, Vincent. Mark me…”

“No.” Then Vincent smiles into Sephiroth’s nape, smiles and squeezes Sephiroth’s cock again so Sephiroth’s protesting noise turns thready. “If I did everything you wanted when you wanted it, you’d forget how badly you want it. But I’ll let you nap a little like this, and then, if you remember the whole poem afterward, I’ll dig out another one and try using your front as a practice sheet this time. With your nipples clamped.”

He pinches one as he says that, and Sephiroth moans eagerly. But when Vincent merely tucks his head in and his breathing smooths out, Sephiroth doesn’t protest again. No, he lets his own body go soft and quiet, too. He has no doubt Vincent means it, and tired as he is, he fully intends to last long enough to do as Vincent tells him.

* * *

Vincent has Sephiroth recite the full poem in the private training room across the hall. On his knees, wrists strapped to ankles, his sweat running past the cuffs to seep under his legs and soften the floor varnish so that it sticks to his skin, sticks and then rips away at the slightest movement so the salt stings acid-hot against the cool wood.

And he moves. He can’t help it, strung up as he is on a hook seated deep within him, its deceptively gentle curve nudging apart his buttocks and its rounded tip nested securely against his prostate no matter how he squirms. The hook is at the end of a long chain fastened to the cross-bar running just over his head, holding him up just enough to keep the tip pressing into him, pressing and pressing till he thinks he’s too sore to even register it anymore and yet he does. Smoothly rolling against his tortured body’s attempts to clench it in place, smooth and always cool within his fevered flesh, smooth and filling in a way that thickens his throat around each of his gasps.

He's hoarse before he finishes the first stanza, his head lolling and then jerking weakly to attention whenever the hair Vincent has braided around the hook’s chain catches him up. Catches him at the scalp and then lower, within himself, the hook tip pressing inexorably against his jellied nerves and sending his knees scuffing against the floor as he tries to lift himself. To find some relief, but the hook is so perfectly-balanced that any movement forward only tips it deeper, slicing his hamstrings with electricity and making him fall back, moaning and trembling.

“Don’t look there,” Vincent says calmly, catching his chin and then cupping it upward, so the sweat runs away from his eyes and down his jaw and throat like little molten rivers. His boot swings between Sephiroth’s legs and grazes its top softly against Sephiroth’s tight, need-heavy scrotum; the rough ripple of his bootlaces rattles another moan out of Sephiroth as Vincent strokes his neck as if assessing how pliant it is, how easily it can be reshaped. “You’ll have nothing to do there till you’re done.”

Sephiroth purses his lips, but as he musters up the first word of the second stanza, the hook tweaks him. Or he tweaks on it, he can’t tell, so closely does his flesh seem to wrap about it now. So he groans instead, letting Vincent’s hand take some of the weight of supporting him.

Vincent sees, of course. Sees and smiles, and, indulgently, gives him a little aid by strapping a posture collar on him. Chin locked up, the center of weight of his head tilted permanently in favor of the hook’s upward digging as he struggles on his knees, struggles and finally, desperately, mumbles the stanza.

“Good,” Vincent says.

His fingers rested on the tops of Sephiroth’s shoulders for that, light enough to let Sephiroth’s balance sway and slide under them, firm enough that any attempt to hitch away from the hook was brushed back with the authoritative careless of someone who knows all avenues of escape are nullified. But now, as Sephiroth sucks in a lungful of cool, sweet air, Vincent strokes his fingertips down off the shoulders. Tracing over heaving pectorals, twisting a little as if to enjoy their firm planes before landing at—Sephiroth whimpers even before Vincent closes his fingers around Sephiroth’s nipples. A hot, warm pinch at first, and then, sleight of hand that makes Sephiroth jerk hard on his hook, hard enough to put dizzying galaxies in his eyes, the chilly bite of metal.

“Go on,” Vincent says. Holding onto the clamps themselves as Sephiroth chokes out another stanza, with that small, pleased curve to his mouth, someone savoring a treasure secured solely for themselves. When Sephiroth is finished, he tightens the clamps and then makes low, soothing noises, running the backs of his fingers around and around the throbbing nubs as Sephiroth’s cries break into shivery splinters in his throat. “One more, and then the last one, the one I didn’t write on you before.”

He drops to one knee, his one hand rising to stroke at Sephiroth’s left cheek as his other drops to caress Sephiroth’s desperately hard cock. Sephiroth stutters as his body tries to revolt—tries to overwhelm not only his will but Vincent’s, a viciously sharp shove going all through him, iron-stiff in his belly and groin while his legs shudder bonelessly against the floor. But Vincent catches it—makes a crushing ring of fingers at the base of his cock to hold him back, to tame his body as his mind has long since acquiesced.

Sephiroth bucks but it’s mechanical, without true determination or even consciousness behind it. It’s momentum more than anything else forcing him up against the cuffs, and then—nothing behind it but the rough hot scorch of the leather tugging his skin, the wood dragging at his shins. The needling pains of his hair yanking against the chain, which clinks and twists and turns the hook inside of him so he feels seated on a plump, enveloping ache below the waist. He sags, gasping, only the collar’s hard edge propping up his chin.

His lips move around words, somehow; his mouth seems entirely detached from his mind. Sweat sluices down his body. Even though they can’t be more than trickles, they feel as if they carry the weight of glaciers—he can feel how the drops build up on the nipple clamps and press at them, drawing the trapped flesh into exquisite points of fire. And then a panting breath will shake off the sweat and make the clamps lift again and the relief of their lightness is even more brutally hot.

“Good,” Vincent says from what seems like very far away and very close all at once, close enough to gather him into a tender, careless embrace, leaving him whining and squirming as Vincent sucks his lower lip and rubs up against his clamped nipples and corkscrews one hand tightly about his hard prick. “The last one. Now you can—”

A stroking blaze up from the tip of the hook, dislodged unexpectedly as Vincent’s mouth caresses along his jaw. Sephiroth writhes on it, whining, too caught up to obey. Not intentionally, he’d never set his will against Vincent’s. Not here, not like this, but he can’t help it. He feels so much.

Vincent waits him out. Arm curled around him, holding him still on the chain, until his breathing slows and the twin spears of fire in his chest recede to small, vicious spikes. And then the man moves his hand around, touches one clamp.

“Come,” he says, flicking it open. His other hand slides down Sephiroth’s cock, shaping out a trail Sephiroth’s body can’t resist following. Then rises again to lie against Sephiroth’s chest, just under the other nipple. He waits, Vincent, waits till the first crescendo has burnt the top of its arc through Sephiroth, and then—he pulls off the other clamp.

Sephiroth’s orgasm doubles in on itself, so what should have been a great, sweeping wave of relief instead wraps him up till he seems like he’s strangling. Dangling on his line, a hooked prize well-secured and available for however Vincent chooses to mount him.

But there’s the hand pressed to his cheek. Slow and steadying, till he tips his head into it and feels the belated release of no longer having to hold himself up. Slack against the man’s shoulder, then nestled into Vincent’s throat once the stiff collar is stripped away. Slow and soft, murmuring his aches and wants as Vincent gently and thoroughly pets every sore and strain.

“I wonder if I should have you recite a poem every night I’m home,” Vincent says. He gives Sephiroth’s right nipple a light flip, just enough to set the embers burning red-hot again, and then bends Sephiroth’s head back by the nape as he stoops to circle the nub with his tongue. “You do it very beautifully.”

“Would you like the…epics or the love-songs?” Sephiroth asks. Sighing, bowing his chest into the suckling, his neck into the drag of the man’s grip, and then letting himself shiver between the two when Vincent nips him. “But this one—didn’t finish…”

“Didn’t you?” Vincent’s head rises and he gives Sephiroth a look that doesn’t even pretend to be reprimanding, with how it lingers on Sephiroth’s mouth. He pulls himself behind Sephiroth, his arm slipping down to playfully toy with Sephiroth’s cock. “You finished the poem.”

Sephiroth cants weakly into the fondling, his head sliding against Vincent’s shoulder. “You didn’t—tighten for both—last—”

Vincent laughs into the damp warmth of his hair. Then reaches up and loosens a few strands from the chain, letting him sink further against the other man, before retrieving something from beside them. “Insatiable,” Vincent says as he slips a cock cage over Sephiroth.

Sephiroth inhales as the rings tighten over his prick. He’s going to be soft for a while anyway, soft and spent, but the stricture nevertheless sends a persistent whisper of arousal swirling through him. His body correspondingly tightens all over in a shiver and he can’t speak for a few moments, can only watch and feel the whimper building in his throat as Vincent wets a finger with a small bottle.

He closes his eyes the second the menthol touches his nipples. The cold doesn’t stab through him so much as clasp him up in an unyielding embrace, two phantom hands of steel splayed over his pectorals. He can feel them even after Vincent’s own hands drop away, clutching him firmly in place and keeping his breaths short, his mind crystal-clear of anything except their grip.

“Spoiled,” Vincent says. Leaning over his shoulder and blowing intentionally down his chest, the rippling waterfall making his skin tingle and spark as its warmth battles with the menthol’s ice. Vincent does it again, then sucks lazily at his shoulder, marking it while he mewls and shifts uselessly about on the hook.

The tease of Vincent’s breath is evanescent and can’t last long against the chilly hold on his chest. He settles sluggishly back into its tight grip and then Vincent puts the clamps back on.

Holds him as well, fingers curled tightly over his shoulders, then dropping to wrap over his belly as he gasps and arches and then drops back like a ragdoll on the hook. The bite of the clamps is freshly hot, a red center to the deep-seated ice of the menthol, red and white streaking across his vision as he’s consumed between the two. Because they don’t quench each other, but build upon the other’s torment, each throwing more and more tendrils about him till he has no way out and can only surrender himself.

“Spoiled,” Vincent eventually says again. Less teasing, more thoughtful, as he fiddles with something above Sephiroth’s head.

He takes the hook out, presses his fingers in its place to ease the sudden hollowness. Cradling Sephiroth against him, patiently untangling every hair from the chain till he can lay it on the floor next to them. Then his fingers touch the cuff on Sephiroth’s right wrist, only to withdraw when Sephiroth moans in protest.

“You’re going to have to wear your coat close on Monday,” he adds, rearranging himself to pull Sephiroth onto his lap from behind. His fingers slip out, but his cock is there to replace them, hard enough to fill up Sephiroth even as he clucks his tongue. “People won’t see the marks, with your healing, but you’re going to feel it.”

“But I want to,” Sephiroth says. He uses the last of his energy to hitch himself a little deeper onto Vincent’s cock, then lets himself sprawl on the other man as Vincent idly traces fingertips up and down his torso, straying around but never onto his nipples, little red-white prickles wiggling over his skin in their wake. “If you wrote a poem on my back, I could memorize it while I sit through my meetings.”

Vincent snorts as he retrieves another item: a bottle of water, that he tips first into Sephiroth’s mouth before drinking some himself. He puts it down and then tugs Sephiroth by the waist against him, biting at Sephiroth’s throat when Sephiroth moans. “Romantic.”

“When you want to be,” Sephiroth says, and then nudges his head forward on the off-chance…Vincent’s mouth is there, and warm, and welcoming even as it makes demands his wrung-out body aches to consider meeting. “If I asked you…”

“Yes,” Vincent says simply. He’s silent a moment, as Sephiroth shivers for reasons entirely separate from and yet deeply rooted in how the other man has held him, constant and unflinching, for the last few hours—for all the time since they first met. Then he runs his hand up Sephiroth’s belly to the sternum. “I want you pretty for after dinner.”

Sephiroth shivers again, because for all he asks, Vincent asks so little back. He’d give the man much more—Vincent knows that, and refrains from asking so often for the same reason, Sephiroth knows. And it is much more complicated than that, but this—is not. So to this, Sephiroth says, “Yes, Vincent,” and then rests obediently in the man’s arms as the clamps are released a second time to burn him to the roots.

* * *

Dinner is very sedate. Vincent repurposes some leftovers after he’s helped Sephiroth through the shower and then back to the bedroom to doze. Hunger eventually impels Sephiroth to wander into the kitchen once the smells grow enticing enough; when he drops to his knees by the stove, naked with his hair still damp and loose over his back, Vincent looks amused but doesn’t make him get back to his feet. He eats a few tidbits there, then shuffles to take up a similar position by Vincent’s chair once the other man has finished cooking.

His cock is locked up through their meal, but his earlier orgasms cleared him sufficiently that the cage’s weight and grip feel supportive rather than restrictive. He doesn’t have to think about it as he leaves Vincent to do the dishes and returns to the bathroom to, as requested, make himself pretty.

Face and mouth refreshed, hair tied back into a loose tail with a silk cord and the white silk slip on, he settles on Vincent’s cock on the living room couch. He added a collar as well, and Vincent bats the black silk tassels dangling from its back a few times before binding his arms and legs. Forearms straight across the back, legs folded neatly to either side of Vincent’s lap, strapped into black leather and facing forward while Vincent stretches and ties a matching silk cord harness about his chest.

His nipples are played with but only briefly, sparking a lively ache in them that the harness continues to tug at while Vincent brushes up the hem of his slip and then takes his caged cock in hand. Sephiroth inhales sharply as Vincent rubs one thumb over his cock head, testing the first steel ring locked just behind it, then rolls his hips as he feels Vincent’s grip loosen.

Vincent makes one of his amused noises and sets his chin on Sephiroth’s shoulder. He turns the TV on and cues up something, which Sephiroth doesn’t watch as he then abandons the remote for the bottle of menthol and a set of sounds. “If I were to truly train you on poetry, I’d make you compose as well as recite,” he says.

Rubbing the menthol solution on a sound, the gleaming metal slipping easily but not carelessly through his fingers. Sephiroth’s eyes can’t help but follow the highlight as it moves back and forth over the slim rod. “Did you ever learn?”

“No. Even my father wasn’t that in love with Wutaian traditions,” Vincent says, with enough humor threading his voice that Sephiroth doesn’t try and look back at the other man. He smears a little extra on one end of the rod, the end that goes in first, and then brings it up to just rest on the edge of Sephiroth’s cock slit. “The codes don’t rely on that kind of improvisation either.”

The menthol is already starting to absorb, an icy tingling spreading from the rod tip into Sephiroth’s cock, and then, when he twitches, it throws a ring about the cock slit itself so he almost feels as if he’s already being spread by the rod. Vincent pulls his cock up a little higher, steadying it, mouth tasting at Sephiroth’s throat above the collar as Sephiroth sucks his breath.

“He would quote the love-songs to my mother sometimes. On what he thought was her birthday, special occasions like that. She appreciated the intention behind it but I don’t think they moved her on their own,” Vincent says. His voice grows a little distant as the rod tips up and pushes firmly into Sephiroth’s cock slit, but when Sephiroth’s own gasp thins and breaks, Vincent presses his mouth firmly behind Sephiroth’s ear as if to compensate. “Rhapsodos is under the impression you detest poetry.”

Sephiroth feels as if he’s dropping with the rod, dropping so quickly he hasn’t any pretense at control over it—but he doesn’t feel lost, with how closely Vincent has him gathered. And when the rod’s flared end comes to rest against his cock head, he doesn’t feel any sudden jerk or crash, but only a…kind of gliding swoop of a landing, one that leaves him as he wants to be, curled into the other man with his body prettily tied and presented, and nothing for him to do but feel it. So he can talk, while Vincent does everything else.

“I don’t see the point in that poem, his obsession…I recognize its—its significance…in literature,” he says, gasping here and there because of the menthol’s steady burning chill, but by no means broken. He’s already been molded for this by their play earlier, made ready for this and then slipped into it as perfectly as his slip clings to his body. “Even…some of the lines are…beautiful, but…it doesn’t mean what…he sees in it…”

Vincent lays Sephiroth’s cock down, careful not to jar it, and then smooths the slip back over it. Then cups Sephiroth’s thighs, casually possessive with the occasional teasing but non-urgent rub of his thumbs along their inner sides. “I never really saw the point in the old epics or the love-songs either, outside of using them in the clan codes. They talk about a completely different world and an honor code I don’t think was ever real. And even if it was…” Vincent pauses briefly, idly caressing Sephiroth as he thinks “…it’s not one I find workable. But it’s interesting when you repeat them to me—I think I see why people find them beautiful.”

“Romantic,” Sephiroth says after a moment.

The other man doesn’t speak. Only smiles, a little rueful in a way Sephiroth suspects only he’s privileged to see, and then nestles his head into the curve of Sephiroth’s throat.

Sephiroth licks his lips, thinking—and then pushing the idea away, because it’s so quiet now, with even the TV so much meaningless background noise to Vincent’s steady, calm breathing, the reassuring weight of his hands, the perfect stretch of his cock inside Sephiroth. And then revisiting it again, because it is quiet and perfect, what the man does, and Sephiroth thinks…he should do more. Vincent doesn’t ask for it but he should do more.

He purses his lips again, and the movement makes Vincent lift his head. So their gazes cross as Sephiroth murmurs the first line of another Wutaian poem. A well-known love-song, with historical significance because of its use as a code-sign in a notable palace coup two centuries ago, which is why Sephiroth happens to know it.

That isn’t why Vincent’s eyes half-close as he listens—and he does listen. He lets Sephiroth reach the end of the line and then pulls his hand up to curl over Sephiroth’s throat, pulling Sephiroth’s head about for a long, languid kiss as little quivers of strain run down Sephiroth’s body from his grip. Then brushes his hand down Sephiroth’s front, chasing the tremors till he’s settled Sephiroth back against him, gentled into the bonds.

His hand drifts under the slip, then brushes up against Sephiroth’s cock. Sephiroth flexes himself around Vincent, not in struggle but in invitation, and says the second line of the poem. The last word barely drops from his lips when Vincent flicks his thumbnail against the sound, sending icy vibrations through Sephiroth and pulling a ragged cry out of him.

“Do you want—me to say—more?” Sephiroth pants.

For an answer, Vincent twists the sound again. Sephiroth arches as the menthol seems to refresh its intensity, pushing an icy wave deep into him, deep enough that tendrils even start to frost his scrotum—Vincent cups that with his other hand, and warms Sephiroth’s throat with first his lips and then his breath. Just enough to coax out another line, and then another, as Vincent matches each with fond, precise caresses that inextricably tangle pain and pleasure.

When Sephiroth runs out of breath, Vincent tugs his head back onto the man’s shoulder. Leaves the sound in, pinched between thumb and forefinger so even as Sephiroth slowly sags against him, an anticipatory tension continues to sing through Sephiroth’s body.

“Am I training you to be a romantic now?” Vincent says. Then laughs low in his throat, as he draws his other hand lightly along Sephiroth’s thigh. “I doubt it—we’ve both learned too much of how the world truly works—”

“But I want what I want.” Sephiroth speaks before he thinks—or perhaps it’s that his thought can’t interfere with his words, when they’re like this. He has no reason to mind what he says, when nearly all other times, he has something to guard against. “I didn’t think to want before, but you—I want what I want now, and I can’t go back to not wanting—I can keep it away from those fools but I want…I always want now, Vincent. You trained me and I want…make me say them, make me want to say them…make me what you want. I didn’t want before you did that.”

Vincent’s silent for a moment. Then he inhales sharply. His hands don’t seize at Sephiroth but go very still instead, and their stillness is more telling than a bite or slap would have been. But Vincent doesn’t punish, as he’s said—and he doesn’t take his weaknesses out on Sephiroth either.

He exhales, and as he does, his arms tighten around Sephiroth to draw them even closer together. “Then give me another poem,” he says, as his fingertip circles where the sounding rod rises from Sephiroth’s cock. “Any poem, so long as you can finish it…tell me all the ones you know. When you run out, then I’ll stop.”

They’ll be here all night, Sephiroth thinks as he shakes on the other man’s cock. Promises, silently, before he takes in a ragged breath and licks his lips and, as Vincent begins to nip along the side of his throat, starts on a new one.

Chapter 58: Side Scene: Laundry Day

A common argument between SOLDIER recruits is whether laundry or sewer duty is the worst assignment to draw, given the likelihood you’ll end up having to touch stuff you wish you didn’t, but Zack’s never had a problem with it. Maybe it has to do with him growing up in a large family where you either pulled your weight with chores or your siblings were going to leave you out, but it’s just a thing that has to be done every so often. And since it has to be done, he might as well do it himself, or else even if R&D doesn’t scrape a sample off the lint screen when you’re not looking, some mutant killer cockroach is going to end up getting tracked back to the dirty socks he just stuffed in the trash because inventory restock was the next day anyway and he could just get a quarter’s worth of new ones.

Okay, so maybe he had to learn that particular lesson, but once Zack’s picked up something, he never drops it. The point is, he does his own laundry, and ever since Angeal saved his ass from those cockroaches, he’s happy to return the favor when Angeal gets knocked out of commission for a couple days.

Angeal’s fine, more or less, just needs some intensive rest-and-recovery after SOLDIER medical finished patching him up because the man ran around untreated for three hours first, tracking down every last one of his squad and personally dragging them to safety, and Genesis isn’t going to get back in town for a couple days. For totally legitimate SOLDIER reasons, which even his worst critics wouldn’t call an excuse to not be rushing back, but Genesis is the kind of guy who will keep on rampaging through a really bad infestation of deathworms while blitz-texting you messages about the zillion important to-dos that colossally self-sacrificing moron he lives with decided were less important than rescuing the asses of incompetent idiots. So yeah, Zack’s over at Angeal’s apartment after-hours with a list of stuff he’s pretty sure he can clear so Genesis doesn’t bring the rampage home, and laundry is one of them. Because laundry isn’t unsanctioned genetic engineering, right? Totally achievable.

The thing is, Zack realizes as he stands in Angeal and Genesis’ utility room and stares at the literal row of boxes of cleaning supplies—not a box, a row of them, and these are good-size boxes that are filled with bottles and tins and what-have-you—is that he doesn’t think he’s ever actually seen Angeal do the laundry. And he’s been over a lot, and seen the guy doing plenty of other domestic duties, but not the laundry. But Angeal’s a pretty simple man, doesn’t wear anything that doesn’t come off the commissary shelves. Genesis, all right, that’s a guy with a wardrobe which is going to come with care instructions, but Zack can tell that all these supplies aren’t just for Genesis’ side of the closet, because over the row of boxes are several shelves, each holding a few bins, and these bins have clothing in them. Clearly sorted, clearly including items from both of them, and clearly using a system that is totally obfuscating to Zack.

It's just starting to sink in that Zack might just fail this mission when there’s a buzz at the door. Zack goes to get it without checking his phone, and so when he opens the door and finds Sephiroth standing there, it genuinely feels like a guardian angel descending from on high to bail him out.

“You’ve been watching those ridiculous holiday shows again,” Sephiroth comments as he and Zack go back into the laundry room. He promptly starts pulling out bins and selecting cleaners, with maybe one sniff of the air before lining up various combinations in front of each bin of clothes. “Pre-soaks, different formulations for different staining. The timing matters too—also temperature, but Angeal does it by feel. There should be some thermometers in the kitchen.”

Zack is not so blinded by the effortless glory of his commander that he does not pick up the implied ‘of course I do it with scientific precision,’ but he’s not an idiot and now is clearly not the time to learn the full Sephiroth method of laundry. They’ve got equipment to assemble and clothes to clean and a rabid Rhapsodos to forestall, so he hops to it.

It’s about twenty minutes later, after they’ve gotten everything soaking right and are now setting up some racks for air-drying, when Sephiroth mutters that standard-issue detergent’s fine except for the smell. “Never noticed it, really, but then, I’m pretty sure the genes skipped my nose,” Zack says as he carefully tweaks a rack.

Sephiroth’s lips thin slightly. Given the situation, Zack assumes that means the rack still isn’t level and he starts to adjust it again, only for Sephiroth to shake his head. “It was fine before,” Sephiroth says, and then pauses, staring at the rack. “They came up with that when we were still living in the lab. Everything smelled like it.”

“Oh,” Zack says, because ninety-nine percent of the time he thinks his friends function insanely sanely, even Genesis, for people with the childhoods they had, but every so often something comes up.

He has a hard time calling it a slip too, because Sephiroth just isn’t the kind of guy who makes slips. And since it’s probably not a slip, then Sephiroth is probably going somewhere with this, except Zack is pretty proud of figuring out how to support most of his commander’s brainwaves but he’s never quite figured out this type, not without coming off like an idiot.

Sephiroth seems to get that, because he just turns away, checking something on his phone. “It’s effective for the majority of the type of stains we incur, and can be formulated for mass-production. Criticizing the smell is a luxury.”

“Well, being an officer has to get you some perks, right?” Zack says. Because yep, idiot is all he’s got.

Thankfully, he’s saved the second time by the doorbell. Although this time it’s a bit more like cutting out in the middle of the climatic heartfelt, revelatory speech to an urgent weather update when Sephiroth comes back with Vincent.

Vincent being Vincent, he just ignores the boggling and nods at Zack while holding up some bottle he’s brought with him.

“We need to dilute it first, three parts to two,” Sephiroth says, nodding at the one bin they haven’t treated. He pauses again and Zack can see him eyeing Vincent, something twitching around under his bland expression, as Vincent immediately reaches for a measuring cup. Zack’s pretty sure Sephiroth hadn’t checked out his reaction like that. “Angeal would rather soak twice than limit Genesis to dark colors.”

The corners of Vincent’s lips twitch. He doesn’t stop mixing but something he does must be what Sephiroth is looking for, because Sephiroth suddenly snorts and steps back. He leaves Vincent to it and pokes around in the bins till he finds a nearly-empty bottle. Once Vincent’s put enough in the bin of clothes, he gives his bottle over to Sephiroth, who uses it to fill up the one he found.

“I need to go in to speak to Cissnei, so I’ll pick up some for tonight,” Vincent says, watching Sephiroth.

He apparently means whatever’s in the bottle, and at that point it occurs to Zack that Sephiroth probably asked Vincent to get some from their place when he noticed Angeal and Genesis were low on it. Zack doesn’t remember Sephiroth texting but then, he’d been kind of hustling his ass to follow Sephiroth’s instructions for each bin. “Okay, so can we selfie now and send it to Gen so he knows I didn’t bleach out his pants?”

“No,” Sephiroth says, but he does it like he just thinks Zack is being a ridiculous newbie, not like Zack is irredeemable. “But you can go see if Angeal’s awake enough for a quick message. Then I’m putting Genesis on blackout till they clear the rest of the reactor.”

“All right! Enabling speed-sexting, here we go!” Zack says, scooting out of the room.

“No,” Sephiroth sighs from behind him, and then the man goes on more quietly and clearly not to him. “Let’s deal with the food before Zack does.”

Zack actually has handled dinner for Angeal before, but the low, amused sound from Vincent is a cue he can read, and he makes sure he takes the long way through the apartment. Angeal’s fine, really, but he figures he’ll wait till Sephiroth convinces himself of it too.

Notes:

A lot of my ideas tend to start out as me wondering how you would handle basic chores in this or that non-basic environment. This is one of them.

Chapter 59: Interlude: Vincent’s Turn to Be a Mother Hen

It wasn’t the worst scrape SOLDIER has ever had to handle, but the environment had been disgusting, even by the standards of any veteran of Midgar’s subterranean depths. Sephiroth’s injuries hadn’t prevented him from walking himself out, and while he’d availed himself of the nearest washing facilities, he’d been later to them than the others since, as highest-ranking officer and SOLDIER’s commander-in-chief, there were some calls he needed to make and they couldn’t be delegated. Under the circumstances, his delay to clean his wounds had been a reasonable sacrifice with the anticipated consequences.

“Healing factor usually handles infection,” he mutters, nodding at his phone on the examination table by his hip.

Vincent glances in that direction, but doesn’t pick up the phone. Instead he comes expressionlessly up by Sephiroth, who stiffens before he can help it. Then, grimacing, Sephiroth pulls away the wad of gauze from his side.

SOLDIER medical has already lanced the area and it’s been draining for the last fifteen minutes. It was a relatively simple issue to address, and the few complications had been due to the length of time before Sephiroth had sought treatment. But he’d dealt with his calls and ensured no one was going to chase if he took an early evening; his mother’s out of town at a conference and he thinks they’ll be able to keep his test results from her till she returns. He may have been a little careless in missing the first signs of inflammation, but all the delays after that point had been justifiable.

And yet he finds himself watching Vincent’s face for signs of…he’s not quite certain, even though Vincent would never betray his professionalism in a setting like this, and outside of it Sephiroth thinks he’s found Vincent in sufficiently worse states for the man to not be a hypocrite. When Vincent lays two fingers just shy of the wound, next to obvious traces where the scalpel had widened it, Sephiroth inhales sharply and finds his sword-hand pressing open-palmed against his hip. Not defensive but not quite assured either.

“Hewley dropped in on his way out to Sector Three—yes, I checked your rosters,” Vincent says, his hand rising automatically to pin Sephiroth’s shoulder as Sephiroth lets out an irritated noise. “You can yell at him from your desk. Not here.”

He’s right, but Sephiroth resists the man’s downward push for another second. Then makes himself relax just as the surgeon peers around the corner. This one recognizes Vincent and doesn’t wait time going through formalities about visitors that Sephiroth would dismiss anyway. When Sephiroth nods them in, they come over as Vincent moves to the side and give Sephiroth’s wound a quick inspection, then put in a few more quick-dissolve sutures. Once the wound is clean, the stitching is largely just to guide the muscles to knit correctly. A light gauze wrap is added for protection and then Sephiroth is left to see himself out.

Albeit with Vincent’s silent, almost infuriatingly unobtrusive assistance. The other man hands him his phone without Zack’s chattering recaps, then takes Sephiroth’s coat and chest armor from the other end of the table and slings that over his arm, correctly guessing Sephiroth won’t want to cover the wound. Then they walk out and through the halls till they’re deep into SOLDIER’s part of the building.

“Can I yell now?” Sephiroth finds himself asking tightly, while keying in the code to his office.

Vincent looks at him with a bemused expression that only deepens once the door closes and they’re assured privacy. “Your medical wing is secure, but given where Hewley was going, he’s probably only getting to somewhere with cell reception now.”

“Do I want to know how you know that?” Sephiroth says. Then he shakes his head, annoyed with himself. He knows how Vincent knows that sort of thing, and how much of it is knowledge versus an educated guess, and he—knows it’s entirely on his side, that the other man’s solicitousness is irritating. He’s not used to it—still isn’t used to it, despite how accustomed he is to Vincent these days.

He knows what it is—he wasn’t kept in the dark about human relationships, only encouraged to alienate himself from them. And he knows what he wants, and it’s the opposite of what he’s feeling, but it’s times like these that he thinks…he thinks of his two parents, he may have killed the wrong one.

Which is a foolish thought, and he’s wiser than that. He knows that, it’s only—he stills, then swallows absently, shocked out of his thoughts by a fingertip touch on his jaw.

Vincent looks straight into his eyes. Unblinking and calm, but by no means cold…when the man finally moves his gaze across Sephiroth’s shoulder and then down, Sephiroth exhales at the warmth of its passing. Then obligingly crooks his arm aside as Vincent hooks his hair with that finger and scoops it out of the way, while the man’s other hand peels off the gauze covering.

This time Vincent’s examination is as detailed as any doctor’s—more so, with his enhanced senses coming into play as he stoops to sniff along the edges of the wound. “It might be clean but you’re still fighting off the infection deeper inside,” he points out after a couple seconds of examination. “Your stress markers are up.”

“I’ll be fine by morning,” Sephiroth says, but he murmurs it. And when Vincent finishes with his side, he puts his hand out and fists some of the man’s coat before Vincent can move back. “I’ve had this happen before, there’s a protocol—”

“I’ve read that one,” Vincent says. His tone is dry but there is a distinct hint of something with more weight behind the humor, something that comes fully out as he pulls a roll of gauze from his pocket and proceeds to replace the old patch with a few rounds about Sephiroth’s entire torso; the wound itself wouldn’t need so much elaboration but the additional support will help align the healing muscles. His fingers linger a little, then sweep just below Sephiroth’s nipple as Sephiroth exhales slowly. “I’m not going to listen if you beg. I’ll have you when you’re clear for my marks, not before.”

Sephiroth starts to reply, but Vincent times a tug at the gauze so that it catches him first. It’s far lighter than when he’s being laced or bound, but even so, he thinks about that—that and not about why he cannot, as long as his mother still lives, simply see the doctor when he needs one.

“I have the time to wait on you. My next trip hasn’t changed its schedule.” Vincent ties off the gauze, then lays his palm over it as Sephiroth’s fingers crumple more of his coat. He lets Sephiroth pull them near enough to share a breath, but keeps his mouth clear. “You know what to look after here, Sephiroth, and then I look after everything else.”

He wants this, Sephiroth thinks, and sometimes, like now, he wants it with a ferocity that would destroy everything, even what he wants to protect, if he’s not careful. And he’s always been the one to be careful—even Angeal and Genesis can’t always watch themselves or others when they should, so he’s been the one. He never learned to share that.

He can—can and is and will. He’s never failed at learning what he must either, and as he thinks that the last vestiges of his irritation disappear. “At least tell me what time I should be home for dinner, if you’re going to insist on being impossible,” he says, giving in and letting the ache in his neck bend him towards the other man.

Vincent smiles. His fingers slide about the back of Sephiroth’s neck, intuitively seeking out that line of tension and easing it, then tilt Sephiroth’s stooping head so that he can kiss past Sephiroth’s parted lips against the side of the jaw, with just enough teeth to promise this isn’t a permanent ban on marks. “Take care of anything before six,” he tells Sephiroth. “And then you’ll be done.”

“Six,” Sephiroth says, letting that serve as a barrier between him and his worries. “It’ll be done.”

Chapter 60: Interlude: Sephiroth Explores His Sense of Fashion

Vincent works Sephiroth so roughly that he almost forgets about it. Two hours with his wrists strapped over his head to the weapons rack in his private training room, stiff exercise bands slinging each of his thighs back to the crossbars running diagonally to either side of him. His feet aren’t tied to the bars and Vincent tells him to keep his legs closed, but the elastic of the bands keeps dragging them apart, while straps around his torso keep his spine pinned to the column behind him and reduce how much leverage he can exert with his upper body.

It's simple calisthenics but Vincent pushes him past his preternatural strength and stamina until he’s dripping with sweat. Rivers of it sluicing through the wet tangle of his hair behind him, its warm salty sting needling under his bonds as the friction starts to rub away at his skin. And the voice—the soft, steady voice telling him to close his legs, to close them even as the burn nestles into his thigh muscles and rockets into his knees and shoulders and pelvis. Soft and warm as the tongue lapping the sweat from where it runs off his waist, his groin, the tip of his cock and the curve of his scrotum. It caresses him into sagging, surrendering himself to that seductive affection…and then sharp teeth bruise at his inner thighs. Making him jerk away and try to bring his knees together, feeling how the aching drag of his flesh out from under those teeth extends into the hot, tingling streaks of fatigue spreading through his limbs.

By the time he comes, he’s an unstuffed doll hanging in his bonds. Vincent has to hold him up to untie him, and then carry him across the hall and wash him in their shower while he’s on his knees. He sinks pliantly forward onto his elbows as well, content to let his sore body be molded to the other man’s wishes. When Vincent’s cock finally presses at his hole, his shuddering moan puts his cheek flat to the tile.

“I should put you to bed,” Vincent says, a finger still smearing come between his buttocks as the man dries his hair afterward. “I can wake you for din—”

“No,” Sephiroth says without thinking. He blinks once, the world still gently muddy even though he can see the mirror over the sink—they’ve moved out of the shower—and the glass is clear. His thoughts are still more of a haphazard sketch than a true roadmap, but…he remembers. He’d asked for—he’d promised more. “I want—I want to dress for you.”

Vincent’s hand stills. Then turns slightly, cupping Sephiroth’s buttock while his other hand drops the towel and slides under Sephiroth’s chin as Sephiroth turns towards him. Nuzzles between Vincent’s claws, which obligingly spread so Sephiroth can tease the joins, as sensitive as the webbing of any other person’s hands would be.

“Did you order your own?” Vincent asks. More on the pleased side of amused, Sephiroth thinks, and when he suckles into the vee of the man’s fingers, the warmth of Vincent’s gaze deepens. “I’ll have to ask my contact why—”

“I didn’t use them, I used…someone Genesis recommended,” Sephiroth says. He pauses, then flicks his tongue against the join again. “So you needn’t worry about any compromise of your contacts.”

“I don’t with you,” Vincent says. Rubbing his thumbpad along the line of Sephiroth’s jaw, the words coming without hesitation but not without thought. He doesn’t scold either, though he lifts Sephiroth’s head a little to study it. “How much did Rhapsodos extract for that favor?”

Sephiroth snorts. He hadn’t been particularly concerned about Vincent’s reaction, but it’s still…welcome to have the confirmation, he thinks. He doesn’t take the man’s understanding for granted, ever. “Not much,” he says as he pushes himself up on his arms. “We have our annual retreat coming up. He already expected you’d show up at some point.”

“He wants to see you in this outfit, with me?” Vincent muses.

“He likes having his good taste affirmed. Though I told him I can’t guarantee you’ll like it as much as he thinks,” Sephiroth says.

Vincent smiles at him. Then ducks down and presses their lips together. It’s only a kiss, lightly probing but by no means the kind of scorched-earth ravaging they were engaging in either. But it’s the calm in it that renews the weakness in Sephiroth’s legs, the way it affirms Vincent’s willingness to take what he has to offer.

It takes Sephiroth’s head back down to the floor, and he rests there for a few minutes as Vincent finishes drying him. Then a few minutes more after Vincent gets up and walks out of the bathroom, moving in the direction of the kitchen. Vincent hasn’t cooked in a few days and the expected meal from scratch will take a while.

But not so long that Sephiroth can afford to laze about forever, and even if Vincent is unreasonably tolerant at times, he does think Vincent will like it. And he wants to see if he—not Genesis, however much the man wants to take credit for it—is proven right.

So he peels himself off the floor. His legs feel unwieldy where they aren’t trembling with tiny razor-edged twinges of exhaustion, but he manages to comb out his hair. Braiding it would take too much effort so he simply ties it back at the nape, and then again halfway down. And then he staggers to the closet, where the plain stack of boxes has been waiting for a couple days.

Vincent noticed it, Sephiroth is certain, but the man hadn’t asked till just now. And Sephiroth thinks a little on that, Vincent not asking when everyone else in the world does, before summoning up his remaining reserves. Because he needs to be careful if he’s not going to ruin it.

He’s already clean from the shower but he takes the boxes back into the bathroom and wipes his fingers off before he lifts out the dress so he won’t smudge it. Every mark would show on the silk, a glossy pink satin that’s a heavier weight than what Vincent usually chooses for him, but that still requires very careful smoothing to sleek down his torso. No lace or embroidery interrupts the shimmering surface either, and the slim cut allows no margin of error for flaws.

But there aren’t any, once he has it on. He checks all angles to confirm that before he moves onto the rest. First the brown leather belt, which clasps from just below his pectorals to the tops of his hips. It lacks the boning of Genesis’ corsets, but the belt is subtly contoured to have a similar effect, and its leather is certainly robust enough, despite its buttery suppleness, that when Sephiroth tightens the lacing in the front, he finds he has to start breathing from his chest rather than his gut. Not so much that it will impair him unless he’s fighting against its constriction, and he doesn’t intend to.

He firmly ties the laces off, centering the knot against his breast, and then starts to bend, only to feel the dress tauten across his hips. He stops and brushes his fingers against the tops of the leg-slits, testing their give. They actually run a little higher but the top two inches are laced closed with matching ribbons. He takes the ribbons out and puts them aside for now, then snags a pair of white silk panties from the counter and bends again to pull them on.

The panties aren’t new, but the dress and belt are, and he’s never worn satin before. He takes an experimental step and then sways, moaning a little between his teeth, as the dress whispers across the bruises Vincent left up his inner thighs. It’s clinging more closely to him than the gauzier silk slips in his closet; the dress also runs to his ankles, while the slips generally are mid-thigh or higher.

He walks slowly. The kitchen isn’t far, but the teasing pull of silk across his skin has his cock hard and his balls tingling by the time he enters it. He thinks it’s more his hitched breathing that turns Vincent’s head than his footsteps.

From the looks of it, the other man has just finished prepping all the ingredients and was about to turn the flame on under the wok. His claws click against the stove dial as he takes in Sephiroth; he doesn’t snap it off or nick or anything overly dramatic but he does have that moment where his control is less of a concern than his appreciation.

Then he leaves the stove and comes to where Sephiroth is standing against the counter, hands folded over its edge so Vincent can wrap about him from behind, leaving himself open to that possessive embrace. When Vincent’s palms slide over his belt, he flattens his own to the counter and tilts his head back against the other man’s shoulder, closing his eyes while Vincent sucks a burning, aching mark into the side of his throat.

“Very pretty,” Vincent murmurs when his mouth releases Sephiroth. His hands continue their roaming, one coming up to knead over the bodice so Sephiroth feels again how they’d pressed against the weapons rack earlier, the other swinging across Sephiroth’s groin and then tucking into a leg slit to fondle over the panties. “My pretty consort would like to join me for dinner, and ask for something…a favor? Dressed like this…”

Sephiroth rolls up onto the balls of his feet as Vincent’s fingers stroke the silk taut across his cock head. He can feel it growing sticky over the slit—he bucks helplessly as Vincent pets the spot with a fingertip, and then again when his right nipple is snagged through the bodice slit and twisted just till it sparks sore. “Dressed like—like what, Vincent?”

“Like a—a pretty sweet, the kind of sweet you…” Vincent pretends to think, but his mouth is nursing down from the bite-mark on Sephiroth’s throat, burning a line of arousal to the top of Sephiroth’s shoulder where he bites again, just next to the dress’ thin strap “…put out on a pretty dish for later. After the work is done—I need to cook, we’ll have nothing to eat and you look like a promise—such a sweet, delicious little promise—”

He pulls and rolls at Sephiroth’s nipple, then moves to the other one to work it just as sore, while his fingers stroke relentlessly over the panties. He’s hard as well, but when Sephiroth rubs against him, Vincent drops his hand and hooks the belt lacings, tugging them even tighter as he curls two fingers between Sephiroth’s thighs and suddenly rakes over their bruising.

Sephiroth gasps, and then gasps again, slumping into Vincent as the belt keeps the air crammed high and hot in his chest. He sways a little, clutching the counter, and very dimly feels Vincent release the laces and spread that palm against his belly. “Breathe through your nose,” Vincent says.

Voice curling into Sephiroth’s ear, its own kind of promise as Sephiroth obeys its command. Vincent rewards him with a press of the mouth just behind the point of his jaw, and then keeps that warmth there as his nipples are plucked again. He gasps at it but Vincent rubs the hand he has over Sephiroth’s belt in a slow circle and somehow this smooths the rough edge off the gasp so it’s not as dizzying. Only hazy, the comfortably-encompassing haze Sephiroth always searches for when they’re like this.

“You need to be tied up,” Vincent tells him as he groans and lolls against the man. “In a pretty little package till I’m ready.”

“Not—” Sephiroth manages, and even in his haze he can feel how Vincent pauses to listen “—legs, please, I want them open. They’re so sore…I can’t—close them…”

Vincent laughs, low and a little rough. “Is that the favor you wanted? My lovely consort, so sweet I would kill anyone who sees you like this, and all you want is to keep my hand—” he pinches Sephiroth’s cock head through the panties and laughs again when Sephiroth whines “—here.”

“Please, Vincent,” Sephiroth moans, though even as Vincent pulls his hand out from the dress, he’s loosening his grip on the counter, ready for whatever the man wants from him. “Please, I want—I want them open for you.”

There’s another laugh, but Vincent doesn’t reply. Only pushes him against the counter, then turns him around. His hands briefly rise to grope at Vincent’s shirt, but then are pushed back to press against the drawers.

Vincent pulls up the front of his dress, then slides his panties down his legs. He has to grip the counter again to step out of them and continues gripping it as Vincent folds the panties about the upper half of his cock and then knots them off so they form a little cap on it. They’re not tight enough to keep him from coming, which he does when Vincent turns him back around and fucks him against the counter.

Sephiroth rests belly-down on it afterward, letting his arms dangle till Vincent pulls them up against his back. Straps them into a binder that way, forearms horizontally crossed, rendering him helpless as Vincent scrapes the come back into his hole and then plugs him. He’s turned back around with the dress still hiked and Vincent, watching him as he whimpers and hitches without trying to pull away, ties up his cock and balls with silk cord. Keeping him soft now, soft and aching with his netted balls rubbing insistently over his bruised thighs as his dress is finally brushed down.

Vincent ties a chest harness on him next, trapping his nipples till they’re as pink as his dress, the man tells him. He moans so much that Vincent retrieves the ribbons from the bathroom and uses them to gag and blindfold him before shoving him down onto a kitchen chair.

His legs aren’t tied, but he can’t push himself up. He’s too bound for that, too wound into the need Vincent’s expertly woven through every bit of him to do anything but sag in the chair and listen. The sink tap running and then not, the hiss of oil in the pan and the hum of the stove fan.

He’s going to be there till Vincent’s finished cooking, but he can’t help himself. He can’t rise but he can spread his legs and he does, rolling his hips every so often when he hears Vincent pass near him. And sometimes the man will stop for a few caresses, stop to tweak his nipples or brush claw-tips up his thighs. Once, as something bubbles delicious smells from the stove, Vincent grips Sephiroth’s knees to opposite sides of the chair and noses under the dress to trace all the silk cords digging into Sephiroth’s balls with his tongue. He reduces Sephiroth to a mewling mess, then sucks at the silk-wrapped head of Sephiroth’s cock till he works out enough precome through the panties to make a savoring sound.

“Let me come, please,” Sephiroth groans when Vincent finally cuts away the gag.

“Such a sweet little toy,” Vincent says, hand caressing the underside of Sephiroth’s jaw. Then he moves it to encircle Sephiroth’s throat, thumb pressing over the bites from earlier as he pulls Sephiroth forward on the chair by that hold. “After the meal, with your legs open.”

“On—your cock, on it, please,” Sephiroth gasps, but he’s drooping in Vincent’s grip.

He’ll take however the man wants him. Which is in their bedroom, still bound and blind, with Vincent nestled behind him and each of his legs carefully bent up and out to the sides so Vincent can easily toy with him. There’s a tray of food somewhere that Vincent feeds him from, flicking his nipples or scratching his thighs to make him open his mouth and then stroking lazily over his cock bindings to reward his swallows. He’s not on Vincent’s cock yet, only wedged against it as his body grips at the plug he still has to settle for, and he’s convinced it’ll be like that when Vincent suddenly pushes the tray away and curls both hands under his buttocks.

Sephiroth’s mind clouds out once he’s sunk all the way onto Vincent’s cock. It fits so much better than the unyielding plug, he fits, he’s been shaped and trained to fit and now that he’s in his place he doesn’t want to think about anything else for a while. He thinks Vincent lets him enjoy it for at least a few minutes, that simple mental nothingness, and then…little, insistent, dragging strokes along his bruised legs, drawing out bursts of hot pain that start to clear his mind. The touches soon graduate to deceptively gentle massaging around the rim of his hole, and then rubbing along his perineum till he’s squirming and whining, fully aware that his cock is still tied and still soft and still aching.

“Vincent,” he starts to rasp, and the curl of fingers across the front of his throat stops him.

Tilts him back, lipping his pleas soundlessly at the air instead, as Vincent kisses the corner of his mouth. “Open,” Vincent tells him.

He keeps his mouth open, swaying and shuddering, as fingers tug around his cock head. The panties loosen and then drop away, only to reappear in a tightly-balled wad poked between his lips. He sucks at it without thinking as Vincent knots the gag behind his head, then gasps so hard that the belt seems to crush his ribs when the cords on his cock suddenly loosen. He wants to come, he does, but it’s so—Vincent’s fingers replace the cords and he finds his rhythm with his breathing again, steadied by their tightness. He doesn’t have to think about this, he’d forgotten. He doesn’t have to think, just—

“Come,” he’s instructed, and he does.

* * *

“What made you think of the color?” Vincent asks him when he’s recovered a little. Still seated on the man’s cock but ungagged and with the blindfold off. The belt and chest harness are off as well, but Sephiroth hitched himself on Vincent’s prick till the man agreed to keep his arms bound for a little longer. “I like it, but it’s…not something Rhapsodos suggested, is it?”

Sephiroth smiles where he’s resting his forehead against Vincent’s temple. “He tried very hard to argue me out of it. Insisted I’d…look like a playacting schoolgirl.”

“His insults are very helpful for anyone needing to work up a profile of him,” Vincent observes dryly. He satisfied himself sufficiently earlier, or so he said, but his fingers keep trailing teasingly behind Sephiroth’s scrotum. “What made you think of that color?”

When Sephiroth pauses, he can sense Vincent’s attention sharpen, but not in a way that causes him alarm, or that makes him feel as if he needs to quiet the other man’s alarm. Vincent’s curious but if Sephiroth doesn’t want to say, he’ll find another time. And he always finds another time—Sephiroth is annoyed at himself for a moment, because of how he feels wary of that and because he knows his wariness has nothing to do with the other man. Which is why he answers. “It’s…there’s an explanation. Aerith left her shawl.”

“Gast’s daughter?” Vincent says after a moment. Dipping his head to kiss the top of Sephiroth’s shoulder at the same time, then nuzzling at Sephiroth’s jaw as his hands smooth along Sephiroth’s inner thighs. Not teasing, though they’re running over the teeth-marks—grounding, grounding and leveling off the irrational nerves that keep trying to rear their head in Sephiroth. “I didn’t realize Gast had his family up to visit.”

“She caught him by surprise as well—he hustled her out just before I dropped in and that’s why she left it…” Sephiroth moves his head and shoulders in restless irritation, but then succumbs to Vincent’s persistent petting; Vincent’s still only curious, only ever that and never judging and he can trust in that, has trusted in that. He doesn’t need to dress up the truth in the hesitations his fears keep trying to foist on him. “She likes pink, but that wasn’t—her shawl was pink satin but I was looking at the design on it at first. Gast told me it’s a traditional Cetra design, and that pink actually holds symbolic meaning for them. They dressed their leaders in it and their leaders were chosen on the basis of courage.”

“Not necessarily physical strength, if I remember—Ifalna told us something like that once when we had them over for dinner,” Vincent says when Sephiroth pauses again. He moves one hand to run the back of a finger over Sephiroth’s dress. “The courage to stand for a given position.”

Sephiroth nods. Then leans his head against Vincent again. “It wasn’t—I don’t want to be a Cetra. But I kept thinking about the color afterward, not the meaning—the color and the way it felt—Aerith was up to see Zack and I took the shawl with me to give to him, since Gast is going to be busy with Mother all week.”

Vincent makes an amused noise. “Is Gast concerned about that?”

“Not enough to speak to me about it, and he knows I’d speak to Zack if he asked,” Sephiroth says. Perhaps a little sharply, but Vincent kisses the side of his throat, just near enough to the sore spots that he shivers. “I should sit Zack down. I don’t care how many people he sees but he should be more discreet about it—Vincent, I’m still sore—”

“Still so sweet, too,” Vincent rumbles, as he licks harder at Sephiroth’s throat. When Sephiroth groans and arches, Vincent bends so that it pushes Sephiroth’s flesh between his teeth. “Sweet enough to taste…to keep you sore, that’s what you thought when you saw that pink…how it’s the color you turn when you’re this sore…”

He’s right, of course—that is the truth, that even though Sephiroth had no reason to connect Aerith’s shawl with what the two of them do, there’s always a small part of Sephiroth these days which is looking for…ways to fit this in. Sephiroth isn’t a fool and knows very well which boundaries are uncrossable—even Genesis only lets his selfish hedonism go so far—but that’s not why he’s learned to let himself not only have but occasionally also flesh out such thoughts.

“I knew you’d taste it,” he murmurs. Keeping his throat bared for the warm mouth savoring it, sinking into the hot trembling swirl of blood its sharp teeth raise in him. “Taste what I saw. Genesis can’t see it but I knew you would.”

“We’ll talk about Rhapsodos later,” Vincent says, pulling him closer. “When I’m done with you. He can wait.”

* * *

Genesis had wanted something in return for recommending his tailor, and Vincent isn’t averse to it once Sephiroth tells him what it is. Nor is he averse to taking the instinctive irritation Sephiroth felt at Genesis’ demands and turning it into a form Sephiroth finds far more satisfactory.

“Satisfaction? Is that what you’re hoping for?” Vincent says, almost coy in how relaxed he is. He curls his hands over the tops of Sephiroth’s shoulders, pressing lightly down into their shivering, before letting his chuckle tickle across Sephiroth’s nape. “Such a needy toy, thinking of something like that.”

He caresses Sephiroth’s shoulders again, this time catching at the thin straps of the dress. His touch is barely more than featherweight but it’s enough—more than enough to send waves of sensation crashing all through Sephiroth. Who can do nothing but shudder with them, whimpering as all parts of his body signal how subject he is to the other man’s whims.

Bound and gagged on the bed, packaged into the pink dress like a luxurious delicacy. His waist is tightly cinched in a brown leather belt that makes him breathe from the breast, and the liquid stretch of the satin over his pectorals makes them look softly rounded rather than imposingly defined. His arms are sheathed in matching leather gloves with sleek mitted ends, and straps hooked onto them keep the upper arms pinioned to his sides and the lower parts crossed over the belt, with his wrists held helplessly to his belly. He can only flutter his fingers in the mitts, watching, as Vincent reaches around him and leisurely begins to roll up the front of the dress.

Underneath his legs are strapped together for now, but Vincent unclips the thigh cuffs and then puts his hand between them. When Sephiroth twitches, Vincent drops his arm around Sephiroth’s waist, giving one of Sephiroth’s wrists a squeeze of pretend reassurance while his other hand roves up to where Sephiroth’s cock is laced with brown leather strips. Snugly straitjacketed but with stretches of skin between the bands, skin highly-sensitized from being bound so snugly that even the lightest touch feels like fire. And Vincent is far from light, as he fondles and teases Sephiroth’s cock, even tugging it by the head as Sephiroth muffles desperate moans into his gag.

His cock isn’t going to be freed any time soon. More straps under the dress are holding it up against his groin, out of the way as Vincent transfers his attention to Sephiroth’s unbound ball sac. The man pulls it from between Sephiroth’s thighs and digs at it with his thumbnail, leaving red crescents all over it as Sephiroth’s mitted hands pat futilely a few inches above. Sephiroth’s bound cock flushes in its straps, bright against the soft pink of the dress. “Like if I’d bitten you, and sucked for the juices,” Vincent murmurs as he slides further behind Sephiroth, his mouth dropping to Sephiroth’s throat as Sephiroth whimpers. “I think I will bite you, and compare for myself.”

Then he does, deep into the join of neck and shoulder, and Sephiroth can see how his skin sinks before Vincent’s teeth, how the blood rises—yes, how very much like the sweet inside of a fruit it looks. He can see this, because Vincent has a tablet locked into a hinged arm extending from the bedstead and the screen is inches away from Sephiroth. Showing him himself, his lips reddening as well against the white cloth gag stuffed between them, his dilated pupils, his bruising flesh…he can see this, and somewhere, in the other suite, Rhapsodos is seeing it as well.

Vincent is looking now. Raising his head from his handiwork and checking its quality on the tablet. He inhales absently by Sephiroth’s ear, then makes a low satisfied noise as he then swings himself fully behind Sephiroth.

“Let’s see your pretty hole now,” Vincent says as he pulls up Sephiroth’s legs by the thighs. He grips each thigh-cuff by its ring as Sephiroth arches back against him, trying to spread as fast as Vincent wants.

Twin clicks and Sephiroth’s thighs are chained open. Vincent adjusts the pillows to accommodate and moves his own legs under Sephiroth’s knees, then reaches around to tuck the dress’ skirts out of the way. When he does, he takes a second to grab Sephiroth’s chin and point Sephiroth’s head back at the tablet—Sephiroth shivers a little, against Vincent and on-screen, then chokes down his rising mewl as what he sees seizes him perfectly in place.

The open offering the vee of his thighs make, and how the high gloss of the pink satin makes their white stretches look soft and yielding by comparison. His bound cock and how its flush periodically deepens as he’s touched, his ball sac with its slightly paler blush—but then a black line stretches across it, stretches and presses in and makes the flesh all around it as vividly red as the backs of Sephiroth’s eyelids squeezing shut.

He has to, he has to stop for a moment, stop and close his eyes because the sheer intensity of the need in him would burst them otherwise. Stop and moan into his gag, moan and shudder and only feel how he’s being tied even more tightly, toyed with ever more roughly, feel it and let it overcome in until he’s fully submerged.

And then he doesn’t feel the difference, because it’s simply his world. He can open his eyes again, safely enveloped in his hazy acceptance, and see what Vincent’s done to him, what Vincent is still doing to him. See how pretty it is, his ball sac knotted with black silk cord and slung up out of the way as Vincent’s fingers stroke his perineum. See how the thin skin there retains streaks of color even after Vincent’s fingertips move off to the side, see how it strains under the slightest pressure. How it’s echoed by the twitching rim of his hole, as Vincent teases that with a claw-tip and then uses both index fingers to lightly stretch opposite sides.

A little twist of empty ache goes up through Sephiroth and he rolls his hips and watches himself do that on the screen. Part of his bound cock bobs into view, but then leaves as Vincent presses him back to the other man’s chest. Holds him there, only able to tremble now as he watches Vincent’s finger slowly slide into himself. But it’s not too much of a hardship, not with how strangely mesmerizing it is to see his body open itself for the other man.

Two fingers, and he can trace the way the strain flexes out from where his hole lips at Vincent’s knuckles, running up into either thigh before spreading into a growing burn under the thigh-cuffs. Three and the flesh around them is as pink as the dress, pink and pinking even more as Sephiroth watches. Going into true red when Vincent skates his thumbnail against Sephiroth, a winging red comet that shoots straight up Sephiroth’s spine into the top of his head as he arches violently.

His head goes back when he does, and for a few seconds he’s not watching. Feeling, yes, feeling and whining and aching for it, aching in his bound limbs and bound cock and balls, aching and needy because the bottom drops out even as the comet is shattering his mind. Nothing in him, he’s empty and he can’t, he needs—

“Better,” Vincent says, chin to Sephiroth’s shoulder. His fingers are all out now but massaging at Sephiroth’s perineum, massaging up the ache rather than reducing it as another inch of his tail works into Sephiroth.

Sephiroth moans into his sodden gag. A shift of Vincent’s shoulder behind his head moves it just enough so he can see the screen again, can see how the plush dark fur catches the sheen of the pink satin draped at the edges of the frame. Can see his pretty, yes, pretty and delicate and straining hole wrapped around it, how pretty it is when he’s being fucked.

The screen shows him the sliding glint of the light along Vincent’s tail as its muscles bunch up. He bucks his hips in anticipation, but then the view abruptly changes. He shudders before the tail actually moves in him, and then shudders again, harder, as its twist finally catches him.

It’s his nipples they’re looking at now. Being tugged through the bodice slits hard enough that Sephiroth can glimpse a little of the surrounding paler flesh, tugged and twisted so they rapidly pass from pink to red. Deep red, a deep, tender-looking red like the fragile but brilliant center of a flower against the petal-like pink satin. He can see them swelling between Vincent’s fingertips and the close-up view almost matches how it feels, the way the hurt of them burrows through his whole chest and makes his pectorals feel heavy and straining against the dress’ thin silk. And then Vincent clips gold clamps to each one.

Gold, catching the light so flares briefly wipe out sections of the screen. His trapped nipples round out to either side of the clamp, burning hot like twin suns but looking wet, their red the wet of berries ripened to bursting. The string of creamy pearls dangling between them tugs mewls out of Sephiroth as Vincent reaches out and moves the screen so Sephiroth’s breath won’t fog it, and Sephiroth can see too how the pearls’ rippling is echoed in the small spasms of his chest muscles under the dress.

He can see all of that, all the pretty, helpless parts of him as Vincent makes adjustments. Nudging his head forward, plucking a few strands of hair off his shoulder, retucking the folds of his dress’ skirts so they don’t stick to his thighs as Vincent’s tail slowly fucks in and out of him. And then…Vincent as well, his black hair spilling down the side of Sephiroth’s shoulder as the man sucks a stinging bruise to life on Sephiroth’s throat. His long fingers claiming Sephiroth’s cock, their white bands fitting neatly between the brown leather ones, and the elegant way the curve of his claws settles against Sephiroth’s left inner thigh. He looks as if he’s plucked the perfect fruit and is satisfying himself with it—not tearing it to pieces, not ruining it as he gorges himself, but languidly savoring it as one should a fine delicacy.

There’s a small staticky noise, and Sephiroth looks up, but is so dazed it takes him a few seconds to realize the tablet made it because the screen is off now. He continues to stare at the blank black space as Vincent raises his head, rumbling low in the throat, and casually pushes the tablet away. Then continues the motion to tip them both back against the pillows, moving his hands down under Sephiroth’s thighs to help hike Sephiroth up his own body.

“That should be sufficient,” Vincent says. He looks at Sephiroth for a moment, then makes an amused noise as he slits the side of the gag and then pulls it out of Sephiroth’s mouth. “Rhapsodos never specified seeing you finish, and I want that for myself.”

Sephiroth nods absently. Then lets his head fall against Vincent’s, as the other man gets him a cup of water from the bedside. He drinks enough to wash away the parched feeling the gag gave him, then turns back to nuzzle at Vincent. Who pushes his jaw till he finishes the rest of the cup, but who concedes after that, as Sephiroth nuzzles him again.

“In your hand,” Sephiroth remembers, and then begs for, pressing his mouth to whatever of Vincent he can reach. He feels Vincent shift behind him—feels the shift in him, the way Vincent’s tail tip flexes sharply—and nuzzles harder. “In your hand, from my—my nipples, please—”

“While you watch?” Vincent murmurs. He accepts a clumsy kiss, then ducks away to nip at Sephiroth’s jaw. “While we watch—you should watch. See what a pretty toy you are on my cock…”

Sephiroth moans. Moans and lets his head loll, resting against Vincent as the other man turns the tablet back on. And yes, he watches—watches as Vincent’s hands strip the bonds from his cock only to lock tightly around it, watches himself twitching eagerly as Vincent reaches for the clamps on his nipples. Watches the way his face goes slack and pale but for the rounded dark of his pupils and his open mouth, the dark that then leaps from the screen out to briefly take over the world.

And then later, watching while curled into Vincent’s embrace. Stripped of the dress and all the other trappings, but well-tied nevertheless with the bands of fatigued muscle wrapped about his bones, the collar of softly-throbbing bite-marks about his throat…the warm, steady breath filtering through the hair at the back of his head and the hand lazily tracing over his belly. Vincent stretches against him and he feels the slightest flex of the man’s cock up against his buttocks, brushing along the tops of his thighs—Vincent’s not hard at all, but Sephiroth is so sore, so filled with the aching ghost of Vincent’s cock that he moans and shudders and Vincent has to reach out to catch the tablet before it slides off the fold of blanket it’s propped on.

“You like watching yourself so much, I almost want to find a way to keep a copy,” Vincent says with a low laugh. He loosely cages Sephiroth’s cock with his one hand while, with the other, he moves a fingertip over the tablet screen as if petting the straining, panting mouth it shows.

Sephiroth’s own, from earlier. He feels a tingling little stroke pass over his lips now, a phantom echo of Vincent’s caress, as if Vincent’s collapsed the past and present and all exists at once, all exists only here. He’s seen himself on plenty of footage, but that was video made from a distance, for the interests and purposes of others, with him as nothing more than a subject. He’s had to put up with it since birth and he’d told himself he’d become numb to it, but the moment war with Wutai created opportunities for him to take parts of his life outside of their scrutiny, he launched that offensive, and he’s rarely ceded ground on that issue since then.

But this feels different, and not only because Vincent has promised the video will be erased as soon as they turn off the tablet tonight. It feels—when he watches it, it feels as if, despite Genesis being the impetus for its creation, it was made and meant only for him. It feels as if what he felt when he was being filmed and what he feels now when he’s watching is…consistent.

It feels as if it could be something he’d want to keep, if they led the kind of lives that allowed for a choice like that. His partnership with Vincent has opened up experiences he never even considered possible, let alone daring to try, but he’s not an idealistic fool. He’s not going to value the virtual keepsake over the real man; they can always make another one but not if Vincent’s spending his energies safeguarding this one.

So he watches, but he shifts as well, parting his legs so that Vincent’s cock, soft as it is, can nestle more closely against him. “You like showing me,” he murmurs, relaxing his thighs to catch that cock between them. “Showing off your pretty toy.”

That familiar hum of amusement comes from Vincent, low in the chest and warm as his breath in Sephiroth’s hair. But it takes a little longer than usual to tail off, and then the bridge of Vincent’s nose drifts down against the back of Sephiroth’s neck. “Showing my lovely consort why I enjoy it so much, hard work as it is. I know you enjoy it, but you don’t truly see yourself at the time because you’ve gone so deep.”

Sephiroth pauses, and Vincent, sensing this, taps the screen to pause the video. The other man doesn’t stiffen or show any signs of nerves, but he does wait. He likes to wait for Sephiroth to think through a matter as well; no matter how much Vincent teases Sephiroth for being a slave, a plaything, a mindless vessel for pleasure, the man wants Sephiroth’s mind involved. He’s never wanted only the beautiful, powerful figure on the screen.

It's only that sometimes Sephiroth’s mind is actively engaged in complex strategy, and sometimes it’s been carefully calibrated to engage only in physical sensation. But either way, it never truly disappears—and Vincent never truly plays with it as if he wants it to disappear. And this is what makes Sephiroth smile and arch himself against the other man, that Vincent takes so much pride in his being able to bring Sephiroth back and forth that he wants Sephiroth to take pride in it as well.

“I see it now,” Sephiroth says, twisting his head about to nip at the side of Vincent’s jaw. When Vincent’s fingers tighten about his cock, he gasps and lets the resulting shiver ride his thighs along the other man’s prick till it sluggishly twitches. “I see it—I see it, and I…I don’t know whether I’d have to kill more people if they ever learned how much my partner truly can do, or whether they ever were foolish enough to think he’s not good enough to be valued…”

“Fortunately for them, your partner thinks he’s being reasonably valued at the moment,” Vincent says. Slowly massaging Sephiroth’s cock as he nudges his own further between Sephiroth’s legs; when the tablet tips off the blanket again, Vincent doesn’t reach out to right it but instead for something to slick the fingers he pushes up between Sephiroth’s buttocks. “Tseng doesn’t want a rival and neither do I. I have more leeway being a specialist than a leader. So I think we can keep you a toy for a little longer.”

And for now, that’s all Sephiroth needs to let Vincent push his mind to the side.

Chapter 61: Interlude: The Firsts and the Old Dark Holiday

Angeal probably should’ve turned when he heard the door, or hell, when he saw Sephiroth’s notification ping on his phone screen, but getting a First drunk requires careful planning and dedicated time and he’s just gotten to the point where his limbs are pleasantly loose. He hates to waste all that effort and so he’s slow, when Genesis has already looked over one shoulder and then loosed a derisive sigh.

“Well, well, and I suppose once again, we’ve forgiven others their failures while faulting ourselves for our perfection?” Genesis drawls.

Sephiroth pauses, his expression shuttering. This part of closing out the year isn’t any easier on him, but then, that’s exactly what Genesis is saying, and that’s why it hurts no matter what kind of face the man puts on it. “Gen,” Angeal starts, hoping to forestall the argument.

“Oh, finish your drink.” Genesis twists back around, batting dismissively at Angeal as he does, and then takes up another sheet of paper from the diminishing stack next to him. “You’re no more use right now than any of these poor souls.”

Angeal grimaces, but the words skate over rather than cut through him. Maybe it’s the alcohol, adding just enough of a glow to everything that he can set his temper aside, or maybe it’s how, for all Genesis is genuinely scathing, the man is slouched in his chair, his sword leaning against the wall with Angeal’s, with a pen in his hand instead. When Sephiroth takes another step into the room, Genesis sighs again, but only flicks a bit of hair out of his eyes with the end of the pen before writing a number across the plain back of the sheet.

The front of the paper is covered with a brilliant red-and-gold pattern that flashes attractively between Genesis’ fingers as they nimbly fold and twist the paper up. It’s distracting, and by the time Angeal catches himself, Sephiroth has already put a piece of paper down on the table and both he and Genesis are looking at him with more than a little amusement.

“He’s not remotely fit for duty, if that’s what you were looking for,” Genesis says, tone clipped with something rougher than contempt. He shifts in his seat so that he’s facing off with Sephiroth, while his coat flaps out to graze at Angeal’s knee. “Isn’t that what Fair is for?”

“There’s nothing pressing. Only a late filing from R&D.” Sephiroth closes down his expression again, but he gives Angeal one last look. When Angeal shakes his head, Sephiroth presses his lips together for a moment, skeptical, before giving Angeal a curt, acknowledging nod; the man isn’t going to step in if Angeal doesn’t ask. “I did remind Mother—”

“So she knew exactly how long to wait before sending you this.” Genesis uses the tiny, intricately-folded paper figure he’s made to point at the sheet Sephiroth’s laid down, then contemptuously flicks his free hand at it. With his other, he sets the paper figure carefully down at the end of the neat row he’s set up. “Never mind, I know Vincent’s waiting out there. You can go explain to him what strange little eccentricity he’s stumbled across now, and see whether it’s enough to put him off.”

That’s a little much even for Angeal, who knows damn well how much of Genesis’ bite comes from having someone else sink teeth into him that way. “Hey.”

“That’s enough,” Sephiroth says, and it’s mild only because he has better things to do than get into a fight. Vincent isn’t in the room, or in the sliver of hallway that Angeal can see from his seat, but him being around is obvious enough just from how easily Sephiroth turns away. “I’ll see you both in the morning, if you’re fit then.”

“Never doubt me when it comes to fighting for what I deserve,” Genesis says. He twists around and looks over his shoulder at Sephiroth, who doesn’t seem pleased about it but who lingers long enough to give Genesis a cool answering stare.

Then, snorting, Genesis turns back around. He picks up another sheet of the origami paper, then tilts his head to look at the sheet Sephiroth left; behind them, the door closes. Angeal hadn’t looked very closely at the sheet, and to be honest, he doesn’t want to…but after a moment he musters up the effort and pushes forward in his seat.

“I have enough to finish, if you were wondering,” Genesis says. He writes on his sheet, then drops the pen and starts to fold it into another figure. “No need to run out and terrify that poor shop-owner again.”

“Yeah. Yeah, looks less than last year,” is what Angeal manages after a second. He feels his mouth twist as he says it, then kicks himself back in his chair.

His foot goes out harder than he’d planned on and knocks into the table leg. Genesis throws his hand out and catches the edge of the table, lifting it and then maneuvering it on three legs so that the paper figures slide dangerously close to falling off, then swing just clear as Genesis lowers the table. Then, without looking at Angeal, Genesis puts down his half-folded figure and starts twitching the ones he’s already made back into perfect rows.

“Shit,” Angeal says, stupidly.

Genesis sighs. And then, before Angeal can push past the booze, he drops his hand to Angeal’s knee. Just that, just holding it for a second. Not groping or provoking or anything, just…and then he lets go and picks up the figure he’d been working on. “Just…sit there,” he mutters. “Not now, Angeal.”

Who could and should say something here, for all the times they’ve been through this—all those times and all the times yet to come, because that’s the world they live in and he still hasn’t done anything about it. But he doesn’t—he gets as far as opening his mouth, even though he knows he doesn’t have the words, and Genesis reaches back and grips his knee again.

“Pour one for me for when I’m done,” Genesis says, quiet and without rancor, and that’s what Angeal does.

* * *

“He still keeps that custom,” Vincent observes to Sephiroth. “One for each clone?”

Sephiroth nods noncommittally. Then stops and makes himself exhale, and look the other man properly in the eye. “I don’t know if Genesis actually believes it releases their souls, but it seems to soothe him.”

“But not Hewley.” Vincent takes a seat without unduly avoiding or holding Sephiroth’s gaze. He’s not hiding his interest in the discussion either, but somehow he keeps that from verging on intrusive. “I think there is—or there was, at least, a debate in southern religious circles whether clones could have souls, but—”

“Is that something you’re asked to keep track of?” Sephiroth asks, bemused. He’s never particularly surprised when Vincent proves himself familiar with an esoteric topic, but the diversity of the man’s knowledge does sometimes catch him off-guard. He never can guess ahead of time what Vincent has interested himself in. “Or was it personal?”

“Tseng doesn’t dismiss the power of a cult. But also I’ve traveled in the Banora area, and it is far enough from Midgar that people aren’t quite as secretive about their religious beliefs,” Vincent says. He looks briefly amused. “And I’ve had my share of people trying to fit Chaos into some of them, so I try to at least know enough to know how to travel.”

“I don’t think Angeal cares what some theologian thinks, even if he’s heard of it—he tries to avoid that sort of thing,” Sephiroth says after a moment. He stretches his legs out in front of him, then pulls one in as his seat starts to move on its wheels. “Genesis does adhere to many of the rituals, but…I’ve always had the impression religion for him is a matter of payment and debt. Perhaps it’s better to call it superstition—he would be the first to tell you he sleeps well after killing a clone in the line of duty, but he still burns those figures to release their…unrealized potential, is how he put it to me once. Otherwise he thinks it’ll fester, and somehow bring him harm.”

Vincent nods. “And Angeal drinks to keep him company.”

“He’d say it’s to honor the innocents,” Sephiroth says, but the words come reluctantly. He doesn’t like to call Angeal a hypocrite, but he can’t blind himself to the man’s faults either. “He doesn’t believe in souls at all, or in gods, or anything like an afterlife. If he did, I don’t think he could bring himself to carry out some of our missions. Mother—”

“She’s not a fan of religion either,” Vincent notes, looking up again.

Sephiroth feels the corners of his mouth twist. “No,” he says curtly, looking down at his tablet. “No, but she—never mind what she thinks. She’s never bothered to learn about anything she deems an irrational behavior. As long as she sends me accurate reports, she can be as ignorant as she likes.”

He runs down the first page of the file on his tablet, then presses his lips together and forces himself to start at the top. This time he actually reads it; he takes probably three times as long as he would normally need to, but he’s determined to actually absorb the material this time. Nothing surprising—he already read the initial report months ago, when the autopsy was first done, and the file simply fleshes out the rest of the clone’s life. If there had been anything notable, his feelers within R&D should have alerted him long before this. But he needs to know that for himself.

“This may take a while,” he says a little later, pulling himself out of one report to pick up his coffee and happening to notice the time. “I’m not going to leave for anything short of a worldwide disaster, if you want to come back and find me later.”

Vincent has plenty to do this week, Sephiroth knows, but when the other man looks up, he’s wearing an expression of mild surprise. “You’re not bothering me,” he says.

The tug at Sephiroth’s mouth is far less strained this time. “I’m going to read all of them,” he points out. “Not only the ones developed from my line.”

Every year he reviews the files, and while he can’t quite fathom Genesis’ and Angeal’s behavior, he can recognize he has his own rituals. Even Zack knows to leave them all alone for this, but Vincent merely keeps looking at Sephiroth. The man knows what files are on Sephiroth’s tablet but he hasn’t asked to see them, or asked to discuss what is in them.

“You’re not bothering me,” he says again, and Sephiroth lets out a long exhale before he realizes.

When he does, his eyes drop to his tablet. Then rise again, finding Vincent reviewing something on his phone as if they’re only sitting together on any work matter. And then, exhaling a second time, Sephiroth drags them back to the tablet. He has more files to go through, but…it doesn’t bother him, the company. It’s better now.

Notes:

My idea for Genesis is that he makes the little paper figures to represent each clone and then ritually burns them to ward off any ill-feeling from their untimely deaths.

Chapter 62: Interlude: Vincent’s End of Year Resolutions

By his own admission, Vincent adheres to very few cultural traditions simply for the sake of conformity. The ones he does honor are all linked to some part of his past, even if he’s currently not choosing to disclose that, and so often give Sephiroth the feeling he’s being permitted to witness—and increasingly, to participate—in a very private, very idiosyncratic ritual, even when the tradition is a common one.

Sephiroth has no issue with this. As a child, he hadn’t been cut off from social customs around major holidays, but his upbringing had made it very clear that any tendency towards frivolous attachments would be leveraged against him. Accordingly, and with his mother’s chilly approval, he’d observed what others did and had learned what was necessary to induce them to behave towards him how he wanted them to. He’d even taken part here and there as necessary. But he’d never developed any emotional attachments towards any such customs, and they’ve always ranked roughly on par with matters such as mediating personnel conflicts, duties necessary to maintaining his position without actually enhancing any of his interests.

Angeal and Genesis still retain traditions from their hometown, particularly with respect to year-end, and Sephiroth has grown to respect that, recognizing it for more than mere homesickness. Zack, too, tries to bring in as many festive traditions as he can wheedle the rest of them into tolerating, and in this Sephiroth can trace the man’s need to reinforce personal bonds as well as his sheer love of any kind of celebration. But those are the meanings they assign, and not ones Sephiroth personally has adopted. To him, the end of the year has generally been no more and no less special than any other time—it only differs in that he has to recognize the difference between his own expectations and those of others.

And usually he has to be on duty. His teams earn more rest and recognition than they ever are gifted by Shinra management, and if he won’t enable them to stand down, no one else will bother. So he takes on the last shifts of the year, while everyone relaxes in the way that they prefer, and though it’s seen him take on some difficult missions as a result, he hasn’t seen it as a burden. It keeps him busy and builds political goodwill for the new year.

But this year Genesis, of all people, puts in to take those shifts, and of course Angeal won’t abandon the man. “Nothing’s up, I swear,” Angeal tells Sephiroth, though there’s a distinct undertone of uncertainty to his tone. “He just wants to take our days off around the bonfire nights instead. And look, hit me if you think I’m jinxing it, but I don’t think there’s anything lurking around the corner—”

“No, I agree,” Sephiroth says, and then has to smile when, in spite of his obvious disbelief, the other man looks relieved. “For once I don’t see any potential disruptions. We’re past the last board meeting, and Rufus has gotten all the factions in hand.”

“Well, he sits there and we stand ready behind the chair,” Angeal snorts. But he’s already glancing towards the door. “All right, I’m not going to question it if you won’t. You deserve the days anyway, Seph, so enjoy them.”

“I plan to,” Sephiroth says, and he’s being quite honest about it, that and his confidence that his plans won’t be disrupted. Genesis had been ahead of Angeal into his office, explaining lucidly that Heidegger’s death and the collapse of the man’s faction had convinced him it was finally safe to visit Banora outside of official duties. He had never had any fear of his personal safety, but Heidegger had taken over Hollander’s operations down there and while alive, had never missed an opportunity to bait them over how many locals had been collaborators. Angeal has never been able to control himself well in that sort of situation, Genesis had reminded Sephiroth.

“Call me what you will, I can wait for my revenge to ripen on the tree,” he’d said. “He can’t. But enough of them have run off at this point I don’t think we’re likely to run into anyone who’d dare face us. And I do owe my respects to the few who did stand for a couple orphans, and who were cut down for it.”

“You have enough time accrued, Genesis, and there are no operational reasons why I shouldn’t approve. That’s enough of a justification,” Sephiroth had replied.

In other years the exchange might have used the same words but in very different tones. But Genesis has…if not mellowed, grown more studied in how he directs his temper. They have more mutual enemies than ever merits his railing against Sephiroth for continuing to let them exist, and Sephiroth does appreciate not having to fight the man into accepting that. There had been a moment where they’d both looked at each other, and felt the difference. And then Genesis had nodded and withdrawn, and Sephiroth had turned back to the work matters crowding his inbox.

And so this year Sephiroth is free to rest, and to do so with company of his choosing, and in a way that…he probably would have laughed at, if not taken deadly offense, if someone had posited it to him so much as a year before. Not for the vices it entails, but the way Vincent chooses to indulge them and him—he sometimes wonders at Vincent’s sense of humor.

Sometimes he simply wonders. He has the space to do so, lying quietly on their bed. He can still smell the faint scent of soap off his body in between the waves of enticing aromas periodically wafting from the kitchen—he showered himself, made a clean canvas for Vincent’s pleasure. His hair is brushed and braided back with green and red ribbons, the ends of which crumple against his fingers whenever he moves them, and he’s been slipped into the green woolen dress from their trip to the Nibelheim mansion. The bodice top has slipped a little from when he was squirming about earlier, straining his bonds to feel their grip around him, and when he breathes now he can feel the slight shift of the silver rings piercing his nipples.

It's been long enough they’ve healed and are no longer sore, but the flicking weight of the piercings keep the nubs stiffened against the tease of the dress’s fur trimming. He presses his shoulders back into the bed, raising the rings free of the trimming, but when he relaxes they flip down and drag the tips of his nipples just into the fur so he shivers, and so the taunting sensations continue.

Vincent took his time tying Sephiroth up earlier. He hadn’t fucked Sephiroth into exhaustion first, hadn’t roughed Sephiroth into submission but instead had seduced him into it, murmuring tender promises into Sephiroth’s ear as his fingers had sleeked loops of plastic cabling about Sephiroth’s body. It’s red, the kind one pulls out at this time of year to make functional wiring blaze out with the rest of the decorations rather than hide it. Red and flat and a half-inch wide, narrow enough to move easily along with a caressing hand but wide enough to not immediately start to cut into the flesh. Not unless, like Sephiroth, one has been bound with it for a while.

Though he can’t say it cuts. He feels it, feels how the plastic has long since lost its slipperiness and now sticks to his skin, inescapable no matter how he moves. It doesn’t hurt but he feels it and he can trace out its elegant lacing along his body. Over the top of his chest, then wound about both arms to pinion them behind his back, drawing them into the vee of his crossed wrists—bound additionally with tape for cushioning, Vincent knowing better than to let Sephiroth mind himself—before looping forward about his torso in pretty diamonds. Binding and decoration all at once, webbing over him so that when he tries to turn himself, he feels the twist along the cabling and feels how it tightens, how it draws the breath out of him and pulls up the heat to flush against his bonds.

He’s far freer below the waist, only a makeshift shackle of more of the red cabling leashing him to the end of the bed, but the lack of restraint only makes him more wanton. The skirt of his dress has long since rucked up to bare him and when he hears Vincent’s step in the hall, he doesn’t throw his free leg over himself. On the contrary, he lets it fall to the other side, spreading himself, hips arched to offer up the pretty, red, weeping cock Vincent wants to see.

“Dinner will be another twenty minutes,” Vincent says, standing at the side of the bed. Missing his suitcoat, his shirt carelessly untucked with its sleeves rolled to the elbow. He takes the time to catch a stray lock of hair and retie it back into his ponytail as he leisurely sweeps his gaze over Sephiroth. “But the speech is about to start.”

Sephiroth groans. Vincent gagged him with a white silk scarf, and the dampness of his spit has allowed it to stretch as he does, pushing the fabric out from between his lips. But before he can slip true words out, Vincent leans over, smiling, and puts his palm firmly over Sephiroth’s mouth. Holding Sephiroth down that way, the tips of his claws lightly grazing the underside of Sephiroth’s jaw, as he picks up something from the bedside. One of their tablets, Sephiroth can’t turn his head to see which, and once Vincent has set it to broadcast the annual year-end speech the President of Shinra delivers, he tosses it to the far corner of the bed.

Then he climbs onto the mattress and casually settles himself between Sephiroth’s legs. His knee slides over Sephiroth’s inner thighs, pinning them open as he cradles Sephiroth’s head between his hands. He pulls the silk scarf tight into the corners of Sephiroth’s mouth, till Sephiroth is gasping at the taut band pressing down onto his tongue now, and then reties it that way. Kissing Sephiroth lovingly over the gag as he does, and when he’s finished with that, he continues kissing his way down Sephiroth’s body. At the throat, the collarbone, both nipples—he bites them lightly, then ducks away when Sephiroth tries to press into his teeth—and then down the cables interlaced around Sephiroth’s waist.

Before the President speaks, a department head is always tasked with introducing him. Sephiroth has had to perform that duty more than once, but this year it’s Tuesti, with Rufus wanting to foreground Shinra initiatives besides the military. The man coughs awkwardly after the first few words, apparently not comfortable with the microphone—and then Vincent’s teeth graze at the head of Sephiroth’s cock and Sephiroth forgets the speech altogether. It’s only background noise, an intermittent crackling beneath Sephiroth’s own moaning as Vincent suckles him to the brink, then forces him to teeter there with a merciless grip on the base of his cock.

Three times Vincent tortures him that way, and then the man allows him relief just as mercilessly, nursing his cock down to limpness. Then, as Sephiroth lies under him, drained to soft, dazed docility, Vincent pulls out a pair of silk stockings from his trouser pocket. He uses one to wipe off Sephiroth’s cock and then bind it, tying it to the ball sac, then leans up to wrap the other one about Sephiroth’s eyes.

Sephiroth groans once into the darkness. His head lolls and comes up against Vincent’s hand, which holds it still as the gag is tugged away. His lips instinctively purse against the parching air, then obediently open as a commanding tongue laps at them. Once Vincent’s had his pleasure, he pillows his arm under Sephiroth’s head and tips a little water into Sephiroth’s mouth.

“Please,” Sephiroth says as soon as he can. He licks at the tip of Vincent’s finger, then nuzzles the man’s hand more fully as he feels Vincent stretch over to put the cup down. “How…long…”

Vincent’s weight shifts to the side. It’s Rufus on the broadcast now, but the sound of the shifting mattress cuts out what the man is saying, so Sephiroth can’t tell where in the speech they are. And then Vincent is sliding in behind him, pulling them together so that Sephiroth is cradled in the man’s embrace, with deft fingers knowingly seeking out where the cabling bites and adjusting it to a pinch. And then, as Sephiroth slowly finds the breath for more words, hooking flirtatiously at a nipple ring.

“Not that much longer,” Vincent says. His other hand curls under Sephiroth’s thigh and then lifts it up and to the side, bending that leg over his own. Then it dips back, tucking Sephiroth’s skirt out of the way so Sephiroth is helpfully bared to the oiled fingers now starting to work into his hole. He presses his nose against Sephiroth’s throat and breathes in when Sephiroth gasps, as if scenting that. “Still long enough to make you sore through dinner. I know how you want to have that.”

“All I said—” Sephiroth half-recalls, half-gasps “—doing something better than—than hearing what I’ve already proof—proof—”

There’s no reproach in his voice, only need, but Vincent kisses him as if silencing a protest. And then keeps kissing him, even though he only grows noisier as the man fucks him on long, insidiously clever fingers, twists his nipples till they’re swollen about their piercings. The speech goes on and on but Sephiroth doesn’t need it muted to not catch a single word of it.

When it’s over, and the familiar tinkling of the holiday closing music filters in, Sephiroth is finally quiet again. Spitted on Vincent’s cock, bite-marks finally stinging his neck and shoulders, his aching cock dribbling on the finger Vincent keeps tauntingly running over its head while Vincent slowly recovers his own breath in the nest of Sephiroth’s hair.

“Yes, you said. But I heard that you wanted to be here, like this—” Vincent nuzzles at Sephiroth, then pauses as his voice roughens. Then he makes a low, lazy, appreciative sound as Sephiroth whimpers at the feel of one of his claws finally slipping between Sephiroth’s skin and the stocking knotted about Sephiroth’s cock. “Kept away from all of that, kept tight on my cock like you should be…like a gift, like the gift you are.”

Did Vincent’s parents give the man gifts as a child? The thought had passed through Sephiroth’s mind as he’d laid there on the bed, because he still can’t help but wonder sometimes why Vincent does what he does. The man has a very clear idea of his wants in life, and what he is and is not willing to tolerate in order to attain them, and before they had run across each other in Nibelheim, he’d apparently been satisfied with that. Sephiroth believes him when the man says he cannot go back to that way of life, but he wonders whether Vincent had reasoned out the pros and cons and then made a decision, the way Sephiroth has every year before this decided how much of his time he’s willing to expend on holiday activities. Or whether this somehow links to some unfulfilled element of the man’s past, the way Genesis and Angeal never disavow their Banoran roots no matter what they feel about what happened to them there.

He has thoughts like that, when the man leaves him alone, but when they are together—when Vincent has him like this, says things like that, he thinks only that he can’t imagine what else they could want.

The last shred of silk comes off his cock and he spills out onto Vincent’s hand, feeling as if all parts of him are slowly crumpling together. His bonds, tight as they are, aren’t enough to hold him, but Vincent swings his arm up and tugs Sephiroth back against him and the solidity of the man is. Vincent’s still breathing a little roughly from his own climax minutes before, but he keeps Sephiroth cradled to him.

It's not till Sephiroth has recovered enough to nudge at his head that Vincent loosens his hold. “You’ll have your marks,” he says, both indulgent and gently teasing, as he traces over the cabling at Sephiroth’s upper arm. “Past dinner and into tomorrow at this rate.”

Sephiroth drops his head against Vincent’s jaw, letting himself go limp again as the man starts to cut him free. “Into the new year,” he murmurs.

Vincent slows for a moment. Then shifts, apparently to better reach the wire wound around Sephiroth, but his lips graze at Sephiroth’s temple, too, and that isn’t necessary for that. “Spoiled,” he says, but it’s a little absentminded. “If you’re back to doing the intro next year, I’ll have to find a way to mark you beforehand.”

“Dressing-room. Sound-check always runs over,” Sephiroth says without thinking. Then he pushes his head up Vincent’s shoulder, into the crook of the man’s neck. “Are you always going to be in town?”

Because he can’t not think of the world they live in. He can put it aside, take it out of his mind for a while, but in the end they always come back here, too. Vincent doesn’t promise him otherwise—the other man moves back so that they can see each other, and he’s thoughtful but not irritated or regretful.

“I can plan for it, and you can too, and I think between the two of us, we have a better chance at making it so than the rest of them,” Vincent says after a moment. Then he tilts his head so he can cut another wire, with the side of his mouth facing Sephiroth also tilting, but up instead of down. “Unless you’d like to try something else next year. I admit, I didn’t think you’d want to bow out of the speech entirely, so I didn’t have the time to—”

“Come up with something more elaborate?” Sephiroth says, amused, because when it comes to their scenes, Vincent’s idea of ‘simple’ is anyone else’s crowning masterpiece. Then he lets his smile come to rest against the man’s throat, and thinks he can let his duties—official and self-imposed—lie just a little longer. He has no tradition of doing so but he’d like one. And he can afford it now. “Mmm. I’ll think about it after dinner.”

Vincent rolls his nipple between thumb and forefinger, and then, as he’s starting up from it with a throat-caught whine, kisses him. “You’re not going to think if I feed you properly,” the other man says, and this time it is a promise, one he keeps and one Sephiroth gladly accepts.

Chapter 63: Interlude: Sephiroth Considers His Personal Style

The point of a corset is to remove any choices about conformity, Genesis once told Sephiroth. Genesis would be the expert on such things, given how he’s broken every SOLDIER clothing and gear regulation at least once and still holds General rank. Yes, his corsets are dripping in lace and silk and all sorts of other delicate trimmings, but underneath it all, they clamp him into rigid docility. They don’t let him be willful.

Sephiroth can see the attraction, but there’s still a difference with how Genesis chooses to fetishize it: when Angeal takes the man on, it’s to discipline him for stepping out of line, and discipline is a very different thing from training. Those corsets keep Genesis in place under the lash, but they also keep him from ever completely molding to Angeal’s grip when the other man finally picks him up. Both of them have to adapt to the shape of the corset, and while Sephiroth sees that suits the two of them, his tastes—Vincent’s tastes—have followed a different path.

They’re not entirely opposed. Like Genesis, he’s still a kept thing—currently locked away in a windowless, largely featureless basement room in a Turk safehouse somewhere. Only a desk, a light overhead, a few power outlets and the bed where he’s been lying for an indeterminate amount of time, safely bound and gagged. The only door leading to an exit is directly across from him and it’s heavy steel, with reinforcing bolts at the hinges and a biometric keypad that wouldn’t recognize him even if he was free—so keeping him this way has little to do with the necessities of restraint.

No, he’s tied up purely for entertainment. Dressed in a white slip, its silk brocade stretched taut over his body by a black leather band laced about his lower torso. The belt cinches him from between the bottom of his pectorals to just below the bellybutton, so tight that he has to breathe from the chest, shallowly, and so presses himself into the silk cord harness tugging his nipples through slits in the bodice. The silk is translucent from all the sweat it’s soaked up but still glimmering in the light whenever he squirms, softly pale against the deep pink of his tortured nipples—he can’t help sucking his gag whenever he catches a glimpse of them, even though it hurts. It hurts with the cords tweaking them over and over, making his entire chest a single heated sore—but when he sees them, sees how lusciously ripe they’ve become, he knows what Vincent is going to want to do and he can’t help mirroring it with his sucking.

His cock and balls ache just as much, strapped about with black leather bands that occasionally shadow through the slip’s skirt. Sometimes the lace trim on the hem sticks between his thighs and the edge of it feels razor-sharp against his over-sensitized skin, but the sweat trickling out from under his belt soaks into the skirt and keeps it sticking to him no matter how he struggles. His legs are belted together at the mid-thigh, knee, and ankle, with a chain from the ankles to the end of the bed so he can’t simply kick or roll the folds away. And he can’t brush them out either because his hands and forearms are laced into mitted gloves, fingers able to only scratch uselessly inside the leather as the straps crossing his wrists over the belt mean his straining fingertips can only tug the slip’s folds up from the sides and not the middle.

Anyway, he’s long since tired, and despite the way the lace cuts at his poor groin, he can only muster the energy to rock a little against the bed now and then. He doesn’t know how long he’s been suffering like this, and he doesn’t know how long he’ll have to—

The shower in the other room turns off. Its muffled rushing noise has served as a backdrop to Sephiroth’s ragged noises for so long that the silence comes like a slap. That doorway is the opposite side of where his head is turned and he arches mindlessly against the bed at first, then falls breathlessly slack as his bonds squeeze him at the cock, nipples, lips. He pants against his gag a few times, blinking while the ceiling slowly wavers about the light in its center.

Then he manages to turn his head. A few other noises are coming from the bathroom now, unhurried footsteps and the thwap of a swinging towel, the exhale of someone moving through their daily routine. Sephiroth shifts and part of his chest harness catches against the pillow behind him, jerking his nipples. He whines and inside the bathroom Vincent makes a low, appreciative noise.

But the other man takes his time. It’s several more minutes before he appears, hair still making damp streaks down the shoulders of his sleeping robe. He comes to the edge of the bed and looks down at Sephiroth, gaze savoring as much as it assesses. Sephiroth whines again and Vincent smiles without moving.

Then Vincent turns. He stoops to retrieve something from the side of the bed—a phone, which he sets on Sephiroth’s lap before he takes a seat by the side of the bed. Sephiroth’s phone, its screen flashing notification after notification as Vincent swings up his legs and then slots an arm behind Sephiroth’s shoulders, pulling him into an affectionate embrace.

“I’ve been keeping you from the people who want to find you,” Vincent says, as if remarking on the weather. He puts both hands on Sephiroth’s hips to adjust how they’re lying against each other, then lets one wander under Sephiroth’s slip to fondle Sephiroth’s cock and balls. The other hand reaches around and takes up the phone again, tilting it so they can both see the notifications. “They have no idea where I’m keeping you.”

He taps the end of the phone against Sephiroth’s left hand, pushing it hard enough so that even through the mitt, Sephiroth can curl his fingers around it. Curl them but not use them, still safely kept away from any way to communicate—a clear, exquisitely cruel reminder that shivers through Sephiroth. Then he cries out into the gag as Vincent’s teeth sink deep behind his ear, easily taking advantage of him while the notifications continue to stream in.

“No idea how to even ask me to give you up,” Vincent murmurs. Slowly loosening his bite, letting Sephiroth’s shudder drag the flesh through his teeth. Then he bites again, into the top of Sephiroth’s shoulder between the slip’s shoulder strap and Sephiroth’s throat; at the same time he suddenly snaps the connection between the thigh-cuffs.

Sephiroth twists under Vincent’s teeth and the motion makes his legs bow apart till the knee-cuffs stop it. Not intentional but merely the absence of resistance, his body falling into that gap…and as it does Vincent’s hand slides further between his legs, stroking firmly along his perineum and then taking hold of the plug that’s been seated in him. He’d half-forgotten it, had been forced to accommodate it for so long that his body had settled into its stretch, but Vincent works it roughly in him now, making him whine and jerk his hips.

“Not that I would.” Vincent abruptly yanks out the plug—its rounded end flicks across the back of Sephiroth’s thigh as he instinctively folds his knees up against the harsh hollowness. The ankle-chain jolts Sephiroth again as it jerks him short and he collapses against Vincent, mewling, as Vincent presses two fingers to either side of Sephiroth’s hole to hold it open for the thick, furry tip now pressing in. “Such a pretty captive…I don’t think I will let them buy you back.”

As Vincent’s tail fills him, Sephiroth hitches twice and the effort strains him against the belt, the gloves, the remaining leg-cuffs—and then something frays apart inside of him. He feels himself sink down and he can’t stop himself, even as the pressure continues to mount. Can’t stop it, can only surrender, open to whatever Vincent wants to do.

Slack and dazed against Vincent. Nothing holding him up, not even his bonds: they only keep him wrapped just as Vincent wants him, and Vincent doesn’t want him like a mounted trophy, rigidly pinned in place. No, Vincent wants him like this, soft and malleable, muted by his gag but not fully silenced, as the other man settles back with his phone.

“Why are they looking for you? Shall we see?” Vincent muses as he unlocks the screen with a quick thumb-swipe. He moves his free hand to cup Sephiroth’s buttock, caressing it with obvious appreciation for its curve as he goes into the emails. “Revisiting a rejection of a new weapons model…”

Scarlet, some part of Sephiroth’s mind supplies. But before it can do more than that, Vincent reaches up with the hand holding the phone and hooks at the chest harness with a claw. Its cords snap apart and bright-hot feeling rushes back into Sephiroth’s nipples, only to ram up against the grip of the belt as he gasps—his mind stays scattered and hazy, as his head lolls against Vincent’s shoulder and his lips work his gag.

Vincent uses the hand plumping his buttock to tilt him, then balances his phone atop his bound wrists. Then the other man reaches for something as he reads the email currently on the screen. “Recommended disciplinary measure against a Second…ah, no, Rhapsodos disagrees with Fair…”

The names provided this time register enough that Sephiroth starts to drag his head up. But then Vincent’s teeth graze at his throat and he stops, still not inclined enough to see down his body—and Vincent slips a pressure ring over his still-throbbing nipple.

He drops his head back and whimpers, squirming, as the ring is tightened. Vincent’s tail twists in him and he tries to open his legs but they’re tied—he can’t. He can’t, he’s being kept away from all of that, kept just for the other man’s pleasure.

“Far too pretty to be sent to some barracks. Leave that to the officers, they’re trained for that sort of business,” Vincent says. He pushes and pulls at Sephiroth’s thighs, rearranging them, and then makes a humming noise as the phone pings. “And this one—priority flag…priority because it’s an overdue budget approval.”

Sephiroth doesn’t even try. He lies where he is, draped over Vincent, his pliancy letting the other man fit them closely enough that he can feel the head of Vincent’s cock starting to nudge his back, and Vincent closes the second pressure ring about his other nipple. Then leans over and sucks at the underside of his upturned chin, bruising it as he groans into his gag. Vincent’s hands move up his body, stroking and caressing over his bonds so he’s reawakened to how secure they are, then settle over his pectorals. Cupping around the nipples, massaging his chest with a brutal care to how each touch draws the pain of the clamps further into the muscle.

Then they suddenly stop, with finger and thumb snapping to just hold the pressure rings as Sephiroth wetly sucks an anticipatory breath past the gag. “All these people looking for you, and none of them know where you are,” Vincent tells him. “None of them know how to reach you. And none of them know you’re like this—locked away, dressed up and used like the pretty toy you are. Though I could tell them.”

A long, thready, aching noise comes out of Sephiroth. He isn’t certain where, because he doesn’t try—he isn’t trying now. He’s lying very quietly against the other man, no longer even struggling against the belt for air, only taking of that as much as his bonds allow him.

“Yes, I could,” Vincent says against his temple, slow and savoring.

One of Vincent’s hands wanders down to scoop up the phone, while the other comes up to loosen and then pull out Sephiroth’s gag. When Sephiroth coughs, Vincent briefly wraps both arms over him. Then, once he’s steadied, the other man retrieves a water bottle and puts it to his lips, but just for a few sips. The moment he turns his head away, Vincent puts the bottle away and then uses that hand to rake the slip out of the way and pick up his cock. He whimpers and noses urgently at Vincent’s jaw as Vincent’s thumb starts to play over the aching head, rubbing the plentiful precome dripping from it back into his heated skin.

“I could even show them,” Vincent says, as if he’s been teasing Sephiroth without any break. He presses something hard and thin against Sephiroth’s mitted hand again, then chuckles as Sephiroth twists his hand away from the phone. “Do you want to speak? You can—no one can hear you but me.”

“Vincent,” Sephiroth manages, and then has to stop and moan. But he—he wants to, he thinks, and it’s not because he’s slid out of the haze. On the contrary, he’s still very much embedded in it, aching and sore and soft. So soft that he can be anything the other man wants him to be, anything at all, and that’s what he wants to tell him. “You trained me—didn’t you?”

“Yes, but you were very easy.” Vincent moves the phone away, but continues to tease at Sephiroth’s cock head. His other hand returns to Sephiroth’s chest, playing with each nipple as Sephiroth mewls. “Look how responsive you are, how much you like it when I do this—keep your nipples such a pretty, tender pink—such a pretty, obedient—”

“Slave,” Sephiroth says. He shudders in the other man’s hands, but into, not away. His body drags itself where Vincent wants it to go. “Slave, not a—not a captive, a—your slave.”

“Then I don’t have any reason to tell them anything,” Vincent says with a laugh. He starts to work himself down the pillows and Sephiroth hears something slide away across the sheets: the phone. Away from them both, as Vincent cradles him. “It’s no business of theirs where I keep my slave, or what I do with you—and now I want you to show me how I’ve trained you.”

Sephiroth nods weakly, then lets himself succumb to the other man’s hold. That’s sufficient, after all—the straps and toys they use are only tools, and one doesn’t need the tools to get in the way. So no, no corset is necessary as far as they’re concerned.

Chapter 64: Side-Story: Veld/Verdot Shows Vincent How to Glaze a Duck

Notes:

I've run out of tags at this point, so please note that this one includes some knife-play.

When he comes home, Vincent is already in the kitchen, a bag full of bloodied feathers at the man’s side. The air smells like blood but the counter and floor are spotless, and even the sink drain has been wiped clean. The duck sitting on the other side of the sink is a pale, buttery color, even all over as if it’d been born bloodless.

“That’s special,” he says after a deep breath. He puts his bag down on the counter, puts away any thoughts about the gun in the drawer underneath it, and steps over to the sink to rinse up. “Can’t be for me.”

“I’m told you don’t eat much meat these days anyway,” Vincent says conversationally. No blood on him either, on that mutated hand of his or on the rolled-up sleeves or on that unchanging face, with its smooth uncreased skin. “The you who’s still in Shinra’s files. Do you want Veld or Verdot now?”

“Veld,” he says, with a gruff laugh before he can help himself. “You weren’t ever anyone but Vincent, even to your mother’s side. Let’s not stand on ceremony—I don’t have as much time as you, these days. What do you need?”

That makes Vincent raise his head, though the man’s surprise comes out more from the motion than the expression. He studies Veld for a long moment, and Veld would like to say that, despite the time that’s passed, he still remembers enough that that doesn’t raise his hackles. But since he went off the active list he’s tried not to lie to himself, at least.

“You tell me,” Vincent finally says, and as much as he still looks like the young, restless, too-intuitive man who used to be Veld’s partner, his stillness gives him away. Only age can bring you that kind of gravity, the way you know to sit yourself at the bottom where everything is going to tumble down eventually anyway. “It’s your recipe.”

Veld looks at the duck. It’s not much of a reprieve, with its blank flesh scrubbed free of any kind of character, any sign of past life beyond just…he sighs. Sighs and reminds himself he’d known all along that retirement wasn’t going to mean he had all the time to do what he wanted rather than what the mission was. Which also isn’t to say that he regrets retiring either; he’d wanted a little bit of life, even if it still came marked by Shinra, and that, not freedom, was what he’d earned with all his years of service. So he can’t now say he doesn’t know why Vincent is in his kitchen.

He finishes washing up his hands, then picks up the duck and turns it to point the body cavity towards him. Vincent has already moved away, flicking on a stove burner and then putting a pot on it. All the raw ingredients are set up to the side—sugar, spices, soy sauce—and once Veld’s reeled off the amounts, Vincent adds them with smooth, efficient movements.

“I showed you this before,” Veld has to say, fingers massaging under the duck’s skin to get it loosened from around the legs.

Vincent’s head tilts. “You didn’t tell me, and I was a little distracted at the time. I wasn’t stopping you to compare to measuring spoons.”

Veld laughs again, a little more wholeheartedly. “Not like you used those either. Or use them now, Tseng says.”

“Does he?” Vincent asks, tone deceptively idle.

Silence falls over the kitchen again. The smell of caramelizing sugar soon fills the air, pointed up with citrus peel and the vague hint of pepper. The thing is, Veld remembers, he’d always liked Vincent outside of their missions. Never thought he’d understood the man all the way through, but Vincent is one of the few people where that had never bothered him. He’d never felt Vincent was a threat, either to him or to the Turks or to their objectives. And even when he’d found out what Vincent had gotten up to with Dr. Crescent, he still hadn’t felt that—oh, it’d been a mess, but no one had been that sad to lose Hojo and it had always been clear Hojo was going to be the main casualty.

But things aren’t the way they’d used to be. He knows that from Tseng, and so does Vincent. And he may be glad that Vincent survived but that he wasn’t going to sacrifice everything for the man back then, and he’s not going to now. “He comes and talks about what he’s having a problem with sometimes. Sometimes you get in there, but I’m not trying to pry with him. I’m not going to side with him over you, or you over him either—he’s too smart to think you won’t come see me too. I just try to keep my daughter clear of it all, Vincent. I’ll help if it counts towards that, but otherwise I don’t think I’m much good these days.”

Vincent inclines his head, still watching the pot. When Veld finishes prepping the duck, he takes the pot off the stove, swirling it to cool its contents, and then carries it back to the sink so they can smear the first layer of glaze onto the duck while it’s still hot. They don’t have to talk for this part; they still know each other’s moves.

The glaze doesn’t. A string of it laps over the rim of the pot and hits the backs of Veld’s fingers before it does the duck, its heat unmediated and enough to make him hiss. He flips his hand over and presses it into the cool flesh, while Vincent holds onto the duck without blinking. “I haven’t seen her in three years, but Tseng lets me know she’s still alive and well,” Veld says. “He’s good at keeping his promises. He’s good at his job, too. I don’t know if he’s giving you trouble, but I can’t tell you anyone right now is going to do a better job than him.”

“He’s in over his head,” Vincent says tonelessly. He doesn’t bother to say that that means he doesn’t consider Tseng a threat, but Veld can still read that much. What Veld can’t read is why Vincent is interested anyway; Vincent has always only seemed to divide the world into those that he watches and those he doesn’t. “Rufus isn’t his father. He’s smarter. And Tseng knows what the man says but doesn’t know what the man truly wants.”

Veld grimaces. “Well, can’t do anything about that,” he mutters.

Vincent looks at him. It doesn’t feel like judgment the way that the closed door to Felicia’s bedroom does, but it still gets under Veld’s skin, how it seems to see him. He never put Vincent in the category of people he had to impress, but…maybe it matters a little, now that he doesn’t have rank to pull on the other man, that Vincent still thinks him worth asking a question. Even if he honestly doesn’t want to answer.

“He’s not my son. Never was close to that, and I don’t think I ever misled him about it,” Veld says. He deliberately takes glaze out of the pot rather than waiting for Vincent to pour it so it’s cooled by the time it hits the duck. “Anyway, you’re not getting this recipe for him, that’s what he tells me, and I never tried to get into your family affairs, just like you never got into mine. I didn’t think he was family for you anyway.”

“True.” Vincent doesn’t stop him from burning himself, but the other man pulls the pot away after that handful. He picks up a rag and wipes glaze off its lip, then wets it under the faucet before holding it out to Veld. With his other hand, he picks up the hook for inserting into the duck.

Veld rotates the duck in his hands. His fake hand doesn’t feel pain, obviously, but the pseudo-skin covering isn’t designed to take hot glaze that’s already setting up; he’ll have to scrape that off to keep the material from completely being compromised. Unless he wants to go to Shinra medical, but even as he thinks that, his lips thin. Then he takes a breath and holds the duck out.

Vincent puts the hook in. The other man fiddles with it for a moment, checking how securely it’s seated, and then steps back. He goes to the sink again to wash up, leaving the duck to Veld. Who looks at it for a moment, then sighs. “Are you just coming back for this?”

“I can leave you alone,” Vincent says. He raises his voice over the running water, but not as if he’s straining to do it. “Just like you left me, Verdot—I can repay that. But if Tseng ever asks me for help—he’s not so deep that he isn’t looking for allies. And if he can’t ask you, he’ll ask me.”

“Then he’s going to ask you, Vincent. I let that go. Let it go just like I let you go, and if you’re asking whether I’m going to come at you anyway, you know the answer to that,” Veld says. He hefts the duck in one hand, then turns and goes to the fridge.

There’s never very much in there now, with just him, and when he opens it he sees Vincent’s already put in a tray to catch any dripping. He hangs up the duck, and when he turns, Vincent has another rag ready for his hands. His old partner, knowing him, bothering to come by even when they both know Vincent always made his own choices and then lived with the losses. Besides, compared to who does seem to matter to Vincent these days, Veld was always only going to be worth a moment of courtesy, and that wasn’t Vincent’s doing, same as it isn’t Vincent’s fault that Veld can say the truth about himself and Tseng and still feel as if he’s no better than the dead duck, stripped of everything that does matter.

This isn’t Vincent pitying him, this is Vincent knowing him, and yet…Veld sighs again. “I can’t ask you for anything. I won’t. But Tseng never had any idea how much Shinra and Wutai are the same, you know,” he says. “It’s not like he had your mother to explain those kinds of things to him. He just had me, and I just needed a Wutaian recruit. And now he doesn’t have me, and even if he did, you could deal with me.”

“I’d rather not,” Vincent says, tone and gaze even.

Which makes Veld laugh. “Thanks, but if you do, I don’t blame you. And if I have to—I’m not going to. Tseng knows that too. He’s not my son, and I…I had one kid and I lost her, the last time this came up. I can’t do that all over again. He’s a Turk, he’s going to live and die one, and he’s old enough to know you’re going to charge him for any help you give. And I’m just…I’m not going anywhere, if you want to come by for that in a couple days.”

He nods at the fridge. Vincent looks at him, and after a second, nods as well. Veld has the sense that nothing in their conversation is that surprising to Vincent, but that like the recipe, Vincent hadn’t wanted to have to experiment on his own to confirm. And Veld can’t say he isn’t relieved when Vincent leaves afterward, even with the duck still hanging in his fridge. Or that he dwells on it for too long, even with what they’d talked about. These days he’s just…not part of it anymore, even if Tseng does still drop by to pick old secrets out of his brain.

And he bought that kind of obscurity, Veld thinks as he picks at his hand. He bought it because that is something you have to pay for, and can’t just be graced with, and he bought it with open eyes and a tired heart. That’s why his daughter never wants to see him, and that’s why he just wants to know she’s still out there in the world, and does just enough for Tseng to keep news about her coming, much as he used to like—and still, guiltily, likes—the man.

But he doesn’t like Tseng enough to pay for the man’s life. He needs Tseng there for news about Felicia, and if Tseng stops being there…someone else will take Veld’s money for the same. That’s how it is, and he doesn’t like it but he’s not going to stop it. He’s not that kind.

When Vincent comes back, Veld will have the duck layered with more glaze and roasted for him. And maybe his old partner is the kind who, if there’s a personal stake, will change how things are done. But Veld’s not going to look out for it.

* * *

Vincent has Sephiroth trussed up on the table alongside the other delicacies the man is preparing. Before the blindfold went on, Sephiroth even saw a golden, crisp-skinned duck, its limbs neatly tucked in, glazed to a mouthwatering sheen, and he can draw the parallels to what Vincent intends for him. Kneeling with his legs tightly wrapped in leather belts, his arms similarly bound behind him and his torso bent back over a pillow that cleverly also spreads his knees, leaving the air to flirt up between his damp thighs. His collar is chained somehow to his legs, and the slightest struggle not only chokes him but also tweaks the webwork of silk cord trapping his nipples and his cock, keeping the former pointed tenderly towards the ceiling and the latter trapped against his balls. More silk cord rubs tortuously-positioned knots along his perineum and straps in a vibrator that intermittently buzzes him into mewling incoherency behind his gag.

The vibrator is off for the moment, letting him seek a little rest, hedged as it is with burning limbs and sore nipples and aching cock. He no longer hears sizzling oil, or scraping against the side of a pan, and the pungent smells of fresh-cut herbs have long since softened into the rich scents of various sauces. So when footsteps come up to the side of the table, he musters up enough energy to twist his head towards them.

Vincent’s low chuckle makes him whimper, even before he feels the brush of the man’s clothing against the outside of his left leg rather than between both where he’s longing for relief. “Not yet,” Vincent tells him, as a metallic rasping noise fills the air. “I’m not ready for you yet.”

The rasping grows louder, ending in a sharp click: Vincent honing a knife. Sephiroth shudders instinctively, then slumps back over the pillow. But then stiffens again, deliciously tingling adrenaline racing through him as the chill of the knife’s edge brushes lightly up his inner thigh. His bonds clasp him in place, baring him to the danger as Vincent caresses him similarly along his other thigh, whetting what is patently an already sharp blade against his skin. He’s helpless as the flat of the blade pivots to a point that then traces ever-so-gently over the tightly-knotted cords around his cock, up over his groin and belly, and then around each nipple. The knife tip swirls again over his right nipple, then lifts just as he’s unable to help a whine that makes his chest jump against the silk cords.

Sephiroth jerks in place, then again, trembling viciously as the vibrator abruptly comes to life. Over the wonderfully-hazy static filling his head he vaguely registers slicing and chopping noises off to the side, but it’s not till the vibrator goes off and Vincent’s cool, calming hands are cradling his head that he can put together what the other man was doing.

“Let it sit on your tongue for a moment,” Vincent says.

He’s taken out Sephiroth’s gag and put a morsel on Sephiroth’s tongue, something both lavishly fatty and pleasantly tangy. As the fat melts, the tang develops more complex flavors, and Sephiroth finds himself swallowing before he can help himself. Vincent doesn’t chide him for it, only licks a smear of fat off his lip and then feeds him another piece of slivered duck skin.

This time Sephiroth is obedient, and doesn’t chew until he’s told to. Then opens his mouth so Vincent can lick the taste out of it. “More,” he groans, nuzzling at the other man.

Vincent gives him another, and then plays with his nipples as he sucks the glaze off it. “I haven’t had this one myself in a while,” Vincent says, roughly massaging one nipple and then kissing it when Sephiroth hisses. “It’s good. I think I’ll do this for when we have Tseng over again.”

“It’s been…a while,” Sephiroth says, his sense of time still fragmented. He hitches as Vincent flicks his nipple, then sags back as the man’s mouth latches onto it. “Yes, please…any way you want me.”

“Good,” Vincent says. He pushes up, then presses his lips against Sephiroth’s forehead and keeps them there as a piece of duck is rubbed over Sephiroth’s lower lip. “But you first.”

Chapter 65: Eleventh Vacation: Administrative Leave

Notes:

Some breathplay and wax play kink here.

“I—”

“I can’t finish my recommendations if you keep interrupting, Sephiroth,” his mother says coolly. When the table trembles under his fists, she merely slips a second finger behind her tablet to steady it. “You’ve provided SOLDIER’s input. If nothing else, I would expect that military training also instills some respect for protocol.”

“Not in the face of blatant misinterpretation of evidence,” Sephiroth snaps. “Evidence made out of the dead and injured bodies of my—”

“But you are talking during her slot,” Rufus says, and then, damn him, has the nerve to flick his eyes to the side where Tseng and Cissnei are standing when Sephiroth leans further over the table. “General, you’ve made your position very clear. I do understand. However, I want Dr. Crescent’s opinion as well. It’s no slight on you or your expertise, but if you would please allow her to finish, I would appreciate it.”

“Not now, Seph,” Angeal mutters. He stopped trying to kick at Sephiroth’s leg when Sephiroth surged up from his seat, but he’s still hanging onto a handful of Sephiroth’s coat under the table level, slouching visibly in order to do that. “I know, but not now.”

“Every perspective is going to be considered per its merits,” Lazard says. He’s stood up as well and though he has his hands flat against the table, his expression—carefully tilted away from his brother—is silently pleading for cooperation in a way he normally doesn’t expose.

He’s only begging because he thinks it’ll better preserve SOLDIER in the long run; his self-interest aligns with Sephiroth’s own there. Even so, he’s blocking part of Sephiroth’s mother’s head from view and it takes all of Sephiroth’s very short patience to not read that as defending her. As defending her and her assumptions and her inability to ever consider that anyone could possibly outthink her, let alone disguise their true intentions from her gaze.

And there she still is, staring back at Sephiroth as if he’s a child again, so undeniably intelligent that she can’t help but be disappointed in how badly he’s applying that to the facts. The blood is still sticky on parts of his throat and under the cuffs of his coat from the fighting, and as he takes a harsh breath, he can feel flakes of it peel off to itch under his clothes. He thinks for a moment that he’d like to refresh the stains with her blood.

“Seph,” Angeal hisses, an urgency entering his voice that barely cuts through the gathering buzz of rage in Sephiroth’s head. “It’s not going to help. She’s not going to care.”

Which Sephiroth already knew—which he can see in her damned eyes, the way that she looks dismissively at him now. And that will be the way she looks at him even with his blade in her chest, he knows that. When he’d killed his father, at least Hojo had finally looked at him with some kind of awe, some acknowledgement that Sephiroth had shattered the man’s theories, and that had been sweet. But his mother? His mother only expects that kind of irrational outburst. All it will do is confirm her theories.

“Whatever interpretation you want to put on it, I know what I saw with my own eyes, and I trust in what my teams have reported to me,” Sephiroth grates as he forces himself back into his seat. “I gave my recommendations.”

“They won’t be disregarded without reason, General. I know they come from a desire to protect,” Rufus says, and at least he has the grace to pretend to be meaningful about it.

Sephiroth’s mother snorts. “Now, if we can return to addressing the actual cause—”

“There’s no need to be petty. We’re all trying to understand how this got through our controls,” Rufus says smoothly. He drops his gaze from Sephiroth but doesn’t then move it to Sephiroth’s visibly-irritated mother. “I also acknowledge you knew the key scientist here, Dr. Crescent.”

“I knew him enough to catalog his incompetencies,” Sephiroth’s mother says after a moment. She appears to be constraining her true opinion, and it sits uneasily on her, but then she turns back to her tablet. “I would number politics among them, as well as an odd taste for the exotic. I suppose that might look to the casual eye like connections to the Wutaians, but—”

Sephiroth can’t help a snarl under his breath. His mother doesn’t so much as acknowledge it, as she has Rufus’ apparent attention now, and continues along her narrow line of reasoning. But there’s a ping on both Lazard’s and Sephiroth’s phones, and when Lazard glances at the message, his first act is to wince and look up at Sephiroth.

“Another urgent matter?” Rufus says at nearly the same time. He doesn’t look away from what Sephiroth’s mother is showing on the large screen, even as his index finger idly slides off his phone. “I understand, General. This is certainly something you can catch up on after we’ve fully secured the site. We need you more where there’s an active threat.”

Lazard looks silently at Sephiroth, his face stony but with more than a hint of genuine fear behind it. He knows better than his brother how thin a line there often is between Sephiroth’s sense of duty and Sephiroth’s sense of how little honor others find in his commitment to that. And whatever Rufus tries to mask, his own words disclose a slighting of Sephiroth’s value, treating him as nothing more than an enforcer.

But this is not how, Sephiroth reminds himself. Not this.

“General Hewley will stay,” Sephiroth says after a long, tense silence; the others at least are giving his reaction space. He pauses and takes a studied breath, then pushes back from the table. “I’ll return once I’ve seen to the matter.”

“Of course, General. Take your time,” Rufus says indifferently.

Sephiroth’s mother has been waiting to continue, and does so with an impatient motion of her tablet. Rufus’ eyes narrow slightly but they don’t leave her, and he certainly doesn’t rise or even turn his head as Sephiroth exits the room.

The lesser Turks outside hold their positions but nervously defer their gazes till after Sephiroth has stalked down the hall. At the turn, Sephiroth encounters the first SOLDIER, who sees his expression and takes a half-step back before catching themselves and saluting properly.

Sephiroth doesn’t trust his voice yet, so he nods curtly and then detours into the empty room next to the SOLDIER. He doesn’t close the door but does turn his back to the doorway before he checks his message: an authorization for him to take a week of personal leave he hasn’t requested, effective tomorrow and signed by Rufus.

* * *

Lazard tries to excuse his brother in a later SOLDIER-only debrief session, claiming that Rufus is only trying to shield Sephiroth from the public blowback of another high-profile quarrel with Sephiroth’s mother. Apparently, not only do they need a united front when being questioned about yet another former R&D employee’s ability to create mercenaries with Shinra-patented enhancements, they also need to prove to the general public that SOLDIER isn’t susceptible to the same violent blackouts that had led to the mercenaries’ discovery. “We are presenting SOLDIER’s annual recruitment and retention statistics at the end of the month,” Lazard points out, swallowing hard but keeping his gaze on Sephiroth. “There are potential concerns around the attrition numbers for medical causes.”

“SOLDIER medical treats existing issues, they don’t create them. That’s Mother’s expertise,” Sephiroth bites back. “Along with improperly firing scientists who then create private armies we deal with.”

“She couldn’t just refer him to you to eliminate, Sephiroth. His family has a seat on the board—and yes, Rufus is dealing with that now, if you don’t create a distraction. He’s not siding with your damned mother, all right?” Lazard snaps, but it’s far more an outburst of unstrung nerves than true courage. He swallows again and his glasses slip to the end of his nose. When Angeal shifts, he startles and has to snatch at the glasses to keep them from falling off entirely. “But he can’t very well reprimand her for her mistakes if you’re drawing a blade on him. Then he needs her to control you, can’t you see that?”

“Oh, believe me, we know better than you who needs control around here,” Genesis drawls. Then refolds his hands across his belly and makes himself more comfortable in his sprawl, looking away from all of them. “But in all honesty, Sephiroth, perhaps it’s better to have a little distance from this mess. We have eliminated all known test subjects, after all, and if your mother says there is no way they could have replicated the technique even if they had managed to export it to Wutai, who are we to criticize her analysis?”

Lazard exhales as if he’s only just discovered that ability when Sephiroth turns away from him, then frowns. But before he can say anything, Angeal raises his hand. “We killed them all but we haven’t tracked down all the support staff—we’ve still got to wrap that and that’s going to keep us busy,” he says, looking at Sephiroth more than Lazard. “That’s gonna go a way towards calming people down, and you know R&D isn’t going to give a shit about anyone without the genes, even if they’re still threatening people and storing hazardous waste all over the place. We can keep that going while you’re out.”

“Like the productive little team players we are,” Genesis says, with just enough sarcasm that Angeal grimaces and scoots back from where he’s been trying to wedge between Sephiroth and Lazard to where he can keep one hand on Genesis’ chair. “Anyway, your mother’s only going to find ways to drop it in front of your face that you’re overreacting if you stay, Sephiroth. She does it enough times and someone might just think to suggest we all deserve mandatory attitude adjustments.”

“I give you my word that no one is going to view this as Rufus punishing you. I talked to him about that and yes, he’s my brother, but I do think he understands the benefit of not having anyone doubt his head of SOLDIER’s capabilities,” Lazard says, tone low and insistently desperate. “He does think you’re more of an ally than your mother, he has seen what she’s been turning out lately. That’s why he wants you back refreshed. This has not been an easy few weeks and you’ve taken the brunt of it more than anyone, General.”

“You don’t need to be your brother’s PR shill, Deusericus,” Sephiroth says, but he is resuming his seat. He glances at the tablets scattered across the table, then looks at the door on the other side of the table. Down the hall his mother is running her own team’s briefing session, and no doubt planning on exactly what Genesis has predicted. “I understand the reasoning. And as the head of SOLDIER, I can’t disobey a directive from the President.”

Genesis makes a derisive noise, and then huffs irritably when Angeal tries to shake his arm in warning. Sephiroth looks in their direction, then makes himself take up his tablet and start going over coverage instructions for his leave, like a rational person.

* * *

But he’s not rational at all about it. Sephiroth pretends very well, considering he grew up in an environment where any sign of suboptimal behavior was meticulously documented, and he never ceases to be surprised when people don’t realize that. But that is their burden, not his. All he has to do, courtesy of Rufus, is pretend until he steps off the plane in Nibelheim and hikes far enough into the wilderness to be certain that no observers are present.

At that point, the first thing he does is locate one of the massive, hollowed-out stumps Vincent has shown him and stow most of his gear in it, including his coat and his boots. The snow is still several inches thick on the ground but at this time of year, on a windless day like this, the sunshine is strong enough to keep him warm so long as he keeps moving.

And he has no problem there. He slashes out a clearing for himself, stacking the brush up around the edges to help with sound absorption, and then runs through every practice stance he knows till the sweat is steaming off his body. Of course without a simulator, he doesn’t have the pleasure of feeling his blade sink into his targets, or of seeing them drop into pieces—he’s generally not bloodthirsty, or so he pretends, but when he’s angry he does feel how that could be to his taste, how he could come to crave it.

Practice stances aren’t sufficient. He slices his way out of the circle and goes back to the stump, where he takes up a seat on its rim as he cleans off Masamune. The work did wear on him physically, enough so that his muscles welcome the chance to relax, but it hasn’t eaten at all into his rage.

Still, Sephiroth is enough of a swordsman that he tends to his blade with care, checking its length for damage before he sheathes it and stores it away with the rest of his things. Then he straightens up again, looking out over the mountain and idly identifying key landmarks. He’s thinking about retrieving his boots for a hike when the wind changes.

Sephiroth looks directly overhead, then throws himself off the stump and into a rolling dive for some bushes. They’re still in the budding stage and rake him unmercifully all over, while a rock smashes into the heel of his left foot as he drags his leg over the ground. He flattens himself barely in time to avoid the claws that raze off the tops of the bushes.

Vincent swoops out of his dive and wheels about, his great leathery wings stirring up gusts of snow as he looks down at Sephiroth. He’s a monstrous dark-furred being, all horns and shining claws and blood-red eyes studying Sephiroth with unnerving steadiness. He flaps a few times and though he largely stays in place, he rotates so that if he dove again, Sephiroth only needs to angle the other way in order to return to the stump and Masamune, rather than having to cut under those claws.

Sephiroth inhales and finds he has to do it as a gasp, a deep enough one that his chest aches at the edges. He raises his arm, then puts it down and uses it as leverage against the ground to haul himself out of the brush. The snow doesn’t numb his healing scratches but instead stings them with its cold. He gasps again, pushing himself up onto his knees.

Then, exhaling, he lets his arms fall to his sides, his hands loose against his hips. He watches as Vincent rises a little higher in the air, the rage blown completely out of him, and then closes his eyes as Vincent’s wings tilt.

A second later Vincent’s down on top of him. Blunt-nailed fingers drag down his trousers and fling him onto his belly, smooth-skinned limbs press roughly over him—Vincent’s no gentler for having changed back to human form, and works Sephiroth open with his tongue alone before pulling himself up and driving his cock in. Sephiroth cries out, chewing on bits of snow that fall into his mouth. Keeping his limbs to himself, out of Vincent’s way, letting the other man lay waste to his body until Vincent’s come is tracking down his thighs.

Vincent grunts twice before leaning an arm against Sephiroth’s body and pulling out. He pauses as Sephiroth groans and twists under him, then reaches over and tunnels one hand under Sephiroth’s belly, feeling around till he has Sephiroth’s spent cock in hand. “You don’t run hot enough for this,” he mutters, withdrawing his hand and wiping his sticky fingers against Sephiroth’s hip.

Sephiroth shivers, then mewls as Vincent gives his buttock a light slap. It’s nowhere near enough to mark, but it wakes up his skin from the chilly air, makes it remember the now-healed scratches from the bushes. “Warm me?” he murmurs, twisting his head over and looking up at Vincent.

Who only smiles as he pushes further off of Sephiroth, smiles and shakes his head before giving Sephiroth another slap. Pointed this time, catching at the underside of the buttock so Sephiroth hisses and hitches up onto his hands and knees. Then Sephiroth groans again as a surging need goes through him, arousal so intense it makes his anger earlier look like a child’s tantrum. He shivers and presses his head against Vincent’s shoulder.

Vincent doesn’t speak, only twists one hand in Sephiroth’s hair and then stands up. He walks, Sephiroth crawls, the handful of yards back to the stump, and then instead of reaching into it, he kicks some snow away and then toes up a square of precut turf. In the hole beneath lies coils of rope.

Sephiroth puts his wrists out. Vincent glances at him, the man’s usual indulgence tempered with a little…not impatience, but it makes Sephiroth briefly wonder what expectation he hasn’t met here.

Before that can fester, Vincent takes him by the chin. He’s jerked forward, precisely enough that he has to shove a knee out to support himself, and then Vincent lets go to take up his wrists. “I said I’d chase you if you needed it,” the man says as he picks out a rope and then starts to tie it around Sephiroth’s left. “I thought you would. Tseng said she didn’t spare you.”

The mention of his mother makes Sephiroth tense. Vincent tweaks the rope as he knots it, making Sephiroth rock on his knees and scattering his thoughts. He sucks his breath between his teeth and shakes his head, then jerks forward again as Vincent lets his bound wrists drop, hanging from the rope the other man retains like a supplicant.

Long, curved claws caress up the side of his throat as he tilts back his head and gazes into the other man’s face. Not judging him, he knew that, but he has to be reminded—this is why he comes out here, and make no mistake, he came here. No one sent him to this, least of all someone like Rufus Shinra.

Although the man probably thinks otherwise, and Sephiroth does feel a brief, independent glow of satisfaction, just before Vincent twists his hand back into Sephiroth’s hair and uses it to wrench his head back to focus only on the other man. “But you don’t,” Vincent says, quieting his voice so that Sephiroth has to quiet his own hissing to hear him. “You don’t. You’re only my prize now, and I won’t have you freezing before I finish enjoying you.”

“Vincent,” Sephiroth rasps, shivering again. He doesn’t feel cold at all, he wants to say—not at all, not with every inch of his body feverishly anticipating the man’s desires.

The other man cocks his head, giving Sephiroth a few seconds. When Sephiroth doesn’t go on and only gazes at him, Vincent lets out an amused chuckle. He tugs at Sephiroth’s hair again, then gives the rope a playful bounce so that Sephiroth’s fingers scrape against his knee. Sephiroth’s breath catches and Vincent’s gaze changes, but this time the indulgence is shaded with unconditional appreciation.

Without any further preliminaries, Vincent chivvies Sephiroth up to the stump. Its massive roots are still solidly planted into the earth, providing a suitable anchor for Sephiroth’s wrists. Vincent kicks Sephiroth’s ankles up against two other roots and ties them apart, then knots Sephiroth’s hair up into a loose ball against his nape. He steps back and digs around in the hole again, and then the first lash of the whip cuts across Sephiroth’s right upper thigh.

Sephiroth arches but feels the rope straining. He could tear it if he tried—so he has to try not to, holding himself back against the whip and tiring himself out even as welts slowly heat the backs of his legs and across his buttocks. He can’t simply let himself hang in his bonds, but has to be an active participant in his treatment. It’s work—it’s tiring—and yet the effort of focusing and keeping his body in check also heightens the frisson of his position, the way it emphasizes how he has to bend himself to another’s will.

The whip suddenly swings wide of him, the wind of its passing sheering over his back like a razor and skimming off the thinnest layer of sweat. He trembles harder under that than he did under the lash itself, his body tightly gathered up against a blow that never comes. When the tension releases, he doesn’t have the burn to set himself against and so overcorrects, jerking one leg too roughly and snapping the rope.

Vincent touches his freed ankle with the end of the whip and Sephiroth immediately freezes. Then drops his head between his arms as low as he can, watching his panting eat away the snow under him as the whip snakes along the part of the rope still tied around him, then doubles back over his calf in a ticklish motion. He bites back a moan and a sudden wash of heat runs over him, scoring deeply at every lash-mark, their edges feeling as if they’ve been traced in acid.

The whip lifts but returns a moment later to stroke lightly up his inner thighs. He twitches and it twitches back, its length swishing teasingly between his legs and even brushing a few times against his heavy-hanging balls, tensed as they are with built-up need. He throws his head back before he can help himself, then shudders and drops his chin again, cants up his hips as Vincent wiggles the whip’s tip against his prick.

He feels Vincent’s breath between his shoulderblades as the other man bends over him. “Come,” Vincent commands.

Sephiroth arches himself and his cock spurts into the melting snow. He breaks the other ankle-rope, but retains enough sense to push his foot back into that root, curling his toes as much as he can around its width. Vincent still notices, of course, but only sighs and runs one claw down Sephiroth’s spine, skimming just to the rim of Sephiroth’s hole before lifting away.

The lash-marks don’t run past Sephiroth’s waist, but his whole body feels flushed with heat, and when Vincent pulls him back up onto his knees, he’s a little surprised to see clumps of unmelted snow where he’d been. Vincent cuts through the rope where it leashes his hands to the root, leaving it intact about his wrists, and he half-expects the man to twist him backwards and force him into the snow to writhe till he loses what little breath he has left.

But no. Vincent takes out a ball of twine, coarse stuff that raises itching pink lines at the slightest graze, and proceeds to bind Sephiroth’s pectorals with it. Of course he ensures that Sephiroth’s nipples are well-seated within the harness, their tips reddened and hypersensitive by the time he ties the last knot at Sephiroth’s back. He ties another harness around Sephiroth’s balls but leaves Sephiroth’s cock free; he does give the cock a couple pumps, entirely to watch Sephiroth squirm and then wince as the twine pinches all over.

Then he cuts the ropes from Sephiroth’s ankles. He makes Sephiroth get up and walk with him over the ground, painfully stony where it isn’t covered with ice and snow. Thankfully, they only go about a couple hundred yards through a deceptive-looking cleft in some boulders and then emerge on the edge of a hot spring.

It looks natural, its shape irregular and its edges crusted with sparkling minerals, but there’s a small cabin built up against the mountainside at its far end. Sephiroth only has the chance to note the cabin is partly made of prefabricated Shinra panels before Vincent forces him down into the pool.

The water sheathes up his lower legs, its warmth drawing pleasurably into his sore muscles—but then Vincent pushes on his shoulders. He folds and when the water comes up over his welted thighs and buttocks, he cries out, raising his bound hands in futile protest. It feels as if he’s being caressed to the bone, as if his flesh is burning with pain and burning with hunger for more at the same time. He twists his hands in against his chest, raking at it, but his nails only catch the twine and pull it taut about his nipples—when the water hits those, his resistance melts as easily as the snow under his breath and he slumps.

His head probably would have dropped under the water if Vincent hadn’t seized his hair. Vincent keeps hold of that even after Sephiroth has struggled into a shaky kind of balance, kneeling on the bottom of the pool and pushing the heels of his hands into his thighs to keep his head tilted up for the ragged breaths he’s taking.

“Did you come?” Vincent asks. He wraps another round of Sephiroth’s hair about his fingers to turn Sephiroth’s head towards him.

Sephiroth groans and shakes his head. Then sighs, as pleased as Vincent’s smile at him for that. Vincent unwinds the hair from his hand, combing it a few times with his fingers as he drops it lock by lock into the water.

“Hold,” Vincent tells him.

Obedient, Sephiroth sits in the pool as the other man rises and then walks around the edge till he reaches the house. The water’s warmth has started to smooth over the lash-marks, clear the ache out of Sephiroth’s joints, though the pricking of the twine whenever he breathes keeps him nicely aware of his position. He recognizes the cabin as coming from an experimental field kit they’d tested for Tuesti as part of the new SOLDIER training exercises in the area, and if he wanted to think about it, he could probably call up the exact reasoning why they put it here, which has nothing to do with the hot spring. Hot springs are commonplace in the area anyway; the locals have few luxuries but one almost every family has is a favored spring.

But no one is going to use this one, Sephiroth knows, and he knows this because Vincent comes out of the cabin a few minutes later, still as naked as he was when he dropped out of the sky and with a wooden bucket in the Wutaian style in his hand. And the soap he pulls out of it is Wutaian, too, and so is the small rough towel he pairs with the soap to wash Sephiroth down.

He doesn’t spare the welts, or Sephiroth’s bound nipples or unbound cock. Sephiroth braces his wrists against the pool’s edge or rests their bindings against the top of his head, whatever Vincent directs, and whimpers to no effect except to make Vincent smile even more indulgently. The water’s soothing effects soon vanish and he’s deliciously tortured all over, mind entirely taken up with how desperately he has to work to not seek the relieving bliss of climax.

Eventually, he can’t help himself and reaches down between his legs…but Vincent anticipates him and the man’s tail promptly coils about his wrists. When a half-formed plea drops from his lips, Vincent stands up behind him and holds him by the front of the throat so he can feel how his words bob against the man’s firm palm.

Vincent lets him swallow down the begging, then tugs his head against the other man’s belly so at least he can groan and nuzzle at it. He works his way towards the man’s cock as Vincent sluices handfuls of water over his head, managing to trap its tip between his lips just as Vincent’s fingers start to work down into his hair. When he sucks, he hears Vincent’s breath stutter. He sucks again and Vincent snorts and steps around so that Sephiroth can take in his whole cock.

More water runs down into Sephiroth’s hair, with Vincent’s fingers massaging down after them. The clawing need in Sephiroth dampens a little, lulled by the rhythm of Vincent’s hands that rolls his own mouth down the length of Vincent’s cock…but Vincent only allows a few minutes of sucking before he pulls back. He steps behind Sephiroth again but bends forward, his free hand cupping up water just in front of Sephiroth’s face. He lets Sephiroth look at it, smell the distinctive mineral tang steaming off it, and then he swiftly tips his hand to cover Sephiroth’s nose and mouth.

At the same time his other hand presses Sephiroth’s head forward into the water. The moment Sephiroth is fully submerged, both of Vincent’s hands move to the sides of his head, working in typical hairwashing motions. They circle his ears, fingertips digging deeply into the backs, and then pull him out of the water so he can take a fresh breath. It’s a matter of seconds, not even a minute, not posing the slightest physical test to Sephiroth’s abilities. But then that isn’t the point, and if it was, Sephiroth wouldn’t be submitting himself to the other man.

Sephiroth knows his place. He doesn’t need harsh bindings at this point, doesn’t even need pain, though of course Vincent knows his weaknesses and never fails to explore them. Hands going regularly down over his chest and twisting his nipples, then coming back up to press him into the water, gasping at the other man’s direction…but all Vincent needs is a touch to shape Sephiroth how he wants. A touch, and then a whisper in the ear, telling his body what to do.

So when Sephiroth finally comes out of the pool, he’s cleansed not only of physical filth but also mental, his mind entirely ready for his role.

They go into the cabin. It’s only one room, but includes comfortable space for a rudimentary kitchen, a few shelves, and a fireplace. A backdoor presumably leads to a toilet of some kind, but when Vincent wants Sephiroth to know, he’ll show it and until then Sephiroth doesn’t dwell on it. Normally foldable cots would be provided, but there’s no sign of them; the bed consists of familiar furs piled generously up against one wall.

A single fur is thrown over the floor for a rug. Vincent has cut Sephiroth’s wrists free and he has Sephiroth kneel on the fur and comb out his hair while he puts away the bucket of washing supplies, starts a fire, throws on the same kind of sleeping robe he’d wear in Midgar. Touches of their lives there, touches of their lives here, but none of it feels jarring despite how carefully they’ve previously segregated the two.

Perhaps it’s how light Sephiroth’s mind is. He doesn’t notice how easily the comb is running through his hair till Vincent takes it from him, and when it’s gone, he doesn’t feel the lack of anything to preoccupy his fingers. He only sits and puts his chest out when Vincent slides a claw under part of the harness, inhaling sharply even though the waterlogged twine is already loose.

Vincent has fresh cords to replace it, the usual silk, which raises unusual, pleasurable prickling sensations as it slides where the twine has already rasped the way. The springwater had deceptively warmed the rest of Sephiroth’s flesh so that he’d felt healed, but he shivers anew now. “Not burning yet,” Vincent remarks as he knots the cord about a nipple.

Sephiroth inhales against the tug. “Please,” he murmurs dreamily. “The next time I come…”

“I promised you,” Vincent says. He gives the other nipple a sharp pinch before he ties it up, and then steps behind Sephiroth to finish the harness, meticulously knotting where Sephiroth would find it difficult to reach without aid. “But you did promise to tell me how it went. Did you find the messages?”

The knots nestle along Sephiroth’s spine, lightly pressuring it as he exhales. He breathes a little slower and more shallowly. “Server intact,” he says without truly thinking about it.

Vincent rewards him with a bite at the top of his shoulder, just near enough to where the cord crosses over it that the silk will slip and keep its sting fresh when he rolls his shoulders. Another set of silk cords comes out, whipping teasingly against his buttocks so he starts and hisses. Then Vincent puts his arms around Sephiroth and picks up his cock, which has recovered enough from the pool to consider hardening again.

“Wutaian codes,” Vincent says, almost offhanded, as he weaves an intricate sheath with the cords to keep Sephiroth’s cock soft. He bites along Sephiroth’s throat, tickles fingertips between the taut cords over the sensitizing flesh, and binds up Sephiroth’s balls while he’s at it. “Were they surprised you knew some?”

Sephiroth shakes his head. Then tips it into Vincent’s teeth as they gently worry at his jaw. “No—Vincent, please, I need—”

“I know. Tell me what they said about it while I’m dressing you,” Vincent says.

The buzzing in Sephiroth’s head is pleasantly nonsensical, and if not for it, he’d probably wonder how he can string two words together, let alone carry on a conversation. But he does and they do, with him patiently repeating his mother’s low opinion of the likelihood that a rogue scientist could use Wutaian codes without a senior Wutaian clan actually being involved. He remembers being enraged at their refusal to draw the obvious conclusion, especially his mother given she’s complained about his not taking Wutaian attempts at corporate espionage seriously enough in the past. But that had been when they were dealing with former Shinra employees she hadn’t trained from the beginning—she’s always been able to blame Hojo or Hollander or some other prior regime. This turncoat had been one of hers, and yet she couldn’t contemplate the idea that she’d misjudged their skills so badly that they’d been able to find a career of sorts after losing her favor.

Enraged. He’d wanted to kill her for her blindness. But he doesn’t feel so invested in the matter now, doesn’t feel as if he needs to prove…something. He only needs to follow directions, and so he raises and lowers his arms for the pretty pink slip, its silk teasing his welts as it skates over them. But not his nipples—this slip has a front that opens all the way down to the bottom of his pectorals. There’s lacing that would close it, but for now the ribbons dangle loose from one side.

Sephiroth’s hair is dry enough now that Vincent braids it loosely and then drapes it over his shoulder, tied with a black silk cord to match the chest- and cock harnesses. But it is still damp enough that his slip sticks to it and drags a little to the side. Vincent twitches it back into place, then dips his hands into the open front and palms at Sephiroth’s nipples, working them till Sephiroth is stuttering the last of the details between whimpers.

“Such a good general,” Vincent says, nipping at his throat again. Fingers rolling each nipple against the tightly-knotted cords, swelling them to near-perfect tenderness. “Doing your duty, even when it’s not rewarded—but I reward you.”

A long, wordless moan comes out of Sephiroth. His hands sag at his hips, even as Vincent gives his nipples a parting tweak. Vincent pushes something between his arm and his side and he looks down, then lets his head sway back up as the other man positions the black leather about his torso.

It’s not one of Genesis’ corsets, but it’s a stiffer belt than Vincent has put on him before. Stiffer and broader, spanning from where the open front of his slip starts down to his waist—and both top and bottom curve like a corset, cupping lasciviously under his pectorals and dipping coquettishly over his bellybutton, respectively. As Vincent laces it firmly up the back, he can feel how it shapes him, constrains him, keeps his excited shivers concentrated and thus intense rather than dissipating into his limbs. When he breathes, it makes him press into the chest harness and keep his nipples sore and hard.

“What did Lucrecia want to investigate?” he’s asked as if from a distance.

At the same time, Sephiroth’s arms are stretched out in front of him. He can bend in the belt but its stern flex encourages him to keep bending, and so he doesn’t stop till he’s on his hands and knees. “Not Wutai. She still—doesn’t think they can replicate even if they—know,” he moans, as his skirt is pulled up and oiled fingers slide between his buttocks. “Wants to—find the backer here in Midgar, she’s certain—certain the money comes from here, only here.”

“Only money,” Vincent repeats thoughtfully. Then hums a little to himself, one of those folksongs with lyrics he’s painted across Sephiroth’s body, as he opens Sephiroth up and then fills the space with a thick, heavy plug. “She only thinks it’s money.”

Sephiroth nods. Then groans and sinks on his weakened arms, even as the stretch reaches across his chest and makes his nipples burn, makes his breath cram against the tight belt. There’s a kind of projection at the base of the plug, a blunt little hook with a nubbed end that digs into his perineum where all the nerves in his legs seem to end. He shivers and whines and Vincent doesn’t ask him anything, only strokes his thighs till he lifts them one at a time and lets the other man ease matching silk panties onto him.

Doesn’t ask him anything till he’s been pulled back up onto his knees, then pushed down onto his back. Fur sticking to his damp skin, sticking and swirling against his welted buttocks as he grasps more clumps of it and watches Vincent carefully spread the open bodice of his slip. His skirt has ridden up and his cock is straining its bonds against his panties, but somehow it’s his chest that feels illicitly exposed, something about the combination of the air freely teasing the silk cords webbed about his nipples and the severely-laced belt just beneath.

And then Vincent produces a stick of red wax, with a wick at the end that he proceeds to light. “I need to get your things,” he says as they both watch the wax soften and droop into beads on the underside of the flame. “The weather is going to turn. So I’ll seal you, and lace you up, and you can make me tea. If you don’t break the seals—”

A bead falls. Sephiroth finds himself so fascinated by the way its shape changes as soon as its tail separates from the stick that he forgets to brace himself, and then arches till nearly his entire back is off the ground. The wax falls unevenly, on the silk cord and on his skin, hot enough to make the existing throb of his nipples briefly pale and yet cooling so quickly that he’s still catching his breath when his body tries to countershock the burn with a fresh starburst of pain rising up from within the muscle. He feels strands of fur tear off the rug as he just keeps himself from ripping at his chest.

“If you don’t,” Vincent says. He twists the stick of wax so that the next bead instead runs back around its circumference, delaying its fall a few seconds. “If she had listened to you, she’d find their spy first. You can’t question anyone in R&D without her knowing.”

The bead falls. This time Sephiroth closes his eyes. It’s more intense that way but also easier to let himself simply drop into the burning haze—drop by drop, over first one nipple and then the other, until his panties are soaked with precome and his voice is reduced to mewling, Vincent seals him in place.

“You can’t do anything here,” Vincent tells him warmly, kindly. Kissing his sweat-slicked brow, stroking his throat as he whines, and then kissing each wax-covered nipple as he shudders. “Can’t be blamed for missing anything, can’t be your failure. If you stay where I put you.”

Sephiroth nods, one great effort, and then lapses into a pliant daze as Vincent tugs the slip’s bodice closed with brutal lightness, laces it so its flimsy silk somehow seems to scrape through the wax and send shuddering waves of arousal through him.

“So make the tea, my prize.” Vincent kisses him a last time, deeply on the mouth, before taking him by the shoulders. “Don’t break the seals and I’ll tie you up for the rest.”

When Sephiroth is pulled to his feet, he’s still in a daze. He’s a pretty, docile thing, moving to the kitchen and finding a pot as Vincent steps out of the cabin. Filling it with snow from outside and then setting it on a tripod by the fire, then searching out the canister of tea. Vincent’s shown him how to gauge water temperature by the sound of the bubbles against the pot’s sides, and when it’s perfect, he measures in the leaves. Careful, very careful, though he has the helpful reminders of tightening cords about his balls and nipples, the grip of his belt, the nudge of his plug inside and out.

There are cups, simple ones of brown unfired clay. In Wutai street vendors use these as cheap single-use implements, easy to toss onto the ground and then grind into dust with a shoe-heel. Sephiroth has shattered more than a few himself. But here…he cradles them gingerly as he arranges a wooden tray by the heating water, well aware that should he break one, there’ll be no salvaging it. He won’t be punished but no doubt the cups are linked to some other element and it’d be enough of a consequence, his never learning what Vincent had planned.

As he straightens up, his belt hurries him along and he instinctively pulls back his shoulders. A flash goes down his spine, molten and breath-stealing, only to fan out into jittery fingers of aching as he stops and presses his palms against his thighs and breathes shallowly. He inches his knees apart and the phantom fingers curl deeply into his buttocks, striping along their lash-marks. He feels sweat trickling out from under the belt and into the cleft, the salt in it lightly stinging about his hole as it divides around the plug he houses.

But the tea is ready. He breathes again, whimpers draping over his lips as his chest harness strains under the silk, the wax—he cuts the breath short before the wax cracks and, openmouthed with dizziness, half-blindly reaches for the pot handle.

Somehow he finds it and pours out a cup without damaging anything. The pot does click sharply as he restores it to its tripod, but the sound doesn’t have the decisive ring to it; he hasn’t actually chipped it. He still shudders at the nearness of that error as he settles back on his knees, shudders and digs his fingernails into the sides of his hips.

Vincent’s back in the cabin right after that. Sephiroth pulls his hands away to let his fingertips rest on the floor but he sees the other man’s eyes flick to where they had been, to the unpermitted marks they’ve left. No reprimand is delivered but Vincent’s coolly assessing gaze makes Sephiroth shift restlessly on his knees.

“Stop,” Vincent says. He has Sephiroth’s belongings bundled neatly into Sephiroth’s coat. He sets that on the kitchen counter and turns in the same motion to reach for a bag next to it. When he takes his hand out, he’s holding leather bindings.

Sephiroth can’t help an eager noise, though he obediently keeps still as Vincent walks over to him. Vincent puts two claw-tips under Sephiroth’s chin to tilt it up, then traces them down the front of Sephiroth’s throat, an elegant threat. When they reach the collarbone he spreads his fingers so his claws hook at either side of the slip’s bodice lacing.

“Please,” Sephiroth whispers. “I—I made tea.”

Vincent’s gaze flicks to the side. The corner of his mouth twitches but he doesn’t turn as his claws dip deeper into the slip, sharp tips scratching along the chest harness so Sephiroth has to shallow his breathing again. Then he takes them out, twisting his hand around so that he can drag one claw to the right and delicately tease Sephiroth’s nipple through the silk.

“Arms back,” he finally says.

His hand goes up to Sephiroth’s shoulder at the same time, dropping with a roughness that makes Sephiroth hitch in place. Then he pivots smoothly behind Sephiroth, catching both arms and jerking them together. Freshened pain webs out along the silk cords knotted under the slip, then doubles in intensity as the belt seems to winch tighter against Sephiroth’s panting.

But it’s all bounded now; Sephiroth doesn’t have to hold himself in check against the mounting sensations. Vincent ensures that, with leather sleeves snugly buckled up each forearm, arrowing them together down towards strapped, crossed wrists. Sephiroth’s hands dangle uselessly against his buttocks, good only for scraping maddeningly at their welts, fluttering tantalizingly to either side of the plug he’s clenching against. He can let them dangle, secure in the knowledge that he can’t free himself, can only kneel and pant and stare at Vincent for the man’s undivided pleasure.

Vincent straps his legs thigh to calf, using the finishing tugs to position Sephiroth’s knees even wider so that his own body weight drags him down into the plug’s nagging little hook against his perineum. He squirms a little, then settles with a contented moan as Vincent lays one steadying finger on his left shoulder.

One finger there, enough to hold him as Vincent’s tail abruptly drops out from the bottom of the man’s robe and then winds between Sephiroth’s thighs. Its fur rasps at Sephiroth’s inner thighs, enticing him to rock forward into the tip, which strokes firmly across his panties, turning their damp, clinging softness into utter torture against his trapped cock head.

Sephiroth sways in place, then twists the little he’s able as Vincent moves his leg forward. He sinks his head against the man with a groan of relief even as Vincent continues teasing his cock, reminding it of its subordination to its bonds. “Did Tseng say anything?”

“No. No, we didn’t—didn’t speak at all,” Sephiroth says, barely able to rasp the words between mewls. He shivers as Vincent caresses his nape, then attempts to nuzzle towards the man’s groin, only to have his head turned the other way. He licks at his lips as Vincent stoops down, then purses them for the cup Vincent lifts to his mouth. “Busy with…Mother…”

“Good,” Vincent says. He rewards every sip with a circular rub of his tail along Sephiroth’s cock, slowly working down from the head to the base. Then his tail coils out about Sephiroth’s scrotum instead, and suddenly his free hand is under Sephiroth’s skirt, lazily palming over Sephiroth’s cock as Sephiroth lets out a sobbing moan. “You’re so wet. So very easy to please…is that why you didn’t run?”

“What?” Sephiroth asks blankly.

Not a bit of intelligent thought in it, but something about it amuses Vincent. He smiles, his tail now twining back to stretch up between Sephiroth’s buttocks. He rocks the plug in Sephiroth, then ducks under Sephiroth’s moaning to brush kisses over Sephiroth’s nipples. Then he straightens up again, gaze openly appreciating Sephiroth.

“She was going to upset you. It wouldn’t work if she didn’t, but she does.” Vincent slides one claw under where the panties cross Sephiroth’s hip, then lets its edge cut through. At first the panties barely move, so stuck are they to Sephiroth with sweat and precome, but Vincent uses his finger to patiently, tortuously peel them free. Then he cuts through the other side, all while his tail nuzzles over Sephiroth’s groin till inside it feels as if Sephiroth is carrying a pot of shifting, burning coals. “She always does. I thought you’d have to run it off.”

“But you’re—here,” Sephiroth manages, as it dimly penetrates that Vincent wants something else from him besides mere submission. Wants him opened like he never would for anyone else, opened and exposed and he’s more than happy to do that—can’t even think about it now. He’s simply trained to open for the man. “I saw you—you’re here and—why would I run?”

Vincent inhales. It’s not a sharp or a particularly deep breath, but something in its intensity nevertheless comes through to Sephiroth. But…it isn’t disturbing. Nothing here is disturbing, nothing here is out of place. Least of all Sephiroth, who kneels, splayed and fitted and bound, a willing prize, till Vincent is ready.

“Hold,” Vincent finally says, almost sighing it.

He pulls away Sephiroth’s ruined panties, then knots them with a strip of white silk into Sephiroth’s mouth. The rest of the strip is knotted again over Sephiroth’s eyes; Sephiroth shudders once as the comfortable darkness falls and all his other senses immediately heighten, but quickly slips under the overwhelming sensations into peaceful lassitude.

Footsteps around him, never hurried, and then comes the very much welcome feeling of more silk being wrapped about his head. Smoothed in place over his cheeks and nose, firmly laced at the back, a simple hole for him to breathe through. He can still hear through the hood but the silk, thin as it is, has a softening effect over his senses, making it easy for time to slip away from him.

All he knows for a while is touch. The occasional caress over his body, light enough to not stir him out of his daze but teasing enough for the possessive element to come through. Fingers flirting down his shoulderblades, cupping his buttock or his pectorals. A mouth tasting his skin where his bonds bare him, leaving fresh marks behind as Vincent’s tail explores the older ones on his thighs.

Then Vincent speaks again. Sephiroth is firmly within the other man’s hold, head dropped back onto a shoulder while Vincent’s fingers pick open the bodice laces. “I know you don’t want to kill her,” Vincent says, soft and slow and meditative, his hands covering Sephiroth’s exposed breast. “You’d still rather sacrifice your pride, use it to buy the future, not waste it on a moment of revenge. I understand that.”

Sephiroth stirs a little, but then sags back as the sharp edge of Vincent’s claw sinks through one nipple’s wax seal. Vincent doesn’t draw blood but that almost would have been a relief, with how fiercely it surges up against the fragile, abused skin containing it. How much it makes Sephiroth’s body pulse with aching need all over, as Vincent breaks the other seal and slowly loosens the chest harness, fondling freely as the cut cords fall away.

“I’ll just tell you that I would if you asked.” Vincent’s mouth wets the hood over Sephiroth’s right ear. He moves one hand up to Sephiroth’s throat, the other down under Sephiroth’s slip to palm over Sephiroth’s cock bindings, making soothing noises as Sephiroth twitches needily. “And reward you for what you’ve done. You came here, you didn’t run—you know where you need to be. What you need to do…breathe…”

Air drags through Sephiroth’s nose and deep into his chest, sparking heat into his swollen nipples. The moment the pain peaks, Vincent’s fingers glide up from his throat to either side of his nose and pinch it shut; Vincent’s other hand works about Sephiroth’s cock bindings, then finds enough of a hold to yank them even tighter.

The pressure lifts from Sephiroth’s nose just as the pressure inside his chest bursts outward. He wheezes urgently, only to have Vincent tsk against his ear. “Again,” he’s told.

Vincent cages his breath within him a second time while loosening the cock bindings till the nearness of his release makes him shake. Then lets go of his nose, only to spin him during the dizzying inrush of air so he gracelessly falls onto his back. Onto something softer than the floor, the bedfurs—but he has no time to appreciate the cushioning with how Vincent descends on him.

His still-bound legs slapped open, slip rucked up and cock bindings sliced away so his climax guts him. He’s still trembling from it when Vincent’s mouth wraps around his cock, hot and tormenting; he tries one feeble attempt to twist and Vincent simply grasps him by the buttocks to lever his cock deeper down the man’s throat.

Sephiroth has no alternative, no room, no independent will. He sprawls there for the other man’s pleasure, coaxed into a second orgasm that rips out what’s left of him, with Vincent murmuring afterward about his wantonness, his spread legs and open bodice. But he can’t do anything about any of that, he’s only a pretty toy, only there for Vincent to enjoy. Shivering, blind and mute under his hood, nipples caught in pinching fingers and hole soon speared by a real cock rather than the plug. Nothing for him but nothing, beautiful all-encompassing black nothing.

* * *

And then, back in his head but still very much not back in the rest of the aggravating world, he’s curled in the furs under Vincent’s arm. Vincent’s cock is still nestled inside of him, though his hood and gag have been removed. His belt is still on, to his mild surprise since Vincent was clearly dozing when Sephiroth regained awareness; Vincent has loosened the lacing so it doesn’t inhibit Sephiroth’s breathing but usually the man would strip him before resting.

“Usually I don’t have to worry about dragging you in and out of a pool,” Vincent says. He strokes one finger along Sephiroth’s side, then sighs. “We’ll have to cut this off you. Pity. You looked very pretty in it.”

“You have the pattern now,” Sephiroth murmurs, and then arches from the hips up as Vincent drops the hand and squeezes his nipple. “So do I. I might…have something for you, when you’re back from Wutai.”

Vincent makes one of his low rumbles, nuzzling at Sephiroth’s nape and slowly rolling Sephiroth’s nipple between thumb and forefinger. When Sephiroth starts to moan, the man abruptly stops, his hand curving up around Sephiroth’s throat. Sephiroth swallows back his noises and lets Vincent’s fingers collar him, let himself be stretched back over the other man’s shoulder.

He doesn’t take it as a gesture of irritation, or as a reprimand. He doesn’t actually want to think about that now either, he decides, his eyes closing as Vincent’s fingertips rub gently up and down the straining tendons of his throat, as aches twist unevenly along his body. Even if he’s planning for…even if this was planned too. He doesn’t want to think about it at all, he only wants to feel it.

“Later,” Vincent says, echoing Sephiroth’s thoughts. He holds Sephiroth in that pliant curve for another moment, then changes his grip and pulls Sephiroth forward.

Off his cock, off the furs despite the small, pleading noises that Sephiroth makes. Vincent doesn’t speak now, not even to tell Sephiroth what to do, but that suits both of them at this point.

Clothes don’t, no matter how pretty they are. When the scraps fall off Sephiroth’s body, he doesn’t look at them but only at Vincent’s hands. Long, tapered, knowing fingers teasing at his sore places till he gasps, pulling him out and back into the pool by his throbbing nipples. When he comes out of the water this time, he’s not even a prize. He’s simply at the other man’s disposal, and when they’re in Nibelheim they both understand what Vincent does with Sephiroth.

Stitched into a leather collar and wrist- and ankle-cuffs, Sephiroth splays himself at the side of the pool while Vincent kneels over him, caging his cock and piercing his nipples. Once he’s properly dressed, Vincent locks the wrist-cuffs in front of him, then clips a chain to his piercings. He’s led up the mountain that way, hissing and picking his way barefoot over sharp shards of ice, bruising rocks. But his lacerated feet aren’t why he’s ready to crawl once they reach their cave.

He does that because that’s where he should be, with no need to look any higher than Vincent’s cock. Staring at it, longing for its weight in his mouth as he sits leashed by his nipples to the side of the cave’s bathing area. Vincent doesn’t need to gag him now; he makes only wordless begging sounds as his bloody feet are rinsed off, as Vincent thoroughly ensures each laceration is cleaned with tongue and lips. Keeps making them as his feet are wrapped in bandages, as he’s led on his hands and knees to be chained to another bed of furs, on his belly with his knees spread and his wrists chained tightly between his nipple piercings—keeps making them till finally Vincent indulges him and sits down where Sephiroth can put his head in the other man’s lap and fill his mouth with cock.

Sephiroth doesn’t think he raises his head any more than that for the rest of their time. Not when he’s writhing between the prick in his mouth and the tail stuffed between his legs, not when he’s gasping empty-mouthed at the ceiling with Vincent astride him, his cock temporarily freed of cage and sound but no less free of the other man’s demands. Certainly not with his cheek dragging over the furs, Vincent taking him till his cock cage is smeared with precome and his nipples chafed to burning around their piercings. He doesn’t try and look any farther, and it’s a relief.

* * *

As with all personal leaves, eventually Sephiroth has to wash away the smells of sex and musk and earth, pick the bits of hide from under his nails, let Vincent take off his bindings and piercings and heal his marks. They make their way from the cave via another one of the new training stations SOLDIER has set up in the area, since it provides a useful detour and a soft ramp back into minding his duties. And it’s a fortunate choice as it turns out, since otherwise Zack would have had to go scouring the countryside to deliver the urgent recall message to Sephiroth.

“I mean, I know, do not disturb means do not disturb and we all know there hasn’t been a mountain born that can defeat you,” Zack babbles before giving Vincent, who is idly looking at a stack of new MREs in the hall, a nervous look. Zack hadn’t been at any of the meetings leading up to Sephiroth’s personal leave, too busy holding down other operations, but Sephiroth assumes the gossip has made its rounds. “So, uh, not that I am at all interested in overstepping and doing somebody’s job for them, but you might want to know Reno’s waiting around in Nibelheim too.”

Vincent inclines his head without looking over.

“Is there coffee here?” Sephiroth asks as he skims the subject line and then skips to the end of the message to see the signatories.

Zack grimaces. “I mean, in the abstract…yes, coffee exists here. But it’s freeze-dried and I was honestly expecting to have to fall into a couple holes first, so I didn’t want to bring the good stuff just to have it get all waterlog—”

“Never mind, we’ll not be here for that much longer anyway,” Sephiroth says. He notes the co-signing line for SOLDIER only has Genesis’ name; both of them were splitting temporary command but in different areas. “How long has Lazard had Angeal out at the border?”

“I think he might still be in transit—Angeal was arguing we should hang on till you were back, he didn’t want any kind of accident when we’re still not sure which clans are actually involved, but the board is twitchy and Gen finally told him to go, that it wasn’t gonna be the Wutaians firing the first shot,” Zack says. He pulls his phone out and starts tapping at it. “I pinged when I saw you two but let me see…”

“Make sure they’re not doing anything idiotic,” Sephiroth tells Zack.

The other man nods and walks away, muttering about getting a better signal. Three steps after he’s disappeared around the corner, Sephiroth finally gives in and joins Vincent in the hall. “It’s not that appetizing, as Rhapsodos could tell you.”

Vincent wears a faint smile as he raises his head. “You’ll have to tell him I’ll try a better rendition the next time he and Hewley join us.”

“That might actually reconcile him to babysitting the board till then,” Sephiroth sighs.

Then he looks at Vincent, cleaned up and dressed for work once again like himself. They still have a few hours till they reach Nibelheim but at that point their paths will diverge, with Vincent heading into Wutai to reinforce Tseng and keep the friendly clans from changing their minds about turning a political black eye into a diplomatic triumph for Rufus. Meanwhile, Sephiroth will have to join Genesis in Midgar and do his best to ensure his mother’s errors don’t engulf SOLDIER. They did plan for that as well, but his mother can test Sephiroth’s moods at the best of times.

“You know what I’m coming back to,” Vincent says, guessing at Sephiroth’s thoughts. He lifts his left hand and lays the sharp edge of one claw against Sephiroth’s lips, so lightly that it doesn’t cut. Not a threat now, not between them, but a reminder of how they know each other, as he smiles and Sephiroth sighs again, indulging in a quick lap of his tongue at the claw’s tip. “More details than I have at the moment…I couldn’t run from that, you know that.”

“True,” Sephiroth says, and when Vincent lifts his finger away, he does smile at the other man.

They planned for this. Not the infected mercenaries or the stealing of R&D secrets, that was all independent of them, but when Vincent had first heard of it via his contacts, long before the rest of Shinra, they had made plans.

Nothing is final yet, but Sephiroth does know how it will go. His mother isn’t going to lose her job over this. Nor does Sephiroth intend for that; she still has no satisfactory replacement waiting in the wings, and Sephiroth can’t afford to sacrifice her scientific genius yet. But her judgment outside of her lab will have lost just that much weight not only with Rufus but with the other directors and even the board members, and that will give him and SOLDIER the space he needs to wean them further off R&D’s good graces.

No, nothing to run from, as he turns and goes down the hall, with Vincent in his shadow. Nothing at all between him and his way, so long as he keeps his focus, and as far as he can see, he has everything he needs for that.

Chapter 66: Side-Story: SOLDIERS and Turks, Everyone Needs Presentation Skills

Everybody shits on all the forms Shinra has, but Angeal can live with those. He doesn’t love them either, but at least with a form there’s one way and only one way to fill the damn things out, and if the first time through it takes three tries and then a First pointedly showing up in someone’s office to learn how…then they know for the next time. Anyway, since they got Zack on it, they’ve got a whole handbook on how to do the forms and Lazard doesn’t reach for his migraine pills nearly as often.

Presentations, on the other hand, are hell. First Angeal has to get from Sephiroth what it needs to cover and then Lazard weighs in and then Sephiroth gets irritated—but okay, honestly, that’s true for most SOLDIER tasks. But even after the agenda is settled, Angeal can’t just sit down and figure out what to put in the slides. “My head doesn’t work like that, all right?” he mutters. “I guess Hollander left those genes out when he was trying to make his version of a super-soldier. Probably nobody sent him the memo that you had to be a graphic artist too.”

Zack is doing his best to make soothing gestures. Which make him look like he’s kneading invisible dough, but the kid means well so Angeal tries not to scowl when Zack reaches for the tablet. “Okay, okay, I know but if you use the smart art, it makes the graphic for you and you just need to put in the data. Well, okay, you have to pick the style too, but how about you just tell me how you’re feeling today and I can set it up. Going for the top? We can do you a pyramid. Or swimming with the flow, well, we’ve got a chart for that, or maybe you’re feeling like some hot scatter—”

Okay, this is a little much. “Listen, I know you’re trying to help, but if you need a second alone with that stuff, I can step out,” Angeal says, eyeing the other man.

“Aww, Ang, give it a chance. We just want to all be friends,” Zack says as he taps and swipes away. He usually ends up redoing whatever godawful diagram Angeal finally hacks together anyway—or at least Angeal assumes that, since what makes it into Sephiroth’s deck never looks remotely like what Angeal sent in and as much of a perfectionist as Sephiroth is, Angeal is pretty sure Sephiroth’s not the one picking tasteful bar graph color schemes. “And by that I mean I have one hundred percent verified there is no nasty R&D or Turk code waiting to lure you in with some pie-on-pie slice action—”

“Fucking Turks probably don’t have to pull slides together every quarter,” Angeal can’t help muttering. “Assholes don’t put anything on the record, and that must be great for this kind of bullshit.”

* * *

Reno digs around in his pockets for his emergency rotgut ration. “Why.”

“We go through this every single time, do we have—” Cissnei starts in a heated tone.

“No, okay, Ciss, it’s not like my memory gets wiped between missions, much as I know you’d love a nice obedient Renobot to work with,” Reno says as he finds the tube. He pops it open, pours its contents into his coffee and then doesn’t swirl the mug before he downs it all. Then he frowns, because actually, that tasted better than his coffee alone did and now he’s going to have to wonder if someone fucked with their coffee machine again. “It’s just even if I know we gotta, I still have to point out we are goddamn covert ops and why we have to do a fucking year-over-year breakdown of our progress on KPIs is just completely fucking against the point.”

Cissnei can’t really argue with that, she knows it, and so she just looks disappointed that they can’t sweep that under the rug and do what they need to in order to go home today safe and sound. Which is reasonable on her side, so Reno just lets her do her look.

Neither of them are actually doing the slide anyway. That’s Rude’s job, and by the time Reno and Cissnei get done with the sidebar argument they always have, he’s got a beautiful little bar graph up on his screen. “Well, if you have any idea what the colors mean,” Reno says as he looks over it, since at least with Turk presentations they don’t have to put fucking labels and notes since all that gets talked through in real-time by Tseng. “’cause if you did, I’d probably shift this one back two points and move that over to yellow there because otherwise Valentine might feel a little undercredited.”

“No, it’s over on this one,” Rude says, flipping to the next slide. “Valentine did his own this time.”

“But you tweaked, right?” Reno asks, as Cissnei leans over Reno for a closer look.

Rude shakes his head. “No, didn’t touch a thing.”

“It looks in the right format and everything. And if the scale is what I think it should be, that…should be about right. He’s not including anything not him,” Cissnei says, looking oddly at Reno. “What?”

“Oh, I just…dunno, can you picture Valentine dicking around with templates?” Reno says.

Cissnei opens her mouth, pauses, and then turns and looks at the slides again. She looks a little like she needs a rotgut shot now.

“Let’s not do this,” Rude says as he closes out of the slides. “If you two are good, I’m locking it and then going to forget this conversation ever happened. Good?”

Reno sighs and digs around in his other pocket, till he finds his back-up emergency ration, because like hell does he ever go out with just one. He hands it over to Cissnei, who looks slightly less repulsed by the pocket lint fuzzing it than usual. She doesn’t hesitate to crack it open, or to drink it straight as she mutters she’s good. “Lock and load it, Rude,” Reno says. “All right, till we gotta remember next quarter!”

Notes:

Shinra obviously isn't good, but they do seem to keep enough operations going that they must have meetings besides meetings to talk about taking down those pesky rogue mutants. I do kind of wish I could see Rude's slides.

Chapter 67: Interlude: Sephiroth Practices Self-Care

Sephiroth has been told before that his responses in certain situations are suboptimal. His mother never misses any opportunity to point out what she considers unduly emotional behavior, though she has rarely ever intervened. On the contrary, her preferred posture is to observe and then to incorporate it into any ‘recommendations’ she has for improving future SOLDIER indoctrination. His fellow officers have all—even Genesis, he will grudgingly admit—attempted at one time or the other to dissuade him from responses such as spending all night counter-researching his mother, but if he insists, they invariably yield.

Vincent doesn’t insist. Vincent tells him, when the man arrives for one of their private appointments and finds Sephiroth running queries in Shinra’s online archives, to drop it and then drop to his knees. The queries may or may not be useful in cushioning the outcome of a board determination on his mother’s proposal that Sephiroth is waiting for—but they’re irrelevant till Sephiroth knows what the determination is. And spending the time speculating on what it may be is unproductive, but in the past Sephiroth has never been able to simply let a deliberation proceed.

He has to now. There’s nothing for him to do at the moment, and so Vincent quite literally wraps him up so he’s unavailable: laid across his office couch, gagged and blindfolded, with the evidence of a rough fucking still stinging his body. He’s been stripped and then redressed in a delicate sea-green slip and matching panties, clothing that would prevent him from seeking help from anywhere else in the building even if he was free. And of course Vincent has ensured he’s far too securely bound to do so, leather strapped about his arms and legs and cock and then his own coat snugly bundled around him, with his belts tightly buckled over it so when he squirms and moans, he can feel the buckle outlines through the straining layers. A softly-buzzing vibrator keeps his mind safely clouded away from any distracting business.

It’s so effective that he doesn’t even notice when the other man returns and sits down on the couch, not until the vibrator abruptly shuts off. Before Sephiroth’s body can react to the absence of stimulation, something lightly draws up the bare sole of his left foot. No more than a featherweight, the touch, but it’s such a sudden, different sensation to his overstimulated nerves—and so focused on one of the few places his body is free to feel. The leather coat smothers him nearly everywhere else, heavy and deadening, and so when he feels Vincent touch his foot he whiplashes the full length of his body.

Or at least he tries. But his strength has been slowly worked away by the vibrator, and so he finds his head sagging against the couch arm, his chest futilely trying to heave against the constricting leather. Vincent easily shifts him over the cushions with a quick push, and then traces a slow, tantalizing curve along his instep as he trembles helplessly. Fingertip, then claw-tip, dancing in and out between his toes and then tickling back down the sole. Then over to his other foot, drawing curlicues till he loses the energy to even twitch his toes and simply sinks into the sensation.

Vincent plays him so well that when the other man finally has his fill and removes Sephiroth’s gag, he has to prompt Sephiroth to beg to come. And then, once he’s allowed Sephiroth that privilege, he has to nudge Sephiroth—still partly-bound, still dressed unfit for duty, curled contentedly into the other man—to consider that the workday is not yet done. “You were waiting for an update,” Vincent says, lifting his chin as Sephiroth nuzzles sloppily under it.

“No calls—no meetings,” Sephiroth grunts in dazed protest. He’s struggling to persuade himself he should remember what he needed to do. “I thought…”

“No, you’re done here. We can go home and then you can look it up,” Vincent says.

Sephiroth cannot, for the life of him, think of why he shouldn’t do that. “Are you taking me back like this?” he murmurs, and laughing, Vincent starts to pull his coat back around him.

In the morning, he sits down to review the board’s decision, and although it’s less than ideal, he can work with it. Moreover, he finds himself far more willing to do so. The research queries he’d set to run would have been useful for one potential response to the decision, but another, more politically-useful approach occurs to him now, and so he puts the query results aside for the moment.

* * *

Zack frequently tells Sephiroth that a good meal can’t prevent a bad decision but skipping them definitely makes those happen. Usually he’s shouting it through Sephiroth’s office door, takeout in hand, while Sephiroth attempts to concentrate on something important, and so the situation almost always ends in cold food waiting outside the door. It isn’t that Sephiroth doesn’t see the sense in what Zack says, since basic science has amply demonstrated the effect of caloric deficits on the brain, but science has also demonstrated Sephiroth’s high intelligence levels. If Sephiroth’s mind is negatively affected by a skipped meal, he will still be functioning better than the ordinary person, and he can afford to take a temporary downgrade if he can still accomplish something important.

That’s the rational approach. But Vincent doesn’t bother reasoning it out with him.

Vincent ties his hands behind his back with leather and his own hair, puts him on his knees in their kitchen and on a pretty silver chain ending in exquisitely painful clamps attached to his nipples. Every time the leash tugs at him, he opens his mouth to cry out and Vincent slips a piece of food onto his tongue. Then presses a hand over his lips, or strokes the side of his throat with a lovingly threatening claw, until he consumes the tidbit and is moaning for more, his nipples burning and stripe after stripe of come painting the floor between his legs. By the time the plate is empty, his head is held up only because Vincent allows him to rest it on the man’s thigh and his body is exhausted with satisfaction.

He's given a shower, and then put to bed with his head on Vincent’s lap, collared with leather about his neck and his sore, limp cock, the tip of Vincent’s tail twining up between his buttocks to prolong his feeling of relaxed fullness. “You wanted to look at this again,” Vincent reminds him, showing him his tablet.

Sephiroth looks, mind refreshed and body entirely free of nagging distractions, and offers up a plan requiring longer-term commitments but far less resource investment than he’d been considering before.

* * *

More than one piece of Shinra technology has suffered the raw end of Sephiroth’s temper, with simulator repair and replacement in particular eating up a not-inconsiderable portion of SOLDIER’s budget. Lazard never says a word these days, but he still pauses whenever they reach that line, as if he’s in any position to second-guess Sephiroth on the ongoing cost. Food and shelter and supplies, that is what Shinra provides, and in return Sephiroth not only works for them but stands up for them. In relation to that, it’s a very minor expense.

Of course, Angeal points out that it’s not merely an expense. It’s what people think when they see the broken parts stripped out and carried away, what they think and how that then makes them act with SOLDIER, as if they’re closer to guard dogs than people. And it is a more than fair point, but at the same time…Sephiroth needs to take that cost out of Shinra. He needs to or else it comes out of him.

At least, he used to think in such black-and-white terms, seeing no real alternative. He doesn’t blame himself for the blindness; he recognizes that his upbringing blinkered him in that way. And now…

His eyes are carefully bound, letting not a hint of light in, but in the darkness he has clarity. Lying on his belly, naked but for the yards and yards of silk ribbon wound about his body. Keeping his arms pinioned to his sides, its edges crisp enough to sliver him and provide warning whenever he so much as breathes too roughly. He has to stay relaxed in the frail, demanding bonds. Has to stay soft, has to stay open, has to let himself lie there and feel his flesh stretch and stretch and ache as Vincent works one hand into him.

“Spread,” Vincent whispers, breath caressing the small of Sephiroth’s back. When he leans over, his knuckles slide fractionally inside of Sephiroth and the full press of them makes rivulets of sweat run all over Sephiroth’s body. Makes him shake, makes him whine openmouthed as the ribbons tighten all over him and seem to trap clouds of lightning just beneath his skin. “Now hold. Like this, like this, I’ll keep you like this.”

Not torn apart, even as Vincent stoops and lavishes kisses down his trembling buttocks, the effervescent graze of the man’s lips shocking compared to the solid, unmoving weight of the man’s hand reshaping Sephiroth around it. Not taken to pieces because he hasn’t struck out first, not anything close to that. And when Vincent finally pulls his hand out and gathers Sephiroth’s slack, unresisting body to him, Sephiroth doesn’t feel as if he’s paid any kind of price. Vincent, unlike Shinra, doesn’t exact that from him.

He feels calm. Tranquil and centered and complete even with an aching, empty hole, with a firm shoulder to rest against and a soothing hand stroking the spasms from between his legs, and a welcoming warm mouth when he wants to raise his head. Calm enough to think, after they’ve gotten out of bed, that there are far better-targeted debts he can call in from Shinra than equipment they list on the same page as his salary. He’s more than the sum of those costs, and he should remind them of that.

* * *

It’s easy these days for Sephiroth to put himself in Vincent’s hands and trust to the other man’s judgment of his needs, but Sephiroth hasn’t failed to think. Vincent isn’t an escape, and above all, that is why Sephiroth finds it easy when he resisted so fiercely with others. And it’s also why, with his newly-gained clarity, he offers the same service when Vincent is in need of it.

When Vincent returns from a trip to Wutai that wasn’t assigned by Shinra, Sephiroth dresses himself without asking. Clean and pretty, his hair braided back, his body sheathed in silk, with an array of leather straps set out for the other man’s perusal. And he lets Vincent satisfy himself first—makes himself a wordless, yielding plaything to be pushed up against a pole in their private training room and tied up. Leather crisscrossing up his torso, then winging out to frame his pectorals so his stiff nipples, already aching in anticipation, press out through the dress’ bodice like proffered sweets. His arms similarly laced together behind the pole, and then his legs left shockingly loose by comparison, though Vincent buckles cuffs on his ankles and then connects them with chains to the bottom of the pole.

But he can still move his legs nearly a foot away from the pole, enough to give the intoxicatingly deceptive impression of a struggle as Vincent suckles his nipples to hot tenderness, fondles his cock and balls under the dress, and then finally slides between Sephiroth’s legs to swallow his cock. He can jerk his knees against his chains and tire himself out so he’s panting, truly feeling his lack of freedom in how the burn of fatigue slowly travels up his thighs to join the ache in his cock after two violent orgasms. And then loll against the pole, chains stretched taut, as Vincent binds up his cock and then stands up to continue caressing his nipples and thighs.

“My trophy,” Vincent says over Sephiroth’s shivering moan. He licks at Sephiroth’s open mouth, takes it in a kiss, and then moves his head back before tucking it against the side of Sephiroth’s throat. “If nothing else…”

Sephiroth leans against the man’s lips. He’s pleasantly dazed, but not so distracted that he doesn’t detect the way Vincent’s tone shifts. “Yours to take,” he murmurs roughly. “I wanted you back—waited for it.”

Vincent is silent for a moment, and his hands still where he’s cupping Sephiroth’s pectorals. Then he moves them down, briefly dropping them to squeeze Sephiroth’s buttocks before bringing them back up to circle Sephiroth’s waist over the leather straps.

“They always say I’m not needed, but then—I shouldn’t have to ever have to clean up anything, if I’m such a non-factor in those circles,” he says, before suddenly pressing his face into Sephiroth’s throat again. They’re both aware he isn’t referring to Shinra’s demands, but to the clans. He inhales against Sephiroth’s skin, moves less than an inch, and then does so again, with a deliberateness that makes Sephiroth recall Rufus’ pet scenting something Rufus has just touched. “If I didn’t care to keep it from following me back, I don’t think I’d bother these days. But I do…my pretty trophy. So needy, waiting for me.”

Which is all Vincent says before he unties Sephiroth from the pole and then takes him back to their bedroom for a thorough ravaging. But it’s enough—Vincent’s head is out of Wutai and firmly back here. And when Sephiroth is too used to play with, Vincent lies by him and talks instead, telling him about a five-generation feud so overgrown with bloody elaborations that likely nothing short of total extermination of one line will end it. Vincent tells it like one of the historical epic poems he occasionally has Sephiroth recite for him, like he’s telling Sephiroth a story to lull Sephiroth to sleep. And then, right after he mentions his mother had accepted marriage to his father instead of a proposal to marry into that, he buries his face in Sephiroth’s hair, sighs a little, and goes to sleep first.

Sephiroth is hardly awake long enough to crow over outlasting the other man for once, but he remembers it when he wakes. And he knows what he’s done, when he wakes, and thinks his aches well-earned.

Chapter 68: Interlude: Sakura Season

When Vincent returns from Wutai, Sephiroth meets him at the bedroom doorway.

He’d heard the other man enter, but had still been plaiting his hair, his fingers unaccountably slipshod despite the reasonable—for once—advance notice he’d had for Vincent’s arrival. He hadn’t wanted to present himself like that, and so had knocked his foot lightly against the wall so Vincent could hear and locate him. Then had finished, swallowing curses under his breath, the small hairs on his skin rising with anticipation as Vincent had paused, then gone briefly into the kitchen and the home office before padding in his direction, footsteps carefully measured out both in pace and volume.

But it’d been worth it, even the last-minute fit of nerves, to stand in the doorway and let the hunger in Vincent’s gaze slowly lap every part of him. Running down his throat and his nearly-bare shoulders to the silk slip he wears, its blush-pink silk summerweight and nearly transparent under direct lighting. Savoring with only a look the way his nipples peak out of the slits in the lace-edged bodice—then the slight intake of breath as Sephiroth turns, feeling more than a mere draft of air dance up the similarly-lacy slit in the back.

Vincent steps up behind him, gloved fingers coming around the front to clasp his left pectoral while the other hand brushes through the slit to tease between his buttocks. Then his nipple is deftly caught as he hitches, that first warm hint of pain stirring a low groan from him as Vincent laughs and caresses him tauntingly over the matching panties. “Cherry blossoms,” Vincent says, his lips closing over the slip’s shoulder strap with just a hint of teeth.

Sephiroth nods and tilts his head aside for the other man, accommodating how Vincent tucks his chin over that shoulder to watch the fingers tracing out the finely-worked petals surrounding Sephiroth’s nipple. “You were in time for the season, I’m told, but didn’t have the chance to enjoy it…”

“Yes.” Vincent is quiet for a moment, something about him connoting perfect stillness even though his hand between Sephiroth’s legs is still quite active, cupping possessively through the panties so Sephiroth can’t help squirming the tops of his thighs together. Then he lets out an amused noise again, kissing the side of Sephiroth’s throat. “Very pretty, my prize. Now stop thinking.”

Without any further ceremony, he pushes Sephiroth back into their bedroom. Sephiroth had considered laying out certain items to go with the slip, but in the end had only left the closet door open, deciding the frisson of speculative uncertainty would entertain him better, especially if Vincent was delayed. Untangling his hair hadn’t actually left him much time to fantasize, but this time that suits better—the brusque way he’s pushed up against the wall, the only fleeting glimpses he’s provided with before Vincent starts binding him, all of that strips away any pretense he has to directing this, makes it abundantly clear his role.

It doesn’t include thinking. It does include gasping and sagging, curling his nails into the wall and then letting his palms drag flat against it as Vincent shapes him into the perfect welcome present. Leather belt tightly lacing him from breast to hips, puckering up the back of the slip so that its slip gapes across his buttocks even after Vincent straightens its hem. Panties pulled down to allow fingers to check his hole, an extra layer of oil applied inside before they’re pulled back up as a clear rejoinder to how he instinctively cants himself backward. He’s not to fucked, not yet.

Bound, yes—he’d already strapped a black leather sheath around his cock and Vincent spends a few minutes languidly swirling the panties’ silk over it, teasing out the heat till Sephiroth is panting into the wall. But that is only a temporary distraction, as then the other man pulls him back. He sways a little, one hand still grazing for the wall’s support, and Vincent makes a clucking sound before pushing a hard, leather-wrapped pole against Sephiroth’s spine.

Vincent straps Sephiroth upright, buckling the posture collar about his throat and then carefully aligning its dependent pole and ensuring Sephiroth’s hair is clear before fastening the pole to the belt. The long plait swings freely in a way Sephiroth almost envies, as one by one, his arms are curved back and then tied down to follow the pole, his hands left to rub their knuckles helplessly across the tops of his buttocks. They’re turned outwards, with no way to protect himself from the hand that strokes him through the slip’s back slit; Vincent further teases him by tracing a claw over his flexing palms.

“Turn,” Vincent says.

Sephiroth obediently pivots, then tips his head back the little the stiff collar allows as Vincent seizes both of his nipples and relentlessly pinches them till they’re throbbing. The front of his panties is damp with precome from his bound cock, and when Vincent’s body brushes over that, he can’t help bucking against the posture pole. Vincent doesn’t soothe him but instead takes one hand and spreads it over his groin and pins him in place, whimpering and aching and wanting, as the man bends and gently, pointedly bites each nipple.

He whines but his body settles, understanding this is only his role as the man’s plaything, here to be taken and pleasured however and whenever Vincent feels like it. When Vincent picks up a bundle of silk cord and adds a chest harness to trap his sore nipples, he doesn’t roll away. When the man then takes a strip of silk and gags him with it, he pliantly opens his lips and then closes his eyes, letting the tugs of the knot Vincent ties at the back of his head flex his throat against the imprisoning collar.

Vincent’s hands drop to his shoulders, then linger. Sephiroth’s eyes flutter open again without conscious thought and then he stays unthinking, a mute, receptive, wholly reactive toy as Vincent studies him. Claws grazing over his oversensitized nipples, flirting with his inner thighs and then outlining his cock head over and over against the filmy panties as he jerks and moans and spreads his knees as best he can, while Vincent watches how delicious he looks, how open and inviting and ready to be sucked dry—he doesn’t require thought when that is so plain in the other man’s face.

But then Vincent smiles the secretive smile, with his arm slipping behind Sephiroth so he can take hold of the posture pole. “Come,” he says.

He waits for the shudder to finish passing through Sephiroth’s body, pure denied arousal raking through and leaving behind a floating daze, and then he pulls Sephiroth off the wall and out of the closet. They go into the home office, where Sephiroth stands dumbly watching as Vincent pulls the desktop into standing position and then nudges Sephiroth in front of it. The computer is on but with only a neutral screensaver visible, until Vincent reaches around and taps the keyboard. Then it shows a paused video of some kind.

“The first hour of this is absolutely useless, I know that already,” Vincent says conversationally from behind Sephiroth, where he’s moving around and briefly above, then back to his normal height. “I can’t fast-forward for reasons I’ll take up with IT later.”

Sephiroth makes a muffled noise, not because of what Vincent is saying but because fingertips, bare ones, are petting the curves of his buttocks. Light, affectionate, as they twitch his slip out of the way and then work under the thin strap of his panties to insert a chilly, oiled hook. It pushes him open and drops inside of him, making him tilt his weight backward—then presses forward, an infinitesimal but infinitely consequential amount as everything in his mind suddenly seems not empty but full, full and gloriously staticky at the same time. No thought but only feeling.

His trembling legs shift him and the fullness abruptly diminishes, allowing other sensations to infringe: the pressure of his collar narrowing his breathing to a wheeze, the desperate ache of his nipples and cock, the increasing heaviness in his balls as somehow the panties continue to sling them uncomfortably high. He’s only barely aware of Vincent dropping a kiss on his shoulder, or the video on the computer screen unfreezing; he’s far more preoccupied with shifting back to where he can immerse himself in that beautiful feeling again.

The hook twists in him as he does and he can feel the chain it’s dangling on slide over his hair and arms. A link catches, twisting the hook further, and his right knee wobbles dangerously during his resulting shiver, lightning melting nearly everything on that side. He tips the other way and a strangled cry catches up against his gag as the now-wet panties drag at the hook, making even a slight change in position feel as if its tip is scraping him head to toe. His hands work against their bonds, his chest heaves up against its harness. The hook moves again and he whimpers, swaying on it.

Vincent returns, years or minutes later, to a being of pure need. He’s sympathetic, of course—sympathetic to how Sephiroth shakes at the slightest touch so of course he wraps a firm arm around Sephiroth, to how Sephiroth can only mewl and whimper even with the gag removed so he has to whisper suggestions into Sephiroth’s ear, then flick a nipple for a response. Sympathetic with how, after a few sips of water are coaxed into Sephiroth’s mouth, he then takes his time caressing every part of Sephiroth’s body and luxuriating in the resulting wordless begging as Sephiroth hitches and shudders on the hook.

It's only after that that he pulls the panties out of the way, and even then, he presses first his fingers and then the head of his cock in alongside the hook. His breathing roughens but he lets Sephiroth do all of the squirming, working himself near-senseless and barely upright, and only then does he pull out and take the hook with him. Then pushes immediately back in, fucking Sephiroth as the computer screen jitters and then goes back to screensaver.

When he’s done, he holds Sephiroth up for a few minutes. Sephiroth is of course still bound, still held to the other man’s satisfaction. Vincent seems to think about that, his hand briefly straying down to stroke softly over Sephiroth’s strapped cock, but when Sephiroth whines he lifts his hand.

“Needy,” Vincent says, and then he puts his hand back, but squeezing, aggressively fondling without any hint of mercy. “My pretty prize doesn’t need to come?”

Sephiroth has to bite back on the groan. No thought but pure impulse—impulse born of all the time they’ve spent apart and together, all of that shaping how he responds to the other man. “You’re—still working? Then I rest—I rest when you rest.”

The faintest hint of resignation filters into Vincent’s sigh. And then he turns and starts nuzzling behind Sephiroth’s ear, paying special attention to where the posture collar is digging in, as his hands move up Sephiroth’s body. “I do deserve a prize for finishing.”

“Please,” Sephiroth manages, his eyes closing as the posture pole starts to shift along his back. “Please—in your mouth, I want—in your mouth…”

“Then you’ll have to wait,” Vincent says, implacably patient as Sephiroth whines. “And I want your mouth first.”

He pauses in unstrapping the pole to let Sephiroth finish out the shudder. Then he takes that and the posture collar off. The chest harness comes off as well, but the belt stays on, squeezing Sephiroth into docility as he drops to his knees. With his hands retied behind his back, clamps freshly torturing his nipples, he waits for Vincent to push the chair back up and then sit in it. Then he closes his eyes again, opens his mouth, and when the man’s cock fills it, he finds himself back in that wonderful unthinking place again. He settles in.

Chapter 69: Side-Story: Cissnei Decompresses, Reno Listens

Of all the people, Cissnei honestly wasn’t expecting Reno’s to be the door she ends up knocking at post-mission, out of uniform and on leave and having to remind herself every couple seconds to not clench her hand around the wine bottle’s neck so hard she snaps it. “But there you go, can’t predict everything,” she says as she swings that up for him to see.

Reno bobs and weaves a little like it’s a fist, and while he’s grinning, there’s enough real weight to his twisting that she realizes he really isn’t sure she’s here to pick a fight. “Nah, but you can say, hey, not me.”

Cissnei jerks the wine bottle down. Bad idea, she’s thinking, with the part of her that doesn’t just want to pivot and throw the bottle over the rail and into the atrium of Reno’s building and watch it tumble end over neck over end till it smashes into a thousand wasted pieces. And then she exhales, because—yeah, not her. It’s just…

There’s a shift. She picks up on it more than hears, though when she turns back, it’s not the carefulness of Reno’s expression that strikes her so much as the fact that he’s swung the door open enough that she can see his feet and his…toes. He’s barefoot. Which for some reason makes her blink hard, even though he’s off-duty and Reno is the most likely of them to have flip-flops somewhere in his locker anyway.

“Look,” Reno starts on a sigh, and then he catches her staring and quicksilver changes back to his usual lazy, slightly indecent gaze. “You want somewhere to drink where nobody’s going to log your brand, you’re welcome to my couch, but I’m telling you upfront anything coming with a cork ain’t the way to my heart.”

“I’m good for takeout, too,” Cissnei says, and Reno’s smile widens just a fraction after his shoulders roll back and down into bracing position.

He throws the door open, then backs up a healthy amount as she walks in. She pauses a little more than halfway through, already feeling guilty for cornering him, and then she sighs and shakes that off, because it’s not like she can take it back at this point.

Reno’s apartment is logged—they all know where each other lives on record, and Cissnei thinks she’s been around long enough to know most of his off-record places—and surveillance is sometimes necessary. But Cissnei’s never been in Reno’s place and though she recognizes what she sees…it’s the way she recognizes it. The promised couch, and that one armchair that always has never-worn ties flung over its back and the worn-down dents in the arm stuffing…and then the vast empty space around that island, like Reno staged it all for the camera angle. But then it’s the same in the kitchen when she follows him in to get a glass for her and a bottle of his preference for him, this one patch around the sink and the two cabinets right there, and when they go back to the living room she glimpses enough of the bathroom to see it’s the same there too. It’s not staging, he clearly lives here, he just…doesn’t seem to live in the place beyond these little plots here and there.

“Thought it was gonna be a dump,” Reno says as he flops down into the armchair, his wrists coming down exactly into the dents. “Right, Cissy?”

Cissnei pauses, working the cork out of her wine, and then shrugs as she sits on the couch. “You keep your weapons clean, I didn’t think it was going to be a dump, but…”

Reno gestures at himself—same rumpled dress shirt and trousers as when he’s on duty, just without the suitjacket and belt to give him even a hint of trying—and Cissnei nods, smiling before she can help herself.

Then she ducks away and gets the glass so she can pour out the wine. She hears Reno take a swig of his and something in her just…sags out of its watertight little seal. “I’m a fucking Turk, not a freak or a flower girl.”

There’s a swallow, a grunt, and then Reno thudding his elbow into the armchair like he’s thinking about heaving himself over the side and sneaking away. He goes right into the dent on that arm. “Cissy, listen, you want somebody to take it up with them, that’s what Tseng is—”

“No, that’s not what I w—look, I just want—I want—” And then a splash of wine shoots out of the bottle and ricochets so high up the far side of the glass that it almost overtops the rim. Cissnei twirls the glass in time to spare her jeans, but then sighs and puts both glass and bottle down on the floor by her feet. Then pushes herself up but just high enough to cross her arms over her knees and lean on them. “I knew what I was doing, it was my mission to run and I ran it and that’s my job. And this time that meaning I got up close and personal with Corneo in his idea of a uniform doesn’t—it doesn’t—”

“Well, you bit off Elena’s head when she tried to give you a gold star,” Reno says dryly. “Then about did the same to Rude when he tried to excuse you with the ol’ rough one line, and obviously I’m not gonna be taking those pervy assholes in R&D as role models so I’m running out of shit to say here, you know.”

Cissnei jerks her head up, but then shakes that; of course Reno heard about it already. “I’m not here for talking about…you’re the one who just is going around like this is any other mission.”

“And…so I got you and that and talking about it, for some reason,” Reno points out.

“Yeah, I know, I need to drink this.” Cissnei reaches for the wine again. Pauses as her fingertips touch the bottle, then firmly wraps her hand around its base. She isn’t lying, she thinks as she finally pours out a glass: she doesn’t feel like she needs comforting or protection or voyeuristic jackassery, and if everyone else seems to think she does…she should be able to ignore that. She really should. “So tell me something else—I don’t know, tell me why you think Valentine went along with it.”

“What, he say something to you?” Reno asks. He’s half-playing it off, but half-not, and the interested part is…Cissnei wouldn’t call Reno obsessed with Valentine, but there’s something about the other man that makes Reno give off skittish vibes in a way Tseng and Rufus don’t.

“No. Might as well have been just another mission for him too—not like an asshole, just…like him,” Cissnei says. She sips at her wine. She’d been wondering if maybe one wasn’t enough, but when the taste hits her tongue, she suddenly loses that urge to just chug it down, even though this isn’t exactly sipping standard. “Made it easier, I’m not going to lie. But it’s just, you’d think with Sephiroth in his corner, he’d have better things to do. It’s not like we needed him specifically.”

Reno humps a shoulder and takes another pull from his bottle. “No, but I hear back in the day when SOLDIER wasn’t sending enough raw recruits to R&D, sometimes Corneo would pick up a chump or two for them for some designer drugs back his way.”

“SOLDIER doesn’t do that at all now,” Cissnei frowns. “R&D has to do their own recruiting and it all has to be public and buttoned-up and signed off by Rufus—I don’t think Valentine would want to help Crescent get around that, it’d get him into more trouble than she can get him out of.”

“Yeah, plus he doesn’t like it when Sephiroth has to go skewer unauthorized mutants,” Reno says as he slouches down. “But what, you think Corneo knows that? Dumbfuck like him?”

“But he never talked to Corneo. I mean, sure, Corneo saw some of what Valentine did, but they never were even in the same room,” Cissnei says.

Reno snorts and rolls his head over, and for a second something darker crouches inside his lanky sprawl. Cissnei’s been in the poor Sectors enough to recognize it, and she remembers Reno’s background, but he just doesn’t usually let it show so…plainly, rather than his uncultured jackoff act. “Corneo’s not such an idiot he’s gonna forget the style. You do remember that shit when you’re in his…you know Corneo’s old enough to remember Verdot’s teams, don’t you? He's seen Vincent’s shooting before, I guarantee it.”

“Oh,” is all Cissnei says, before she drinks more wine. It makes sense, and even if it was outside of the mission, she can’t say it goes against Turk objectives. It does itch at her a little, not picking that up ahead of time when she was the mission lead, but Valentine was just detailed to support her, not assigned to her team, and to be honest she doesn’t want to be the one directly managing him. He’s good at what he does and he’s on her team, and she doesn’t want to go any farther than that.

She and Reno drink in silence for a few minutes. Reno doesn’t seem interested in binging either, even though she can tell whatever he has is stronger than her wine. He doesn’t seem that antsy about having her over, despite his protests, and for a moment she wonders if this is good enough for her right now.

“I took this one because I wanted to know I could do it—could deal with it and not make it into a huge…personal thing. Because it’s not. I mean, Corneo is disgusting, but I get why we can’t take him out and even if someone did, all the stuff he runs isn’t going away with him, because…I just wanted to know,” Cissnei finds herself saying, with too much wine outside of her to be an excuse. “Because you have to know what you can do, in our line of business. And I don’t want to talk about it, but I do just want one damn person to get why.”

Reno sighs, but when she looks over, he isn’t staring at her and instead has his bottle to his lips for a normal, unhurried swallow. “Okay, fine. Fuck if I’m gonna judge why somebody else puts on their suit,” he says when he’s done.

“Yeah,” Cissnei says. She fiddles with her glass. “But…you ever change why you’re doing it? I don’t need to know exactly why, I’m just—or never mind. Look, this was nice of you—”

“Depends on how you look at ‘why,’ probably,” Reno says, and then blinks like he’s surprised she’s surprised he’s answering. “Always appreciate a roof over my head and food in my belly and not having that come with a prison sentence, you know.”

“That’s not ‘why,’” Cissnei says. “That’s what you get for it.”

Reno smiles and it’s not sly. If anything, it’s a little tired. “Good girl. Nah, look, I think all you need to know is I’m not crusading either. That’d be too much work—look at Valentine, can’t just shoot a guy, has to fuck up R&D’s unofficial quota with it and see if they get desperate. I just want a job I can do, most of the time. So you making good on dinner or not?”

Cissnei drinks her wine, then nods. She probably should check in with Tseng about Valentine; she’s sure their boss is aware but it’d be good to confirm that. She’d be a good Turk if she did that. But she…she’s fine after this mission, she really is. She just doesn’t want to go on another one right away, and for all his ways, Reno is loyal enough to Tseng that he’d be in Tseng’s office himself if Tseng had to know now.

“What do you want?” she asks, pulling out her phone.

Chapter 70: Interlude: Sometimes Vincent’s Work Trips Aren’t to Vacation Destinations

“Two weeks.” Sephiroth tries to keep his tone neutral as he reads over the briefing on Vincent’s tablet, but he’s grimacing into the other man’s chest even before he finishes. Being able to have the privacy to even think of selfishness is a privilege he never takes for granted, nor ever stops working to maintain, and so he knows it’s counterproductive, the dismay he feels. He still feels it. “And dealing with Corneo for nearly all of it. If Shinra doesn’t give you a medal of distinguished service—”

The puff of Vincent’s breath warms the top of his head, lulling it into tilting even further, and then the man’s lips tease behind his ear. Then fingers stroke firmly up over his belly, helping him keep his weight back as he leans his cheek into Vincent. He’d call the other man distracting if there was any reasonable way to undo the proposed mission, but there isn’t and so he greedily absorbs what he can.

“There’s not enough precious metal in those these days to melt for a single bullet,” Vincent says as he lets the tablet drop onto his lap. He noses down to just behind the point of Sephiroth’s jaw, then exhales, amused with a small, sharp upflick of arousal at the end, as Sephiroth moves the sheets aside to stroke his cock. “You have enough medals for the two of us, if there’s ever any call for that. I’d rather have a clean and on-time exit.”

Sephiroth snorts. If he had his way, Corneo would long since have had a sword in the belly, rather than having the best covert operative Shinra can call upon go out now to save him from an upstart rival…but Corneo provides stability to his territory, much as it disgusts Sephiroth to admit. It’d disgust him more if SOLDIER had to directly administer to the area, and so he finally persuades himself to stop being unproductively self-centered. That would only keep Vincent away longer, and thinking of his return is more pleasurable.

Pleasurable, Sephiroth thinks again, thoughts half-clouded by Vincent’s insidious nuzzling but not quite slipped away. “Not a trophy of any kind, then?”

Vincent doesn’t bother to ask if it’s an offer. He pauses for a moment, lips grazing Sephiroth’s skin, and then laughs low in his throat, his hand sliding possessively up Sephiroth’s belly and chest to encircle Sephiroth’s throat. Sephiroth bends under the man’s grip, parting his lips for the hungry kiss that descends on them.

“Let me get through this briefing first,” Vincent tells him, making no move to retrieve the tablet. On the contrary, he kisses Sephiroth again, with an urgency that startles Sephiroth into arching against him. “I don’t leave till Thursday, and for now I want you in my head, not that.”

A direction Sephiroth is more than happy to comply with, and the subsequent night goes a long way towards filling the empty space in their bed for the next couple weeks. He thinks he’s greatly improved his composure about it, given about halfway through this time, Zack stops bribing the night shift to tattle on his staying late in the office. But it still aches when he’s alone and among their things, with only memories and the odd status update from Tseng—a deep, slow, abiding pain like how radiation sickness is often described, something that if it goes on too long will irrevocably twist Sephiroth.

It aches the day after Vincent’s return as well, but in a far more welcome way, the warm prickle of sunlight rousing him from the dark.

Sephiroth stretches lazily, the odd grunt escaping him as various places remind him where Vincent renewed his marks. Twists in his shoulders, dappled sores across his ribs and up his thighs, a vague stiffness between his legs that pleasantly sharpens as he hauls himself off the bed and into the bathroom. He can smell tea in the air so he takes his time about relieving himself, inspecting his homecoming tokens in the mirror. Tracing a few of the bruises, letting the resulting sparks suck his lip between his teeth before he makes himself stop and take up a washcloth.

Slightly more civilized in appearance, he limps back to the bedroom and rolls himself back into the crumpled sheets. A few folds flap over his legs and one arm, but he doesn’t bother to pull them over himself; he’s too content to need it.

Vincent comes in a few minutes later. Sephiroth turns a little, tipping his head back as the other man leans over him and draws his arms up over the pillow. Vincent laps gently at his mouth, sharing the taste of the tea for a few unhurried seconds…and then the leather cuffs tighten about Sephiroth’s wrists.

Sephiroth had been utterly boneless a moment before, their kiss more flirtation than serious engagment, but the grip of the cuffs—still hardly violent—sends a sharp shiver through him. He gasps roughly, and then gasps again as Vincent drops one hand to unceremoniously wrap about his cock. “I can’t,” he says breathlessly, rocking his hips as Vincent lightly thumbs the head of his prick. “I can’t come again, I’m still too sore.”

Vincent gags him with a kiss and then purposefully tugs his prick. He eats his own groan, then subsides against the mattress as Vincent straightens up and leisurely takes out a cock harness. Each strap makes a fragment of a whine drop out of Sephiroth’s mouth when it draws taut about him; it’s the restriction only, the restriction and the understanding that comes with it, and no friction at all with how well-worked the leather is, how thoughtfully Vincent warms it with his hands first. Tight enough to leave him free to squirm, till Vincent climbs further onto the bed and between his legs.

“Spread,” he tells Sephiroth, who can’t help a moan even as he hikes his knees out to either side. Smiling, Vincent puts his knees over Sephiroth’s thighs and then fondles his ball sac till he’s rocking, fluttering his fingertips along the chain holding his wrists to the wall. “I have to leave in thirty minutes for my debriefing.”

Sephiroth lets out a full-throated whine, hearing the man and comprehending it but too uncontrolled—too seduced by the security of his bonds into that—to be rational. Which is Vincent’s goal, apparently, since his smile grows only fonder as he binds Sephiroth’s scrotum, too. His fingers flirt down the perineum, tease at Sephiroth’s hole, and then he rises with just a pause to flick Sephiroth’s nipples before he climbs off the bed.

He's heading for the closet, not the door, although that occurs to Sephiroth only after Vincent has put his hand on the knob. It never occurs to Sephiroth to be concerned, even if he’s to be left behind, since he knows Vincent and what Vincent means to do once the man’s work obligations are seen to. But it does occur to him right then, tied to the bed and still ravaged from the night before, tied and aching and with an irresistible stirring of need in him—it occurs to him what it’d mean to be left here. Left for after the briefing, left for hours waiting and wanting and by the time Vincent comes back, Sephiroth has twisted from back to side, groaning as he slowly ruts his bound cock against the bed.

“Needy,” Vincent says, half-observing, half-appreciating. He knows Sephiroth was aiming for the latter reaction, and knows even more that he needs only to reach down and take Sephiroth by the throat to make Sephiroth’s groan collapse under its own weight. “The mission isn’t officially done till I debrief.”

“No trophy—till that?” Sephiroth manages. In the roughest whisper, not because of Vincent’s hold but because of his own arousal thickening the air in his throat.

“Oh, no, I picked that up beforehand.” Vincent has a short stack of promising boxes in his other hand and he sets them down on the bed as he gives Sephiroth’s throat a playful tug. “I’ve done this too long to count on always receiving my due—but I do like to close out first. Then I’m not distracted.”

Sephiroth feels the other man’s fingers loosen and tilts his chin so it slides along Vincent’s forearm when he’s released. He lets himself drop back against the bed, half-closing his eyes; he can hear the zip and rustle of boxes being opened but doesn’t look down now. He’ll see soon enough what Vincent wants to make of him, and anyway, the taste of anticipation is far too rich and electric for him to swallow it early. “Am I a distraction?”

“Enough that I’d never accept a mission where you play Cissnei’s part,” Vincent says. The slight brusqueness of his tone makes Sephiroth look again at him, even as he distracts himself with a brush of one claw’s sharp edge over Sephiroth’s lips. The crease between his brows is smoothing away, and it doesn’t seem to be merely because he’s hiding his true thoughts, not with how a soft, savoring noise now slips from his own lips. “Because I’m selfish and it doesn’t whet my appetite to let others enjoy certain things, not because I’d substitute my judgment for yours. But some of the clothes had their points, and you do like to think about such things, for a pretty toy.”

“You should stop that,” Sephiroth murmurs. Vincent’s thumb slips under his jaw and presses into a sore spot, sending a liquid ripple of heat through him. He shivers, then obediently complies when Vincent moves his hand to Sephiroth’s shoulder and nudges him up onto his elbows. “Stop me thinking.”

Vincent’s smile in response is both a promise and a silent command. He brushes the back of his claw over Sephiroth’s eyes, closing them, and then clasps that hand over Sephiroth’s mouth. His claw tips dance menacingly against Sephiroth’s cheeks as the rustling stops and instead of the expected silk or leather, metal meets Sephiroth’s skin. Pressure rings on his nipples, languidly tightened as Sephiroth stifles his whimpers into Vincent’s palm.

There’s no chain between them, but Sephiroth can feel tiny loops on their exterior rims, ready for one. When Vincent releases his mouth and shifts away, he opens his eyes and has to blink to clear the ripple out of the air. Then he looks down, but before he can see clearly, Vincent unlocks his wrists from the wall and makes him get up onto his knees.

The clamps are tight enough—and his nipples are still sore enough—that the mere change in position makes hot, aching webs radiate out over his pectorals. He whimpers again, too distracted to remember why he wanted to look down, especially when Vincent is having him put his hands up.

A white silk slip is dropped down his arms and over his head, then eased into place with fingers that inevitably caress his beringed nipples. He groans but knows to let his arms fall to his sides, fingers digging at the soles of his feet as Vincent goes on to tickle his abdominals and cup his buttocks in the course of smoothing the silk over him. The slip is new, but cut in a familiar way—at least, he thinks that until Vincent starts pulling the leather straps out and threading them through loops placed along the slip’s seams.

“Hands over your head,” Vincent says, and then draws a strap snug about Sephiroth’s chest as Sephiroth inhales, obeying. He waits till Sephiroth exhales, pulls it a little more, and then leans forward for a kiss, casually enjoying the way arousal makes Sephiroth tremble.

Keeping his wrists crossed over the top of his head pulls Sephiroth’s chest out against the slip, pressing his nipples into the thin silk that nevertheless feels like the edges of nails deliberately shaving away at the clamped nubs till nothing but heat is left. He watches mutely, only the occasional mewl escaping, as Vincent buckles a harness over the slip, the intricate criss-cross of black leather filling the space between his waist and the bottom of his pectorals. Keeping him bound within its network so that he has to measure his breathing, even as the straps let him sway with the stroke of Vincent’s fingers over him.

Above the pectorals, the harness opens out to frame each muscle, its straps acting as a tensioning border that keeps Sephiroth’s flesh tight no matter how much he tries to relax. His nipple rings aren’t joined to the harness but the tension bounds his aching too so it can’t dissipate, heightening the sensation with every breath till he’s dizzy with it. Vincent has to lift his chin for him to put on the harness’ attached collar, and when he feels the tugs of straps over his back, he closes his eyes again. He has to deny himself sight so that he doesn’t lose his other senses, with how vivid all the sensations are.

His arms are lowered, and there’s a click as his wrists are locked together again, resting in his lap. Then Vincent moves around him, letting go of his cuffs and putting a hand to his left hip. A firm push and Sephiroth docilely goes over onto his hands and knees, a few low words and he spreads his legs again for the pillow that’s slid between them.

The slip rasps over his nipples so his thighs go boneless when a palm flattens against his bare upper back. He moans and whimpers but Vincent only pins him more firmly against the pillow, its unsteady softness making it impossible to ever settle into the ache. Which is the point, as he’s too preoccupied to do anything, to even think about it, as two fingers scissor apart his buttocks for something thinner and covered with fur. Vincent’s tail, rapidly thickening as it drives deep into him, keeping him full while his chin is tipped up and his mouth is put around a hard cock.

Sephiroth’s eyes open at some point while he’s sucking Vincent off, and he sees Vincent watching him. Hardly blinking, the man’s gaze intense as if it means to devour him layer by layer, even though Vincent uses him very languidly. He’s only a little damp with sweat by the time Vincent finishes in his mouth, his head sagging rather than dropping to the pillow.

“Off the bed,” Vincent says.

He pulls his cock away, then uses some scrap from the opened boxes to wipe it off as Sephiroth carefully works himself onto the floor, the man’s tail still buried within him. Then Vincent pulls that out and briefly turns Sephiroth around to push in a plug. Sephiroth scratches blindly at the floor to keep from pressing into the side of the mattress and trying to rub the bindings off his cock. Then hisses, going half-slack, as Vincent takes a handful of his hair and jerks him upright.

“Hold,” Vincent says, and whimpering, Sephiroth does, even though he feels as if every part of him is singing with fire, so hot that touch alone should crisp anything to ash.

But his silk-and-leather prison holds. He holds, as Vincent finger-combs his hair and then braids it, wrapping it about with black silk ribbons from the boxes. He holds as the other man kneels behind him and then takes him into a close embrace, lavishing caresses that miss no chance to stoke the twisting, burning need in him. Nails scratching up his bruised inner thighs, palms rubbing across his clamped nipples, a mouth sucking fresh hot marks along the tops of his shoulders. And when he’s panting, the beginnings of a futile plea on his lips, Vincent teases his nipples out through the customary slits in the slip’s bodice and clips a chain leash to the nipple rings.

“My pretty trophy,” Vincent says with a contented sigh. He simply gathers Sephiroth against him for a moment, leash looped about one hand that he lays over Sephiroth’s left inner thigh, fingertips just brushing Sephiroth’s cock through the slip when Sephiroth hitches. His other hand he cups under Sephiroth’s jaw, turning Sephiroth’s head towards him. “You’ll have to wait till I’m back, but I’ll put you where I won’t miss you.”

Sephiroth groans, a thousand tantalizing possibilities arising in his mind, and each of them is entirely capable of wiping every other thought away with delicious anticipation. Together, they make him almost drunk, his slack mouth easy for Vincent to plunder.

When Vincent is done, he pulls Sephiroth’s head away and then flicks the chain with one finger. Not hard, but the swing of it makes Sephiroth shudder, and then continue shuddering, unable to stop himself even as his nipples burn, as Vincent has him get to his feet.

There’s one more piece of clothing, a mass of pearl-gray silk brocaded with white cranes that unfolds into an ankle-length kimono. Its vee in the front dips enough that the chain leash can spill out, but has no slits for his nipples and he twists his wrists in his newly-relocked cuffs as Vincent pulls the kimono tight over his chest. “I’m not going to tie your arms more than they already are,” Vincent warns—instructs. “I want my trophy ready for me to unwrap when I come back.”

“Please,” Sephiroth says in a shaking whisper, as much of an assent as he can manage right now.

It’s sufficient for Vincent, who smiles, small and secretive and pleased, as he moves behind Sephiroth. The kimono comes with a matching cloth belt that Vincent knots tightly at the small of Sephiroth’s back, reinforcing the lacing of the leather harness underneath. Sephiroth wavers in the double binding like a near-toppled tree as Vincent gives the sleeves and lower half a few last tugs, then breathes in.

He feels it all over, that breath, like a blanket of sparks that never settles. Tied into gorgeous silk, nipples clamped and cock bound, his body clenching around his plug as he’s led into their closet. He doesn’t need a blindfold or a gag, with how that breath envelops him and keeps him wordless and unseeing of anything except the white bursts across his vision.

There are a few glimpses. The back of the closet, his uniforms pushed to the side so he can slide to his knees in the corner—a set of cross-belts hanging with the gleaming buckles somehow touching off an echoing flash of lightning all along the straps wrapped over his body. Vincent’s knuckles, pale and perfect, just before two fingers slip into his eagerly-sucking mouth. The flare of the kimono’s hem over one of his ankles, making it so that the bare limb and not the silk looks fragile.

And then Sephiroth is set in his place. Half-curled into a knot of sprawling silk, head resting against the cool wall and tracing the nipple chain’s trail from his burning flesh across the floor to between the bars Vincent is setting up.

A dim part of Sephiroth’s mind tells him they’re from the training room, repurposed equipment racks that are held in place with tension springs and not bolts, and so could be kicked or shouldered out of the way. The rest of him, the part of him he cares to listen to, says cage and wait and need, tells him he’s being kept till he’s wanted, tied and caged and desperately ready but not yet, and he shivers till his head slides off the wall and he falls onto his elbows and then crawls the few inches to the bars, pressing his fingers through them till his wrist-chain comes up against the pole so he can brush wantonly at Vincent’s shoes.

Vincent laughs and stoops, reeling in the nipple chain till Sephiroth jerks and mewls. He puts his other hand through the bars and dips it into the front of the kimono, loosening it till he can caress Sephiroth’s clamped nipples.

“You’re not going to gag me,” Sephiroth moans plaintively.

“No one’s going to hear you or check your own bedroom without your approval,” Vincent says. He lets his hand drift out of the kimono, ignoring how Sephiroth arches after it, but strokes Sephiroth’s cheek a few times before withdrawing his arm. “I’m going to leave your phone here—” he puts it on the floor, then waits till Sephiroth reaches for it and they both see how the nipple chain, which is fastened to the far end of the bars, catches Sephiroth up just short “—and text you when I’m on my way.”

“Vincent, please,” Sephiroth begs.

He sinks down, cheek on the floor, his bound hands moving back to push helplessly in the folds of his kimono, as Vincent turns and walks out of the door. It shuts on him, very softly, the only judder the one that runs through him as the dark closes over him, and then he’s left there.

The darkness is by no means complete, between the cracks of light outlining the door and the initial soft glow of the phone screen. Even when the latter automatically turns off, Sephiroth can still make out recognizable silhouettes all around him. He’s not alarmed at all; the frisson that shivers through him in the first few following seconds is entirely arousal.

But even that is muted, and soon fades of its own accord, though he pushes the kimono between his legs and then rubs his thighs together around his bound cock and balls in a half-hearted attempt to prolong the sensation. He’s still tired from last night and the dark reminds him of that, while the even, taut pressure of the harness wound around his chest and torso provides just enough to hold him clear of any distracting or divisive thoughts. Not imprisoned but locked away for safekeeping, that’s all he thinks, and though it’s a fantasy—neither of them can truly exclude themselves from the world for long—there’s enough real intent, enough of a real vow, knowing Vincent, woven into that fantasy for Sephiroth to settle quickly.

He's comfortable enough. The kimono’s silk is a lightweight weave, airy enough to let the sweat quickly dry, while its capacious folds still trap enough of his body heat so that he doesn’t chill. He only twists his legs to bare a little more of the calves—the kimono does have unconventional high slits running up the sides, so that doesn’t require him to rise and straighten it—and then rests and listens to his breathing slow and lengthen.

Something buzzes. Sephiroth instinctively lifts his head, even though it’s far too soon, and then lets out a soft, moaning noise as the chain tugs the pressure rings on his nipples. Then it catches somewhere in the rustling kimono and he has to shift himself to relieve the strain; by then the phonescreen has gone dark again. He starts to put his head down again, only to repeat his error when the phone pings a second time.

Vincent put it a little too far for him to reach but left the sound on. And changed other settings, Sephiroth finds when he peers at the tiny rectangle: notifications are flashing up but their content is blocked from showing, even the sender. He can gather from the color-coding that most of them are work-related and non-urgent, and it’s surprisingly easy to then push away his curiosity—but then he remembers Vincent telling him no one will think to look for him here. And he moans again, pressing through the masses of silk brocade between his legs and rocking helplessly up into his bound wrists, doing that and watching all those notifications rise and vanish without answer. Heat flares up all through his body at the knowledge, not the wondering, of how well Vincent’s secreted him away from all of that.

His nipples are tugged and then yanked, the chain mercilessly twisting at the pressure rings, but he can’t help himself. He stares through the bars of his cage at his phone, too busy savoring its taunting to even notice when at first the pain in his nipples shifts. Lesser, but then redoubled, burning not only deeper but broader, a pair of great, grasping hands gripping across his entire chest as he finally tries to shimmy back towards the wall. But before he can make it, the pressure rings suddenly click open.

Sephiroth flattens himself belly-down under the tsunami sensation that crushes him. He can feel the blood rushing not only into his nipples but into the pit of his belly, the backs of his eyes, surging as if it means to burst him open. His hands aren’t even bound in that manner but he can’t raise them to rub and ease the pain; they’re gripped between his thighs, ground against his cock and balls. Which hurt too, but not enough, not enough to scour away the white heat of his freed nipples.

It eventually lessens. But he’s scoured out by it, left limp and mewling without even the energy to lift his head when he hears a different notification ping. In fact, he doesn’t raise himself again until the light from the bedroom is blanketing him, all but his face where Vincent’s body shades it away.

“Ah,” Vincent says, soft and knowing, as he squats down. He reaches through the bars and unseen, plucks up the chain so that it slithers and zips over the silken folds spilling out around Sephiroth. “I set them to open if you tugged too much.”

Sephiroth musters up a trembling whimper that smooths as Vincent’s hand slips under his cheek, cradling his head so he can look at the other man. “Is there…is there…a consequence?”

The hopefulness in his voice makes Vincent laugh. A thumb runs across his lips, then briefly lets him nurse it, and then Vincent pulls at him till he pushes shakily onto his knees. His kimono has loosened enough to fall off one shoulder, to let his bare knees peep out, and he doesn’t attempt to tidy himself as Vincent motions for him to shuffle forward.

Vincent has food and water. Cubes of fruit and soft bread and something equally soft but savory: egg scrambled with fragrant herbs, then drained of oil. He lips them from the man’s one hand as the other strokes the back of his neck, the tops of his shoulders, teasing under the kimono at the straps of his harness so that he never leans more than a quarter, if that, of his body weight against the bars between them.

He'd like to press harder, because the bars are cool against his feverish skin and the alluring warmth of Vincent is only a little beyond, but Vincent always stops him with a crook of a finger, the hike of a strap. “You’ll knock them onto you,” the man says of the bars.

Sephiroth doesn’t want to think reasonably. He’s not intended to, being only a pretty trophy well-wrapped for a deserved recipient, and so he swirls his tongue around Vincent’s fingertips and arches back his shoulders to stretch his throat out under Vincent’s claws. “Please.”

“You need to add a request, trophy,” Vincent says. Giving Sephiroth a playful chuck under the chin, then pulling his arms away as Sephiroth whines but dutifully stays in place.

He takes his coat and suitjacket off, hangs them up along with his belt, then unbuttons and rolls up his shirtsleeves as Sephiroth bites back another plea. Then, finally, he applies himself to the bars. They’re made up of two sections, one of which Vincent removes and levers aside to lean against the wall and the other that Vincent steps around as he comes over to Sephiroth’s side.

“Your hand, my cock,” Sephiroth murmurs, tipping his head back as Vincent walks up to him. He feels the man’s thigh under his chin and lets it turn him till he’s nosing along Vincent’s inseam, listening to the small catches in Vincent’s breath as his lips slowly trace the other man’s erection. “And—my nipples, make me come from—from that.”

“Dressed?” Vincent says, and then laughs again as Sephiroth nuzzles at him; Sephiroth meant to seduce but instead finds himself starting to suck urgently at the cloth of Vincent’s trousers. He pulls Sephiroth back by the hair, then gets Sephiroth onto his feet. “I still want to unwrap my gift.”

Sephiroth groans but goes against the wall, his bound hands dropping to dangle against his bound cock while his nipples try to stiffen where they’re being crushed. He spreads when he’s told to, then goes compliantly soft as Vincent uses him. Not unwrapping him yet, only pulling his kimono and slip up out of the way—and then letting them fall back and stick between his buttocks, catch up between his inner thighs as he’s led, stumbling, out of the closet and back to the bed.

He's pushed onto it and perhaps Vincent wants him to crawl, but Sephiroth only has the will to twist himself onto his side and keep enough of his body on the mattress that he doesn’t immediately slide to the floor. Vincent flicks his right nipple, then snorts and hooks his legs up onto the bed when he only whines and shivers in place. Then the other man goes into the bathroom for a few minutes, only to return with a damply warm washcloth.

Vincent bats aside the kimono to expose him up to the waist, then slides the washcloth with calculated roughness up his inner thighs while he’s still shivering from the chill of the air. He instinctively tries to squeeze his legs together, then hitches up his knees, moaning, as Vincent simply uses that to press the washcloth firmly against his perineum. Its weave seems to scrub raw lightning into his skin, keeping him rocking as Vincent climbs onto the bed behind him.

Sephiroth turns towards the other man, then stills as Vincent’s free arm comes around his waist. His pliant body is hauled up against Vincent’s chest—Vincent grunts once as his buttock slides against the man’s cock, then pinches the back of his scrotum through the towel as he tries to repeat the move—so he’s draped with his legs falling off Vincent’s lap, his head to Vincent’s shoulder. His hands land against the pillow, but Vincent briefly abandons the towel to pull his mussed but still-intact braid over his shoulder, retying some of its ribbons to his wrist-chain. Then, apparently satisfied, Vincent leans back and reaches down and starts to slowly drag the washcloth up and down his perineum.

“Where did this come from?” Vincent murmurs, lips tickling the rim of Sephiroth’s ear, as his claws skate over the bruised parts of Sephiroth’s thighs.

“Mouth,” Sephiroth says without thinking, and then he groans into Vincent’s shoulder as a corner of the towel is flicked to sting one reawakened bruise. “Teeth, your teeth, and your—your claws.”

Better, says the warm caress of Vincent’s tongue behind the point of his jaw. “And this?”

A tormenting fingertip up between Sephiroth’s buttocks, just circling his hole with the towel; the sensitive skin there is still hot with barely-healed abrasions. “Cock,” he says, moaning when Vincent refuses to press farther. “Cock and tail, and tongue.”

“Such pretty marks,” Vincent says. He tosses the towel out from between Sephiroth’s legs, then moves his hands to untie the kimono’s belt. Once it’s open, he pulls away the robe to expose Sephiroth’s buttocks, holding Sephiroth down with one arm while he slicks as much lube around Sephiroth’s hole as in it. “You’re going to show me all of them.”

He unwraps Sephiroth a little at a time, brushing the kimono away and fondling the flesh beneath till Sephiroth chokes out the reason for its abused state. A little test, but trophies are for display as well as play, and whatever the man wants, Sephiroth wants to provide it with excellence.

And when he’s done, there is a consequence: Vincent’s tail coiling around his unbound cock, its fur rubbing his cock head a rich, inflamed red while Vincent twists his nipples till their burning consumes all of him.

“You can’t even open your eyes,” Vincent scolds him, tone warmly affectionate, as he lies in the man’s embrace afterward. “And still so needy.”

Nevertheless, Vincent doesn’t stop running his fingers along the harness Sephiroth is still wearing. Sephiroth shivers as one caress skates over the silk slip instead, then resumes lapping at the traces of sweat on Vincent’s collarbone. “Someone needed to give you a trophy, for what they asked of you. I’d have killed before I let any SOLDIER do that kind of work.”

The air shifts. Not very much, and no warning in it, but Sephiroth settles against the other man to wait. Since returning, Vincent hasn’t said a word about the mission, aside from his comment about Cissnei earlier. It had been successful, Sephiroth knew that, but only from the updates Vincent sent to Tseng, and Vincent often says something…more illuminating in private. And Corneo’s milieu would test anyone, Sephiroth knows that himself.

“I’m no crusader,” Vincent says after a moment. He leans his jaw against the top of Sephiroth’s head, while his fingers drift along the interlaced straps wound over Sephiroth’s waist. “The Turks don’t recruit that type. It was Cissnei’s proposal to start with, and having executed it, I think she judged rightly. She hit all the mission goals and seemed satisfied enough with that. I don’t think she was acting when it came to that.”

It's not a reproach and Sephiroth doesn’t hear any tang of defensiveness in Vincent’s tone, but he finds himself biting his lip for a moment. But the steady petting of Vincent’s fingers eventually draw the tension from him, and when he looks up again, Vincent only seems interested that he’s still apparently preoccupied. “I don’t head the Turks and Tseng doesn’t head SOLDIER, I do respect that about him and his people,” Sephiroth says slowly. “You can choose your work, obviously—but Tseng doesn’t usually let his teams operate like that, is what I wanted to…he doesn’t put them in positions with obvious personal conflicts.”

Vincent nods. “No, he’s not Veld that way…Veld insisted you could only operate objectively, that personal feelings were irrelevant during a mission. He kept Rufus’ father’s confidence but he also missed a good deal, not wanting to see that even the best-trained inevitably feel something for something.”

“Mother did respect him, and disliked him a little less than the other department heads,” Sephiroth says. He lowers his head, though he can still hear the man’s pulse and very, very occasionally that gives Vincent away quicker than any change in expression. “Which speaks for itself, but also—when she knew him he was—he was your—”

“Was technically my partner at the time when I met your mother, yes,” Vincent says. Slightly drier than he usually would, though then he moves his head so that his mouth is resting against Sephiroth’s brow. “And didn’t investigate very thoroughly when I didn’t report in, because he was told I was AWOL and per his lights, that’s all he needed to know. I don’t need you to kill him now for that, Sephiroth.”

Vincent’s voice doesn’t change, but Sephiroth still finds himself tilting his head to brush his mouth against the pulse-point in Vincent’s neck. “I know, but if you…”

“If I ever did and wasn’t capable myself, I’d ask no one else. He partnered me for work purposes, he wasn’t my partner,” Vincent says, with the faintest stress on the last word. Voice suddenly warm, as warm as his mouth as he presses that against Sephiroth’s brow. “But that isn’t what you’re wondering about.”

Not originally, but for a moment Sephiroth is tempted—distracted, he’s almost irritated to acknowledge, as any hint of Vincent’s past is liable to do to him. But he limits himself to merely a huff that Vincent then soothes with a teasing caress near one still-sore nipple. The man is composed entirely of distractions, he thinks. “Only selfish curiosity. Not questioning your judgment, but…why would you support that kind of approach yourself? You don’t need to ingratiate yourself with Tseng or even Rufus at this point, and it’s not the only way we can starve Mother of test subjects.”

Vincent gives the question due consideration, even moving his head back to lean against the wall. His finger doesn’t stop circling Sephiroth’s nipple but that seems absentminded, and when Sephiroth finally hitches, he moves the finger clear. Then rumbles in amusement as Sephiroth hisses in disappointment.

“Because I don’t want you cleaning up all the sewage that will rise when Corneo does die, anymore than you do, and Cissnei’s plan is setting up the pieces to solve that,” he finally says. “It was a good plan, and she had good reasons for why we couldn’t take a…more typical approach. Tseng did question her thoroughly on that—he wanted to be certain it would meet the objectives but I think also because he wanted to know she’d thought it through. He does account for personal motivations in ways Verdot never did, but he’s still practical about it.”

“That’s reasonable,” Sephiroth replies, and then grimaces at himself. “Again, I’m not doubting your—”

“But you’re selfish, and it doesn’t whet your appetite to know I’m sacrificing myself for a useless cause,” Vincent says, pulling his head forward. He tugs Sephiroth up against him, then lifts his chin as Sephiroth noses under it. “We could have planned something ourselves, but this works just as well and Cissnei already did all the work. It was worth it to go now with Tseng’s team instead of having to go on my own later. But I won’t make a habit out of it.”

Vincent is no crusader, as he’d said, and doesn’t hide his lack of traditional morals, but he’ll follow his few principles over money or any other enticement. And one of them is to not promise more than he can deliver, and that is a promise. They both understand that, and for a moment Sephiroth wishes he had something better than gratitude to offer up in return.

He will have something better for the other man, he’ll ensure that. For now…he kisses Vincent’s throat again, letting his eyes close as he feels Vincent stretch one finger to pet over his own pulse. He has the other man back, telling him where he stands in relation to Vincent’s principles, and he intends to maintain that standing.

Chapter 71: Twelfth Vacation: Field Research Trip

Notes:

Long since run out of tags, so additional warnings: breathplay, bit of rape fantasy (not really hardcore, because Sephiroth is, well, not much of an actor), leather and glove kink.

Sephiroth adds a last comment to the report in front of him, saves, and then leans back in his chair, only to stop with a soft, savoring sigh as the silk panties he’s wearing slide teasingly across his cock and balls.

He’s at home and not at all dressed for his duties—his Shinra duties, at any rate. Hair carefully plaited and falling softly over one shoulder, heavy uniform replaced by a slip of pink silk so airy that he frequently forgets he’s even wearing anything, only to find himself shivering all over again as it whispers across his skin with the slightest movement. He looks down at himself, leaning further back, and then lets his head tip against the chair as he raises his hands and lightly tweaks his nipples. They’re already peaked but he pinches and rubs them against the bodice’s accommodating slits until he just starts to feel the heated seeds of pain unfurl, and then he makes himself pull his hands away.

His tablet screen has dimmed. He watches it for a few seconds, mind already drifting away even though he’s spent a diligent ninety minutes after-hours poring through reports. His hands drift as well, sliding down his stomach, chasing the warmth pooling under his skin, then skimming along his thighs. They run off the hem of the slip, across a strip of bare flesh that feels startlingly hot by comparison to the cool fabric, and then back onto silk. He stretches his legs out and arches a little, toying with the elastic bands of his stockings, letting his thumbs drag teasingly up the insides of his thighs to just flirt with grazing at the thin, very thin layer of silk between them and his cock.

Then Sephiroth bites his lip. He closes his eyes, forces himself to focus, and sits back up. The tablet is dark now, in sleep mode, and he ignores the small cluster of pending notifications that appears at the very bottom of it as he pushes himself out of the chair.

He goes out of his home office and pads through the darkened apartment, glancing only briefly at the front door before he makes his way to the bedroom. He stands in the doorway for a few seconds, studying the smooth, tucked sheets and the unmarked pillows and trying not to succumb to the frustration lurking in the back of his mind. His fingers twitch at his sides and he makes them straighten out. Then inhales slowly as he steps into the room.

The air pressure shifts infinitesimally to his right and slightly behind him. Sephiroth halts, his instincts triggering, electricity playing up and down his spine and sparking deep in his gut. His legs twitch towards each other as his cock stiffens in its silky sling.

And then he’s being dragged backward, one arm twisted roughly behind him as his other hand gropes blindly into the wall. As soon as he touches the wall, he’s shoved a second time and his palm goes into an uncontrolled skid to the side, gliding away from the salvation of the doorway. A leather-gloved hand stifles his mouth and pinches his nostrils, a simple and effective threat that makes him go limp against the wall. Spraddle-kneed, acutely aware of small, strange little details like how stiff his nipples feel against the cold plaster, how hot the air directly between his thighs is and how icy it is when sucked into his mouth, when that’s released in favor of twisting his other arm behind him.

Sephiroth gasps and drags his cheek against the wall, exhilaration racing arousal to cloud his normal reflexes to defend himself. Neither leaves any room for words, only a low groan as his wrists are crossed and quickly taped that way, as he’s then spun off the wall and dragged, off-kilter and stumbling the entire way, to fall face-first over the edge of the bed. The sheets rumple up into his mouth and he feels how his nipples tighten when he gasps a second time and feels the wetness of his own breath pressed back against his face.

His captor wastes no time taking advantage of his daze, taking him by the legs and lifting him further onto the bed, then pulling his stockings down to his knees so a taut band of tape can replace their grip on his thighs. Sephiroth does manage to turn his head and spit out the sheet as the stockings come off his feet, but then feels a sharp slap to his right buttock. The whimper claws out of his throat of its own accord, taking his nascent desire to struggle with it, and he slumps helplessly back into the bed.

His ankles are bound, every round of the tape sending little taunting jolts up his legs and into his cock and across his belly. He shivers and the movement unintentionally rolls his head to where he can just glimpse a dark figure stooping over him. His breath stutters and the figure’s head rises; Sephiroth twists his own head away but far too late.

A merciless hand winds into his hair and pulls him around, lifting him by it so that he has to squirm onto one elbow and hip to alleviate the sting in his scalp. Then he’s abruptly dropped, but before his head falls more than an inch, he finds it cradled against a gloved hand. The musky smell of leather fills his nostrils, earthy and rich and raising all sorts of pleasurable past memories—he moans and when a palm is pressed over his mouth, only moans louder.

The figure holding him snorts in amusement as something slips about his eyes and makes the darkness absolute. He’s blindfolded with his own stocking, several rounds of it snug across his eyelids, and then pulled up with a knee across his back, gagged once again with leather-covered fingers. Another hand strokes down the front of his body, leisurely reveling in his captive state, caressing him as he squirms and shudders. His head is pinned back against a shoulder and he whines into the glove, jumping when teeth suddenly fix on the top of his own shoulder.

Fighting is useless. The tape he’s been bound with is strong enough to hold him even if he tries, and anyway whenever the thought tries to arise, he’s distracted by sensation: the heat of bruising skin, the twitch of his cock between his bound thighs, the susurration of silk across his sensitized body as he’s fondled for someone else’s pleasure. Fingers tease at his flexing belly muscles, then unceremoniously pull up his slip and cup him over the panties. When he arches and strains himself, the hand over his mouth forces him back down, making him choke on his own whimpers as his captor unerringly locates the damp, sticky spot on the panties and then circles the head of his cock through it.

By the time the hand lifts, Sephiroth is too breathless to groan, let alone cry for help. He pants as his underwear is slit first on one side, then on the other—the skitter of sharp edges against his suddenly-freed cock makes his breath almost clog his throat—and then tied into his helplessly-open mouth with the second stocking. Again, several rounds before it’s secured with knots, more than enough to keep it tight no matter how wetly he sucks at it.

And he does, nursing his gag as he’s pushed back onto the bed. The strap of his slip comes down his shoulder, rucking his slip to the side so that for a moment, he thinks the garment might tear—but the gloved hand brushes it back up to its place on the way to gripping his throat. He worms his legs along the bed and feels his feet and ankles slip off the edge, but there’s no escape. He’s held far too securely, those same sharp edges now gliding menacingly along his pulse as his slip is pulled up again.

A gloved finger pushes between his buttocks, then crooks so that another one can slide in beside it. They scissor apart enough space for a small, plastic oblong so generously slicked with lubricant that Sephiroth feels it dripping down his perineum after the thing has been pushed into him. It’s not large enough to strain him but certainly unignorable, shifting and pressing flirtatiously against his prostate as his arms are dragged down, his legs bent up. Tough, thick cable ties are zipped snugly about his wrists and ankles over the tape, and then a third one links them to keep him bent into the desired position.

The sliding, feverish strain already growing in his limbs and back spurs moan after moan out of Sephiroth. He senses his captor moving around him but doesn’t even attempt to try to lift his head, only rocking a little as his bonds stretch and retract, always drawing him back precisely into his place. The bed dips near his chest and then the hands return to caress him, tugging at his nipples and pinching the insides of his thighs, massaging at his balls, drawing whimpers and mewls out of him. It’s very clear that his captor’s pleasure comes not merely from his physical reactions but from the setting for them, the fact that he’s completely unable to resist, that he has no choice but to respond.

Sephiroth is played with for some time, he doesn’t know how long. Long enough to reduce him to a shivering mess, before a mouth finally dips to cover the head of his cock and fingers take the rest of it firmly. Still gloved—the leather runs differently over his skin, both smoother and yet sticking to his skin in a way that bare fingers would not. And when the glove pulls away, the sting of its friction makes him—he comes, hips jerking, fingers hooking futilely against his own backside, legs attempting to spread as his hands pull the zip ties one way and his ankles the other.

A hand catches his knee and then holds it up as his shudders slowly diminish. Very slowly—the mouth on his cock expertly prolongs them to just the pleasurable side of exhaustion, tongue flicking into his cock slit to milk out every drop of come before ensuring the wetness on his skin is from it and not his own sweat. Then, as he’s lolling on the bed, trembling slackly in his bonds, his captor ties up his cock and balls.

Silk cord, silk but taut, tormenting, netting his overworked flesh with knits and crisscrossed strands that mark out a red, deafening pulse in his head. He groans and works at his gag a little, but this is only what his captor wants, what is most enjoyable about him—how easily he falls into their toying. His cock is lined up pointing towards his bellybutton, a length of cord knotted about his waist to keep it in place, and then another length is stretched from his balls back between his buttocks, with carefully-placed knots all along his perineum to dig and nudge where he’s most sensitive.

Then his slip is smoothed down, a deliberate taunt of his non-existent modesty. He whimpers and the gloved hand cups his chin, helps him lift it from the sweat-soaked sheets as fingers adjust the strap of his slip over his shoulder. A mouth presses over his gag and he can make out the shape of smiling lips through its sodden weight as suddenly, the thing inside of him buzzes to life.

From somewhere enough desperate energy whips Sephiroth into a shuddering, straining bow, his entire body electrified as the vibrator burrows down to judder the suddenly rocklike knots, with his prostate pummeled relentlessly between them. But the surge runs out as quickly as it comes, even as his cock now starts to swell and push against its restraints, and he can’t help falling back onto the bed. Mewling, squirming, and all the while his captor is lasciviously kissing him through his gag, drinking in his struggles.

Then they retreat. A lock of his hair that’s strayed from his plait is scraped off his face and tucked kindly behind his ear, one last caress, before his captor climbs off the bed and leaves him there, blind and mute and hogtied.

They don’t exit the room. He hears them moving but that awareness is rapidly eroding as his black, close world narrows to only the torturing toy in his body and to his own denied need. And then—he spasms violently when the vibrator turns off.

For a brief, tantalizing moment, he thinks he may have come in spite of everything. But no…when it fades, he’s only that much more aware of his place, limp and not even able to suck at his gag now. He only realizes that his captor has returned when fingers slide along his ankles.

Something about the touch is—different. That comes through and he moves his head a little, vaguely perturbed even though it’s the same leather-gloved hand testing his bonds. They’ve held—he’s still held by them, though there’s a furrow in the tape that the captor traces next to the zip tie. He relaxes, and a moment later his captor moves to raise his head again so he forgets about it.

Something is pulled over his head—silk, at least double the weight of his slip but still silk, still with that glossy cool as his captor delicately tugs it over his damp skin, letting it mold to him so even with its lightness he’s well aware of how it hoods him away, wraps him with yet another layer of bondage. Laces tugging across the back of his head, then tickling at his shoulders as he’s set back against the bed; he’s not quite deaf but his hearing is certainly muffled.

And then the vibrator is turned back on. He whines urgently through the gag, the hood, but gloved hands press him down till the lassitude of submission comes back over him and he slumps. It’s not…as confrontational now, the vibrator. He’s only shuddering, not spasming, but in some ways it’s a more brutal way of wringing the pleasure from him, the constant niggling just below what’s necessary to keep him from noticing all those details. How his nipples ache, even though they’ve been left relatively unscathed. How the cords on his cock seem to warp and tighten as if they’ve their own fiendish intelligence about when to thwart his arousal. How the ache pools into the small of his back and then springs out into his joints.

And he thinks his captor leaves him longer this time. They leave the room, but not the apartment: with the hood on, he’s distracted enough that he can’t track them through the rest of the place but he still senses their presence. He knows they’re going to return, and so he moans into his soft, taut prison, splays his burning fingers at the tantalizing wisps of air from the ceiling vents, shivers at the rub of the knots over his body.

When the vibrator turns off the second time, Sephiroth has long since accepted his fate, and so doesn’t resist the shock. He lets it run through him, lets his moan crowd up with him under the hood, and then lies there, compliant, as his captor cuts through the zip ties. His muscles tremble as the pent-up cramps in them release but he lets the trembling move him, doesn’t let his limbs lash out against it.

His captor brushes a hand along his upper arm, and then he feels a mouth kiss the point of his shoulder. Slow and lingering, affectionate in contrast to the way his legs are shoved down out of the way and the cords running between his buttocks are cut away. The vibrator is removed and his captor roughly fucks him, one hand cupping his tortured bound cock while the other cradles his jaw, keeping his nostrils clear of the bed. He whimpers as he feels the other man come in him, feels how desperately his own cock wants to do the same, but doesn’t fight the ache, only accepts it.

The breathing at the back of his neck gradually slows. He’s kissed again, along his throat and then up by the edge of the hood as its laces are loosened. Sephiroth rolls his head a little, mewls when teeth sink into his neck, and then breathes in deeply as the hood comes free. Fingers and lips caress his jaw as his gag comes away next—bare fingers now, with a slightly bitter taste under their nails, as they brush at Sephiroth’s tongue. Tea, a muzzy thought rises in him, and he sucks weakly at them as Vincent chuckles, nuzzling behind his ear.

“I was late,” Vincent murmurs. His hands move down, his arm sliding beneath Sephiroth as he turns them both so he can play with Sephiroth’s nipples again. “I should’ve told you myself.”

Sephiroth struggles to piece together what the man means. It’s—harder than trying to listen for his footsteps, despite the lower level of distractions. “Tseng…let me know.”

Something about the way his voice rasps is not to Vincent’s liking, because he covers Sephiroth’s mouth with his hand. When Sephiroth sighs and slumps against him, the other man traces his lips twice before lifting the hand just enough to allow the rim of a water bottle to be pressed to them. He obediently drinks the water, too well-trained to protest no matter how uninterested he is in it, and then moans wantonly when Vincent rewards him with a fondling of one nipple.

Vincent chuckles again and does away with the water bottle so he can tease Sephiroth with both hands. He makes the nubs hot and sore before reaching down and finally cutting through the cords tied about Sephiroth’s cock.

After Sephiroth’s second orgasm, Vincent makes him drink more water. Still lying fully-dressed behind Sephiroth, his cock comfortably tucked into Sephiroth’s body as he idly hooks his chin over Sephiroth’s shoulder. When the bottle is half-empty, he caps it and rolls it aside, then works his hand between them to stroke one finger along the tendons of Sephiroth’s forearm. “Nerve damage doesn’t heal overnight, even for you,” he says. “I think I’ll save the zip ties for when you’re too tired to need them.”

Sephiroth sluggishly remembers, then flexes his ankle and toes. Yes, the zip tie had cut in, but he only feels a deep bruise and not any reduction in reflexes. He’d enjoyed it, and he knows the risks—but he knows not to say that to Vincent, same as he knows not to turn away water. The man doesn’t punish but he will obsess over his craft, and he does consider this a craft. And Sephiroth can’t truly disagree with such an approach, even if he does give off enough of an irked air for Vincent to press a smile to his back and pinch his nipples again.

“You knew it was me,” Vincent says over his whimpering. Then eases off the delightful torture again, only circling one tender nub with his claw as he noses at the back of Sephiroth’s hair. He sounds thoughtful now, not self-reproachful. “You knew when I moved, I saw how you relaxed. That’s too fast for even your senses.”

“You were coming, even if it was hours later, and who else would break in?” Sephiroth says. He twists his head back, still a little reluctant to engage his higher reasoning faculties when his body hasn’t yet stopped shivering. But at the same time, Vincent always entices him to look again, to consider what he previously dismissed—and he knows when he does, the man won’t use it for anything but Sephiroth’s advantage. “Too fast for even logic?”

“I know instinct and logic for you are hand-in-hand, but…” Vincent lifts one hand to support Sephiroth’s chin as he cranes around and kisses Sephiroth, as easily affectionate now as he was merciless earlier. Then he lowers Sephiroth’s head back to the bed, absently stroking his thumb along Sephiroth’s jaw. “I was going to let you see my hand, but you were turning away from me—you knew it was me even before I touched you. That’s not how you were when we first started.”

Sephiroth starts to ask—if it bothers Vincent, if it alarmed him, if it threatened him, all the thoughts his years and years before the other man had burned into him, because even now it would be suicide to lose those instincts. But Vincent senses it just as quickly and clasps his hand about Sephiroth’s throat, pushing his cock a little further into Sephiroth at the same time so Sephiroth arches into the hold. Remembers who possesses him, even before Vincent’s warm mouth nestles against his ear.

“My lovely consort, always mine and never my enemy’s,” Vincent murmurs. Caressing along Sephiroth’s neck as Sephiroth groans and half-closes his eyes. “So well-trained you know me even before you see me…I’m not going to untrain you now, not when you’re perfect. But it occurred to me that I also knew you’d know—I didn’t let you see my hand, after all. I didn’t have to even think about it when I saw you.”

“Then what?” Sephiroth says. Letting himself be petted, luxuriating in it as he’s directed this way and that, and only needing to enjoy himself…but he can’t quite do that, not when he…senses Vincent. Not when the man is still mulling over something.

Vincent sighs. He doesn’t sound sorry, but does sound as if he half-wishes he too could let himself simply toy with Sephiroth. “Hojo tried to use some of his Jenova techniques on me, but your mother undid them, replaced it with Chaos.”

“Do you think she lied?” Sephiroth asks immediately, starting to tense.

Before he can fully stiffen, Vincent lays his mouth against Sephiroth’s pulse. Nothing else, only that, but it drains the tension away. “No,” Vincent says, as Sephiroth listens, his instincts quieted in favor of that. “No, but…you know I have my files. It didn’t occur to me before, but you might learn something about yourself or your friends from how she undid Hojo’s work. And if that’s true, then you might also learn something if we pulled the old Chaos research. She hasn’t buried that the way she has your files.”

Sephiroth stiffens again. This time Vincent doesn’t kiss him but waits on him, still entwined with him and showing no signs of concern about that as Sephiroth breathes in deeply and carefully and thinks through that. It is true, that part of Sephiroth’s mother’s hold over him and his fellow Firsts is the fact that she still hasn’t disclosed everything she knows about their genetics—Genesis’ recurring illness alone has stayed Sephiroth’s hand for years. They’ve been piecing the gaps together, but it’s been slow going even after Vincent started ferreting out things in old, forgotten archives. And it is also true that the prospect of accelerating their progress is an undisputed benefit.

But it’s the old instincts, Sephiroth thinks as he drops his chin against the bed. Wary of his mother, of how every time in the past he’s seemed to gain the upper hand, she’s pulled out something to stop him in his tracks. “You know, the reason I was taking that vacation in the first place was because she’d lorded it over me again, how much I still didn’t know about myself.”

Vincent hums an acknowledgement into Sephiroth’s shoulder. He flicks Sephiroth’s nipple a last time, not a distraction but a parting caress, before leaning back and cutting at the tape about Sephiroth’s wrists with his claws. “I can’t promise anything. I’ve spent a lot of time on my own genetics, but I learned that as needed. I never was the scientist my father wished I’d be.”

“If you were, Mother would’ve long buried you, and then I’d either be dead in a snowdrift or irretrievably insane,” Sephiroth says. He winces a little when the tape parts and his arms can pull apart, but then sighs and settles back into Vincent as the other man works their arms around to Sephiroth’s front.

There Vincent curls his fingers over the tape, working its edges off Sephiroth’s skin. He stops when Sephiroth speculatively rolls his hips back into the other man, then laughs lowly as he pulls Sephiroth’s hands up to cross over his chest. “You want to stay like this a little longer.”

“Blindfold, at least,” Sephiroth breathes as his forearms brush over his still-tender nipples. He twitches, then moans softly as Vincent reaches down to tickle in between his bound thighs. “You were late—a little longer? And then…” he pauses, then exhales “…tell me about the Chaos work. In the morning.”

“Needy,” Vincent teases, but he’s already wrapping his hand back around Sephiroth’s cock.

* * *

They do talk about it in the morning. Sephiroth had half-wondered if Vincent might delay matters—the man won’t put Sephiroth off for no reason but he does like to ensure an optimal setting, particularly for difficult discussions. And it hasn’t escaped Sephiroth that there is no way to discuss the Chaos research without going into Vincent’s father. But Vincent brings up the topic when they’re preparing breakfast, and then proceeds to lucidly and unhesitatingly walk Sephiroth through how they’ll have to access the files.

The ones in Vincent’s possession are not necessarily as accessible as the ones still in Shinra’s, for the simple reason that Vincent has a Turk’s distrust of digital security methods and keeps them largely in physical form, in several different locations. Sephiroth and he narrow down the ones Sephiroth would like to read first, but it’ll still take him a few weeks to arrange the necessary trips among his work missions. In contrast, Shinra keeps the relevant files in a single backwater storage facility in Corel.

Sephiroth needs to head over there anyway to check in on operations, and it’s not difficult for Vincent to arrange a complementary trip at the same time, since the records in question are so old there’s a good chance they’re not fully cataloged. But it is a little surprising to Sephiroth that Vincent proposes that they go together to the archives, not the least because it’s much more logistically complicated than Vincent going alone to pull them and then sharing them with Sephiroth on-site.

“Because I rarely talk about him,” Vincent says with a dry, knowing smile as he lies back on the bed in Sephiroth’s guest quarters in Corel. He has his own, in some local Turk safehouse, but Sephiroth will never turn down the man’s company. “And you enjoy offering yourself up as compensation.”

Sephiroth is fresh from the shower after a training session with some of his officers, his hair streaked in damp clumps along his body where it’s not trailing along the bed. He pushes some of it out of the way, then pulls himself a few more inches along Vincent’s legs. “Not as a bribe, Vincent. But it’s an effort for you and as your partner—”

“As my partner, you’re entitled to know without doing anything,” Vincent says. A little more firmly than usual, though his tone is still far from accusing or peremptory. When Sephiroth crawls closer, he raises his hand almost to touch Sephiroth’s face, but then detours it—so close that Sephiroth feels the heat of his fingertips trace a line across the bridge of Sephiroth’s nose—to instead wind up some of Sephiroth’s hair around his fingers. He tugs and Sephiroth obediently eels up to his waist, sighing as he skates a claw down Sephiroth’s throat. “I’m only a little eccentric about answering you.”

“I don’t recall asking about this,” Sephiroth says after a moment’s careful study of the man.

Vincent smiles again. His claw brushes up under Sephiroth’s chin, then bends away as he shakes the strands free from his fingers. Then he curls his hand over the back of Sephiroth’s neck, pulling Sephiroth up over him. Sephiroth lifts his leg and then puts it down between Vincent’s knees, spreading his arms to either side of the other man as Vincent crooks back his head, holds his throat bared while cool fingertips trace the fading bruises on his chest and ribs. Nothing serious, nothing to keep him from offering up what Vincent is entitled to, since partnership goes both ways—but Sephiroth glimpses Vincent’s face and swallows the words.

Instead he makes his body the response, opening it to whatever Vincent deems appropriate. That flicker of reluctance in Vincent’s face has little to do with him, he knows, and this is only a small accommodation on his part.

“Such a good pet,” Vincent eventually murmurs. He tugs at Sephiroth’s nape, then stoops and lets his tongue snake out to flick at Sephiroth’s lips when they part around a stifled begging noise. But then he leans back, even as his hands urge Sephiroth down his body again, making a leash out of Sephiroth’s hair and directing Sephiroth to his cock. “Such a good silent partner…”

The slight change in inflection makes Sephiroth glance up. Then he has to groan, as Vincent’s tail begins to wind up one of his legs. He cants his hips downward to meet it, but still keeps his eyes on the other man’s face. “Do you want me to talk?”

That shade of…mixed reluctance and appreciation rises in Vincent’s expression, and this time he doesn’t shunt it immediately aside but lets Sephiroth regard it. He lets Sephiroth see him work through whatever complicated thoughts he’s having, even if he doesn’t voice them, and then lets himself sigh and slouch down the wall. “You don’t ask as often as you could, and I think—when I was younger, I think I would’ve thought you a little foolish for it. My father never asked what my mother was up to, even though she didn’t keep it all away from home. She was very good but no one is that good.”

His hand cups Sephiroth’s jaw, thumb rubbing along it as he speaks. Sephiroth leans into the touch, listening past the mock-insult—not meant for him, even the slow tickling of Vincent’s tail between his legs can’t distract him that much—and watching Vincent’s face.

“He knew about her, but he didn’t—I thought he thought if he simply pretended to never see it, they’d never have a problem. And I thought that that was foolish, with where he worked and what family she was from.” Vincent’s smile is rueful this time. He caresses Sephiroth’s cheek, then slides his hand back to take hold of Sephiroth’s throat again as his tail-tip abruptly presses up against Sephiroth’s perineum, startling a groan out of Sephiroth. He keeps the hold without tightening it as Sephiroth shudders, arches his hips, and then resettles against Vincent’s legs. “But I was young back then. I thought I knew how weak he was.”

“You’re not like him,” Sephiroth grunts. He’d sunk down onto his forearms but pushes himself up a little when Vincent cocks a brow at him. “No, I never met him, but Gast has said that to me, and so has Mother—and if they agree on something—”

Vincent laughs. He moves his hand to keep the hair from falling into Sephiroth’s face, as his tail insinuates itself between Sephiroth’s legs and draws out more groans. “No, not very much—I haven’t changed that much. But I did misjudge him. He and my mother, it wasn’t a partnership but it was…it was enough of an understanding that I think fool is the wrong word. When she finally left, she didn’t leave anything for him or me, and he never once looked for her—never once asked for that, even after I joined the Turks.”

“Because it could have put her in danger, you’ve said,” Sephiroth says.

“Yes, but it wasn’t like that—it was like it never even occurred to him. He mourned her, but somehow he never wondered…I knew better than to look too, but I still wanted to, and I never understood why he didn’t,” Vincent says, and for a moment, as he looks at Sephiroth, something unshutters in his eyes that Sephiroth hasn’t seen before. Vincent is a deeply cynical man but remarkably lacking in bitterness; he doesn’t waste time on what can’t be changed, and the past falls into that category. But in that moment he shows Sephiroth that that is a learned habit for him. “I know you’re not the same either. When you don’t ask, it doesn’t mean you’ve given up.”

He falls silent after that, though his fingers drift back under Sephiroth’s chin. Sephiroth lifts his head for them, then leans in as Vincent’s thumb passes over his mouth. He considers simply opening his lips and sucking in the digit, leaving his response to physical motions again, but…that feels incorrect.

“No. I’ll look for you,” Sephiroth finally says. He watches as Vincent’s eyes warm, then allows himself to take in just the tip of Vincent’s thumb. Catching it lightly between his teeth, licking at its tip, before it hooks down and draws him forward. “I’ll go to you too. I don’t ask because I know I can do that if it comes to it.”

Vincent slides his thumb out of Sephiroth’s mouth and curves his hand to the side of Sephiroth’s head. He pushes Sephiroth down, his own head going back as Sephiroth mouths his cock through his trousers. The faintest groan comes out of Vincent before he fists his fingers in Sephiroth’s hair again, pulling Sephiroth back with just enough roughness to sharpen his anticipation. Sephiroth whines and tugs back, simply to feel Vincent haul him up, and then shivers as, held there, Sephiroth hovers while Vincent lazily opens the front of his trousers and makes his cock available. Then Vincent picks up his cock between two fingers and playfully bobs it under Sephiroth’s mouth, making him wait a few more seconds.

Sephiroth whines again, pressing his groin into the bed. His cock is almost fully hard itself but he knows without being told that he should hold himself back till the other man is satisfied. Smiling, Vincent runs his thumb along Sephiroth’s lower lip one more time, then loosens his grip.

Later, when they’re both clean again, Vincent curled up against Sephiroth’s back with one hand lazily teasing the bruises he’s left on Sephiroth’s hips, Sephiroth finds himself saying a little more. Not because he thinks the other man didn’t hear him or misunderstood him, but because he wants to. He wants to, and as much as Vincent toys with him, they both know it’s because he wants the man to. They’re free to want it, and there’s no reason to speak about that because they both understand how precious that is.

“I don’t know if I’m going to discover anything new about you, simply because I’m reading your father’s old files,” he says, and listens for the slight shift in Vincent’s breathing. The man was listening before, but he does so differently now, setting his chin on Sephiroth’s shoulder. “But if anyone’s going to see your expression when you pull them out, it’s going to be me. No one else has looked at them in years.”

“Compensation, not a bribe,” Vincent says. More thoughtful than teasing, although then his hand slips down to wrap around Sephiroth’s inner thigh with a casual possession that, tired as Sephiroth is, sends a flush of heat through him. “Do you think I’d let myself show up on access records?”

Sephiroth presses himself back into the other man. Then turns his head when he feels Vincent’s breath ghost past his cheek, only to drop it forward with a gasped chuckle when Vincent bites him just under the point of his jaw. “No. No, but…don’t you want to show me them?”

“Insatiable.” Vincent nips Sephiroth again before moving back. His hand stays on Sephiroth’s thigh. “No, they’re right. You don’t have to correct them before you put them back.”

“I wouldn’t anyway,” Sephiroth says, frowning.

Or he starts to, only to find Vincent’s mouth covering his own before he’s fully lifted his head. He opens up for the kiss, sinking down again, and then lies there, comfortably pliant, as Vincent gives him a third bite on the point of the shoulder.

“I know,” Vincent says, and then he pauses for a few seconds. Before he speaks again, he takes a long, low breath. “The idea that that old work might have some use to someone—it never did much for my father. I don’t think it even really distracted him from my mother leaving…but this isn’t like Rhapsodos’ shoulder for me, Sephiroth. Still, I do appreciate having some entertainment along. It’s going to take a while to read through them.”

“That’s why I’m coming with you,” Sephiroth says. He closes his eyes as Vincent nuzzles back against his nape, then keeps them closed as he feels the other man settle. “You didn’t ask for that.”

“No. No, but then, I knew you’d come,” Vincent says.

He presses his mouth in behind Sephiroth’s ear, then relaxes. Sephiroth exhales quietly, nosing absentmindedly at a fold of bedsheet just under his head, and then they fall asleep together.

* * *

The archives are in a little-used underground level, tucked behind several halls of bomb-shelter provisions and other such things. Air and electricity will be provided but little else in the way of comforts, so Sephiroth brings a duffel bag of supplies with him when he meets Vincent in the nearest breakroom, a dusty little alcove equipped with a sink, and coffeemaker, and a trashcan. He’s in full uniform, having spent the morning in meetings, and so when Vincent pulls him forward for a kiss, the man does so by his cross-belts.

“Good,” Vincent murmurs, pulling back. His hands slide up onto Sephiroth’s ribs as the belts, now undone, drop heavily to the ground. He watches with his usual cool, calm gaze as Sephiroth inhales slowly, rolls first one and then the other shoulder.

And then he pushes Sephiroth back against the wall. It’s only a half-step behind but Sephiroth lets his knees buckle with the push, lets the weight of his body jar most of the workday tension out of him. His head tips up of its own accord, his mouth groans wordlessly, and when he’s settled down, Vincent has him.

They don’t have to speak these days and it’s clear Vincent doesn’t desire that now, as he slips the coat off Sephiroth and then twists Sephiroth around to face the wall with brisk, commanding efficiency. Sephiroth is allowed to hitch and moan as he pleases so long as he doesn’t resist and he’s happy to comply, resting his cheek against the concrete as Vincent pulls his wrists behind him and then binds them tightly with tape.

Four zip ties go over the tape, placed side-by-side to distribute the pressure. They feel like cuffs, they grip like the leather Sephiroth is bound with at home; when they’re traveling Vincent can’t always bring along such things but these are a reminder, a message. Sephiroth is a toy here, a captive, his SOLDIER garb only so much ornamentation and only because it pleases Vincent to see it.

Turning Sephiroth around, his hair bound back as well, keeping his body unveiled for the other man’s perusal. Vincent smiles slightly, stroking lightly at Sephiroth’s right pectoral before he deliberately avoids the nipple and instead seizes Sephiroth’s mouth mid-moan. He pushes Sephiroth’s head back into the wall before he stretches the tape over Sephiroth’s lips, his thumb then coming over it to rub against the vibrations of Sephiroth’s whimpering. He traces it twice to emphasize Sephiroth’s muted state before drawing his hand down the column of Sephiroth’s throat, lingering to squeeze it around the groans.

But then he’s back to brisk, taking out bundles of thin black cord. Not silk but coarse twine, its friction raising fine pink lines just from running over Sephiroth’s skin. Vincent ties one of his more complicated chest harnesses about Sephiroth, trapping the nipples and the upper arms, and then works it down Sephiroth’s torso as every breath seems to tighten the knots. When he reaches Sephiroth’s waist, he pauses to undo Sephiroth’s belt and push down Sephiroth’s trousers, but leaves them hanging at the tops of the thighs as he works the rope around either side of Sephiroth’s cock and back between his legs.

The rope is tied in place and then Vincent steps back. He takes Sephiroth’s erect cock in hand with seeming indifference, pinching its head when Sephiroth bucks off the wall but not looking to see that Sephiroth sinks backwards at the reprimand. Because he knows Sephiroth will, because he knows he has his hostage perfectly helpless, unable to so much as wheeze without feeling the yank of the ropes at rapidly-swelling nipples.

They grow red and tender in their bonds, little points of fire that burn even after Vincent’s stroked the orgasm from Sephiroth. No tenderness there aside from a little oil on one gloved palm—black gloves, the same type Sephiroth wears, that Sephiroth’s tied hands are clenching in even now, futilely rubbing against the concrete wall as Vincent raises his soiled glove, examines it, and then takes a playful lick at the smears.

Behind his gag Sephiroth is salivating, imagining the taste on his own tongue. Thinking about having the grounding weight of Vincent’s cock in his mouth, about having some active part in the man’s pleasure—but he’s denied that and the amused gleam in Vincent’s eyes enjoys that. Enjoys how hungrily he moans, tape flexing over his lips, as Vincent proceeds to clean his own glove and then, smiling, wraps the spit-coated hand about Sephiroth’s throat.

Vincent holds him that way, looking directly into his eyes as the other man jerks his trousers back up his hips. Does up his belt, but loosely, with his fly open so that his spent cock can hang out through it. When Vincent pulls him away from the wall and forward so he’s pressed against the other man, his cock rolls across the rough weave of Vincent’s trousers and he whines, jerking, before Vincent’s grip at his throat tells him to stop.

He does so but can’t help shivering. “My pretty little soldier,” Vincent whispers along his trembling shoulder. “Bound and gagged with your pretty cock out and your pretty nipples red enough to see from the control room—” Vincent bites down when he whines again “—if I let them see that.”

As ignored as this part of the Corel facility is, it’s still packed full of security cameras and other surveillance equipment. Sephiroth knows that, and with Vincent’s words his mind promptly fills with thoughts of himself on footage, still in uniform but very much a display model rather than a real soldier. A trophy for the other man, strung along behind him as Vincent pulls him towards the door.

Literally so: Vincent stops after picking up Sephiroth’s clothes and their bags, and clips clamps over his already-bound nipples. Sephiroth cries out as the burning in his flesh increases to near-white, then staggers in place, bent over at the waist even though Vincent hasn’t done more than that. He pants roughly behind his gag, the tape flexing sharply but not giving, until the pain in his nipples slowly subsides to merely fiery.

Then Vincent tugs at the chain attached to the clamps. Sephiroth whimpers but this time he expects the jolt, and when it comes he sways into it, taking a stumbling step forward. Then another, and then another, as he’s led down the empty hall.

Objectively he knows it’s less than a ten-minute walk, but it seems both endless and over in the blink of an eye, the aching of his nipples crowding out all sense of time while the snug, even pressure of his other bonds keeps it—and himself—held together just enough for him to walk down the hall. Step after step, their echoes seeming to only highlight the waves of arousal running through him as he follows Vincent.

“Hold,” Vincent says when they reach the door.

Sephiroth twists at the hips and has to press his tongue against his teeth, feeling how his once-again erect cock wants to batter itself against that command. But he’s been told and so he holds, mewling, as Vincent opens the door and then sets them up inside.

There’s a spare reading area at the front of the archives, a table and a chair that has to be taken off its hook on the wall and unfolded. Vincent puts the chair down to the side rather than pushing it up to the table, then puts their bags on the table. He has Sephiroth’s coat separated from them, and after folding it over itself, he lays that on the floor. He doesn’t look over as he gestures and Sephiroth obediently kneels on the makeshift cushion.

A hand winds into Sephiroth’s hand, then comes to rest against his nape, steadying him. “Come,” Vincent says, reaching over to release the clamps.

Sephiroth arches and through a wavering haze, watches himself lay gleaming stripes across the glossy leather of his coat. Then he slumps back on his heels, sucking air through his nose, as Vincent takes his boots off and tapes his ankles together, cleans his cock off and ties that and his balls up with more cord. His trousers are unbelted and pushed down again, and the rope between his buttocks is temporarily untied to allow Vincent to stretch him enough for a large vibrator, which goes on as soon as it’s inside of him. Only on a very low setting but still enough for him to feel it reviving the aftershocks of his second orgasm, his thigh muscles feverishly liquid, his nipples throbbing, his cock already trying to torture itself in its bonds.

The blindfold that goes on next is a relief. Pure darkness, nothing to distract him from what he’s feeling, only the freedom to let it completely take him over. He feels more zip ties banding his ankles but it’s comforting, their unyielding pressure. It takes the need off him to do anything.

Vincent pulls his trousers back up but leaves the belt undone, hanging and occasionally swinging to graze his legs as his ankles are tied to his wrists and then he’s laid down on his side. His bare feet can squeeze and scrunch against the leather of his coat, raising more of its earthy scent into the air as his nose bumps up against more folds of it. His still-gloved hands are locked away in contrast, not only by the tape and zip ties but the comparative lack of sensation, reminding him how he can’t control what he’s permitted to sense but can only submit to Vincent’s ideas about it. And he wants nothing more than that—he squirms from time to time, but only so he can feel his restraints, can let them hold him in place.

He's not sure how long Vincent lets him go that way, but it is a while before something nudges the back of his head. Then touches him again as he groans and hitches, only partly pulled back out of his daze and uncertain as to which direction he’s even facing. Vincent pauses and Sephiroth hears a sigh.

Then the man’s hand cups under his head. He’s lifted just enough for Vincent to slide his shoe under Sephiroth’s cheek, then allowed to slump back down. Mewling his thanks, even briefly trying to nuzzle the unseen mound of the shoe’s toe before his pleasurable suffering grows too much again and he slips back below its surface. Head cradled on Vincent’s foot, awaiting the other man’s pleasure while he floats amid his own.

Eventually, Vincent wants him again. He’s tipped back onto his knees, his heavy, swaying head propped up against a thigh as some escaped locks are brushed out of his face. A flicker of awareness penetrates and Sephiroth noses at Vincent, feeling the directional line of an inseam through his tape gag. He swallows and suddenly a surge of fresh desire claws at him and he presses clumsily forward, dragging at his bound legs as he follows the seam to the crotch of the man’s trousers. He can feel the erection enclosed by them and he wants it in his mouth, but can only rub his gagged lips uselessly against it.

Vincent lets him torment himself for a little while before pulling him back by the hair. When the tape is peeled away, Sephiroth still isn’t given what he wants; he has to drink water first. And then, when he finally is permitted the satisfaction of Vincent’s cock filling his mouth and dipping down into his throat, he’s told once again to hold. Sucking just enough to keep his spit from dribbling out, keeping the man’s cock warm as Vincent languidly shifts himself from time to time.

He has to wait far too long that way, and then Vincent tapes his mouth shut again with the slick of the man’s come still coating his tongue. The nipple chain is clamped back in place and Sephiroth is forced back from the other man, though with his ankles still bound, he can’t move from there. Vincent seems to take pity on him and slings him over one shoulder, but then the nipple chain jerks and bounces under its own weight as he’s carried out of the room and back down the hall, freshening the ache in his nipples till all he can see behind his blindfold are two glowing-hot, scarlet dots.

By the time Vincent puts him down again, Sephiroth is only capable of whimpering and shivering. His clamped nipples scrape against some kind of cushion and he whines loudly enough that Vincent reaches underneath him, rubbing soothingly all around the clamps without taking them off. It’s distracting enough that when the vibrator turns off, Sephiroth barely twitches.

But then the clamps release. Sephiroth bows up sharply as much as he’s able—his wrists and ankles are still linked together—and while the zip ties hold, he’s not quite as certain about his spine. The bones certainly feel no better than jelly when he finally drops back, exhausted and dazed.

He’s arranged on his back, his bent knees held up mostly by the zip ties. Vincent pulls away his tape gag and gives him a little more water, but it does nothing to give him any voice beyond wordless, needy noises. He only pants as the other man leisurely unties his cock and then proceeds to climb on top of him, working his own cock between Sephiroth’s slack lips before starting to lap at Sephiroth’s.

Sephiroth can’t manage to even suck, and his mouth is only a convenient holder for Vincent as Vincent draws him to a shuddering climax, nurses him down and then mercilessly works him hard again. Then the other man turns around and seats himself on Sephiroth’s cock, rocking as if he’s in no particular hurry. When Sephiroth’s head drops to the side, Vincent reaches down and tweaks his nipples till he’s arching again, using the last of his strength to jerk up into the other man till Vincent lets out a long, satisfied groan.

They slump together for some time. Vincent retrieves the water and coaxes Sephiroth to take in a few mouthfuls by way of kissing it between Sephiroth’s lips. Then he kisses Sephiroth without the water, taking the time to renew his claim on all parts of Sephiroth’s mouth before he lets up.

He cuts away the rest of the harness before he takes off the blindfold. Sephiroth blinks hazily as Vincent then frees his arms and legs, looking around the small room with its bathroom facilities in the opposite corner of the air mattress he’s lying on. There are a number of electrical outlets on the wall between the two but no equipment.

“Turk breakroom, decommissioned,” Vincent says, sparing Sephiroth the necessity of having to revive the logical functions of his brain. He moves over to tuck the ball of zip ties and tape fragments into his bag, then comes back to help Sephiroth turn onto his side. “You need a wash before we can go back up.”

Sephiroth makes a noncommittal noise, but Vincent still deduces his reluctance, giving him a peck on the temple as well as a light slap on the buttock. His eyelids flutter at the first and his body grudgingly hauls itself up at the second. Vincent lets him crawl over to where the other man can rinse and wipe them both down, then returns them to the mattress. He pulls out fresh clothes for both of them, but only dresses himself and only in an unbuttoned shirt before, sighing, he pulls Sephiroth up against his chest.

“Found it?” Sephiroth manages, in between nuzzles at Vincent’s collarbone.

“Yes.” Vincent tucks the hair out of his face, then sighs again, amused and resigned in equal parts, as Sephiroth drapes over him. “I thought about bringing lunch too, but that’d be planning on staying here that long.”

“You like keeping me in Turk rooms no one else remembers,” Sephiroth says. Closing his eyes as Vincent traces a rope burn still pricking with heat, though the abrasion is fading even as the man does. “You like me needy.”

“You tempt me sometimes,” Vincent snorts. The sharp smell of ointment fills the air, and then Vincent’s mouth comes to rest against the top of Sephiroth’s head as he starts to dab it onto Sephiroth. “I copied a little more than we probably need, although you’ll have to tell me. You were making it difficult to read with your noises.”

The ointment cools rather than stings and as sorry as Sephiroth is to lose the fever memories, he can’t help the small, pleased sounds that leak from him as Vincent works around his groin and then up his belly and sides. “Hmmm?”

Vincent snorts again, and then doesn’t speak as he tends to Sephiroth. Eventually Sephiroth lifts his own head—the mattress is not thick enough to keep him from feeling the concrete floor, and the air here is stagnant with dust, even though he’s certain Vincent cleaned the place thoroughly beforehand. It’s not an appealing environment to linger in, even with Vincent’s company, and now they don’t have any good reasons to do so.

They dress and go back up to the regular levels. It’s after-hours now so hardly anyone is present, and those who are can be easily avoided even without Vincent’s skills. Though the man still makes a point of checking that all relevant surveillance logs read as they should, once they’ve returned to their guest quarters.

“I could show you if you want,” Vincent says as Sephiroth climbs into the bed next to him. He accepts the cup of tea Sephiroth hands him with a brief smile, then turns back to his work. “At this point you don’t necessarily need to know how I wrote most of these scripts to be able to launch them.”

“And have to think about Shinra’s IT update cycle when I’m off the clock?” Sephiroth says, half-playful but half-genuinely reluctant. He pulls up his leg to prop his tablet against it, then pauses to hiss and adjust his weight a little. Then stretches himself, enjoying how that flash of ache softens but keeps its warmth when he does so. “Helpful to know you’ve given in and automated that for whenever you decide to take me in my office. Perhaps I can stop having Zack block out my calendar.”

Vincent raises a brow. Then looks tolerant as Sephiroth leans over a little more, tipping against his arm and shoulder and balancing the tablet instead against a clump of blanket. “If you think there’s a gap, there’s enough time for you to go down by yourself before we go—I’ll be unavailable after today,” Vincent says after a moment, no longer amused. “The scripts will work all the same.”

And once Sephiroth’s read through what he has on his tablet, he won’t need Vincent to guide him through the remaining files. They can’t always make this play…but he nods less because of Vincent’s offer of the scripts and more because he’ll be coming back to the man regardless of how he goes down there. That’s enough by itself, and he doesn’t have to say that to Vincent to know the other man understands. Vincent came back with him, after all, even knowing what’s in these.

Then Sephiroth braces himself against the other man, and opens up the first of the files.

Chapter 72: Interlude: Midgar Fall Cleaning

It’s a common joke that seasons are what happen outside of Midgar, but of course it’s not true, even from a strict weather standpoint. And even aside from the weather, Midgar has seasonal events.

“Not highlights,” Zack mutters as he strips off his gloves and then puts up a hand towards the sweat running down the side of his face. “Listen, I like to see the bright, tourist-friendly side as much as the next guy, but there’s no way you’re gonna talk me into calling this a highlight.”

“Cut the chatter, we’re not on break yet,” Angeal sighs as he grabs Zack’s wrist. He pulls that down before Zack gets anywhere near his eyes, then shoves the man’s hand into a bin of biohazard cleaning fluid one of the Urban Planning people helpfully totes over to them. “Also, be a role model. Remember your briefing. Stop trying to touch your face with dirty hands.”

Zack grimaces with the cockeyed, sideways-tilted pose of someone trying to make the burning sweat that’s run into his eyes run back out. Which Angeal sympathizes with, having been in that exact same position more times than he can remember, but that doesn’t keep him from pointedly swishing Zack’s hand around in the fluid till it comes out without that iridescent film on it.

“Try double-bagging,” the Urban Planning woman says, handing over a box of nitrile gloves. As Zack waves his hand around in the air to dry, she raises her own hand to show the little sliver of nitrile sticking out from under her work gloves. “It’s still not going to keep you from going through decontam, not till we have the new contaminants locked down. But it might save you a couple skin layers.”

“Yeah, those are a bitch to grow back, even if they do,” Zack mutters. He swoops his hand down at the same time, then winces as some of the fly-off from it splatters towards the woman.

“Shit, puppy, it’s like we haven’t even house-trained you,” Angeal says. He pushes Zack aside to just go re-glove properly, then pulls out a gauze wad from his first-aid kit. After tearing open the sterile packaging, he offers it along with an apology to the woman.

Who smiles, but who seems more interested in looking after Zack’s hangdog expression than at Angeal. She’s got safety goggles on, but they don’t cover all of her face and he can see some smears on her cheek. When she notices, she shrugs and folds over the piece of gauze to wipe that off, and then goes back to cleaning off the front of her goggles. “I screened out at the second round of Mako-resistance testing, and we know that’s at least coming in below the five-year average,” she says. “You probably never want to bet against R&D dumping something else out the back hatch, but I’ve been doing the fall cleaning for four years now and I get more worried some monster’s going to get me before SOLDIER than I do about catching something down here.”

Angeal blinks a little, but then catches sight of a familiar silver head coming up the catwalk towards them. He reassures the woman that SOLDIER is here exactly for the purpose of stopping those monsters, and that if she ever has any worries about that, to feel free to come directly to him. She thanks him but tells him she’s been happy with the level of SOLDIER protection so far, and then they both excuse themselves to go talk to their superiors.

“Doesn’t sound like anything. I did give the order to keep your ears to the ground so I understand why you’re raising it, but you said yourself she wasn’t showing any signs of concern,” Sephiroth says a little later. He and Angeal are having a quick break to down some rations and sanity-check this year’s fall sewer sweep—or that was the idea, except Vincent obviously came in early since the little food tins Sephiroth has broken out are much tastier than standard-issue. Angeal’s not as bad as Genesis but even he would hoard that to himself a little more than Sephiroth, bless him, does. “She didn’t seem that concerned that they’re still processing the samples?”

“It’s only day one, I usually wouldn’t be either, unless I had other reasons,” Angeal says. When Sephiroth gives him a minute shake of the head, he relaxes. Sephiroth and his mother seem to be in a truce at the moment, but the twice-annual Midgar sewer inspections are always a friction point. They need R&D for the analysis and R&D always tries to get away with something. “She’s not the only SOLDIER screen-out I’ve run into this time—seems like Tuesti’s built up a little army of them, at least for the sewer sweeps.”

“I have no problem with Tuesti,” Sephiroth says in a measured tone, with his eyes rising from his tablet to Angeal.

“Yeah, I wasn’t getting anything like an R&D vibe or even a Turks vibe off of them.” Angeal feels a little like he wrongfooted somewhere just by bringing it up, even though Sephiroth is looking at him with curiosity and not outright disapproval. This political side just doesn’t come naturally to him, and he does try—he knows his and friends’ lives depend on it, and he can’t just work like they don’t exist in the world they do. He’s just…not that smooth. “Just interesting. You remember Heidegger didn’t want them anywhere he could see them.”

Sephiroth’s upper lip curls. Then he dips into the food tins again and Vincent’s cooking helps soften his expression, but he still has that look in his eyes that means some monster is getting sliced before the end of the day. “That man couldn’t spot an enhanced recruit from a non-enhanced one unless we put badges on them, and yes, I remember having to veto that one…Tuesti’s happy having people who don’t mind getting their hands dirty in mutagen-heavy locations. He has to work so hard clawing resources back from Scarlet, he’d never get anywhere against Mother or me.”

“I don’t think he wants to anyway. He likes his people,” Angeal finds himself saying, as he looks over the side of the rail and down to the next catwalk.

That’s base for the moment, with members from Urban Planning, SOLDIER, and R&D all working on things…but you can tell who’s who, even with hazmat gear blurring some of the uniforms. SOLDIER from the positioning, but Angeal can pick out the Urban Planning people even without checking if they’ve got sampling tubes or measurement lasers in their hand, just because they stop to chat with each other or with SOLDIER. The R&D pair don’t talk to anyone except the officers, and yeah, that’s a standing order, but they also don’t ever seem like they’d want to anyway. Even through the face shields, it’s like they look at everyone else and they’re not even seeing them, they’re just seeing what’s going next into their sample kits.

“He likes having people,” Angeal adds without thinking.

Then he catches himself, shaking his head and looking over at Sephiroth. He’s getting emotional and it’s…well, it’s a sewer sweep, even in the best-case scenario this is the time of year where some SOLDIERs make the case for officer and others end up booking a long stay in SOLDIER medical, but they do this twice a year. He can’t be getting that worked up over it and take care of his own people.

And he fully expects Sephiroth to call him out on that, but to his surprise, the other man is still looking down at the others. “You’re right,” Sephiroth says in a thoughtful, low tone. “Then we should reinforce that common ground…do keep an eye out for them, Angeal. I think Mother’s backed off of us for now, but she’s certainly still in the market for substitutes.”

“Yeah,” Angeal says, following Sephiroth’s gaze to that woman he’d been chatting with earlier, who’s now talking to Zack…and who is standing just in the sightline of the R&D pair. “Yeah, I’m with you, sir.”

Sephiroth smiles, then dips his head towards Angeal as he turns away from the rail. “Let’s make it another clean sweep this year, General Hewley. The sooner we do that, the sooner we can all go home.”

Notes:

Zack's not cheating on Cloud and Tifa there, he's just got admirers (wouldn't be Zack otherwise).

Chapter 73: Interlude: Sephiroth Learns to Embrace Business Trip Perks

As far as Sephiroth’s personal preferences go, work trips are best when they’re functional. He detests unnecessary frivolity and he’s spent far too much of his life justifying Shinra’s investment in his own existence to condone abusing resources like some of the other executives. Socializing with the locals outside of military activities and allowing them to feel awed and flattered by his presence does often further internal goals, so he puts up with it, but he doesn’t pretend to enjoy it.

When he’s initially presented with the boxes of delicacies by the Costa del Sol delegation, Sephiroth thanks them while intending to pass the boxes down later to lower-level officers who have more than earned some rewards, as he usually does with such things. And most of the gifts do end up in those hands, but he happens to glance over the accompanying instruction card to one particular case of very high-end seafood and has another idea for it.

Vincent is dropping in for the night thanks to a fortuitously-timed mission—it hasn’t escaped Sephiroth that Vincent is arranging more and more of these, but he can’t bring himself to call this abuse of resources, given how they soothe his temper—and Sephiroth already has an outfit for the occasion. He’d planned to rely on the local catering for their dinner, and thanks to Rufus and some political pandering that has had him feeling faintly unclean all day, has been strongarmed into staying in a local developer’s newest high-rise rather than the barracks. The luxurious setting had made him snort in disgust when he’d first set foot in the place, but now he does appreciate it a little better.

He looks better here, standing before the penthouse’s sweeping seaside windows, his reflection framed by the unit’s plush furnishings, all creams and tans, now colored gold by the sunset coming in through one side…and him with his hair sleeked back into a braid, his body out of its masculine uniform and reshaped in delicate lingerie. Black silk stockings slim his legs up to delicate straps attached to a bustier of black lace over translucent nude silk, expertly tailored to conjure the tantalizing illusion of a willowy waist. The top of the bustier cups gently just over his nipples, which shade through the lace as he adjusts the bustier’s back one last time. He can’t resist the sight and pauses to finger himself until the nubs stiffen.

Then he forces himself to move his hands away, but he doesn’t have the willpower to remove them entirely and so they trace down the bustier’s lines till he’s gently rubbing his half-erect cock through his black lace panties. He can see its head growing rosy behind the netting, and can feel how the lace is starting to scratch teasingly at his increasingly-sensitized skin. A low moan escapes him and he presses his fingertip across his cock slit. Then shudders, his hands springing away as what little self-control he has left exerts itself.

He wipes his hands on the bare sides of his hips, then picks up the dress. Sugar-pink satin, falling softly against his body as he slips it on, but then shivering caresses over him as he does up the back and then adjusts the halter-top front so the bustier is just covered. The wide bands of black lace topping his stockings do show through the dress’s thigh-high slits, and when he turns the dress parts to reveal the straps holding up the stockings too. He twitches it back into place, then walks from the window into the kitchen area.

There he’s taken out the contents of that box and arranged it per the order recommended in its included instructions on a bed of crushed ice within a crystal platter. The freshest, best seafood that the city can offer, cut by a sushi master. The rice was included separately and is still uncooked in its bag next to a small bottle of seasoning vinegar.

Sephiroth does wonder if he should have prepared that as well, but he does know the difference between the kind of rice one eats at everyday meals and the kind preferred for these sorts of delicacies. He’s developed some cooking skills, but he—

Puts that aside and comes out of the kitchen, comes out of his thoughts and offers up his mouth as Vincent comes in. He hadn’t heard the man slip into the apartment, had heard Vincent’s footstep just on the edge of the kitchen, but the moment he did, he’s content to simply be as he’s dressed.

“My lovely consort,” Vincent murmurs after a first, all-too-brief kiss. His hands are on Sephiroth’s hips, resting just above where the dress splits open. Then they stroke up Sephiroth’s sides, thumbs angling inward to brush over Sephiroth’s nipples as he tilts Sephiroth back for a lengthy, appreciative appraisal. Sephiroth moans unashamedly as Vincent circles each nipple, then runs his hands back down to slip into his dress and cup his buttocks. “Did you tie yourself?”

“No,” Sephiroth confesses. He lets his arms hang compliantly down as Vincent palms him, then parts his buttocks to rub a finger along the silk strip between them. Then he hitches sharply as he feels the nudge inside of him, a teasing graze across his prostate. “Vibrator. But I haven’t—I haven’t turned it on, or come yet.”

Vincent smiles and pulls him in for another, longer kiss. One hand still cradles his right buttock with casual possessiveness while the other slides around his hip to the front of the panties. “Such a pretty outfit,” Vincent says, sucking Sephiroth’s lower hip between his teeth. “And you’re getting wet already.”

Vincent’s fingertip presses down over Sephiroth’s cock head, hard enough that Sephiroth instinctively squirms. His lip catches on a sharper edge and he groans as Vincent bites him till there’s just the hint of blood rising up.

Then Vincent releases him and gives him a calculated push to one hip. He spins half-way around, then stumbles the rest of the way as the other man crowds him up against the kitchen’s island. He didn’t lay out any bindings but Vincent always brings those and the man doesn’t disappoint now, producing a length of strong synthetic cord that he coils and knots into two-inch thick bracelets about Sephiroth’s crossed wrists. Then he brings Sephiroth’s arms back over Sephiroth’s head, touching the bound wrists to Sephiroth’s nape before letting go.

Obedient, Sephiroth holds his arms there as Vincent presses up against him. The other man kisses down the side of his neck, nipping just hard enough to keep Sephiroth jerking against the counter as he picks up a dish-towel. He backs Sephiroth up a little and puts his hand under Sephiroth’s dress again, then pulls down the front of the panties and wraps the head of Sephiroth’s cock in the towel.

“Come,” he directs.

Sephiroth does, hitching gracelessly as he keeps his wrists pressed to the back of his neck. It’s too soon, too little, his climax giving not relief so much as a cruel taste of that—and he’ll be denied for quite a while now, as Vincent next ties up his cock and balls with silk cord. The man tucks him back into his panties, fondling his cock carelessly through the lace as he rubs needily back into Vincent, and then flicks the used towel onto the counter.

“You went shopping?” Vincent says.

His hands are now roaming up Sephiroth’s torso, leaving trails of tingling, warmed skin craving for more, so it takes a few seconds for Sephiroth to answer. “No, gift box,” he manages, squeezing his knuckles against his spine as Vincent reaches into his dress’ bodice. “There are—I thought the rice you’d do when you came—”

That was correct, Vincent tells him not with words but with how the man nuzzles behind his ear, both his nipples now pinched roughly between Vincent’s fingers. Vincent lets him whimper and twist in mock-dismay, then rolls the nubs unmercifully as he feels the other man’s mouth working at…Vincent unties the top of Sephiroth’s dress with his teeth, then finally leaves off abusing his nipples to smooth the bodice down.

“That can be tricky,” Vincent says. He splays his hands over the bustier’s cups, then teases Sephiroth’s nipples till the stiff, already-sore flesh emerges from the slits in each. Then he takes another length of silk cord and ties a chest harness so tight that the brush of the dress back over Sephiroth’s nipples makes him cry out, a wavering, hungry sound that only makes Vincent pull the dress closer about him. “Better to have it fresh.”

“Hot,” Sephiroth chokes out as Vincent knots the halter straps back behind his neck. He shudders at how the silk presses down on his aching nipples, then shakes his head as Vincent puts hands on his hips and caresses him with deceptive gentleness. His hands drag over the top of his head, and then he moans as they tumble down so he can grip desperately at the counter in front of him. “I mean—warm, it says the rice should be warm, and the fish—let it come to—to body warmth…”

Vincent pauses for a moment, relaxed yet firmly in control, pinning Sephiroth with fingertips to the hip crests and lips to the throat and breath draping comfortably down under Sephiroth’s jaw as Sephiroth pants. And then Vincent laughs.

“Such a thoughtful consort, and such a delicious…” Vincent pauses again, deliberately teasing now, before he bites Sephiroth “…dinner. Did you have any yourself?”

“No.” Sephiroth has to gasp a little before he can go on. “No, but I don’t…want…you first…”

“You want to be played with first,” Vincent says knowingly. He reaches up and bends Sephiroth’s head around for a long, claiming kiss. And then, when Sephiroth is drooping breathlessly against him, he releases Sephiroth just enough to work his thumb in between them and over Sephiroth’s lower lip to press down Sephiroth’s tongue. No words, that’s what it means, and so Sephiroth only whines helplessly as Vincent holds him. “I see no problem with that, my pretty toy.”

There’s a gag and a blindfold as well, both of them made with the same black silk as the lingerie but over padding and nude silk of a sturdier weight. With them in place, Sephiroth is pushed down on his knees by the kitchen island to wait while Vincent makes the rice. Bound hands resting neatly in his lap, his silk dress feeling much more like a leather prison as every breath stretches a cord across his prick or nudges a knot into his scrotum or tightens the loops around his nipples. If he shifts even a little, he can feel his body rub against the silent menace of the vibrator.

Cooking any kind of rice doesn’t take that long, Sephiroth knows that. But in the dark, with the hard rubber bit his gag’s lacy covering masks pressing unforgivingly against the roof of his mouth, it seems as if Sephiroth is being held captive for eons. He occasionally feels Vincent pass near him, or hears the sounds of the man preparing things, but Vincent doesn’t actually touch him and that is torture all on its own, knowing what he wants is so close and yet being firmly denied it.

When Vincent finally does return to him, Sephiroth turns so quickly into the hand dropped onto his shoulder that Vincent has to yank him back by the hair. He whimpers but settles back, only moving when he’s directed—pulled off the tile of the kitchen and onto the thick, sinking carpet, then pushed up onto a leather-covered cushion. The lounge chair: its image flashes into his mind, a generously-sized steel-framed piece with cream-colored padding. It’s wide enough that with his wrists tied to the top and his ankles to either of the bottom corners, Sephiroth can’t bring his knees together.

He moans as Vincent of course takes advantage of his vulnerability, massaging lasciviously up the insides of his legs while pushing up his dress. Vincent has Sephiroth on his belly with his elbows propped against the cushions, which strains Sephiroth’s back and shoulders and pushes his chest out so that the cords tighten around his nipples. As he rocks in place, futilely trying to find some degree of comfort, Vincent kisses his shoulderblade.

Then caresses from his back to under his stomach, as the other man slides beneath him. He’s able to rest himself across Vincent’s lap and that helps tremendously, enough so that Sephiroth is starting to go limp in relief when—the vibrator buzzes to life inside of him.

Sephiroth jerks roughly enough to feel the frame creak. But then Vincent’s hand presses down on the back of his neck, grounding him just enough so that he relearns how to give himself over to his bindings, letting them restrain him as he moans and shudders softly in place. The hand at his nape rubs pleasingly at the tension that’s built up there, and then…he thinks at first Vincent is kissing him again, but then the little weights stay in place. And there are more than one, just light touches of pressure here and there on his back. One on each shoulderblade, another along his spine a few inches below, and a fourth just above his dress’ backline.

The sashimi, he realizes, and as he does, the tips of a pair of chopsticks tickle under one and lift away the strip. He senses Vincent’s arms move over him, smells the faint tang of vinegared rice, and then hears the man chewing slowly and thoughtfully. Vincent makes a noise of open pleasure and Sephiroth’s cock pulses in response, trapped though it is in its bonds against Vincent’s thigh.

One by one, Vincent picks off the fish after letting each piece warm a little against Sephiroth’s skin. When they’re all gone, the man leans over and licks at the spots, his hands coming around to circle Sephiroth’s nipples through the dress till Sephiroth is shuddering again. Then he twists his legs a few inches, pulls Sephiroth’s skirts back up from where they’ve fallen, and sets out another serving up each of Sephiroth’s inner thighs just where the stockings leave them bared.

When Vincent cleans up after those, he leaves deep, stinging bites in Sephiroth’s flesh, ones that encourage Sephiroth to keep his legs open regardless of his restraints. He lays more sashimi pieces over Sephiroth’s buttocks and then slides his finger into Sephiroth’s panties to tweak the vibrator. Sephiroth has to struggle to hold still on liquefying knees and elbows, because if he doesn’t, Vincent pinches him sharply with the chopsticks before scooping up the fish.

By the time the last piece from that round is gone and Vincent is dabbing at him with a warm, damp towel, Sephiroth is a near-mindless mess. But it’s a mess he’s embraced, deeply familiar and deeply pleasurable, and when the vibrator turns off, he cries out so loudly that Vincent crawls over him and then lies atop him, letting simple body weight slow his shaking.

He’s still limp as Vincent climbs off and unties his ankles. He doesn’t move his feet as Vincent strips off his stockings, though when the man takes a long, savoring lick at the back of one, he can’t help curling his toes. Vincent makes an amused noise and caresses his ankle, then flips him onto his back.

Sephiroth’s ankles are retied in place, and then another set of ropes is knotted around each of his thighs, pulling him flush against the lounge chair’s vee-shaped bottom. His head and shoulders are centered over the chair’s top cushions and his arms are carefully tucked around the headrest; the cushion is thick enough that his arms are pushed a little further back than his head, which draws him into a slight arch, the chest harness taut under his dress. He moans lowly as Vincent ties down his upper arms, firmly securing him all over.

“Delicious,” Vincent says. He takes some time to leisurely feel up his toy, running his hands up and down Sephiroth’s body, before eventually returning to cup Sephiroth’s lolling head.

One side of the gag loosens, then the other. The bit scrapes against Sephiroth’s mouth as it comes out and he coughs unintentionally. He feels Vincent’s hand shift under his chin and opens his mouth—meaning to voice a plea for more, but he’s so sluggish that the glass is at his lips before he can. He groans but knows well enough to sip, and then is rewarded with a deep kiss.

Vincent has him drink a little more, then puts the water aside and returns to enjoying Sephiroth. He unties the top of Sephiroth’s dress and peels down the bodice, but not to free Sephiroth’s desperately-sore nipples; instead he tortures them, his mouth sucking soothingly over them while his fingers pluck sadistically at the harness to tug them to and fro. He works Sephiroth up to a squirming, hitching mess again, and then he leans up to rest his mouth against Sephiroth’s sweat-covered brow.

“So delicious, I can’t very well deny my consort a taste, can I?” Vincent says as he drops something on Sephiroth’s bare upper chest, just between parts of the harness. He adds three more pieces, two resting directly over Sephiroth’s nipples, and then kisses Sephiroth’s temple as he retrieves the first one and places it into Sephiroth’s slackly-groaning mouth. “Eat.”

Sephiroth obeys. He has…the impression of richness, of a savory plushness very like the feel of the carpet against his knees, but to be honest, he doesn’t register much else. Vincent lies next to him, hand nestled under his dress and caressing his bound cock through his panties when the man isn’t feeding him, and all his aching cravings are centered around the other man. He eats because Vincent wants him to, then holds his mouth for Vincent’s cock.

That taste registers. Salty and welcome, coating his mouth as he moves weakly under the other man. Vincent drops down him and finally unties the chest harness, nursing his nipples as his cock is drawn out of his panties and then freed as well. And then, then, he’s allowed to come in Vincent’s hand.

“I picked up some dessert,” Vincent suggests later, and then chuckles when Sephiroth lets out a groan and drapes more tightly over the man. They’ve moved to the couch and Sephiroth is only wearing the bustier and panties now, but still has the blindfold on. His wrists are also still bound and Vincent has wrapped his cock up in one of the stockings just snugly enough to keep his hips hitching as the man teases a fingernail around his cock slit. The vibrator is off but still a silent, delicious threat inside of him. “Occasionally a gift box also falls into my hands. It would go well with the sashimi, if I could get to it. I put it in the fridge.”

“Go well how?” Sephiroth mutters. He probably should eat a little more, for the sake of pure caloric intake, but he’s quite comfortable where he is. True, he aches, but he knows himself well enough to know there’s at least one more round in him, and knows Vincent well enough to know the man won’t unreasonably deny him. “Warm dessert?”

“It’s not unheard of,” Vincent says dryly. He teases at Sephiroth’s cock again, then moves his hand back to grip Sephiroth’s buttock in a slightly more focused demand. “You can lick it out of me, and if you don’t like it that way, I’ll ice up your nipples and suck it off them.”

Sephiroth shudders before he can stop himself. Vincent twists his head back by the hair, kissing him warmly, and then lets him drop down to the couch as the other man gets off that. The loss of Vincent’s warmth makes Sephiroth tremble a little, but then he settles with a sigh, his body relaxing. Vincent always comes back when he promises, and all he has to do—all he wants to do—is wait.

Notes:

Sephiroth has heard of things like fresh-baked pie, he's just being slightly cranky about anything that could pull Vincent's attention away from him.

Chapter 74: Interlude: The Firsts Review Incoming Recruits

“All right, this one’s through Mako-resistance testing and looks like a good candidate for enhancements,” Zack says, flicking to the next slide.

A headshot of a young blond man appears with basic physical statistics such as height and weight outlined on the left, while the synced version on Sephiroth’s tablet adds testing results to the right. He glances at them, but he’s already caught Zack’s intonation, as has Angeal. “Look, I know nobody wants to give Dr. Crescent an excuse to investigate higher ‘error’ rates, but full Mako resistance and no enhancements for another logistics desk is going to have Scarlet saying we’re just wasting money when she could be automating all of that,” Angeal says.

“As if Tuesti doesn’t have to overhaul her code every time so it’ll lock on the damn enemy we point it at and not our own supply,” Genesis snorts. He’s ignoring the wall-screen and has swiped to a chat window, and when he realizes Sephiroth has caught on, merely kicks his feet up onto the edge of the conference table so that more of his screen is visible from Sephiroth’s position. “There’s an opening in weapons maintenance.”

“We usually want level 1 enhanced sensory for that, if you’ve forgotten,” Sephiroth says dryly. “Unless you prefer it when Scarlet complains instead that we’ve let her prototypes deteriorate in the field.”

“Okay, how about we go with option K,” Zack interrupts as Genesis rouses himself enough to give Sephiroth an irritated look. “As in, I sat in on this class, he’s a nice guy, real go-getter, ready and willing to do it for the team, but also just cannot do math. Like, if the world depended on it, I would be booking myself on one of those interstellar rockets Highwind keeps trying to run past Rufus.”

Sephiroth frowns. “Then how did he get past the entrance exam?”

“Shit, it’s not another cheating ring, is it?” Angeal says, looking up with a pained expression. As he does, he lets his tablet tilt just enough for Sephiroth to see that the chat window on its screen mirrors that on Genesis’, though it at least is off to the side and not obscuring the entire presentation. “I thought we—”

“No, no, we did, look, the scores are okay—sorry, I should’ve said, he can’t do geometry,” Zack says, hastily putting up his hands. “He can add and subtract, and he can even do his own tips. But ask him for anything where you need a little spatial awareness and it’s probably going to end up hitting your ass instead. And yep, read loud and clear, no more deskies for this class, but we are in need of cooking staff.”

“Option K,” Sephiroth translates, and when Zack beams at him, he sighs and looks over to an already-wincing Angeal. “Can he?”

“Like Vincent’s much younger, built like a truck, redheaded cousin from Fort Condor,” Zack says proudly.

Angeal has his face in his hand. “So not like him.”

“Well, but he can seriously cook! He’s already jazzing up the cafeteria food to taste like home, and let me tell you, his home tastes like I want to book time on that plate,” Zack protests.

Genesis has dropped his head against the back of his chair so he can stare woefully at the ceiling. “Shall we just leave the metaphors to actual poets and get on to our recruit’s destiny, o great commander?”

“Let’s leave Vincent out of this,” Sephiroth says, but then sighs when Zack multitasks aggressive nodding with pleading eyes. They all try not to let Zack’s flippancy get out of hand, but the man does have a fundamentally sound point. The recruit’s stats are reasonably good otherwise, and if he’s gotten this far, screening him out would likely trigger initial interest from R&D. Sephiroth never welcomes that, especially since nothing his mother could do is going to fix a baseline flaw in mental capability like this—but she’d still want the test subject. “But yes, fine, if he can validate the skill set and he’s willing to try that team, we can try him there. Agreed we should do it before moving him onto enhancements.”

“Gaia knows if he’d just get pissed off genetics can’t actually make shitty food taste good and quit on his own,” Angeal mutters. He looks down at his tablet, then twitches and slides his seat towards Genesis so that he can give Genesis’ chair a sharp nudge. They’re in a good patch because Genesis’ response is merely to roll his eyes and take his feet off the table, without closing the chat window on his tablet. “Okay, next?”

Zack is busy taking the decision down on his tablet, so he delays answering for a second. “Right, got it, now this one…the final Mako round was a little iffy, but the materia stats are sky-high and good fighting marks too.”

“Consistent personality concerns noted by multiple screeners,” Sephiroth says, looking at his tablet.

“Because a well-adjusted, friendly demeanor is obviously going to protect you around here,” Genesis drawls.

“Good on hand-to-hand, and says he likes guns,” Angeal says, giving Genesis a narrow-eyed look. “Not big on swords.”

Genesis blinks, then glances up at the wall-screen as Zack helpfully zooms in on the relevant stats. Then he snorts and slouches back in his chair, going back to his chat. “In that case, why did he even bother? Scarlet doesn’t have any screening beyond whether you’ll fit properly under her heel.”

“Judging by the flagged personality concerns, that isn’t his preferred position,” Sephiroth notes. He half-listens to Angeal and Genesis bicker about the seriousness of said concerns—it’s very transparently them arguing over Roche being moved to Angeal’s command—as he scrolls through the rest of the recruit’s file.

Again, the problem is what happens to the recruit if they screen him out. SOLDIER is a working unit and not a welfare agency, but anyone who progresses beyond the initial screens is exposed to enough confidential technology and other matters that Sephiroth understands why Shinra prefers to keep them within its orbit, even if they aren’t going to meet SOLDIER’s standards. And terminating a sane, stable, healthy individual is not sustainable—that’s the argument the other directors have come to understand. Rufus probably has intuited that Sephiroth has extremely personal concerns about where that kind of decision-making would lead, but if he has, then Sephiroth doesn’t need to be duplicative about raising it. And if he hasn’t, then that’s his failure.

SOLDIER has made great strides in improving initial screening to minimize the number of individuals that drop out of SOLDIER this late in the process, but even so, that number is never zero. And Sephiroth has to admit that this particular recruit looks like a challenge. They’re unlikely to ever be officer material, but even in the abstract also would be a bad fit for career enlisted. But he’s not going to willingly feed his mother’s labs, even at the expense of another Roche-shaped headache.

“So, also, it might be a tiny bit relevant that he hates the sight of blood?” Zack says loudly. Then makes a production out of looking shocked when they all turn towards him, before dropping that and just shrugging towards the screen. “Yeah, so, apparently, the shooting, he’s just done that on the range, it’s not like he was hunting for a living over at the Gold Saucer. And probably we don’t need to check if he’s already gotten drinks with Reno or something like that—”

“We should still,” Angeal says, but he looks at Sephiroth.

Who nods but gestures to himself to signal he’ll take that; he can ask Vincent later. “If he doesn’t like blood, why SOLDIER?” Sephiroth asks Zack.

“Paycheck, glory, and also he does like shooting at things,” Zack says, with his hand already up. “Also! Non-living things. So not Scarlet-level heartlessness here, just a tiny bit of power-control issues, but hey, who of us haven’t had a fantasy trip once or twice and okay I can see the twitching so can we just ask Tuesti if he’s got an opening?”

“Tuesti?” Angeal says incredulously. “Zack, look, I know you’re trying but—”

“You’re thinking about his pipe-clearing drones,” Sephiroth says.

Zack nods vigorously. “Exactly, sir. Requires precision reflexes, high tolerance to hazardous chemicals, and also I kind of think that that demo Reeve showed looks like that old Duck Hunting game, right? Just substitute the ducks for semi-sentient blockage?”

Angeal’s face is back in his hand. “No. No, Zack, no.”

“I’m not certain about the personality fit, but I suppose we can at least ask Tuesti,” Sephiroth says. “There wouldn’t be much competition over there for sharpshooting, and those drones do still need a fair degree of handholding.”

“Less likely than the Turks to end up dragging Valentine off on a last-minute neutralization,” Genesis adds, and then turns a pointed shoulder to Sephiroth’s glower. His boots go back on the table, despite Angeal’s attempt to bat at him. “Well, now that that’s done, what other fates are we deciding today, Fair?”

“Glad you asked!” Zack chirps as he logs their decision. Angeal’s head is slowly disappearing below the level of the table, and even Genesis is starting to look as if that might matter more than aggravating Sephiroth and the office cleaners. “We’re out of recruit review and into the wonderful world of vendor estimate overruns, and let me tell you, I have some really amazing pie charts for this one!”

“You said his personality could be trained out of him,” Genesis mutters. “I distinctly remember that.”

“I know, I know,” Angeal groans.

“Gentlemen, eyes on the target?” Sephiroth prompts. Though as an undaunted Zack moves onto the next part of their meeting, he does suppress a small sigh himself. Quarter-end housekeeping is merely necessary, no matter what Zack attempts to jazz it up.

Chapter 75: Interlude: Another POV

He’s a striking figure, General Sephiroth. Not merely his physical beauty, although that more than lives up to the billing. But she imagines that it also blinds many, transfixing them for the few seconds of an awed glance and then leaving them with only the impression of something brilliantly unreachable, the same takeaway they’d have when leaving a museum of great works of art. This is not a trait to be sneered at and in the right hands, it alone could raise or bring down empires.

But this isn’t what she sees in him. He uses his height and his perfect proportions to his advantage, but for efficiency and not impression. He moves with the economy of a fighter who sees even the simple act of crossing a crowded room as the end objective and not an opportunity in and of itself. She sees the flicker of impatience in him when someone in the uniform of another team stops him, no matter how quickly he smooths it away. And she sees how his step grows more elastic upon leaving that consultation, even as he seems to take that person’s contribution into account in redirecting his own team. He’d rather people look to his deeds than his appearance, but even there, she thinks he’d rather have the deeds stand separate, somehow divorced from the human being behind them, to take any responses.

There’s something faintly hostile about that, a sense of lurking menace behind the beauty that adds to how people stare and subtracts from them the idea that they might ever come up to touch or even to speak. He probably considers that their fear of his differences and he’s not wrong, but she’s lived long enough to also see the shuddering, vulnerable heart at the bottom of every fear. Very few people want to die for any reason, let alone for the sake of another, and one can’t hold that against them, at least if one does want to survive.

She can see that in him too, the way survival has polished his beauty and magnified his strength. He thinks he fears none, but in truth, he never would have worked so hard—and she does not credit what she sees purely to the doings of nature—if he hadn’t his own fears. So no cloistered statue once you look long enough, she thinks, and then he raises and turns his head as another man approaches him.

And then he transmutes before her eyes. He does nothing more than look and smile, but he sheds so much that she wonders for a moment when her eyes betrayed her—for with age it’s no good to hide behind conditionals; one must acknowledge failing senses to shore them up—whether before or after. Because he’s unprotected now, unarmored by that beauty and patently glad for it, as he steps behind a half-filled dumpster and confers with the new arrival. The smile is already gone and even without hearing their voices, she can tell that the pair are discussing unenjoyable matters, but the change in how the General holds himself remains. One never asks whether the statues in a museum might themselves develop some sense of the sublime, surrounded as they are with paradigms of various arts, but here is one such idol made flesh and he looks as if he too knows the trials and the ecstasy of the common worshipper.

Which makes her smile, despite her years, despite her own battered shields and painfully-patched armor. She still has her own heart kept safe beneath them all—that was the point, she knows now, and not for pride or for loyalty or for some goal set by long-dead and distant leaders—and when she sees her son she still wishes him nothing more than a life filled with the beauty of his choosing. She’s still his mother, no matter his or her deeds, and it does her good to see them.

It's enough to see them. One goes to the museum and what one sees there may come back out, but tucked safely away from the cheapening violence of the everyday. At any rate, one must come back out, after all, for the museum is not where one lives. But she’s seen them, and she will take that away with her, as she slips back into the crowd.

* * *

“…damn it,” Sephiroth says, glancing over at the raised voices. “This isn’t a riot, it’s basic crowd-control—I need a—”

Then he pauses. He tracks Vincent’s frowning gaze to where a side-alley is letting the gathering onlookers grow, then shakes his head again at the lapses in his own team. In a moment he’ll go rectify that, but he lingers a second more and not because of personal preferences. He can’t see anything beyond impatience getting the better of his SOLDIERs, but Vincent sometimes sees more and he would never discount the other man’s opinion.

“I think you’ve lost some witnesses,” Vincent finally says. He starts to turn back to Sephiroth, then stops and glances over. Then he straightens, settling something for himself, and when his eyes meet Sephiroth’s again, they’re clear and untroubled. “Nothing the perimeter won’t pick up.”

Sephiroth sighs. “They shouldn’t have to…can you wait here? Let me deal with that and then we can finish.”

“Of course,” Vincent says. Whatever had caught his eye seems to have been just an illusion, since he casually steps back into the shadows of the alley behind them. “Take your time. My issue isn’t urgent.”

Grateful, Sephiroth nods and then steps away, back into his world. There are other eyes on him, but this pair is the only one he cares to return to.

Notes:

Yep, Vincent's mom is still alive. I've been toying on and off with having her actually interact with some of the others, mostly Sephiroth. Still haven't made up my mind but I did want to signpost her being around, especially since Lucrecia got a little chapter.

Chapter 76: Thirteenth Vacation: Picnic Fantasy

Notes:

Some noncon roleplay - very light because Sephiroth is terrible at staying in character with Vincent. Also a little foot fetish, and a little bit of not quite self-harm discussion, but Sephiroth really needs to be watched for his drop tendencies.

While the days are still warm, the season has turned enough that when Sephiroth rises, just a little after dawn, frost speckles the glass of the floor-to-ceiling window in the Nibelheim cabin bedroom. He goes up to it and the heat of his body clears some of the cloudiness, but in return the transferred chill makes his nipples and groin tighten. He inhales slowly, absently looking out across the wooded hills beyond, and in the glass his reflection blurs again, goes misty as if he’s drifting back from wakefulness to sleep.

More chills slip down his arms and thighs so that he drops his hands and runs them along his legs, then back up his buttocks. His fingers graze against faded bruises and he sighs, remembering the mouth and hands that had made them.

Then he turns. It is undisputably day, he can feel the warming beams coming through the glass, and he has tasks to do. He shouldn’t be lingering on fancies when there are concrete expectations for him.

Sephiroth goes into the adjoining bathroom. He showers and dries himself, then carefully combs out his hair. There’s a stack of white boxes rising on one side of the sink and he removes their pine-green ribbons to use in braiding back the strands, two small plaits on either side of his head feeding into a single thick one going down to the middle of his back. While his hairdressing has come quite a way, it’s still a little ambitious for him to do on his own, and he has to redo the braids before he’s happy with them.

By then his body is perfectly dry, but he moistens his skin with a small vial of scented oil from the first box. The fragrance is very light, with even his preternatural senses catching only hints of fresh flowers, like he’s passed near but not through a garden, and the oil absorbs so quickly that he doesn’t have to wipe his hands before he turns to the rest of the box’s contents.

First is a pair of silk underwear, but as he picks up the flimsy thing, a number of extra laces and ribbons dangle from it. He spreads it out against the counter, then sees how it’s been designed to mimic the latex briefs Vincent straps him into, wrapping his cock and balls up into a pouch and then tucking them firmly back against his perineum so the front of his groin is stretched smooth. The silk feels far more forgiving than latex, but once he’s tied himself up, he finds the truth behind the deception: he’s bound just as severely, those frail-looking ribbons cinching his prick snugly in place.

The underwear is a delicate shell-pink, and shades enticingly into the shadows of his thighs as he then pulls on a white cotton slip, the hem ending at mid-thigh and the bodice splitting down to the bottom of his breastbone. He threads the accompanying ribbons through their holes and laces up the bodice; even taut across his pectorals, the tailoring creates the illusion of slight, inviting curves. Indulgently, Sephiroth takes up the invite and fingers his nipples through the cotton—this slip doesn’t come with slits for them—enjoying how the fabric teases them before he draws a breath and reins himself in.

Last out of the first box is a pair of white silk stockings. He pulls them on, tying off the garter ribbons, and then indulges in a little stroking of his inner thighs, biting his lip a little when he finds a spot that remembers Vincent’s claws.

He has to draw another deliberate breath to move on. The second box contains a girdle of white cotton and silk—not a corset, as Genesis had been at pains to lecture, though it has laces running up the back. It covers about the same area, breastbone to just below the waist, as the leather belts they’ve used before, but feels distinctly lighter when he slips it on. He accordingly laces it a little tighter to reduce the chances of slippage, per Genesis’ grudging advice, and then checks his breathing and mobility.

Sephiroth can still feel the girdle, light as it is: he can feel the sense of restraint, the sense that he’s been shaped into the pretty, slim figure in the mirror, with just the faintest tantalizing hints of pink shading through the bodice and skirt of his slip. He breathes in to feel how it follows that shape, and as he does, his thoughts focus.

He must finish dressing himself. He opens the third box and takes out the dress, a white lacy confection that has to be unwrapped carefully and slowly from its wrapping paper. No soldierly efficiency now, that has no meaning to what he is.

The dress comes with a cotton half-slip, which he steps into first and then pulls up his legs, lacing it up about his waist till the skirt swirls at his ankles. There are buttons running down the entire front of the dress and he pushes the tiny half-pearls through their matching holes, then swings the dress over his arms and onto his shoulders. Then he does the buttons back up, from ankle to neck. More buttons close the cuffs about his wrists, anchoring the billowing sleeves.

It looks conservative, clothing him from ankle to neck, but the entire front of the dress down to his waist is made of lace and his undergarments peep through. The rest is thin silk that flows airily over his back and the half-slip, somehow glossing over his height and build so that he looks as easy to bend as a willow branch. He finds himself bending, stroking down the dress and then pressing a little harder, his fingers working through the layers of cloth to rub at his cock as his eyes dilate in the mirror.

Sephiroth watches himself moan quietly, without any inhibitions, this flush-faced reflection buttoned in and laced in place so precisely that even with his limbs free, he feels his place. He drags his hand to the sink, clutching its edge, and then shakes his head. A drop of sweat flies off him onto the mirror and he looks at it, then makes himself back away.

Into the kitchen. The room is spare—exposed rafters, stone flooring, modern amenities housed in antique exteriors—but stocked well enough for his duties. He doesn’t need to cook, only to prepare, pulling out food and drink and packing them into appropriate containers, with two large wicker baskets waiting by the wall. He has to be careful, to not spoil the fine white of his clothes, has to watch only what he does. It keeps his concentration tight.

So he isn’t paying attention, once he’s finished and has moved to the sink. He checks his cuffs to ensure he hasn’t stained them, then unbuttons them anyway and folds them back before he washes his hands. He’s looking at the water running over his fingers when a hand roughly captures his wrists, another his mouth.

“Shhhh.” Vincent nuzzles up behind Sephiroth’s ear, expertly tightening his grip through Sephiroth’s initial shudder and then pushing slightly forward when Sephiroth sags against the other man. “Such a pretty maid. On your own?”

Sephiroth shudders again and groans into Vincent’s palm. Vincent presses that down for another second, his smile evident against the side of Sephiroth’s throat, and then he removes it. He knows Sephiroth is incapable of anything but thready, soft whimpers, dressed as he is, and takes brisk advantage of that to tie Sephiroth’s wrists together with a piece of rope.

One Sephiroth is bound, he’s pulled away from the sink and pushed up against the crude butcher’s table where all of the packed food and drink are laid out. Pressed down next to it, simply the last delicacy in the line, his cheek against the wood and his ankles shoved apart. Vincent strips off his stockings and reaches around to jerk up his chin; he whines at the flash of pain in his jaw and the silk flicks between his teeth, then tightens into the corners of his mouth as he gasps in belated realization. Another round, then a third. Then the other stocking is wrapped about his eyes.

Blindfolded and gagged, he’s released to squirm against the table as his skirt is pulled up. Sephiroth moans outright at the first caress of Vincent’s bare hand against his thigh and his legs instinctively move apart, which provokes a chuckle over a slap. “Wanton,” Vincent says, delivering another slap to Sephiroth’s inner thigh before his fingers suddenly angle up to tease mercilessly along the silk underwear. “Such a wanton maid—you shouldn’t be left on your own.”

Sephiroth sucks at his gag, going pliant against the table. He hitches when he feels fingers spreading his buttocks, but then they only stay there, lightly touching his slowly-aching cock through the silk as something is tugged and shifted about his waist. Then the half-slip comes away, whispering down his shivering legs, and at the same time Vincent’s fingers work past the underwear’s ribbons.

Vincent doesn’t untie them as he oils and stretches Sephiroth. If Sephiroth moves more than a shiver, he’s slapped again, so he can only lie there and twist his fingers around each other, feeling the rope chafe at his wrists and the gag ride the corners of his mouth. His cock jerks helplessly in its soft, clinging prison as a thick plug is slid into him, and then—the gauzy flutter of his dress coming back down over his buttocks makes him hump sharply into the air.

This time Vincent doesn’t slap him. Instead the man reaches up between his legs—his dress is still only half-down—and pinches his cock head through the silk. Sephiroth shivers and whimpers, going still and earning himself a mocking pat on the hip.

“Not here. We’re going outside,” Vincent tells him as the familiar grip of leather goes around his thighs. “Outside, for a picnic, with a pretty maid all to myself.”

His legs are strapped mid-thigh and at the ankle before his dress is finally pulled all the way down. Then Vincent steps back. Sephiroth senses the man moving near his legs and tucks himself closer to the table, a futile attempt to pretend that every bit of him isn’t slavishly anticipating the man’s next touch, the burn of it through him. When he hears the tearing sound, he’s so wound up with it that he at first thinks he’s bitten through his gag.

But no, his mouth is still full, his voice muffled as the tearing sounds continue. Then Vincent gathers up his dress about his legs and ties it in place with a strip of—the half-slip, Sephiroth thinks. Caught by surprise and then bound up with his own garments, so delicate-looking on him but in Vincent’s hands they feel as secure as steel.

Sephiroth moans helplessly, his toes curling against the stone floor. With his legs immobilized, he can do little but flail his hands in the wrong direction as Vincent pulls him off the table by the shoulder. For a delicious moment he’s pressed up against the other man, weakly squirming under freely-roaming hands.

Then Vincent spins him around. He stumbles, falls against Vincent, directly into his captor’s hands. There’s a slicing sensation and then a hot line of pain across the bottom of his left foot.

Sephiroth is far too dazed to register much—it’s not from Vincent but it’s a very, very minor pain, an unwelcome distraction at most—but Vincent stills. The change in the other man filters through but even so, Sephiroth dislikes it, doesn’t want it to interrupt. The seed of resentment alone that it instills is too much like what shouldn’t be here.

He folds into Vincent, pressing his bound eyes into the other man’s shoulder as he feverishly groans. Vincent exhales with an audible touch of irritation and that—but then he jerks down Sephiroth’s hands by the rope, the assuredness of that immediately sending Sephiroth back into a quiescent state.

“You shouldn’t be left alone,” Vincent says. He still sounds different, but he knows how to distract Sephiroth in welcome ways, a kiss pressed to the temple as he twists Sephiroth’s wrists to just the heated start of pain, a graze of a claw down Sephiroth’s throat as he pushes Sephiroth back against the table.

Sephiroth’s foot stings again, though far less this time. He’s more preoccupied with how the rope is loosening around his wrists…but then his arms are bent back. Vincent buckles leather around his wrists, then locks another set of cuffs just above the elbow, forcing his arms very closely together behind him. He’s lifted up and set to perch on the table, wriggling as his weight shifts the plug in him, then presses hard onto his trapped cock and balls.

“My pretty maid,” Vincent says, still with that faint strangeness in his tone. He takes Sephiroth by the jaw and kisses possessively over the gag. “Sit still. You’re here for me, you do only what I tell you.”

Of course, Sephiroth thinks, the small part of him that’s even capable of thought. So he sits, aching all over under his lace and ribbons, as Vincent brushes his skirt back up and takes his ankle. Touches something, wipes at his sole. It stings very slightly, and Sephiroth does distantly register something hard and foreign being pressed out. But then Vincent licks him, tongue coiling all along his sole before flicking its tip teasingly up along his ankle where the leather wraps about it, and Sephiroth can’t help himself. He moves, he rocks, he squeezes his thighs against each other under his dress and clenches himself around his plug, the darkness behind his blindfold filled with burning red swirls to match Vincent’s caresses.

When Vincent stops, Sephiroth nearly sways off the table. Vincent stands up and briefly steadies him, then drops again. Another piece of the half-slip is wrapped around his foot, and then a second is used to swathe his arms to his waist, bundling him as neatly as he’s packed their food.

“I have one piece left,” Vincent says as he slings his arm affectionately about Sephiroth, murmuring in between nips at Sephiroth’s throat. “Just enough for a hood—” he chuckles at Sephiroth’s eager whine “—but I don’t want you to think I’ve forgotten these.”

As he speaks, he plucks Sephiroth’s right nipple through the dress. Sephiroth arches as much as he’s able and Vincent kisses him over the gag again. He does his best to open his mouth, letting the man’s tongue work past the stocking, as one by one, the top few buttons of his dress are undone. Cool air runs over his heated skin, then cool, clever fingers, sliding into his slip. At first they casually cup his pectoral, only resting a thumb against his nipple, but as he continues to moan, they turn just enough to catch the nub. Vincent rolls and pinches it tender before adding the clamp, his tongue coming out of Sephiroth’s mouth so Sephiroth’s whimper merely dances against his smiling lips.

He does the same to Sephiroth’s other nipple before buttoning up the dress again. Sephiroth is left to hitch and groan, his slip damp all over with sweat, the girdle tugging the cotton down to ride over his swelling nipples, as Vincent’s fingers then go to his gag and tighten up the spit-slackened silk.

Then…yes, a hood, cotton wrapped tight about his head and then knotted repeatedly so he can feed the uneven line marching down his scalp. He breathes through the small hole he’s been allowed, breathes and sways in his bonds. Nothing but a pretty toy, sitting still as Vincent moves about the kitchen. Waiting till the other man finally gets around to him, lifting him up and then lowering him into that large wicker basket, top thudding down over his head. The canes are unexpectedly smooth against his hands and his feet, the only exposed places on him—his hands and his foot. Just the one foot, the other wrapped and he…can’t quite remember why.

Can feel, feel only, a compact bundle in the dark taken somewhere. Bumped a little as the basket is carried, nipples and cock taking turns aching the most—and then a slightly rougher jolt knocking his entire body into the point of the plug so that the unfurling white blossom of pleasure seems to erupt everywhere at once. He nuzzles into the petals, enveloped in their pretty, soft, overwhelming embrace, and doesn’t think.

Eventually, Vincent lets him back out. Spilled onto something stretched over slightly uneven ground, smelling fresher grass and earth—outside. On a picnic blanket, with his hooded head resting on Vincent’s thigh and the rest of him laid out on his side, Vincent’s hand stroking gently down his arm till he comes back enough to stir.

He can smell that perfumed oil, he thinks muzzily. It’s stronger now than in the bathroom, stronger and muskier, with a little of the dusty wicker scent still mixed in as well. He sniffs reflexively, then stops as Vincent’s hand brushes at the side of his face.

Vincent undoes the hood, then lowers his head again as he shudders slowly. He smells a little of the food, registers chewing noises from just above him…then a swallow as Vincent drinks. Then, entirely unhurried, Vincent takes Sephiroth’s head off his lap and turns them so that Sephiroth is on his back. He undoes the dress down to the beginning of the cloth wrapped around Sephiroth’s arms, just enough to expose the slip’s bodice, and then he undoes the bodice laces as well. Sephiroth’s nipples lift their clamps into the fresh air, hot and aching, and Vincent torments their sensitive flesh with the lightest licks of his tongue for a while before finally releasing them from the clamps.

He doesn’t suck or touch them as Sephiroth writhes through the shocking crash of sensation. Only waits till Sephiroth has slumped back, exhausted, before he slashes away the cloth from Sephiroth’s arms. The cuffs stay on, keeping Sephiroth’s arms pinioned under him as Vincent resumes unbuttoning the dress.

When Vincent reaches the strips of cotton tied around Sephiroth’s legs, he cuts through those as well, but then pushes up the dress, hauling at Sephiroth’s legs to fold it up about Sephiroth’s waist rather than treating it similarly. Once Sephiroth’s knees are spread, Vincent holds him down by the thighs while lapping over Sephiroth’s underwear. The silk goes from wet to thoroughly sodden, so stuck to the aching flesh underneath that when Vincent’s claw first starts to slit through, it feels more like being shaved than being freed. Sephiroth needs to come, he’s trembling for it, but it’s not till Vincent wraps a hand about his cock and pushes up and tells him to that he can.

Limp, he only mewls a little as he’s rolled over. His dress is bunched out of the way and then Vincent takes the plug from him and fucks him. Then moves away, leaving the come to dribble a little from him as the other man eats and drinks a little more. Re-energized, Vincent returns and fucks him a second time, squeezing his balls and pinching his cock till he’s hard—then tying a scrap of cloth about the base of his erection as he weakly ruts into Vincent’s hand.

His gag is removed and he’s not allowed to come again till he’s eaten and drunk sufficiently for Vincent. And then the other man is tender, caressing his tired, sore body and coaxing it into finishing in Vincent’s mouth.

“Are you packing me back up?” Sephiroth asks. Head back in Vincent’s lap, dress stripped off but still wearing the slip and girdle. Only his hands are tied, now in front of him with a strip of cotton, but it’s as good as SOLDIER restraints in his condition, and he does still have the blindfold on.

“I’m thinking about it, if only because we didn’t bring your shoes,” Vincent says. He pets at Sephiroth’s shoulder, then caresses up Sephiroth’s throat as Sephiroth nuzzles into his thigh. “The rocks out here are just as sharp if not sharper than back there.”

“Rock?” Sephiroth says, puzzled, and then vaguely remembers; his foot probably was fine before they left the cabin but it’s still wrapped in that rag. “I heal, Vincent.”

“So do I, but you still take offense when I bleed all over our bathroom,” Vincent says.

He hasn’t stopped stroking Sephiroth, even as Sephiroth grimaces and presses his face slightly harder than necessary into the other man’s leg. “Because accommodating your mangled body isn’t what that room is for…all right, I see the point. Though there’s still a difference of degree. Even up the mountain…”

“When I plan to be chasing you through the woods, going after a soldier who’s strayed a little too far from his base,” Vincent remarks. His tone doesn’t carry the sharp edge of accusation, but all the same it’s a reproach, and far more effective of one than if he’d been strident about it. “Not when I’m carrying a pretty maid off.”

Sephiroth inhales slowly. He could resent the man for making him think now—but he doesn’t. He doesn’t have that at all in him, as he twists around and then pushes up Vincent’s chest, stopping when he feels the man’s hand on his jaw and then sighing into the way that brings him forward to curl under Vincent’s chin. “True. Could have ruined the dress and I want to reuse it.”

Vincent snorts. His thumb runs along Sephiroth’s jaw, then angles under it and pushes Sephiroth’s head up. But it’s Sephiroth’s brow Vincent’s mouth touches, right at the top of the bridge of his nose. “I want to ruin you more than once,” Vincent murmurs, then shifts down to kiss Sephiroth in the middle of Sephiroth’s wanting noise. “So I take care when I do it.”

Sephiroth kisses him back. Not surrendering, not passive now because that feels…lazy, but not fighting and not trying to distract either. Trying to—to answer that, answer those words in some way that at least approaches their weight with him.

“So how do you—how do you want to take me?” Sephiroth asks when their mouths part. “I’m only here for that. Even if I’m—not—”

Vincent swallows the ‘perfect’ from him with another kiss, wipes out its poisonous seed without any effort at all. “My pretty maid, all ruined now,” he says as he curls his hand over Sephiroth’s throat. “Just lie still and let me play with you. That’s all you have to do for me.”

His kisses move down from Sephiroth’s mouth, teasing between his fingers at Sephiroth’s neck. Sephiroth groans and tilts back under the caresses, then works his arms out from between them so he can stretch them over his head, offering everything he can to the other man. Ruined but still very delectable, according to Vincent’s murmurs, very much worth spreading out for a lazy afternoon as the unseen warmth of the sunlight strokes across his body.

But it’s only an afternoon, as it's not their annual vacation in Nibelheim, only a quick two days as SOLDIER wraps up a mountain training session. There’s a satphone in the picnic basket as well, and Sephiroth grudgingly spends a few minutes on it, taking updates from his officers over on the next mountainside while Vincent tidies up their picnic spot. But it’s a worthwhile hassle to ensure their evening is uninterrupted—their rental cabin is in Sephiroth’s name, no one save Tseng knows Vincent is in the area, and by now everyone is well aware of Sephiroth’s penchant for hiking off into the mountains on his own—and so Sephiroth almost doesn’t mind that he’s too preoccupied with work matters to turn down the spare coat Vincent hands him.

The man sees before Sephiroth does that there will be no packing him up after all, and goes ahead with the hamper. He could stay back and cull the work thoughts from Sephiroth’s mind, he’s quite capable of it and they both know that Sephiroth would never turn that down from the man…but Vincent likes the general in him as well as the helpless maid. He won’t disadvantage Sephiroth’s career for his own pleasure, even when it’s Sephiroth himself tempting him.

Sephiroth knows that. But as he pauses along the trail and looks up towards their cave on the other mountain—a temptation itself, and yet how unwise a visit would be, at least if they want to keep their tracks as hidden as always—it strikes him with more weight today. His intelligence lets him know things before others, not by supernatural means but simply by logical chains worked out far faster. But a deduction is not the same as an insight, thinking of something is not the same as believing it…he’s said that enough times to his mother, he should know that by heart.

“Still thinking?” Vincent comments when Sephiroth finally steps into the cabin.

Sephiroth blinks and looks over. Vincent is barefoot and in his shirtsleeves, a few dots of suds sticking to his arm where he’s pulled it out of the sink. Nothing Sephiroth hasn’t seen in their Midgar quarters but again, he thinks that’s what he’s been missing: how easily Vincent takes on such mundanities. It’s not the man’s own dirty dishes he cleans, and he never mentions that.

“I want to talk,” Sephiroth says. He pauses so Vincent can study him, resisting the urge to either stiffen or to display himself; they’d both be distractions stemming out of insecurity when there’s no reason for that. Vincent needs to see certain cues and he doesn’t mind giving them—although the soldier in him can’t help ensuring victory. “For dinner. After—you can do whatever—”

Vincent smiles. “Go wash and dress,” he says, and when his gaze runs over Sephiroth this time, the way Sephiroth’s body tightens all over is decidedly free of apprehension. “Then we’ll see how you can be of service.”

Sephiroth swallows a little moan. Clarity, that’s all he’s ever longed for, with all his brains and strength and willpower. He’s only ever wanted to know what he has to do.

He has his orders, so he carries them out to the letter, scrubbing and drying himself before applying a fresh layer of the perfumed oil. This time the aroma seems to linger on his skin without needing exertion to bring it out, and encourages his hands to move languidly over the new bruises, to take their time opening up another stack of boxes. New underwear, new slip, new girdle: he puts these on the same as before. New dress, but this is different, light-green silk with silver cranes embroidered on it. And the dress isn’t high-necked but the exact opposite, its square-cut bodice so low that it barely covers the top of the slip.

There’s one more item in the box: a collar made of the same green silk. Sephiroth doesn’t put this on, but carries it in one hand as he goes back through the cabin.

Vincent meets him on the threshold of the kitchen. The man doesn’t even speak, only glances down and Sephiroth goes to his knees. After passing over the collar, he pulls his hair—braided again—out of the way so the ribbon can be threaded about his throat and then tugged lovingly taut, catching his low inhale as Vincent laces it in place. “Where are you sorest?” Vincent inquires.

His hands wrap around Sephiroth’s wrists, pulling lightly at them. Sephiroth lets go of his hair and lets Vincent steer his arms down behind him. “My—my thighs and my cock,” he murmurs, then hitches as Vincent’s tongue-tip flicks at his throat, just over a half-healed bite the collar is riding over. “And there.”

The other man makes an amused sound. He swiftly laces leather binders about Sephiroth’s lower arms, then straps them together across the back. Then his hands come around to fondle Sephiroth’s nipples through the dress, the right pinching a nub so the left can glide a claw-tip back and forth across it, setting all of Sephiroth’s nerves to tingling with its playful menace. “Not here?”

Sephiroth moans and rolls his shoulders back into Vincent. He feels his nipples press through cotton and silk, pebbling even as the treatment reawakens their earlier soreness. “You like them—tender, more than this,” he protests, before shuddering as Vincent deftly pops that nipple over the edge of the bodice. “So do I.”

Vincent passes a fingertip over the nipple, then scratches lightly about it with his claw, not enough to draw blood but more than enough to heat Sephiroth’s blood. “Are you going to spend dinner talking me into marking you a few more times?”

He pushes the nipple back under the slip, giving it a hard rub with his palm before he moves onto its brother. Sephiroth presses back against the other man, silk skirts rustling across his thighs—no additional half-slip with this one, just the slip he wears under the girdle and that lets him feel the flirting folds sinking between his legs from his knee to nearly his crotch. “Do you—do you want me to serve or—or to look—pretty?” Sephiroth barely manages to moan.

For a moment he’s only played with, Vincent’s claw tickling his nipple while Vincent’s breath runs out over his collarbone. Then Vincent turns and kisses his neck, overlapping his collar and a bite-mark. “I’d like you to taste,” he says.

He rolls both nipples through the dress as he does. Sephiroth droops into his nod—he knows this role, he doesn’t have to think about it—and then moves as Vincent wishes, rising off his knees and stumbling over to a wooden chair. It lacks arms so Vincent slips its narrow back between Sephiroth’s arms and his back, then loops rope between his upper arms and the chair. More rope is wound about his waist and back around the wooden frame, and then the ends are brought under the chair and down to tie his ankles to the front two legs.

Once he’s secured, Vincent smooths up his skirt, rolling it neatly out of the way till his lacy, imprisoning underwear is revealed. He squirms as Vincent traces a claw over the pink silk; his cock and balls are mostly crushed beneath him and he tries to clench his buttocks enough to lift off them and gain a little relief, only to whimper when he inevitably has to relax.

“I made a couple adjustments for the altitude,” Vincent says. Watching everything, watching how Sephiroth suffers under his caresses, how a soft graze of his fingers over Sephiroth’s crotch makes Sephiroth’s shoulders shiver and presses his nipples back out of his dress. He rubs along Sephiroth’s inner thigh with his other hand, then pinches it sharply when the chair creaks. “Hold. I’ll have you taste and see, but I don’t want to have to rebuild the chair.”

Sephiroth obediently slackens his body. He could break the chair, but in this state he’d have to bend his will to it…and his will has been directed elsewhere. “Yes, Vincent.”

Vincent smiles. Gives him a last fondling, thumb dragged hard over his cock as a kiss is pressed to his panting lips, and then the man turns away.

He’d been prepping but hadn’t actually started cooking, although once Vincent reaches the counter, he only chops one more vegetable before he turns on the stove. Which is electric despite the old-fashioned, rough-hewn décor and the giant unused fireplace to the side…Sephiroth finds himself staring at the fireplace’s grate, the familiar sound of Vincent cooking quickly lulling him into an almost meditative state. Bound and waiting on the other man’s pleasure, he knows this well enough that none of his bodily discomforts are distracting, all merely reminders of past and welcome times.

“Different setting,” he finds himself saying, and mostly realizes he’s done so when Vincent makes a soft inquiring noise. “The—not like before. They said when I rented…it was an old hunter’s lodge, some…hermit who only came down twice a year. Perfect for roughing it.”

Vincent laughs, as well he should as he adjusts the stove’s controls. He decants the wok’s contents—they brought that with them—onto a plate and then promptly starts to toss in new ingredients from the meticulously laid-out palette on the counter. “Well, the frame is probably original. I remember the man, he was a hermit, but his heirs certainly aren’t. Nibelheim is waking up to the attraction of more SOLDIER investment.”

“Should we watch that?” Sephiroth asks. They may have expanded their downtime to other places, but the cave is still a treasured retreat of theirs, and one Sephiroth would be loathe to lose.

“Not yet. The training ground is far enough away, and the land’s not that cheap to clear—it’ll take a while before they look near there,” Vincent says. He tosses the wok’s contents in the air a few times, then sets a lid on it to steam them. Then he backs away, wiping his hands off on a rag as he comes over to Sephiroth. He’d already thought about that from how easily he replied, but he’s studying Sephiroth again. “Is that what you wanted to talk about?”

“I…” Sephiroth shifts towards Vincent without thinking, then hitches as his bonds catch him. Then he groans and falls back, fingers limply dragging at the back of the chair as Vincent bends over and licks at a nipple. “Early—earlier—”

Vincent’s mouth lifts. Then works softly along Sephiroth’s breastbone as his hand suddenly cups Sephiroth’s bare foot, the one that had stepped on the sharp edge in the kitchen. Its thumb rubs along the now-unmarked sole as he noses past the bodice and lightly bites Sephiroth’s other nipple; he knows, his gestures say, knows and accepts and so has nothing to say about it.

“Earlier,” Sephiroth makes himself, even as he’s tempted to simply submit to the other man’s attentions. “First time—you didn’t even know and you didn’t want me to cut myself—”

The caresses pause. Then they resume, but with a subtly different tempo as Vincent kisses his way up Sephiroth’s chest. “I knew who you were,” he says, lifting his head.

“You knew about me, you didn’t know me yet,” Sephiroth says.

Then stills as they look at each other. Vincent is still holding Sephiroth’s foot, while his other hand has come up to rest against Sephiroth’s inner thigh. But his gaze is the surest hold of all, keeping Sephiroth’s breath locked behind his teeth until the other man leans forward and unlocks that with his own lips.

Sephiroth gasps into Vincent’s mouth, gasps and then arches till the chair judders dangerously. Vincent kisses him like the man means to—to not steal his breath but to replace it, and for a giddy, spiraling moment Sephiroth believes it.

“I knew enough at that point,” Vincent says when he backs off. He has to stop and catch his breath, although then he splays his hand across Sephiroth’s crotch, curling his fingers along the pink silk so Sephiroth moans helplessly. “Knew I didn’t like the look of your blood on my cave floor—but getting to know you didn’t change that, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“I—” Sephiroth sucks air into his lungs, needing it. He almost doesn’t want it, he wants Vincent instead and it irks him to need something else, but he does need it. “Not asking—want—I want you to be right, to be right about that—”

Vincent stops his stroking. He pushes himself up, looking down at Sephiroth, and then he reaches for Sephiroth’s jaw. There’s a harshness to the movement that touches on Sephiroth’s other training, but it’s him—Sephiroth stiffens and Vincent stops. Breathes in, visibly changing his intent, and then, as Sephiroth sighs in relief, he cups Sephiroth’s chin and lifts it into another hard kiss.

“Try this,” he says afterward, in a very soft, calming voice. “Tell me if it tastes sweeter to you.

Sephiroth nods wordlessly, still short of breath. He wastes a good deal of what he’s managed to recapture in whimpering when Vincent draws back, but Vincent has recovered and only smirks a little at him.

After checking the wok, Vincent instead takes a spoonful from the other dish he’s made and carries it back to Sephiroth. He dips the spoon between Sephiroth’s lips, then brushes his thumb over those as Sephiroth obediently considers the taste. “A little,” Sephiroth says. “Tangerine—fresh?”

“There’s peel too, but the peel alone wasn’t strong enough,” Vincent notes. He runs his thumb across Sephiroth’s mouth again, then lets Sephiroth suck at its tip. “Do you want to serve tonight? Or do you want something else?”

“I want…” Sephiroth lets the thumb slip out of his mouth, then closes his eyes and tilts his head. He doesn’t have to see to know Vincent’s hand will be there, supporting it. “I want to taste you last. And then whatever you want, Vincent. Not because I don’t…care what you do, but the opposite.”

“I know.” Vincent whispers that to the top of Sephiroth’s head, so close that Sephiroth shivers in anticipation of the man’s mouth.

But it never descends, although Vincent does stroke his lips one last time. Then the man tips Sephiroth’s head out of his hand and goes back to the stove. He takes the lid off the wok and adds something that sends billows of fragrant steam into the air, which he sniffs carefully before adding more.

Sephiroth doesn’t take it as a negative reaction. On the contrary, he shivers again, watching the other man employ his skills with smooth, understated efficiency. This is Vincent at his peak, and it’s only a matter of time before he turns that on Sephiroth.

Two more tastes, the last one blindfolded, with Vincent teasing his nipples again as he’s prompted over and over to elaborate on why he ‘likes’ it. Then Vincent stands astride him and fucks his mouth, wiping any other taste out of his throat. He thinks the chair survives, but it seems a close-run thing from how carefully Vincent unties him from it.

Vincent walks him into the bedroom and ensconces him on the bed, arms still strapped behind him and tucked into a fluffy nest of pillows. His legs are hauled apart and leather cuffs buckled about each thigh, keeping him brazenly spread while the other man goes back to finish cooking.

When he hears the clink of plates being set down, Sephiroth starts to arch appealingly. Vincent slaps him directly over his silk-bound crotch to forestall that, and then, while he’s still dazed, cuts away his underwear enough to slide an oiled tail-tip into him. His still-tied cock, its ribbons fluttering against his inner thighs, is then worked into Vincent, who languidly rides it as he feeds Sephiroth dinner.

“Please,” Sephiroth eventually groans as Vincent kisses the remains of the last mouthful from him. “Please, Vincent, I need to come—”

“How was dinner this time? Better?” Vincent asks, and then laughs when Sephiroth whimpers through the start of an answer. It was a rhetorical question, his hands make clear as they cradle Sephiroth’s head for another kiss. “My pretty, sweet consort…you’ll come. You’ll come wet and on my cock, with your blood in my mouth—because you asked for it.”

“Yes…” Sephiroth whimpers, shuddering, as Vincent unwinds himself and then unchains Sephiroth’s legs so the man can move behind him. He hitches and rubs himself as best he can against Vincent till Vincent’s tail is replaced with a cock, till Vincent’s claws are shredding through his cock bindings, till he feels Vincent’s teeth at his shoulder. Then he stops, only breathing very shallowly, as Vincent bites down just a little, not yet enough to break the skin. He shivers again. “Vincent—Vincent, please. Bite—now, bite n—”

Vincent does exactly that.

Chapter 77: Interlude: Sephiroth’s List

Shinra may be a private for-profit corporation, but as long as Sephiroth is heading up SOLDIER, he will not have his division become a synonym for shameless and shallow commercialism. He and his people work for a living, and they do that by protecting others, not by shining up their armor for the cameras and then taking it off to loaf about the office as soon as those are turned away. Yes, of course there are publicity concerns to see to, but there’s a difference between appearing at an opening ceremony for a new power station and shilling consumer products that no one actually needs.

“Well, I mean, people do need to wash their hair,” Zack says, anxiously touching his head as he winces away from Sephiroth’s stare. “Okay, I guess you technically can go without but not when we’re all stuck inside together in a tiny barracks and not when Genesis can get his hands on a water materia—”

“Washing yourself is basic hygiene and so it is a necessity,” Sephiroth says. When he hears the muffled noise, he looks past Zack at Angeal, who simultaneously motions for him to go easy on Zack while also continuing to stuff a gloved hand into his mouth. Unhelpful. “Needing a very specific shampoo to do it is not, and even more so when it’s not even targeted towards the most common hair type. That’s what I don’t understa—”

“Okay, look, this is…inappropriate. Lazard’s gonna do something about it, I’m pretty sure they’re not okayed to use that Shinra logo in the corner either and you know how Legal gets about counterfeits,” Angeal says. He has to pause twice to clear his throat, and still fails to keep a completely even face throughout, but he does manage to scoot Zack and that offensive piece of cardboard Zack found while browsing a drugstore in Sector Three out the door. Then he shuts the door, leans against it, and looks semi-seriously at Sephiroth. “Also I get how, flattering as it kind of is—it is a nice shot of you—”

Sephiroth opens his mouth.

“—it’s still a fancy way of using you like you’re just a marketing trick. Them and R&D aren’t that different that way,” Angeal says. The humor is still present in the crinkles around his eyes, but his gaze is considerably more searching than that. And he waits for Sephiroth to close his mouth and grudgingly nod before he proceeds. “But I really think Lazard’s better taking this on. Sure, we could find their office and barge in ourselves, but that’s going to bring its own trouble.”

“I’m well aware of the pitfalls of my personally intervening,” Sephiroth mutters. He absently brushes his hand against Masamune, then frowns and looks down when he feels something on the hilt. It’s only filth from the morning mission, but he continues eyeing it for a few seconds, thinking on how much sewage he’s already had to trudge through today, and then having only the briefest of rest breaks to clean himself up and go into endless meetings, all to make the world safe—to make some kind of world safe. At times like this, he does wonder exactly what kind. “I do trust Deusericus to handle it.”

“Yeah.” Angeal says that as a placeholder rather than a conclusion. He tilts his head a little, then sighs. “You know, you do think that stuff works.”

Sephiroth bites back a sharp comment, then simply shrugs. Of course he does, that’s why they stock it, and that’s why it’s so damn frustrating to find that he can’t even have this small luxury without some ridiculous escalation tainting it.

“You should get fucking shampoo that gets the guts off, Seph,” Angeal says, raising a hand when Sephiroth starts to exhale in irritation. “Yeah, I know, but you should get it, and look, I like that one too. And it’s not like we’re the only two people who have gone through the entire aisle trying to find something that’s gonna wash things out without making us smell like a completely different kind of asshole—”

“What’s your point, Angeal?” Sephiroth sighs. “We have a debrief in fifteen minutes.”

“My point is, no, they shouldn’t use us to sell shit when we don’t know about it, but we do test stuff and the good ones, we do want that to keep being around for us to use and I don’t think the answer to that is to get Shinra to buy out the company for us,” Angeal says. He lowers his hand as Sephiroth snorts, then reaches over to clap Sephiroth on the arm. “Also honestly, Seph, people like to know what we think are the good ones. So maybe we should just have a list. It’s not a commercial—it’s just a list, and I’m not even saying we publish it, really. But we let people know, and if you’re on it, you’re good. If you’re off, say, because you decided to make a whole big deal of it without asking first, then you’re dead to us. And when you’re dead to the Firsts, you’re gonna have nowhere to go.”

“Unless Mother decides you’ve something of interest to her,” Sephiroth says under his breath. But Angeal has a point there to consider: they are role models, there’s no way to deny that, and Sephiroth is quite aware that if they’re considered good role models, he has considerably more leverage in certain parts of the company.

So they do not do endorsements. SOLDIER is as nonpartisan as Sephiroth can manage in a flawed world, and aside from what his own temper can take—he already swallows too many showpiece functions as it is for Shinra alone—he can’t have people thinking that they’ll merely go with the highest bidder. But they do have a list. It’s not public, although eventually they did create a more or less official document with Procurement so they didn’t have to keep reminding that department what was on it. Word about its contents does make its way around, not the least because it’s a plain fact what products go into standard-issue SOLDIER inventory and SOLDIERs have families and friends who share those, and when word does, sales tend to go up. And that’s all that needs to be said about that, and—after several pointed enforcements—all that is said.

“Ex-externally, anyway,” Sephiroth says, and then hisses as Vincent’s claw-tip skates down his back, weaving a deliciously uneven trail of bright-edged heat between various bruises and cuts. He twists futilely at his arms, bound securely behind him, and then sags back onto his heels till his poor, throbbing nipples—chained to the bar before him by their clamps—protest. “Sometimes we…talk about…updating it far—too—too—Vincent, please, it’s too—”

Vincent shushes him, chin coming over Sephiroth’s sweat-streaked shoulder as both his hands slip down to cup his buttocks. They give him much-needed support, even as their thumbs tease up to circle around his hole; one even dips in to the first knuckle as Sephiroth groans and shivers, his nipples greeting the lessened pinch on them with fresh starbursts of agony. That thumbpad rubs insistently just inside of him as, humming, Vincent reaches up and carefully unhooks the clamps from the bar.

Sephiroth whimpers, twisting to press his face into the side of Vincent’s throat as the man continues humming, his fingers stroking around and around Sephiroth’s aching nipples till some of the dancing lights clear from Sephiroth’s vision. Enough so that he can watch, another helpless moan rising out of him, as Vincent reaches out to the campstove just next to them. There’s a tiny tin of melted wax on it, with a paintbrush that Vincent uses to swirl the wax as Sephiroth shudders.

“What do you talk about then? Comparing test results?” Vincent asks. He gives the brush a tap on the rim of the tin to shake off the excess wax, then lifts it up. Then puts it back in the tin as Sephiroth whines. “Do you all have to like something for it to go on the list?”

Sephiroth shakes his head. Then inhales sharply as Vincent lifts the brush again, and this time brings it out of the tin and over to just between Sephiroth’s trembling thighs. “N-not—not necessarily…”

Vincent makes a thoughtful noise. In his hand the brush tilts till a bead of wax nearly falls—but when Sephiroth’s leg twitches, Vincent flips the brush so that the drop lands on the floor instead, and only the brush’s wooden tip scrapes up the thigh. Not even hard enough to leave a mark, but Sephiroth jerks and then whimpers again.

“But I have to like it now, too?” Vincent suggests. Then he chuckles. He uses the brush handle to nudge the campstove a few more inches from them, then shifts back and moves his other hand to Sephiroth’s waist, pushing till Sephiroth, groaning, is bent forward over his own knees. “I like how adjustable the flame is, but I think we’ll see how well it keeps the wax warm.”

His fingers push between Sephiroth’s buttocks again, spreading them as Sephiroth braces himself against the liquid, almost molten anticipation that goes through him. The residual warmth of the hot wax passes over Sephiroth’s back as Vincent moves the brush closer—and then again Vincent tricks him, snaking his tongue into Sephiroth so that he cants his hips up and is still squirming around that when the first scorching drops finally sprinkle over his skin. His head goes down, his body no longer his own but wholly the other man’s, wholly surrendered to whatever Vincent pleases, and no one else’s approval matters to him.

The stove does make the list. Sephiroth doesn’t discuss why, he simply adds it. All anyone needs to know is that it made the list, after all.

Notes:

I can't be the only person who's ever contemplated Sephiroth doing a shampoo commercial. That said, I'm sure that Zack is responsible for the fact that this list also contains recommendations for junk food and desk toys.

Chapter 78: Side-Story: Rufus’ Theory of Power

Lazard is still shaking his head as Dr. Crescent exits the room, the disgust and outrage he feels obvious in his body language no matter how he tries to mind his expression. “Can you believe that?” he says once he and Rufus are alone. “That she—she not only has the nerve to complain about SOLDIER enforcing actual company policy, she wants u—them punished for it?”

“She probably looks at it as straight supply-demand. Policy was changed so that she couldn’t just co-opt SOLDIER into her studies anymore, in return for a separate recruiting channel. If we’re not letting her recruit from the general public anymore, then in her mind it should revert back. It has logic,” Rufus says dryly, and then suppresses a sigh when Lazard swings around to look at him. Sometimes he feels decades older than the other man, and sometimes he thinks about resenting Lazard for that. “You heard me turn her down.”

It takes a moment for Lazard to catch his breath. He’s only tightening up the surface, not really calming himself; after this he’ll go vent his anger to Hewley or Fair, ensuring they’re up to date on both R&D’s latest proposed infringement and Lazard’s immediate reaction to it. His emotion is as genuine as his political instincts. “Yes. Still, I wonder—she’s not an idiot by a wide margin, so why she keeps making the same ask over and over again, as if this is like the old days…”

“Because the old days were good to her, no matter what she likes to imply about Father, and she’s not the only one who remembers when we didn’t hesitate to launch major initiatives,” Rufus says patiently.

“As if you’re any less ambitious than the old man was,” Lazard says. Then his expression flickers behind the glasses, a belated shadow of caution before he drops into his chair, folds his arms on the table, makes himself back into a fellow executive and not like a man mistaking workplace familiarity for brotherhood. His mother’s still alive and for all that dementia has ravaged her, still occasionally manages enough sentience to sneer at the Shinra name, and once again Rufus thinks about it. “SOLDIER has changed with the times—we’re no longer bodies on a battlefield, we’re integrated into everyday infrastructure. When people hear that name, they don’t run from it. They expect us to show up for them these days, we’re no different from the security cameras or the emergency phone stands. She could take a lesson from that and adjust her methods, and then maybe she would have actual volunteers lining up.”

“Feel free to coach her if you’d like,” Rufus says, and then mirrors the skeptical smile Lazard produces. Then he shrugs and reaches for his tablet. “Crescent knows she still has her funding. Either she figures out a way to spend it or she doesn’t, same as any other department. It’s not as if we don’t pay for an entire zoo for her.”

Lazard nods, but as the disdain fades from his face, he still looks worried. “I don’t think that’s her problem. She can do that, but she doesn’t want to—I think she looks at animal models as a comedown, or something like that.”

“Then as I said, feel free to counsel her to acceptance.” Rufus checks his calendar, then messages his assistants to make room for the inevitable visit from Sephiroth later. Hopefully it’ll be a short one, since both Lazard and the good general know naked aggression works poorly on Rufus, but Sephiroth never likes to take another’s word on his mother and Rufus knows better these days than to try reason on that. “What she needs to realign on is the fact that I don’t need these kinds of genetic enhancements. Even if I had a better killer, what would I do with them? I already have SOLDIER and Wutai stands to make us richer in peacetime than we’d ever make going back to war with them. If she ever wants to propose human research that I can sell civilians on, then I’ll be all ears.”

That flicker goes over Lazard’s face again. He twists a little in his seat, leaning forward at first as if he’s going to confide in Rufus and then reining in that impulse. He’s too sympathetic; it makes him good at dealing with highly-enhanced individuals with damaged psyches but keeps making him think whether Rufus might fit into that category too. But so far he always seems to catch him.

“Dr. Crescent can do her own work, as she’s often told me,” Lazard says. He nods as if to begin his exit, but then pauses again. “I’m just going to manage my own fief. Even if Wutai’s paying us to build their pipelines for them, we still need security. They might prefer killing each other but they’re not averse to collateral damage, and that’s going to be terrible PR.”

“I agree.” Rufus smiles smoothly at Lazard, who looks at him another moment and then gets up with a little sigh. It’s not a lie. Shinra does still need security forces, and Lazard knows damn well why Rufus signed off on Heidegger’s death warrant.

The man also feels secure about what he thinks he’s built in SOLDIER, probably thinking that Sephiroth inclines to him over Rufus in most cases, and in the worst case…well, if Rufus feels no particular love for Lazard, he also feels no particular hatred either. He thinks about what it would be like to resent the man because unlike their father, he’s self-aware enough to be curious sometimes about the differences between him and everyone else. If he wasn’t, he’d have been stupid enough to ignore how other people can turn them against him. But he doesn’t actually want to be like everyone else, any more than he wants to run Shinra the way his father did simply because that’s how Shinra became powerful. The past doesn’t dictate the future, and there’s more than one way to ensure the public stays in its place.

Anyway, Rufus has his own read on Sephiroth, who frankly strikes him as closer to him in nature than to his brother. “I don’t think Lazard will work him up that much. He’ll just want to hear it directly from me, to know his mother hasn’t twisted any hooks into my head like with him,” he says to Tseng, when the man—who of course saw Rufus’ message to the assistants and interpreted it correctly—slips in after Lazard to discuss. “Make whatever arrangements you deem fit, but I’ll take the meeting.”

Tseng nods expressionlessly. He’s worked with Rufus longer than Lazard has, but as far as Rufus can tell, he’s never made the mistake of wondering whether Rufus has forgotten it was Rufus’ father who originally put him in place, and for why. That he eventually was sensible enough to switch allegiances at the right time is not a reading Tseng would ever adopt; he’s the kind who thinks he was always loyal to one party and one only, Shinra itself.

“I suppose you’ll consult with Valentine, too,” Rufus adds. “The next time Lazard brings up those factional disputes, I want to be able to tell him I don’t need to hear it.”

“I’ll pass the note,” Tseng agrees tonelessly.

But what Shinra means…that makes Rufus smile a little, not looking at the other man. His father thought it could only ever be thunder and lightning, as if they haven’t evolved past village blood feuds. Rufus will not make that mistake. He wants peace because in peacetime people aren’t constantly looking up at the walls, not because he’s an altruist. “Just keep his kills on the Wutaian side of things,” he says. “Crescent still works for us.”

“Valentine understands the political situation, but I’ll remind him,” Tseng says. Still blank-faced, but he pauses a little. He works well with Valentine, and certainly Valentine seems to treat Tseng with far more respect than the documented partner of Sephiroth would owe the man, but there’s a nervous ripple in the man these days. “I think he’d rather she get into trouble with you on her own, sir.”

“Him and Sephiroth both,” Rufus snorts. “Well, I do appreciate someone patient enough to wait for their obsolescence. Would that all of my directs were that farsighted…anything else, Tseng?”

The other man shakes his head, then quietly withdraws as Tuesti comes in with new automation plans. Rufus notes Tseng does linger a little in the doorway, just long enough for Tuesti to twitch anxiously, but then Tseng often does that so he thinks nothing of it. Whatever his reasons, Tseng has watched Rufus for long enough to know how Rufus works. And if he objects, he knows Rufus isn’t sentimental. After all, what’s worked for a long time is no guarantee of the future, as they both know. So Rufus turns to his next meeting and focuses forward.

Chapter 79: Interlude: Sephiroth and Tseng Discuss Retirement Plans (Vincent Facilitates)

Sephiroth hasn’t had to work very much on their relations with Tseng in some time, since there’s thankfully been little friction between the Turks and SOLDIER. Roche is, if not thrilled with his new posting, at least chastened enough by being removed from Genesis’ command to keep his head down, and Tseng rightly seems more interested in having his teams cabin R&D’s latest attempts to go rogue. And Sephiroth usually leaves Tseng to Vincent.

He defers to Vincent because he trusts in the other man, but there’s a point at which trust becomes an excuse for dependency, and he takes their partnership seriously. So he does eventually broach what he’s been mulling over. “It’s not only because I personally like watching you break him,” he tells Vincent. “There’s something he gains from it—something beyond a mere bad habit. But I don’t read it as wholly self-destructive either. I don’t have a final analysis of it, but I can see that much.”

Vincent is already looking at Sephiroth, but the quality of his gaze changes slightly. “Is that what you see? In the two of us?”

Sephiroth blinks once when Vincent broadens to include himself alongside Tseng, then reins in his initial impulse to respond and considers why the man would say that. Vincent had insisted at the outset that they frame their approach to Tseng in terms of what Sephiroth wanted; Sephiroth doesn’t think Vincent is signaling insecurity, but the man often refuses to presume a change of course between them, even if he’s confident in his read of Sephiroth. “We started with him because I had a…I made a request. And it was for personal reasons, not political ones, even if the political reasons became helpful. We’ve continued with him because it’s still politically useful and because we both enjoy it.”

“Yes,” Vincent says simply.

There’s no tinge of denial in his voice, but he’s still watching Sephiroth with that extra dimension to his expression, that faint reserve—rare between them these days—where he thinks it might yet be too early to form an opinion. It makes Sephiroth question his own start. “You don’t punish—you don’t break people either, even if you have no problem with the concept of doing so,” he says after a moment. “That said, I don’t know if Tseng would agree with you on that.”

He sounds a little irritated because he is: he can hear his mother at times like these and he hates the fact that he hasn’t reduced her influence to mere scarring the way he did Hojo. But Vincent remains unruffled and only nods, his eyes flicking up as Sephiroth’s breath comes a little more slowly. “I never had the impression Tseng came to us to be broken,” he says, looking back down to pick up his tea for a sip. “Granted, when I signed my contract, I knew enough of his background that I suspected he’d already been through that.”

In spite of himself, Sephiroth can’t help being curious. He has a dossier on Tseng, of course, but Tseng behaves so impeccably that the facts in it have always seemed exactly that: facts, bones so bare and dried by time that it’s difficult to imagine the flesh that once cloaked them. “Has he?”

Vincent pauses again, though the quality of his surprise this time is less watchful, more bemused. “If you want to sound on him on that, we can arrange something. I think you’ll find it interesting, and I don’t think he’ll refuse.”

He doesn’t point out that Sephiroth has had ample opportunity the previous times they’ve entertained Tseng, and Sephiroth doesn’t take it as a reprimand from the other man. But then, Vincent doesn’t need to chastise when Sephiroth is capable enough of seeing the missed chances himself. “I don’t think he comes purely because he wants to stay on my good side, but it’s been too many times for a mere infatuation—and it’s not I lack trust in you,” Sephiroth mutters.

When he looks up, hearing himself and hearing how clumsy he’s becoming, Vincent has put the tea down again and is leaning forward, closing the space between them. Not touching Sephiroth, but even so he’s shown that whether or not Sephiroth has the skill, he does and he sees well enough what Sephiroth needs.

“You’re interested in him. That’s still all I need to know,” Vincent tells him. Then waits as Sephiroth presses his lips together, beats back the remnants of his mother’s malformed worldview, and summons up the will to smooth his breathing and look the other man in the eye. “And I do like seeing the general from time to time.”

“Your pet general?” Sephiroth finds himself saying, with the smile coming more easily to him than he’d expected.

Vincent touches him then, sliding a finger into his coat-sleeve and dragging it around his wrist. They’re in the office and on working time, so the pressure-marks are gone…but Sephiroth remembers, and remembers also how he’d felt grounded by the cuffs—who had made him feel like that.

“I was interested because—” Sephiroth stops, then orders his thoughts. He knows where the ground lies under him now, and he knows it’s firm. “I am interested because I always thought it was a little more personal to him than just the politics, why he’s so interested in you, and that’s so unexpected…I never thought he had that in him. It seems so natural to him to have his role dictate his entire identity, I honestly thought he lacked the capacity.”

“That’s certainly what Rufus and the rest of Shinra want to see when they look at him,” Vincent notes. Still crooking his finger about Sephiroth’s wrist, with his eyes drifting briefly down to it before coming back to meet Sephiroth’s. “He does do it very well—the only one better I’ve ever seen was you, back when we first met.”

Sephiroth blinks. Vincent doesn’t, but his finger becomes two fingers and then the thumb as well, its pad sliding lightly against Sephiroth’s forearm. Then Vincent lets go and picks up his tea again without looking away.

“I did persuade you otherwise,” Sephiroth says. He shifts his own fingers against the table, touching the very edge of where Vincent’s cup had sat. It’s still warm, as comfortably warm as he feels himself under the other man’s gaze. “Despite your initial impression.”

The top of Vincent’s smile just shows over the rim of his cup. “I don’t think we need to persuade Tseng to mind our goals at this point. But you need to know why he’s still interesting to you, and I don’t mind helping. I think that’s what you wanted to know, Sephiroth, but if not, tell me.”

Vincent is, as always, correct. And Sephiroth needs this for his own reasons, but he isn’t going to turn down the other man’s assistance.

Not when it makes for such a pleasurable time, putting himself into Vincent’s hands and letting Vincent make the setting as conducive as possible for the goals. Because untangling the private and the political at a place like Shinra is like untangling a knot of razor wire, and Sephiroth’s natural inclination is to be a swordsman: slice the knot and scatter the shreds. Yes, he has the advantages of intelligence and education, but he had to learn to be a general. He had to learn patience.

He's learned to be quiet. A quiet, docile, waiting plaything, dressed and readied on the bed. Sheathed in the pink dress like a delicate treat from the pastry counter, with his waist slimmed by the tight leather belt and his swordsman’s hands hidden away in sleek leather gloves, mitted fingers winged out to either side of his belly. Straps cinch his crossed wrists to keep his hands flat against him and pull his upper arms back against his sides so he can’t rise from his semi-reclining position against the pillows, while cuffs at his thighs and ankles pull his legs wide open.

Between them, draping him with minimal decency, the front panel of the dress flutters over a cock tightly laced with leather, a ball sac knotted over with silk cord so the swollen flesh between jumps every time the satin sandpapers against it. He has enough slack to rock his hips and does, futilely, his fingertips flexing at the mitts and rubbing at his dress, because of the vibrator inside of him that has been intermittently pulsing for…

…he doesn’t know. Doesn’t know anything at the moment, this endless moment, except how very, very badly he needs to come, and how very, very securely he’s been bound so not a single speck of that need is going to escape. Not only his cock but his nipples, more silk cord woven over his chest and shoulders so every heaving breath yanks their tender flesh till he feels a single, unbroken, burning pulse running down the front of his body and back between his legs. And his mouth and his eyes, they’re bound too—silk strips he doesn’t even feel now under the leather hood hugging his head so tight it seems like the real layer of skin, trapping him under it as he whines mutely in the dark.

He can’t hear when Vincent comes back. His ears are plugged as well, and he’s grown tired so his head has tipped back and sunk down into the pillows, further muffling any sounds. He feels it first—the brush of fingers against one shoulder, so scorching that he misses the sudden quiescence of the vibrator in his writhing.

Then he feels that too, the way his tortured flesh still spasms to a rhythm with nothing to drive it, the disjointed trembling in his limbs now that the vibrator isn’t burring them into order. He can’t do anything but feel it, too taken up with that to resist when Vincent shuffles him up a few inches, loosened chains grazing his skin, and then slides in behind him. Curving around him in a lover’s embrace, pressing warm kisses to his throat and shoulder and rubbing soothing circles up his shaking thighs as if to heal all his aches.

It's a distraction. Vincent isn’t here to unbind him but to celebrate his bindings, to caress his thigh-cuffs and use them to hike his legs a little more wantonly as something winds silkily against one and then another: Vincent’s tail. Stroking under his dress, snaking itself towards the vulnerable warmth of his body as he mewls into his gag; he hasn’t even been whipped but the skin of his inner thighs is so sensitized he can pick out every strand, their touch branded into his mind so it almost feels as if that tail is coiling just inside his hood, too.

The vibrator is tugged out. Sephiroth feels the rim of his hole lip at the end, a forlorn attempt to resist the inevitable, and then he shudders all over as the tip of Vincent’s tail breaches him. His hips ride down and Vincent’s fingertips dig into his thighs, pinning him as more and more of the tail works into him. He’s gasping now, the world somehow brilliantly white under the hood.

The tail stops where it is. Keeping him filled and trembling, a pretty, unstrung doll as Vincent’s hands shake off the dress’ folds and glide up his body. Something plucks at the back of his head and it feels as if his skull is suddenly expanding so the air thins and he’s dizzy—but it’s only the hood being peeled away.

His head drops back to Vincent’s shoulder immediately. He still can’t see—Vincent presses his mouth to one of Sephiroth’s ears, keeping the plug there in, but lets the other plug fall out as Sephiroth sucks air in through his nose. The skin of his face feels oddly loose, even as the lifting of the hood makes tingling sensations spread across it, and he whimpers, but then settles as fingers rub across his cheek and along his jaw, helping him re-anchor himself in his own body. Then Vincent’s mouth moves away. The other side of his face is wiped off and with the sweat goes the unpleasant loose feeling; his nerves are waking up again, telling him there’s still the taut pull of silk across his eyes and between his lips to outline his world for him.

He whimpers again, but in aching pleasure, his dizziness subsiding enough so that he can still feel the rest of his body, can feel how it twists and shivers in its bonds as Vincent’s hands travel back down it. His nipples are tugged, then bitten sharply so his whimper becomes a cry, though the gag catches it and makes its sharp edges wet and soft.

When Vincent’s hands move back, cupping his pectorals over the silk cords as if rolling a ripe fruit in the palm, the biting at his chest stays. He whines at the nipple clamps but Vincent holds him still till the burn steadies and he accepts it. Aching, hitching around Vincent’s tail, but holding in place as he’s been taught.

“Mouth,” Vincent murmurs.

Sephiroth works his, sucking his gag, but the direction isn’t for him. No, he’s free at least to jerk and moan and shudder as something pushes up his dress again and firm, hot lips suddenly engulf the head of his cock. The mouth suckles at him, lapping away the precome as he strains against the chains and rolls his hips against Vincent. Who’s hard, his erection shaped against Sephiroth’s back, but who seems entirely unhurried as he casually fondles Sephiroth’s chest around the clamps, working the silk cord harness so it tweaks starburst after starburst of bright, liquid agony out of Sephiroth’s nipples. And then deftly massaging between the cords, rubbing the pain in till it washes through Sephiroth’s whole body, turning him soft and yielding.

Vincent’s tail starts to move in him. He drags in air around the sodden gag, cramming in as much as he can, though the belt only lets him push it into his chest and not his belly. Which bows him out against Vincent’s hands as they continue to reorient him about the mounting pain in his nipples, the starbursts now overlapping bolts of lightning. His mind is whiting out again and his cock feels as a thin but thickening string of fire is pushing up into it, and never mind the cock sheath. He needs it too much, he’s been tied up to keep it in but Vincent is fucking it out of him anyway, fucking it out with the tail so the mouth on his cock can suck out the rest of the—

The nipple clamps spring open, and Sephiroth rips open even though Vincent’s bonds never fail, not for a single second.

He comes partly back together towards the end of being milked, but isn’t fully aware again till water is being tipped into his mouth. His gag is out but he’s still blindfolded, with his arm- and leg-bindings contributing more to holding him up against Vincent than his actual body. Vincent’s loosened the belt too—Sephiroth can feel it down to his belly when he clumsily swallows—and his cock is out of its sheath but now held in Vincent’s other hand.

Its head is still cupped in that mouth, too, and when he’s drunk enough water, Vincent tells the mouth to suck him again. “Sore,” Sephiroth groans, uselessly, as his cock hardens. “Sore, please, Vincent…”

Who merely tilts his head around and kisses him through his weak protests, kisses him till his cock is fully erect. And then, one hand gripping Sephiroth’s cock and the other Sephiroth’s throat, in full possession of his toy, Vincent tells him to come.

He does as he’s been trained. Even though he hasn’t recovered, even though his balls feel as if they’re turning themselves inside-out to find the smallest drop of come to lubricate his spasms. He’s been told to come, so he comes.

Something else happens. Sephiroth is vaguely aware of it from where he’s thrown over the pillows like a wrung-out rag—mostly because Vincent pulls his tail out and then shushes him, kissing his throat and rubbing a finger against his hole till he stops whimpering, but then because the bed between his legs is being shaken a little. A body rocking frantically there, occasionally bumping into him, and then small, tight, needy cries suddenly falling into silence. But he doesn’t think very much of it, and simply rests till Vincent comes back.

“…hurts,” Sephiroth murmurs when Vincent’s claws graze against his left inner thigh. “C—hurts, please, your c—”

“Later,” Vincent says, amused. He kisses Sephiroth as he undoes the leg-cuffs and the straps around Sephiroth’s upper arms. He cuts off the chest harness too, then folds Sephiroth over onto one side. His hand touches the blindfold but then leaves when Sephiroth musters up the energy to duck. “After you eat. Lie here and catch up while I warm it up.”

Sephiroth whimpers, trying to sound inviting—but Vincent’s not going to fall for a studied trick like that. He kisses Sephiroth again and then his footsteps move away from the bed.

It’s quiet for a few minutes, except for the…the other set of breathing. And Sephiroth hasn’t been thinking for quite a while, but these days he doesn’t need to clutch desperately at a thought to ensure he keeps it; he used to, because if he wasn’t wholly focused on an idea until its fruition, he didn’t trust that he’d ever be able to see it through…but he’s learned since then. He’s learned not only to wait, but to wake.

The body near his knees shifts so that that part of the bed slopes away towards the floor. Sephiroth is close enough to the middle of the mattress that he is never in any danger of toppling off, but silk is still bound about his eyes, his mitted hands are still buckled together at the wrist…enough time has passed that the silk dress is starting to dry in spots and tighten as it does, pulling especially taut across his buttocks. Only a couple inches lower the air is free to chill the tops of his thighs, prickling the most where Vincent’s tail had rubbed the sweat into his skin. He’s still not the Sephiroth he generally presents to the rest of the world, and even behind the blindfold, he’s aware now that there are other eyes on him than Vincent’s. But he’s still himself, and still knows his own mind.

“To business?” he murmurs. Vincent gave him enough water to replace the moisture the gag stole, but even so, his voice sounds ragged, lacking force.

The movement still stops. He continues to hear the breathing but no rustle of clothing against sheet, and no clinking chain or subtle groan of leather either. Tseng’s free to do as he likes, Sephiroth thinks, and the part of him still luxuriating in fantasy shivers at the implications—but the other part, the part that lets the fantastical roam loose here, knows very well that Tseng, even in the depths of ecstasy, isn’t going to forget Vincent in the other room, or the rest of SOLDIER in the world beyond.

There’s a soft, repeated noise: Tseng licking at his lips, with a sigh caught behind the tongue. Then the bed levels out as Tseng settles back in place. “I…” he starts, raspy and tentative, before a sharp inhale “…not till after dinner. That was the offer.”

Sephiroth shrugs. Then lets the motion travel down his body, shaking out little aches and starts till they shiver back up him and out in a little rough puff of air. He squeezes his knees together, then lets his legs relax; he’s tired enough that the release of his muscles has a sharpness to it, one that cuts up into his groin and draws out another groan from him. “Vincent’s offer.”

Tseng is very still and quiet, the way that a cornered animal with a hiding place but no ready escape route is. But he’s not completely silent and he’s tired as well, Sephiroth can hear it in his breathing, soft as that is. When Sephiroth flexes himself again and ends up jerking his hips hard enough to stir the bed a little, Tseng makes a low, thready noise, the shades of arousal in it muted but not at all absent. Then a lower hiss, as he rearranges himself enough to tug at the sheets lying between them.

“I can wait on him,” Sephiroth says. He tilts his head so that his forehead presses into the bed while the point of his shoulder holds his mouth slightly higher, so the words can run out at their own pace. “But if you’re so eager to move on…do you want to go help him?”

“If he wanted me there, he would have taken me,” Tseng says after a moment.

He’s shaping not only his words but the space between them. The point of sex for Tseng never seems to be to relax—Sephiroth is generally not paying much attention to the other man, but even so, he can observe that. Even blindfolded—he heaves his arms up over his head and then lets them fall back against the pillows, twisting partly onto his back as fresh aches and pains arc warmly along his body. Wide-open and tempting, even with Vincent near, but the still silence around Tseng only grows tenser.

“If you wanted him to take you along, you would have asked,” Sephiroth says after a few seconds have passed. He rolls his shoulders, then moans a little at how his still-tender nipples sting against the transmitted strain; he knows Tseng is looking at him from how the silence in that corner winds even tighter. “You don’t want him to make it safe for you, do you.”

Tseng surprises him by taking a sharp breath—and validates the guess, because the way that breath sings isn’t like the sweep of a blade moving into position, but like the way an overripe fruit splits and opens up under the pressure of a nail. “You want—do you want him to find me with you—”

This isn’t at all like Genesis, it occurs to Sephiroth. Genesis wants his crimes and punishment, or at least he can’t ever quite view it any other way, no matter how it ends up twisting his and Angeal’s relationship…but once he’s felt he’s had enough taken out of him, he does seem more at peace. His mind clears, and he uses his insight to read rather than to mark a target. Some of his and Sephiroth’s more productive conversations come when they’re resting together and waiting for their respective partners to return.

But Tseng, on the other hand…Tseng’s voice shakes when he talks about Vincent finding him as Sephiroth has never heard him. And Tseng doesn’t leave these encounters looking as if they’ve refreshed him; on the contrary, he always looks as if he means to burrow into a safe house alone for a few days. But he still takes them up when they make an offer to him, still looks for a moment as if he’s been aching for it, and he’s not the kind of man who would allow himself that if he truly thought he wouldn’t return. At least, Sephiroth had assumed that, but this is what doesn’t quite feel settled to him.

“Do you want him to?” Sephiroth asks in reply, and then, when Tseng’s breathing roughens, he drags his legs up towards himself. His dress is still pushed up about his hips and he feels it tuck up further, letting the open air flirt over the bottom curve of his buttocks. “I want him to do what he wants with you, Tseng. I don’t care about the details, Vincent knows that…do you? Is there a preference I should know about? There are two of us here.”

For a moment Tseng stops breathing. Then he spits out an exhale, sounding as if he’s caught a laugh together with a curse and decided to strangle the two and throw them both away. “If you want my head—”

“I’d have it already,” Sephiroth says. Relaxed, even amused, though for a moment he considers rolling off the pillows and forcing the issue. But his goal isn’t to torture the other man, he remembers, and so he only lets his legs slide down the pillows so he doesn’t have to expend as much energy to keep them raised. If Tseng’s breath hitches, that’s entirely the other man’s reaction. “Though I wonder occasionally whether you’re trying to issue me an invitation. I don’t care about the details, Tseng, but Vincent does, and I do care about satisfying him. He likes clarity on a target, as you know.”

Tseng is silent for a few more seconds, long enough that Sephiroth starts to think this might have to go into a second encounter. There’s only so much of the afterglow that Sephiroth is willing to sacrifice to his own curiosity.

But before he has to make that decision, Tseng inhales. “Not yet,” he says, harsh enough to sound honest—and steady enough to not sound as if he hasn’t thought this through. “I know, but that’s not an invitation you’ll get from me. I’m not a rival, Sephiroth, I’m never going to—I have no interest in that. And I’m not fooling myself about what this is. Business and this, I know where the lines are. It might seem like…we’re both realists. It could happen someday. But if it does, I admit I do have a preference between you two. I’d rather he deals with me if it ever comes to it.”

Sephiroth considers that. A muscle in his left leg spasms painfully and he shifts himself without thinking, only to find a few more muscles straining; he turns his hips against the pillows and lets his knee slide down his other leg to relieve that. The aching reduces and he breathes in and suddenly, he knows Vincent has come back into the room.

He can’t see the man, but he can feel the gaze—can feel how it slides over his tired body and smooths away some of the soreness. But he wants to finish this first so he can give himself up to that. “I think he’d remember you exist without this, Tseng,” he says.

“And if you asked him, he’d let you deal with me instead. I know that. So rest assured, if I can’t avoid it, then I’d do my damnedest to make it so you never ask him,” Tseng says. His voice is still rough but a kind of resignation has crept into it as well, like someone speaking near the end of a marathon, knowing the immediate future holds pain regardless of the path. He hasn’t detected Vincent yet, Sephiroth thinks. “My preference is because he does remember—he’s known for that. He remembers even when it’s beneath someone else to bother, and he takes care of business as business.”

“Rufus—”

“I know where and who and what I work for, Sephiroth. I think we understand each other best on that point,” Tseng says, with uncharacteristic force. “So I see to my own arrangements and I don’t ask you or SOLDIER for that, I only ask to coordinate—”

He cuts off. Then he makes a choked, wanting noise—or Vincent makes him make that noise, followed by the sound of sheets dragging with a body, and then thumps by the side of the bed. Tseng gasps once more time, then diminishes to low panting as fingers close over Sephiroth’s bound wrists and Sephiroth makes his own gasp into warmly demanding lips.

“Are you ready?” Vincent asks, once he’s satisfied himself. It’s a tease, the question; he’s cupping Sephiroth’s balls in his claws, rolling the thin skin dangerously near the sharp tips as Sephiroth groans into his face.

Sephiroth makes a wordless wanting noise and turns himself over the other man. They do have dinner, with him in his pretty, soiled dress kneeling at Vincent’s feet and Tseng no less subservient for all that the man is permitted to sit in a chair, and then…there’s some sort of business transacted. He isn’t in the room for that—Vincent strips and washes him and tucks him into bed before going back to Tseng—but Vincent explains it to him later that night, along with the parts Sephiroth was present for.

“If I agree to do it and the requester has given me no reason to target them instead, I’ll carry the job out even if it ends up happening later than expected,” Vincent says, running his fingers through Sephiroth’s hair as Sephiroth rests his head on the man’s belly. “That’s what he meant. I’ve killed long after the requester died, when their heirs had no interest in the matter…the agreement wasn’t with them, and I generally see no reason why they should be able to revisit it. The only person who can tell me the circumstances have changed is the one who made the agreement. Some people find this eccentric of me.”

“Some people are too foolish to deserve your consideration,” Sephiroth says, and then can’t help a contented noise as Vincent reaches around to caress along the silk collar he’s wearing. Only silk to sleep in, a collar and cock sheath just clinging enough to hold his sore flesh together, since fatigue alone is going to keep him soft and pliable. “Then Tseng’s committed you to be some kind of fallback?”

“He didn’t actually ask, if that’s what you mean,” Vincent says. His fingers slow for a moment, then draw back through Sephiroth’s hair and skate down Sephiroth’s back instead, making room for Sephiroth to tilt his head up to look the other man in the face. “And I don’t think he will. But from what he said to you, he makes correct assumptions—if he needed to be cleared out of your way, I…respect him enough to do it personally. He won’t remove himself and I can understand why he might not want Rufus to dictate the manner of his exit, even if he’s not willing to leave his post before that.”

Sephiroth mulls over this. “Rufus is less prone to unreasonable initiatives than his father, but…he does still fund Mother’s teams. I agree with that now, but if I didn’t…if and when I ever change my mind on that, I don’t know whether he’d side with her.”

“Tseng doesn’t either. I don’t think he meant to tip us off to that, but…” Vincent is quiet for a moment. His fingertips run back up to Sephiroth’s nape, then curl lightly around it as Vincent puts his head back against the wall. “I still think these are all contingencies. Lucrecia isn’t insane enough to think she can convince everyone of her value—she’s always been more realistic than Hojo ever was. She works to be too valuable. Rufus transacts on that, not on personal preferences. Tseng and I both know that.”

“Then you’d rather not kill Tseng early,” Sephiroth says. He levers himself off Vincent’s lap, then smiles as he catches Vincent watching the little hitches and shivers that run through him. Once he’s pulled his legs in place, he straddles the other man and sinks down to tuck his head against Vincent’s shoulder. “He’s prettier alive than dead, I agree.”

“My toy likes having his own toy?” Vincent says, amused. He reaches under the sheets and cups each of Sephiroth’s buttocks, spreading them slightly as he nudges Sephiroth into a different position. “I should make you general more often. You make a very pretty one—I should try the pink dress under your coat sometime.”

Sephiroth closes his eyes and lets his breathing tremble as Vincent traces his fading bruises. “Come to my office and dress me…” he says, going soft under Vincent’s hands. “Tell me what I should be.”

“You tell me what you want to be,” Vincent says. His hands stroke away some of Sephiroth’s hair, then settle against Sephiroth’s thighs. “And then I show you how it could be…but I wait till I can see what you see. That’s why I make you tell me, even when you think you’d rather think about nothing.”

It’s not a reprimand. To call it a confession would be misnaming as well, because there’s never any hint that shame drives the timing of Vincent’s statements. But even so—there’s always that feeling that Vincent would not have ever said such a thing, if it wasn’t for how they’ve cleared the space for it. Both of them—they both did, though in the beginning Sephiroth thought of it as Vincent sweeping away the accumulated history in his own head. But he thinks he sees now how it’s shifted things for Vincent as well. It’s one thing to align yourself with your target’s sightline, to study them so well that you can pick out their next step without thinking, but another to take notes on it from them. And then think about it, and adjust, and return to see if they do see the same thing after all.

That isn’t a concern with a target, when the eventual goal is death. It’s only a concern if one chooses to find a way to live. A lifestyle, Sephiroth thinks. And then he noses up against Vincent’s neck, sighing as the other man pets him. “Can I prefer not to think about anyone else at the moment? Tseng or…Rufus or Genesis or…”

“You can think what you like,” Vincent tells him, a laugh curling in the man’s voice. “I’ll still be here when you make up your mind this time.”

A life, Sephiroth thinks, and then he closes his eyes and doesn’t think at all.

Chapter 80: Side-Story: Another POV, Part 2

She wasn’t there when he was helpless and in the hands of those who saw him as nothing more than a disposable tool. This was an inevitable consequence of her choice to leave him behind, that she would not be there to know when he needed her, and she does not pretend it surprised her to learn about it.

She hadn’t gone to him either, right when she had heard. There were reasons for that, reasons based on logic and practicality, but at the end of the day, they had also been based on her choices and she could have always chosen to be irrational and impractical. She could have chosen to be at his side no matter what, and she had not done so. She does not allow herself to forget this.

She had wept when she had heard. Had wept, and curled up with the memories of her young son cascading through her head, but she admits they had been a late funeral march. That beautiful, unscarred boy was already long buried at that point, and the fault for that was not entirely at the doorstep of others. But she had wept, and she had loved that boy.

She still loves that boy. She may die and he will never know the manner of her death or the reasons she chose that led up to it, but she has come to terms with that. She is not a fool, not now, about her role in his life—her lack of one—and she will not sacrifice whatever peace and happiness he has extracted for himself simply to satisfy her own selfish pride. If she had wanted to help, she would have chosen differently, and now, she’s too far from his life to have the knowledge on how best to intervene, even if she hadn’t long since lost the right to do so.

But she loves him, and she will never forgive those who have hurt him. And it’s irrelevant how that came about; she can choose to ignore whatever role he may have played leading up to his pain as much as she chose back then to ignore his pain altogether. She makes her choices with open eyes, that’s as much as she’s always done.

So when she finds the man in a featureless suburb, retired and pottering harmlessly around with people who know him only as a quiet, polite, lonely fellow living on his pension…when she finds him, she does not pass by. He’s as out of the currents of politics and power as she is, a forgotten pebble cast aside and slowly sinking into oblivion, but that makes it the right time for her. Because once he worked in a lab in Shinra—never very high up, he never mastered the skills to advance him to the attention of executives, but he was a solid and dependable worker and he did whatever he was told. He kept the lab inventory up-to-date and tirelessly sourced even the rarest materials for his superiors, and never once asked why a lab would need so many sedatives, so many medical supplies, so many blood transfusion bags of a type relatively rare outside of Wutai. Never asked why certain batches of medical waste came back out with very specific, very unusual instructions for disposal. He never asked, and even now he likely hasn’t any idea what the exact purpose of many of those supplies was—but others would find this useful information, and others would not have her son’s interests at the heart of their curiosity.

She’s not cruel. Cruelty in her current decade of life is as much unnecessary effort as it is a sign of declining mental state, and so she simply…comes into his life. She’s an old woman, virtually invisible in certain roles, and his pension stretches to a monthly cleaner for his house. She doesn’t make a point of letting him know at the end what he had participated in, or why it matters to her, and merely takes an opportune moment to introduce an efficient chemical. He dies on his bathroom floor, grasping futilely at the pains in his chest, going in a matter of minutes.

The local coroner takes only a little more time to process the death and nothing at all stands out about it. There’s a funeral, and away in Midgar proper, her son is going about dealing with his enemies and protecting his own. This won’t distract him from that, and neither will she, as she leaves once again.

Chapter 81: Interlude: Sephiroth Helps Vincent with Vincent’s Version of Taxes

Notes:

A little bit of breathplay in this chapter.

The sound of Vincent tapping away at his tablet ceases. Vincent doesn’t use an external keyboard so the slight brush of his fingertips is barely audible even in the quiet office, but Sephiroth has become so attuned to the other man that he shudders heavily. His legs try to draw themselves up the couch, but a combination of his sweat-slicked skin sticking to the cushions and the chain locked about his tape-bound ankles pulls them up short. It makes him rock on his hip, his arms flexing in the tape sheathing them from elbow to wrist, and he can feel his fingerpads sticking where their helpless swiping runs across his buttocks.

“I should remember this one,” Vincent says, the dry, faintly self-deprecating tone of his voice in high contrast with how his hand moves assuredly from the point of Sephiroth’s shoulder into the ropes knotted over Sephiroth’s back. They form an inescapably teasing web that wraps around Sephiroth’s entire torso, ensuring that the smallest twitch at them will pluck his sore nipples, scratch the tender places between his ribs, roll tauntingly over his abdominals. And Vincent isn’t twitching: he twines the ropes up between his fingers so they yank cruelly all the way down to the aching cock imprisoned between Sephiroth’s thighs. “Explosive rounds—not armor-piercing, they actually carry a chemical load. I know that’s not under mortars but which category of special ammunition…”

Sephiroth is already whimpering, his nose and mouth pressed in an ultimately futile plea for mercy against Vincent’s knee, when Vincent twists the ropes again. The cut of the ropes angles down his belly and groin, catching about his prick and balls in a way that lances the breath from him, a guttural cry that scores his throat near-bloody as it comes out.

After, he breathes. It stings, stings deep even as the cool air rushes into his lungs and feeds his dazed brain just sufficiently to dredge up the correct answer. “Eighties, it’s—it’s in the eighties for handguns, you have to look under caliber first.”

He can’t see what Vincent is doing, but can only lie there in darkness and listen as Vincent swipes at the tablet. Then Vincent makes a pleased noise. Sephiroth whines, even as the ropes loosen and Vincent’s fingers run along them, rubbing soothingly over abraded skin.

“That’s it. Never makes sense to me, they don’t come in standard calibers but Shinra puts them under ‘additional sizes’ anyway,” Vincent observes. He leans back against the couch, his caresses growing a little more absentminded as they work back up to Sephiroth’s shoulder. “Good.”

Sephiroth, knowing by now what to do, inhales. At the peak of his breath, when he’ll feel the strain against his expanded windpipe best, Vincent tightens the coils. Rounds of muscular tail, unyielding but not inflexible in the way they’re able to communicate the power he has over Sephiroth right now, looped twice about the throat and then once over Sephiroth’s blindfold. When his breath breaks into a gasp, Vincent uses the leverage to tilt his head back, pushing at forehead and chin till his open lips are perfectly positioned for the lone finger Vincent slides between them.

“Good,” Vincent says again. A lower, lazier murmur, accented by the playful way his finger traces a zigzag on Sephiroth’s tongue. His tail relaxes just enough to let Sephiroth’s head find its natural resting place on his thigh again. “That’s three done. Three more…I realize I’m only forced to do this once a year to your quarterly, but I think I would’ve gone on a rampage by now if I had to do it that often.”

Forms, a small, strangely alien part of Sephiroth’s mind supplies. Forms, that’s what Vincent means. Covert ops doesn’t have to submit regular expense reports but they do have to provide annual accounting to back up the stipends they draw, and Vincent…Vincent dislikes the process. But he likes Sephiroth like this, shivering in his bonds, waiting with enforced patience for the man to inquire now and again about some arcane detail of Procurement’s byzantine classification system. And if Sephiroth answers him correctly, eventually there will be no more forms, and then Vincent promised a cock in place of the thick plug currently seated in him, a hand for the ropes wrapped about his own prick, soft suckling lips on the rasped lines drawing burning drops of sweat across his body.

That wasn’t a question just now, but Sephiroth still responds, lapping at Vincent’s finger till the man draws it out. Then he groans and nuzzles Vincent’s leg as much as his leash will allow, rocking his head while Vincent wipes the finger clean on his cheek.

“Hold,” Vincent says. His hand briefly comes curling over Sephiroth’s mouth, but lifts even before Sephiroth has finished sucking in his breath. Then it drops down to pet at Sephiroth’s chest, working temptingly down the ropes towards the nipple, as Vincent sighs and adjusts his other leg. “Now for industrial incidentals, and I understand this is where I should slot poisons and other off-label uses…hold…”

Three more. But it doesn’t truly matter how many, and as Vincent begins tapping away again, the numbers and rationales start to drift out of Sephiroth’s mind. He’s been told to hold, so he holds.

Chapter 82: Fourteenth Vacation: Rehab

Summary:

Good amount of breathplay here, involving water. References to chronic conditions but nothing explicit.

“It’s not cost-effective to permanently terminate every failed recruit. For one, it’s damaging to future recruitment efforts, and Rufus at least cares about that,” Sephiroth says. He has to pause and control himself enough to untwist his mouth before he can go on, even though this is a discussion he has to have in some capacity at least once a year with the other executives. “Besides, most of the disabilities these days only disqualify one from SOLDIER, and don’t keep someone from contributing at all. There are several other career paths for a person with enhanced senses and increased tolerance for Mako exposure, and the expense of the healthcare support they require is more than offset by the value they bring.”

This is also not a discussion he needs to have with Vincent, but the other man walks alongside him as they tour the aging rehab center and listens patiently to his ramblings. The facilities are still functional but badly in need of an upgrade, from the chipped paint on the doorways to the water-stained, cheap linoleum. No, a full gut renovation, Sephiroth thinks as he stifles a grimace at the faint odor of damp rot that rises with every footstep. He’d already thought so when he’d been reviewing the application sent in by the center’s management, and his in-person inspection is a completely unnecessary confirmation.

Unnecessary but for the ridiculous politics of where the Shinra employees this center currently services will need to go while it’s shut down. Finance had grumbled about the projected costs, but they at least had quieted once they’d calculated out the post-renovation increase in employee productivity. It’d been the other executives, most of whom have no direct interest in the matter, who’d complained about the employee relocation. Who still were complaining about it, even after Rufus had signaled his—disinterested, but still clear—support for the move.

“It’s for a few months, and they won’t see any of them unless they purposefully go tour that floor. It’s as if they think these people are lepers,” Sephiroth can’t help spitting out when they’re near the end of their tour. Alone with Vincent, his words safely sealed behind thick walls and Vincent’s command of Shinra security monitoring, but even so, Sephiroth’s voice stays low. “No, worse than that—even when people knew nothing about medicine, they only thought leprosy spread by touch. It’s as if the mere reminder of their existence makes those idiots think—”

“Think that everything they’ve invested in SOLDIER might be as ruined underneath, and then they’ll have to face the consequences of their freeloading someday?” Vincent says. Calmly but not in cold blood, not with how he turns and puts his hand up to Sephiroth’s throat.

Sephiroth exhales roughly. He can feel how the tendons in his neck press out into Vincent’s palm, even as the other man pulls him forward; he shakes his head, then jerks it backward as he closes his eyes. Strong, firm fingertips slide around to his nape and then into his hairline, digging expertly at the wellsprings of tension…and he knows anyway that Vincent is never here to oppose him. Never here to even say stupid, thoughtless things that betray not only his fellow executives’ shallowness but also their true feelings about him and all the other enhanced SOLDIERs—and despite all his achievements, Sephiroth is well-aware of how little separates his fellow Firsts, or even himself, from this center’s clientele. One bad mission, one unpredictable mutation, one intentional gap in critical medical knowledge…yes, his mother has thoroughly educated him on all these possibilities. He’s made a lifetime out of wresting that education out of her control, but only by learning even better than her how fragile the boundaries are.

Two fingertips press into his scalp, then rub about as Sephiroth twists and hisses out of his thoughts. Then he sighs, relaxing as a little of the anger releases under the touch. He rocks his head back into Vincent’s hand, then exhales again and he can hear how much less strained that is. “Sometimes I wonder if they would have even let me grow up, if I’d come out with a face more like that Jenova thing Hojo had been chasing through the history books…you could hardly call that pretty.”

“No,” Vincent says, tone so warmly amused that Sephiroth smiles without opening his own eyes. He continues massaging the back of Sephiroth’s neck until Sephiroth reluctantly shakes him off, aware that they’ve still a few hours of official duties to get through. “Rufus isn’t going to reverse himself and pick a fight with you over this, whatever the others say.”

“No, but he’ll take it out of my budget, even though it’s other teams who reap the benefits,” Sephiroth mutters. He looks around at the small room they’re in—one of the private therapy suites—and then turns towards the door. “At least Tuesti and Scarlet are offering chargebacks, even if Scarlet is making it out as a personal favor.”

“Scarlet won’t touch you.” Vincent has pulled his fingers out of Sephiroth’s hair, but his hand is still sitting at the base of Sephiroth’s throat. It curls around that as he tugs Sephiroth in towards him again, smiling in satisfaction at the low, caught noise that Sephiroth makes. “No one is going to touch you but me, no one is going to deal with you but me. That’s why I came.”

Sephiroth feels another small, wanting noise tremble in his throat. He swallows but it sticks in place, and he can feel his muscles work around it as he leans in towards the other man. It’s a noncritical, selfish indulgence, having Vincent along on these inspections—Vincent won’t be in the room with him when he rams the finalized plans down the other executives’ throats, and he wouldn’t want that even if it was on offer. Selfish of him, but he wants this so badly he would rather sacrifice his pride than to let it be tainted by the day-to-day humiliation he has to put up with.

He wants it, and Vincent sees that and, as always, humors him. “How do you want to come?” the man murmurs, pulling Sephiroth in till he’s just keeping Sephiroth’s mouth from the promise of his own, his fingers now a tight, commanding grip on Sephiroth’s nape. “My pretty soldier…”

“I—” Sephiroth swallows hard again, and this time the noise comes unstuck, a thready, needy groan that makes Vincent smile and grip him that much tighter. “I don’t—I don’t want to—”

Vincent’s brows twitch ever-so-slightly. His eyes don’t cool but they do search Sephiroth’s face. “Come?” he says, and then gives Sephiroth a little slack to hitch imploringly before he tugs them together again. “Not at all?”

“Not—not here. Not here, please,” Sephiroth begs, even as he can feel his cock stiffen against the inside of his trousers. “Not—not as a soldier.”

Selfish of him, when they both know Vincent has to leave in the morning. But Vincent only hesitates for a second, and that has nothing to do with his own schedule. Sephiroth can tell by the way Vincent’s eyes flick over him again, checking for something only he can provide…and he can tell when Vincent finds it.

The other man nods. He gives Sephiroth’s nape a last caressing squeeze, and then nudges Sephiroth back. Sephiroth brushes mindlessly at his coat, working to control his breathing, and Vincent silently keeps him company till he can. Then Vincent steps back, opens the door, and lets Sephiroth lead him out of the room.

After hours, when they’re the only ones in the facility, he lets Sephiroth do the reverse. But this time Sephiroth is stripped of his uniform and dressed in a pretty white slip, its lace-edged hem barely reaching past his buttocks. It’s cotton, not the usual silk, which he understands when the air inside the room hits him.

Moist, warm, no longer smelling of mold and crumbling materials but carrying a clean mineral scent, like an idealized seashore breeze—silk would quickly grow sodden but the cotton, while clinging, still lets enough air through for Sephiroth to feel every prickle on his body. Tendrils of steam rise lazily from the filled tub in the corner, its contours wide and rounded with bars set about its sides and two metal rings dangling from the ceiling overhead. To provide assistance to those who don’t have full use of all their limbs, but that isn’t how Vincent is going to use them, even if Sephiroth is temporarily without use of his own limbs.

He's already bound, tape strapping his wrists behind his back and more around his thighs, keeping him to a slow, whimpering shuffle as Vincent flicks almost-scratches just under his slip’s hem with a claw. Then the man reaches down and takes one buttock in hand, fondling it with lascivious roughness, claw-tips catching at Sephiroth’s skin as Sephiroth groans behind a tape gag.

There’s a plastic mat rolled out beside the tub. Vincent steers Sephiroth down onto his knees on it, facing the tub, and then drops a heavy bag behind Sephiroth. When Sephiroth twitches, Vincent runs one claw down his back from his bundled-up hair to his bound wrists. Then chuckles, petting Sephiroth on a shivering shoulder. He goes and closes the door, its heavy thud making Sephiroth jerk again.

“Nervous,” Vincent notes as he comes back behind Sephiroth. He draws up the back of the slip and rubs at Sephiroth’s buttock, then slides a finger under the matching cotton panties so he can toy with the plug holding Sephiroth open. When Sephiroth moans and squirms on his knees, Vincent only works his finger further down, now teasing at Sephiroth’s perineum while his thumb keeps the plug rocking. “Do you think you’re going to come already?”

Sephiroth shakes his head without thinking, then shudders as Vincent easily drapes himself over his back. Hand still exploring between Sephiroth’s legs, other arm now coming around to pinch at Sephiroth’s nipples through the slip—this one doesn’t have slits for them and the cotton, soft as it is, is noticeably scratchier on the swelling nubs. Sephiroth moans again, trying to spread his legs, and Vincent jerks him backward. Holding him firmly as that hand teases along his cock, now over the panties, making them damp as Vincent traces the silk cords he'd bound up Sephiroth’s cock with earlier.

“Not a soldier now, far too pretty for that,” Vincent sighs as his fingers stroke and roll, coaxing Sephiroth’s flesh into torturing itself in its bondage. “No soldier, but you’re still not going to come.”

Need surges through Sephiroth. He arches in Vincent’s embrace, his head going back onto the man’s shoulder as his hips press futilely into Vincent’s hand. When he’s forced down, he whimpers, twists himself to nuzzle pleadingly through the tape gag—but he’s denied. With a kiss to the temple and a laugh, and then a hard shove forward against the tub.

Vincent lets go of him. Lingering desperation makes Sephiroth mindlessly rub his cheek against the tub wall, watching as Vincent unzips the bag. Watching as the first belt comes out: this one is for him, the broad black leather one that laces tightly around his waist so his breathing shallows and the cotton slip goes taut across his nipples. Then the second: this one is for Vincent, and Vincent wields it with seemingly careless skill as he shakes it out to the side before sending it cracking across Sephiroth’s buttocks.

Sephiroth’s rucked-up slip falls back over him as he gasps and jerks from the blow, and the graze of the cotton feels like red-hot fingers across the newly-welted skin. He squirms as Vincent reaches out and pulls the hem back up, and then keeps squirming as Vincent lands two more on him.

He doesn’t see the belt drop out of Vincent’s hand because he’s turned to press his face against the tub wall, so cool now compared to his burning buttocks. His lips stretch under the tape, then go slack as his belt pushes back against his groans. His legs wobble in their bonds and he slips a little down the tub.

Then jerks back up against it, crying out into his gag, as Vincent strikes him with a flail. It feels softer than the belt—deceptively so, softer but its many strands scatter across his skin and sting between the welts as well as across them. It’s hard to say whether the fresh marks or the existing ones hurt more…and then Vincent strikes him again and he can only writhe and moan and press himself against the tub, trying to draw its coolness out into his heating flesh.

When he hears the flail hit the ground instead of him, Sephiroth flinches anyway. Phantom lightning zings through him and he shudders at nothing. Then at something, at soothing hands that stroke along his arms before delicately feathering along his buttocks, touching his bruised flesh just lightly enough to draw as much pleasure as pain, as he’s carefully gathered up. He’s kissed along the throat, the jaw, then directly over the gag as he sags into Vincent’s arms, grateful for the support.

Vincent turns him around and lays him back against the tub. Both hands cupping his face, thumbs pulling the tape over his mouth taut as the other man passionately kisses him again. He tries to meet Vincent, working his lips through the tape, and then falls back, his wheezing inhale dragging him down as Vincent then nuzzles down the front of his throat. The man’s hands follow along, then go ahead of that warm, comforting mouth, running down to his chest. Clever fingers brush along his pectorals, then tug at the front of his bodice. He hadn’t realized when Vincent had put the slip on him, but the bodice can unlace, and Vincent now does that. Then gently eases the shoulder straps down his arms, one by one, until his entire breast is bared.

His nipples have recovered from their earlier teasing and pebble into Vincent’s caressing fingers. He’s caught a little of his breath now and is moaning behind his gag, lolling his head as Vincent nips his throat and plays with his nipples. Then he looks up, feeling Vincent’s mouth lift from him, and sees Vincent’s smiling face, just before Vincent takes his head and wraps a cloth about his eyes.

Sephiroth starts to squirm again as the blindfold grows snug. Vincent presses a kiss to his forehead, then pats at his right pectoral with one hand while moving off Sephiroth. Then his hand slips away and Sephiroth hears the whisk of the flail in the air. He manages a stillborn whimper before it comes down.

The first strike over his chest stills him. Then the stinging blossoms into true heat and the air in Sephiroth’s lungs heaves him up, throws his head back against the tub and lifts him directly into the next blow. He trembles violently, the fresh pain mixing deliciously with the fading edges of the first wave—and then there’s the echoing ache of his abused buttocks, the throbbing need of his bound cock, all of it coming together to flood conscious thought out of his mind.

He drops back against the tub, blind and mute and bound, helplessly twisting against the flail’s lashes until even moving washes away from him, and all he wants to do is let the fire burn through him.

Vincent always knows when he’s like that. The flail promptly stops and then the kisses and touches come again, slowly and expertly drawing him out of his daze till he’s just aware enough to want again, aware enough to crook his head sightlessly towards that loving mouth…and then Vincent stops that as well.

He’s pulled off the tub and down onto his back on the mat, mewling a little, the occasional shiver going through his otherwise compliant body as Vincent rearranges him. The tape around his thighs is cut and then peeled away, and then each leg is folded so his knees are pointed up. They’re pushed a few inches apart, just enough for him to feel his sweat-soaked panties pull off his skin and for that tantalizing space to spur him into a sluggish wiggle. He can feel the silken cords stretching around his cock and balls as they roll in his panties and he writhes again, groaning, cheek grazing the mat.

Vincent pays his feeble efforts little mind, judging from the brisk way the man goes about tying him up even more. His legs are bound separately, thigh to calf webbed with rope, with what feels like a piece of rubber slipped behind the knee. Then his arms are tied to his torso over his belt; when Vincent pushes him up to thread the rope behind him, the shift of weight onto his welted buttocks makes him whine. Vincent brushes kisses along the tops of his shoulders and down his throat till he quiets, and all the while the rope is knotted and wrapped around him till he’s utterly secured.

Last, Vincent takes his head in both hands and drapes a piece of cotton over his face. He stirs and Vincent moves the cloth, lets him feel how his nose comes through a hole but nothing else—a hood, he realizes, just as Vincent starts to fasten up the back. “I want you to hear,” the man tells Sephiroth. “And you’re going to feel—this way you’ll feel the water soak up.”

Sephiroth can only moan in response, but he does that much, moaning and hitching himself the little he’s able as the cotton is drawn as close about his head as the rest of his bonds are about his body.

When the hood is on, Vincent rests his head against the mat again and then reaches over him, tugging at something at the sides of his chest: the open bodice. The ropes tying his arms still allow Vincent to pull that closed and lace it back up, with plentiful touching of Sephiroth’s lashed pectorals and sore nipples. Then Vincent gives his nipples a few extra tugs through the cotton, chuckling—yes, Sephiroth can hear—as Sephiroth can only make muffled whimpers.

Then he’s left alone for a few minutes. Vincent walks around him, moving things. Metal clinks, there’s a brief mechanical grinding that quickly smooths out into a low whirr, and then Sephiroth feels the other man standing over him again. The rubber looped behind his knees is tugged, first on the right side and then the left. Then both his knees are pulled up, lifting him enough for the slip to slowly peel off his buttocks under its own damp weight, letting the air tantalize their still stinging-skin.

Vincent steps up to his shoulders and then scoops hands under those, lifting him at that end as the whirring continues and his legs are raised at the other. The rings above the tub, drifts a stray thought through Sephiroth’s head. His knees are tied to those—he’s raised high up and then steered to where he can feel the waters steaming against his back. And then he’s lowered.

When the water touches him, it’s warm enough to feel—it’s hot against his buttocks, hot where it splashes up from his hands, which were first to go in. He jerks and whines and then suddenly his head drops back—Vincent had been cradling it on one arm but that support vanishes and Sephiroth goes straight into the water up to his gagged mouth.

He feels that through the hood. And he feels it again as Vincent pushes his head back up and releases his pinched nostrils, the only reason he isn’t also sneezing water out of them. Sephiroth sucks air through the hood, shuddering all over, the swaying in the ropes as they pinch and bite and nip into him, and feels how the water creeps up over his jaw and chin as it soaks through the cotton.

“Hold,” Vincent tells him.

But Sephiroth can’t. He writhes in his ropes, every movement flicking more water up onto his welted buttocks, and every drop feeling like a finger pressing roughly in and then dragging back down his singing skin. Enough water comes through the hood to start running into his ears and he twists his head against it—Vincent grips him firmly, makes him stop, gives him something to sag against as he slowly, slowly, relaxes. Feels it burning again, all over, burning everywhere and when it burns everywhere he only has to let it wash over him.

“Down,” Vincent says, a second before his fingers close over Sephiroth’s nose again.

This time Sephiroth’s entire body drops a few inches, not just his head. It’s not a jerk but a smooth descent, but even so, he can’t help trying to hike himself as the heat spreads over his back and then seems to melt its way between his legs, over his buttocks, over his cock. But Vincent is holding his head underwater and the swing of his body in the ropes seems slower now, the darkness seems softer even as red-white bursts of lightning streak across the backs of his eyes. He goes limp a little quicker, and when Vincent lets him up to breathe, he does it in long, trembling inhales rather than frantic huffs.

“So pretty,” Vincent sighs, and then he bends down and kisses Sephiroth, who feels his mouth as if the gag and hood were nothing. Commanding but also comforting, his mouth, and when he lifts away, Sephiroth shudders once, whimpers, and then goes quiet.

Slack, pretty, bound up tightly so he can do nothing and wants nothing but to hang there for Vincent’s pleasure. Vincent chuckles, touching Sephiroth’s cheek and then throat. Then moving his hand further down, stopping to caress inside the bodice; the water doesn’t quite come over Sephiroth’s chest so his fingers wash in some under the cotton and the scorch of it makes the lashmarks pulse, makes Sephiroth’s nipples pebble till Vincent’s fingers find them and twist them tender and sore again. At first the touches make Sephiroth move, but only briefly, only a little before he rocks back in his rope cradle to an aching daze.

He groans as Vincent’s hand reaches his crotch. The way his legs are tied makes it easy for Vincent to cut off his panties, and he does arch as Vincent lazily rubs the heel of his hand all over Sephiroth’s bound cock. Vincent accounts for that, raising his head to keep his nose clear, but then letting him back down till he’s just barely free to breathe as he sags.

His cock, twitching in its silken harness, is nudged out of the way. Vincent’s fingers explore behind it, toying with his balls, and then roams further Sephiroth trembles around a moan but doesn’t struggle. He’s pliant now, floating with his neck cradled easily by Vincent’s one hand as the other plucks out his plug and then holds him open for the familiar press of Vincent’s tail. His body takes that in, feels it filling him, feels the ropes and hood and belt strapping his flesh snugly in place for Vincent.

Vincent moves his hand back, and without his arm pressing Sephiroth’s left knee out of the way, the ropes slinging up Sephiroth’s legs let them drift closer together. Vincent lets them, giving Sephiroth a caress over the belly and then another one over the bodice as the ropes, not Sephiroth, eventually decide how to settle.

“Pretty,” Vincent says quietly. He’s reaching for something off to the side. “So pretty, but let’s see…”

An icy spear drops onto Sephiroth’s upper right chest. He twitches, then goes slack again as the drop slides off into the bath. Vincent makes a thoughtful noise before reaching down and rubbing a small circle against Sephiroth’s chest, just over the bodice laces. Then a light weight comes down there, followed by a slight increase. Sephiroth moans, pleasantly unclear about what the man is doing, and the weight lessens briefly. He hears tiny clinking noises, not quite metallic—ice. Ice in a cup.

A cup that Vincent sets back on him, sitting on something else—a saucer, something like that to keep the cold glass from directly touching him. He realizes that just as another freezing drop lands on his right shoulder just above the hot water.

Sephiroth shivers and hears the cup rattle on the saucer. Then Vincent’s hand comes down, cupping over his eyes. He mewls helplessly, understanding, and breathes in deeply even before Vincent tells him: “Down.”

An endless time underwater, his breath held not so much by him but for him, Vincent’s hands over his nose and under his head. Then surfacing, breathing—stuttering as Vincent’s tail suddenly starts to work in him. Pressing and rolling and driving in and out of him, fucking him through his initial air-starved spasms and back to perfect submission again, slack and pretty and this time when Vincent flicks ice-water on him, he doesn’t move.

Vincent makes a pleased noise. Sephiroth inhales as far as his belt will let him, then blows it out in a long, aching stream as a sliver of ice is slipped under his bodice and melted against his right nipple. He hears the remaining ice clink once, the glass against the saucer not at all.

More ice is teased against his left nipple, with no sound at all but his own gagged whimpering. Then the saucer and cup’s weight go away, and Vincent’s hands are both back around his head again. Vincent’s tail is moving too, leisurely fucking him as Vincent’s lips travel over his forehead, as Vincent’s hands lift him just enough for him to hear the man whispering through the hood.

He goes down. Not breathing but barely even thinking about it, hanging so wonderfully in his cradle of helpless pleasure. Being fucked and petted, Vincent’s mouth sucking at the side of his throat through the hood, warm below the water and tantalizingly chilled where his chest just breaches the surface. When he’s pushed back up, Sephiroth is so relaxed that Vincent has to bite him to make him gasp.

Even then, he slides back to slack submission so easily that it takes feeling parts of the back of his slip drooping off his skin to realize the water level has dropped. He’s hanging in the air now, water running off him as Vincent slowly gathers him up against the other man. Then lying in the bottom of the emptied tub, groaning a little in protest, as he feels the claws cut through his hood and brush over his cheeks.

Vincent kisses him over the tape, firmly cupping his jaw. He settles and lets the man rest his head on Vincent’s shoulder till his legs are fully lowered. The rubber is unhooked from around his knees but his legs aren’t untied—none of him is untied, as Vincent maneuvers him up against the inside wall and pushes his legs open, removes the tail and replaces it with a cock. He’s kept bound, kept blind and gagged, pretty senseless thing fucked unforgivingly until he feels Vincent’s breathing stagger, feels the man’s body spasm within and against him, and it’s exactly how he wants to be kept.

Though it’s never long enough. He has to think that, his mind reluctantly awakening, when Vincent, now holding him up against the man’s chest, pulls off his gag. “Please…”

Vincent snorts against his temple. The tape goes away, but then Vincent only pulls him closer, wrapping an arm about his back and helping to position his still-tied legs between Vincent’s own as he sighs contentedly. The man knows without Sephiroth saying more what the begging is for.

So it’s no trouble at all for Sephiroth to suck at the water bottle when it’s pressed to his lips, or to nuzzle into Vincent’s shoulder as Vincent wipes his mouth, then at the come smeared between his legs. “Still don’t want to come?” Vincent asks him, and then laughs, slightly differently than when he’s torturing Sephiroth. “You are far too pretty like this, but sometimes I wonder what you’re thinking.”

“You know,” Sephiroth mumbles. He makes a pleased, aching noise as Vincent picks up his cock and lightly teases at its bindings. Vincent kisses him on the brow, but again, it feels a little different. He frowns at the thought, not quite following himself, and then musters up the energy to nudge Vincent with his head. “Do you want me to talk? I thought—I did plenty earlier.”

“You did. And I didn’t even have to tie you up to have you talk to me about it,” Vincent says, tone playful but not frivolous. Even through the blindfold and the exhausted, denied arousal, Sephiroth can tell that the other man is considering him carefully. “You do talk about business these days. I wonder about the other things you think about. What you think about when I’m—I know you enjoy it, Sephiroth.”

“You can tell—you can always tell,” Sephiroth says, but as Vincent kisses him, he realizes it’s far more for his own benefit than for the other man’s. So is the kiss, but he’s selfish and so he lets it go on till Vincent stops it. But then…he does think about it, because selfish as he is, he only wants it as much as Vincent does. “I like it…I like thinking you’re taking me…taking me back. Making me what I want, not what I have to be.”

“Making you pretty,” Vincent chuckles, before kissing Sephiroth again. “Pretty, and marked, and mine…not breaking you.”

“No,” Sephiroth says immediately. Then pauses, but not because he means to take it back. He wishes suddenly that he could see the other man, because he can feel how the air has shifted and he wants—and Vincent’s hand is there, removing the blindfold, holding his hair out of his eyes as he blinks owlishly at the light. He looks at the man, and sees only patient curiosity, and he knew that but he wanted to see it. He wants it, he thinks as he stretches over and starts nibbling along Vincent’s jaw. “No, not that kind of thinking—you don’t punish me, you’ve said that enough. And I don’t want that anyway. I—I used to…but you’ve shown me otherwise.”

Vincent doesn’t ask, but he does give Sephiroth a long, studying look. His fingers brush more strands out of Sephiroth’s face, dropping to linger behind Sephiroth’s ear. Then he nods, just before taking Sephiroth by the jaw and kissing Sephiroth with a sudden, but welcome, fierceness.

Though then Sephiroth remembers his cock is still tied, has been tied through all of this and he wants—he wants, he thinks. He can stop thinking with Vincent because he’s already done all of it, and he knows not only what he wants, but what the other man wants. “I don’t want you to break me, not that—that’s what they think, that that’s the only choice anyway, to break or to be…be what they want to see,” he says as he arches himself against Vincent, stretches his throat out and offers up his mouth. “I want to think about you coming back, when they think they’re done with me, think they’ve broken off everything they don’t want and taking me—taking me away, keeping me. Fucking me and marking me so I’m yours, and all the things they’d throw away, you keep.”

Vincent’s pupils widen. Sephiroth knows what arousal looks like on the other man, but there’s more to this than that, how Vincent looks at him like there is nothing else worth keeping. And then he pulls Sephiroth’s mouth up to his own.

He takes Sephiroth this time, not just kisses him. And when Sephiroth is breathless and shaking, Vincent allows him a little air. “How do you want to come?” he asks, playful again, playful like he always is, because he knows in the end that Sephiroth will do as he pleases, and only as he pleases.

“Not…here,” Sephiroth manages, even as his cock pulses in need. Then he nearly takes it back as Vincent, smiling, works a hand between them and fondles his poor bound prick, rubbing at its swollen head till he can barely speak for his mewling. “Not here, please, I want—I want you to take me back. Back to our—back and then—in the bath there. There, please, Vincent.”

“It’s barely big enough,” Vincent mutters. But he’s already hauling Sephiroth against himself, taking steps to make it reality.

And a little later he keeps his word. Squeezed into the inadequate shower-tub their guest quarters is equipped with, holding Sephiroth against his chest as Sephiroth shudders through two orgasms in quick succession. And then, coaxing and caressing, he licks Sephiroth to a third shattering climax, coming with Vincent’s tongue still twining inside of him, Vincent’s hand firmly wrapped about his cock.

“I’m not sure you’ll be steady in the morning without Cure,” Vincent sighs, idly petting Sephiroth as they lie together in bed afterward. “At least not before I have to go.”

“My first meeting isn’t till eleven and I have the early morning cleared for paperwork review.” Sephiroth laps sightlessly at the fingertip that traces his mouth, happy to let the rest of his face be veiled by Vincent’s hair. “No training displays on this trip either, nothing that should expose me.”

“You should know yourself better than anyone,” Vincent says. He sounds calm but Sephiroth hears the small pause and tilts his head. That’s sufficient to spur a rueful, low noise from Vincent, even as he presses his mouth to Sephiroth’s head. “I like to be sure of my marks whether I’m leaving them or covering them up, that’s just the mercenary in me. I’m not about to tell you how to do your job.”

Sephiroth rests against the other man for a moment. Then lifts himself—he doesn’t want to stop the delicious little tremor that runs through him, no matter how Vincent’s brow arches knowingly—and looks at Vincent. “If you can spot it, they might and it’s not for them, any of it,” Sephiroth says. “Tell me in the morning what you see, we’ll decide then.”

Vincent’s brow lifts again. Not in skepticism—Sephiroth does remember Vincent’s personal ambivalence towards Cure—but there’s enough surprise that Sephiroth pauses. But then Vincent nods. He lifts his hand and runs the backs of his claws down Sephiroth’s cheek, then curves them to cradle Sephiroth’s jaw as Sephiroth puts his head back on the other man’s shoulder.

“We will,” he promises. Satisfying them both, Sephiroth thinks, finally letting sleep take him.

Notes:

I do try and suspend my disbelief, but I never could really buy into the Deepground idea. Even if you can just disappear your genetically-engineered supersoldiers without anyone really noticing, the most coldblooded accountant would tell you that's a really ineffective way to manage your investments (and making a supersoldier can't be cheap). Even the most mindless clones aren't just "add water and grow" and take at least a little while to develop. Also, there's got to be more than a few going through SOLDIER onboarding who land somewhere besides crazed failure and fully-equipped First. So in a world where somebody actually thought about this, SOLDIER includes treatment facilities for those with non-optimized enhancements and debilitating side-effects.

Granted, there are still budget issues and shallow people who'd just rather not see all that, so Sephiroth still needs his stress relief too after giving them some pointed thoughts.

Chapter 83: Interlude: SOLDIER Swimwear Choices

“Well, you’re in the water, everything is swishing around anyway, it’s annoying and I just like knowing my stuff is exactly where I left it. It’s more comfortable and you never know when SOLDIER might get called into action and all that,” Zack says as he strides out, a towel around his neck and a stack of them under one arm.

“Also you’re just shameless,” Angeal says. He steps out next but pauses just outside of the dressing room to fiddle with the drawstring of his trunks, despite the very apparent lack of any slack whatsoever in their seams.

“What? It’s summer! And it’s not like anyone hates bananas!” Zack says, extravagantly spinning around and spreading his arms as he does. He manages to avoid accidentally slinging the towels all over the waiting PR handlers this year, but doesn’t avoid losing one of his flip-flops.

Fortunately, Angeal catches it. Unfortunately, at least if one has more consideration for SOLDIER’s long-term reputation than for short-term viral fame, Angeal’s lunge has the effect of hiking his trunks even higher up his backside. Sephiroth pointedly clears his throat to ensure all cameras remain lowered, even that phone half-slid into the pocket at the very end of the handler row.

“Fair, one more pun and I will drown you in sunscreen.” Genesis stalks out to follow up Sephiroth’s throat-clearing with his own glare, then throws a towel over Angeal’s buttocks. He also doesn’t miss the chance to swivel one leg and stretch out the wrinkles of his kimono, thus ensuring that they all have an unobstructed view of its intricate dye-work. “Goddess, I can feel my skin shriveling as we speak. Can we please get this over with already?”

“Aww, aren’t you going to at least get a little bronzing in before you run back in? I thought they redid the formula this year,” Zack says as he puts the flip-flop back on. “And I’m sure all your devoted fans want a good view of your outfit.”

“And that is why we suffer them, Fair, so we have the promo photos to distribute,” Genesis says with a dismissive wave towards the PR team. “My fans appreciate that I look my best when not slathered in liquid chalk and brine. But since the general public isn’t so discerning, let’s get on with this ridiculous parade. Then I can take advantage of the spa and you can go ruin the innocence of Costa del Sol’s children with that thing in your—”

Zack opens his mouth.

“Okay, yeah, let’s go do the first swim and toss out those free beach balls,” Angeal says. He grabs Zack by one arm, lets Genesis clamp onto his other, and then shoots Sephiroth a quick look as Sephiroth sighs and nods to the PR team. “I thought Tifa and Cloud were waiting on you anyway, Zack. Didn’t you say it’s their first time here?”

“Oh! Yeah, and it’s not like they don’t have swimming up in Nibelheim but you do it in wetsuits and this is just a totally different game for them,” Zack happily chatters as they walk out. “I mean, I’m not gonna lie, the fruit puns were coming pretty thick and fast when Tifa showed me her outfit—”

“Before or after she punched you?” Angeal asks dryly.

“Both!” Zack says with absolutely no…well, shame.

That said, his enthusiasm does go over well with the public, so Sephiroth merely tries not to listen too closely as he dons his sunglasses, picks up the nearest crate of the sunscreen samples Shinra is donating, and takes up the rearguard. He’ll be manning Shinra’s informational booth while the other three take a ceremonial lap before coming back to let the general public flood onto the beaches, and his lack of swimwear is absolutely intentional, as is his ensuring that the booth is well-shaded and equipped with plenty of fans. Shinra can achieve its goals of family-friendly self-promotion without forcing him to take off his damned uniform and burn just as fast as Rhapsodos will once that kimono is off.

Though he does change out of it later. Much later, when the only lights overhead are the stars and the soft nighttime halo surrounding Costa del Sol’s rooftops, and he’s not out on display for all.

He is on display. Kneeling at Vincent’s feet as the man lounges at the side of their private pool—not at the hotel Shinra booked for them either, but at a highly-discreet private rental—with the cooler night breezes teasing over his buttocks and the backs of his feet. He shivers and a few curls of air drift up between his thighs just as Vincent’s fingers would, if he wasn’t diligently sucking the ripe, sweet juices of freshly-cut passionfruit off of them.

Vincent smiles and pulls his fingers free, then plucks another piece off the plate at his side and holds it out to Sephiroth. Who obediently leans forward but can’t quite close his mouth about it, his lips trembling just short as a moan slips out instead.

“Warm again?” Vincent murmurs. He returns the fruit to the plate, then pushes himself forward so that he can lay the back of his hand against Sephiroth’s forehead. Then he uses it to give Sephiroth a nudge. “Swim a few laps, then.”

Sephiroth moans again, the frisson of knowing denial overtaking him even as he obediently starts to move back on his knees. He has tight cords wrapped around his cock and balls, keeping them netted up against his body, and they only squeeze ever more relentlessly when he moves. And the plug tucked against his prostate, rocking so he rises on unsteady knees.

He has to stop a moment, only half-turned towards the water. The play of the breezes changes and the way they caress him, heightening his own shivers—they brush all over him now, spreading irresistible tingling waves as they do. Down his braided hair so its brushy tip feels almost needling as it swings across his buttocks, across his shoulderblades and then around to his chest, calling attention to the fabric shifting across his body.

Vincent brought it. Two pieces, both of pretty pale-green silk that whispers an incessant tease across his heated skin, promising him cooling relief rather than the sticky prison of spandex—and yet he’s bound and made only more aware of it with how the silk toys with him. The bikini top cups his pectorals as if they’re delicacies on offer rather than crude muscle, and whoever made it allowed not only slits for his nipples but also stitched on pressure rings to catch them, rings with tiny blunted teeth on the inside that have slowly nipped his flesh to a searing ache he feels whenever he breathes. And the bottom is as shameless as Zack’s outfit had been earlier, shameless but also cruel, with the way that it tugs over his cock bindings and tweaks the end of the plug nestled inside of him.

He has to kneel again. He does so because he’s been told to, dropping down at the edge of the pool, but also because he has no will left, nothing except this terrible needy fever melting him away. His head sways down towards the water and he only catches himself, pushes back up because he hears Vincent’s footsteps behind him.

Vincent strokes two fingers down his spine, then brings them back up to just rest the tips of his claws against Sephiroth’s pulse. Sephiroth shudders and the man indulges him, waiting it out before he crouches down and seizes Sephiroth’s hair, wrapping it up around one hand till Sephiroth’s throat is arched back in mute offering.

“Two laps,” Vincent says. “Then you can have my cock.”

When he releases Sephiroth, the swing of Sephiroth’s head alone nearly pitches him into the water. Sephiroth groans as the tiles lining the pool scrape at his palms. Then steadies, breathes in, and plunges into the water.

Such a cool rush—not cold but cool, flowing all around so that he can no longer feel his own shivering. Usually it takes heat to do that, heat to burn away any other thought but to obey, but this time the water is enough. The water almost carries Sephiroth on its own, so close to the mindless peaceful stream within his head that he ends up startling himself when his hand bumps into the other end of the pool.

His backwash is already pulling him away from the edge. He lets it, turning into the current and pushing off lightly with one foot as he starts back the way he came. Vincent is still by the pool, watching, and even through the water Sephiroth feels the man’s gaze.

When he reaches Vincent, the other man has pulled up his kimono and sat down to dangle his legs in the water. Sephiroth nuzzles at one knee and Vincent pets his cheek before pushing his head back around. He does another lap and then returns, and by then he’s adjusted enough to the water that need is starting to flush into him again, prickling where the knots dig into his cock, the rings pinch his nipples.

This time Vincent has a piece of rope in his hand. He takes Sephiroth by the nape of the neck and pulls him up by the edge, then leans down and ties Sephiroth’s wrists behind his back. Quick loops and only one knot, but it’s still enough direction. Still enough, as he twists Sephiroth back by the shoulders and then cants his hips forward, his erect cock shaking free of his robe—still enough that all that washed-away heat suddenly drenches Sephiroth’s body.

Sephiroth gasps, then cranes forward to slip his lips about Vincent’s cock head. He keeps his hands where they’ve been bound, treading water till he’s mouthing all of Vincent’s cock, till he’s fighting the drops splashing up all around him for the come smearing over his tongue. Vincent holds his shoulders but only to keep him in place; that his mouth stays on the man’s cock rather than dropping underwater is entirely his own effort.

And he’s burning with it, burning all over. Burning so that by the time Vincent’s prick slips from his lips and Vincent hauls him up beside the pool, he can see the steam coming off his skin. Curling and dipping, stroking at his face as Vincent rolls him onto his back and pulls away the silk and the cords, lets his cock finally swell and rise and be taken up into Vincent’s body.

It’s still hazy when he makes out Vincent’s smile above him, and though the night air has cooled him, there’s still enough heat smoldering in his body to make him hitch and hiss when Vincent plays at loosening one of the pressure rings. Vincent swings close, nearly meeting Sephiroth’s open, yearning lips…but then pushes himself back. His other hand comes up to wipe off something from beside Sephiroth’s mouth, and then his finger drags the last taste of his come across Sephiroth’s tongue.

“Never cared for the beach myself. Sand in my guns no matter what, hated that,” Vincent muses, as Sephiroth laves into the creases of his knuckle. He rolls his hips down into Sephiroth who jerks and groans around his finger, hitching up to meet him, and then re-tightens the pressure ring. “But this, I can see the attraction…yes, I can.”

He throws back his head, hips moving steadily atop Sephiroth now, and together they celebrate the first night of summer.

Notes:

I'm not sure if 'banana hammock' as slang for a speedo is common everywhere, but anyway, that's what Zack has on. Because why not?

Genesis absolutely has something fabulous under the kimono, he just doesn't care to color-coordinate with sunburn. And of course the sunburn heals right away, but it's still going to hurt to get it, and why be the head of SOLDIER if you can't pull rank to be that one fully-dressed person poolside right next to the A/C?

Chapter 84: Side Story: Zack Takes On Pop Music

“What the…” Angeal starts, seeing the first prone, groaning SOLDIER in the hallway. His hand automatically goes over his shoulder to his sword, but before it can get there, he realizes that the man isn’t clutching his leg because it’s wounded.

At least, not in the bleeding sense. As the man jerks in surprise and attempts to twist around for some kind of salute, Angeal sees his calf muscle spasm between the clutching fingers. The man’s eyes roll back in the grips of a truly horrendous cramp and he ends up flopping onto his other side in the middle of his ‘sir!’

“At ease, it’s…it’s…” Angeal starts again, gesturing for the poor SOLDIER to just stay put. These days he tends to know his limits, but even he pulls a muscle every so often, and usually it’s at the damnedest time. So he has sympathy…till he glances past the SOLDIER to the rest of the hall and realizes how many others are curled up against its walls, all clutching limbs, all with the same pained expression. “…what the fuck is this?”

“Oh…hey, Ang!” Zack comes out of the simulator at the end, a tell-tale strained grin on his face. He attempts to hop over the SOLDIER sprawled right outside, only to not even get one foot off the ground before he ends up in a doubled-over hobble, spastically waving one arm because he probably needs the help with his balance as much as he’s trying to signal. “Glad to see you! I was—just—trying out the new program and it’s—awesome—”

“New program?” Angeal asks. And then he remembers what usually happens when Zack’s excited about the simulator and groans. “Oh, fuck. Zack, damn it, this is why we talk about new programs fi—”

“Look, look, it’s not even a new—it’s just a new skin on the Costa del Sol run,” Zack says. His arm-waving gets broader and broader as he zig-zags around all the SOLDIERs now discreetly trying to squirm away from them. “Not even a new skin, actually, just—new soundtrack, updating it a little bit—”

Angeal presses two fingers against his temple. He is absolutely going to regret knowing, but as a First, it’s his duty. “Zack. Soundtrack? These are fighting simulations, not video games.”

“Well, yeah, and I noticed that—average time to complete for new recruits—was a third faster year—year over year and we gotta—we gotta keep raising that bar, right?” Zack says. He has to pause and inhale, then smiles that ridiculous hopeful smile of his when Angeal frowns at how out-of-breath he seems. “So I was bopping along to that new Huntr/x banger—and I realized—next level breath control. It’s—it’s important, and footwork alone doesn’t cut it, and—”

Also, Angeal regrets that at this point, he already knows enough about Zack to predict the man’s thought patterns. It is his duty to understand the minds of potential opponents, even when they’re only that way in the training ring, and Gaia, but none of the dead ones have ever made his head ache the way understanding Zack does. “You turned the Costa del Sol run into a dance routine?”

“No, it’s still fighting. It’s just synced to the beat because you have to sing too!” Zack says, beaming, as he pushes off the wall and limps the rest of the way up to Angeal. “Turns out they’re totally right, it is really fucking hard to sing and do anything else at the same time. Best time so far is only a minute fifty.”

“Zack, look, I get the intention but that’s not what—” Angeal blinks “—what, you didn’t even get through one song?”

“Listen, it is murder on the dancefloor,” Zack says, suddenly serious. He twists a little, grimacing and kneading at his thigh, and then points in the direction of the simulator door. “You don’t believe me, you try it.”

Angeal deeply, deeply regrets everything about his duties, his friends, and his life in that moment. But even so, as the man he is, he can’t not take up that challenge.

Genesis and Sephiroth come down to find them twenty minutes later. “This is insanity,” Sephiroth says flatly. “I am not admitting to my mother that SOLDIER’s greatest test is a pop song.”

“Nor should you for garden-variety incompetence,” Genesis sniffs. He finishes helping Angeal up against the wall by pinpoint-stabbing into the pressure points that release all the crying muscles around Angeal’s knee. Then he steps past as Angeal, hissing in mixed relief and agony, promptly slides back to the floor, and makes sure to whip his coat so it doesn’t touch Angeal as he does. “Utterly ridiculous. It’s not even a good song, the bridge just shifts everything from last fall’s single down to a minor key and the chorus is completely banal—”

“He’s a fan?” Zack wonders, blinking.

“—to need fifteen tries to just put up two and a half minutes is weak, Hewley,” Genesis finishes, just before the sim spinning up around him would’ve cut him off anyway.

So SOLDIER’s reputation is saved. Okay, it takes Genesis three tries, but to be fair, his first was botched because of Angeal and Zack’s cheering, and the second time through, his boot slipped because there’s actually a fair bit of sweat on the floor since no one was cleaning up between all the people testing it out before. But anyway, they get a score up that proves it can be done and gives everyone else something to aim for, and the only damage in the end is a run on medical for cold compresses and Sephiroth doing that toneless sarcastic voice as he refuses to bother one-upping Genesis because he actually is going off to protect the world while they mess around here.

Angeal happens to know for a fact that Sephiroth just has a meeting with Rufus and then Vincent’s home for the weekend. So he, like the good friend, officer, and partner he is, decoys Genesis off to scold him all through stretching out his back, checks that all the SOLDIERs are in recovery too, and then takes Genesis home and fucks him before they even get their boots off, because watching Genesis set that record was fucking amazing. Also he figures this should buy them at least a year before Zack gets another bright idea about the simulator, since with Sephiroth bowing out, there’s no way anyone else is topping that score.

Six weeks later, Cloud and Tifa visit Zack. “I mean, it was a little tricky around the second chorus,” Tifa says with the polite face of someone really trying not to offend their host.

“It’s fine,” Angeal says. He likes her and thinks she’s good for Zack, and honestly, if she and Cloud came more often, he’d probably worry about the puppy less. And he knows Zack had been going out to Nibelheim more in the last few months because of the whole Roche thing, so now that Roche isn’t stationed in Midgar, he wants to make sure they feel welcome. “Honestly, it’s fine. Nobody’s offended—”

“Nowhere near Code Red yet, Tif, trust me. Gen doesn’t hit up the simulator when we’re busy, I figure we’ve got at least a good two or so weeks before he finds out,” Zack says, already slightly manic-looking with bad ideas.

“He’ll be fine,” Angeal stresses, staring at Zack. Who nods vigorously but who doesn’t really lose the crazy eyes till Cloud puts a hand on his back. “I’m just impressed, really. I watched and I just—it’s like you two do this kind of thing all the time.”

Cloud and Tifa glance at each other, and then Cloud shuffles his hand through his hair while looking at their scores as if they’re somehow embarrassing rather than beating Genesis’ by a whole three more songs. Because at that point, they’d run out of simulated opponents. “It’s kind of a catchy album. Even got up to Nibelheim,” he mutters.

“Listen, Spike, with Ang and me, you never have to apologize for your taste in music,” Zack says warmly as he slings an arm around Cloud’s neck. “However trashy you think it is—”

“I meant the overall effort,” Angeal says. Then, thinking he sees Tifa look a little uncomfortable too, he adds: “You both have pretty good voices too, better than me, believe me. But really, the way you can actually sing and still have the breath for fighting too, that was pretty amazing.”

“We’re in the mountains. Altitude helps with the lungs,” Tifa shrugs, though she looks less wary. She and Cloud share a glance again and then she even smiles. “I guess it’s kind of a thing up there, too.”

“You make noise so things know you’re coming. Some of the monsters will just avoid you, they don’t really want to attack people but just do it when they’re surprised,” Cloud elaborates. He hunches a little as Zack looks attentively at him, but that seems mostly reflex as he actually seems encouraged to go on. “Singing works. So you just get in the habit of doing it when you’re doing other things too—unless you’re actively hunting or something like that, but oherwise…”

“Yeah, so we have some practice,” Tifa says. “Not that hard after a while if you keep it up.”

“Good to know there’s hope for the rest of us,” Angeal says. Then he shoos them off to go make Zack happy without him accidentally ruining Sephiroth’s day. He doesn’t want to erase their scores, but since they aren’t actually part of SOLDIER, he does find one of the simulator technicians and asks whether they can just do a separate score table for non-SOLDIERs or something like that, since Genesis usually doesn’t bother to scroll past the top three.

And then he should go get some work done. Real, actual work. But what Tifa said kind of sticks with him, and that song is catchy…and he doesn’t have a meeting for another hour. The song’s only three minutes long, he can fit in another quick run.

He punches up the sim, just for one try.

Notes:

Yes, this references the K-Pop Demon Hunters movie. Let's imagine that Wutai has an analogous music industry for the sake of the joke.

Living at altitude does tend to result in inheritable adaptations that increase a person's ability to take in, store, and efficiently use oxygen (because high altitudes have lower oxygen levels). Also, it is actual good advice for you to sing or otherwise make noise when you're hiking in many wilderness areas, because that lets animals like bears know where you are so they can avoid you. Of course, if they're habituated to people because you're prioritizing tourism over ecological well-being and don't care whether that results in them having to be put down by wildlife services, it can have the opposite effect, so please check advice for your local area and don't just take the word of two Nibelheimers with awesome fighting skills and a zillion monster fights under their belts.

Chapter 85: Interlude: Sephiroth’s Favorites

First Vincent marks him.

Sephiroth kneels for hours in their private training room, facing a wall of practice weapons, all the tools of his rank and power meaninglessly close when he’s this helpless. He can’t look away: the stiff posture collar keeps his chin pointed up towards the racks no matter how he sways. His arms are bent up between his shoulderblades and strapped to the steel rod running down his spine to where the hooked end nestles between his buttocks. Its bulbed tip presses inside of him no matter how he shuffles his knees, slowly crushing groans out of him as it tortures his prostate.

More straps cross over his ribs and chest, digging in with every straining, hitching breath he takes. And he takes many, as Vincent pads slowly around him. The collar keeps him from turning his head to track the man and he can only watch Vincent come in and out of view, his eyes inevitably going to the whip hanging quietly from the other man’s hand. It’s only when he can’t see Vincent that the whip flicks out, so quick and smooth that at first its touch seems a caress. Merely licking at him, and it’s only in the whip’s wake that the fire rises.

He takes lash after lash, trailing up his twitching inner thighs and tasting at the tops of his shoulders, curling across his knees and nipping at his hips. Vincent changes targets too much for him to find a pattern in the onslaught, until he’s so dazed that he gives up all pretenses at rational thought, at being anything but a canvas for the other man’s desires. And it’s then that Vincent stops circling him, stops toying with him and truly marks him.

The marks are still there when he wakes later. No longer in his bonds, as he slowly stirs awake in their bed, but still as thoroughly indoctrinated into his position and purpose as he was when Vincent finally finished with him, a near-insensate mess only capable of the occasional sigh as he was carried and washed and dried. He still doesn’t need to think.

Feeling, on the other hand…he feels himself, passing one hand down over his body and letting the crests and troughs of the resulting aches gradually turn him onto his side. His fingers linger a little on his cock, brushing at its tip and then pulling away as its dull throbbing briefly flashes into something a little more urgent. Vincent milked him dry at the end, wrung him till he was closer to unformed clay than man—it’s clean now but strapped into a fresh leather sheath, and without that close grip Sephiroth has no doubt he’d fall apart.

He stops tempting fate, lets the sheath take on that burden and pulls himself out of bed. To the bathroom, to relieve himself and then comb out his hair. His fingers feel a little loose—all his joints do, to be honest, so he doesn’t attempt a braid and only ties it into a tail. Then to the clothes waiting for him on the counter: a pair of black thigh-high lace stockings, black silk panties, a black silk camisole with lace edging that cuts delicately at the welts criss-crossing his chest.

Sephiroth can see in the mirror how his marks are highlighted by the garments, their fading pink brightened against his skin. The lines of the panties subtly reframe the welts on his hips and buttocks, clipping them so that they look like they’d match the fingers of an angling hand—he has to stop himself from stroking along one side. Though the camisole covers up most of the marks on his chest…or so he thinks, and then he smooths down the front and understands. The bodice is entirely lace, and openwork enough so that he can clearly see the pink-and-white of his skin. Pink and white, caged in behind black netting that reminds him of other…he half-imagines the ropes pulling across his body and watches his own nipples tighten under the lace.

He moans to himself, as he forces his hands down to the counter. Gripping it as he continues to look, to appreciate—he’s learned that, Vincent’s taught him to do that, to look at himself not only to see how well he performs but to enjoy how he looks. Marked and dressed, and ready now to think.

Vincent’s in the office. Not at the desk but standing with a cup of tea in his hand as he studies the flatscreen on the wall. He puts the cup down as soon as Sephiroth steps over the threshold, but doesn’t turn around till Sephiroth has almost come up to his back.

When he does, he doesn’t hesitate at all to catch Sephiroth’s wrists and pivot to put Sephiroth up against the desk. Sephiroth hisses as the edge scrapes his bruises, then lets it turn into a wanting sigh as he shifts to perch on that, letting his knees spread so Vincent can slip between them.

“You have your marks,” Vincent notes, his gaze traveling down Sephiroth and then coming back up. His right hand moves down Sephiroth’s wrist to the box in Sephiroth’s hand. He takes the box—one of those plain white ones that periodically appears in their closet—and when he feels the weight of it, his brows tick up slightly. But he doesn’t ask yet and only tips up the lid.

“I do,” Sephiroth says. He looks at Vincent, tracking the way the corner of the man’s mouth moves slowly into a smile, taking in the box’s contents. Nothing new, only items with well-known places in the closet, and it’s that familiarity that shapes Vincent’s mouth, that sets anticipatory frisson throughout Sephiroth’s body. “I’m still sore.”

“Sore enough?” Vincent says, gently disbelieving. He laughs even before Sephiroth shakes his head, then pulls out the leather harness from the box. “I’m not through this report yet.”

“I’ll be quiet,” Sephiroth says. He tilts forward, twisting a little as Vincent looks at him, and then presses his mouth to the side of Vincent’s neck just above the man’s shirt. When Vincent sighs, he kisses a little higher, and then starts nibbling along Vincent’s jaw. “You can put me back to bed, but I thought you might like to check your other work first.”

“Do you,” Vincent says, still scoffing a little. But his thumb is starting to rub at Sephiroth’s wrist, and he keeps hold of that as he goes through the other things Sephiroth collected and brought.

Sephiroth continues nuzzling as Vincent considers them. He works his way nearly to Vincent’s mouth, and he’s about to try and catch Vincent’s lower lip between his teeth when he’s abruptly twisted about, his arm bent roughly behind him. He arches as white-hot lightning daggers along familiar channels, then goes slack into the teeth that sink in just behind his ear.

“I think you want to make noise,” Vincent murmurs. He lets Sephiroth’s arm unbend but keeps it pinned as Sephiroth shudders, his breath warming the freshly-pricked skin. “To distract me. Insatiable.”

“Sore,” Sephiroth pants. He shudders again as Vincent brings the harness up against his belly, then whimpers when a hand roughly kneads his left buttock. “Vin—please, Vincent, it hurts…”

The other man makes one of his amused sounds, acknowledging without mercy as he straps the harness onto Sephiroth. One band about the torso, right under the pectorals, and then one each looping under the arm and over the shoulder to anchor the top of the last strap, which follows Sephiroth’s spine. This one carries tiny metal rings that match the ones on the half-sleeves Sephiroth’s forearms are buckled into, forcing them together and then pinning them up into a reverse prayer.

His fingers flail uselessly in his hair, tangling in at the nape, until Vincent pulls his tail forward over his shoulder. Then the other man steps up behind him, licking and sucking teasingly at his fingertips. “Are you sore?” Vincent says. “Here?”

“Yes,” Sephiroth groans, as Vincent’s hands cup him over the bodice. His nipples are pinched and then tugged, the lace scratching more and more heat into his welted skin. He’s starting to feel it burning all over and not only on the old marks, and the burning is sinking in deeper, stretching down towards where his panties are rubbing up over his bound, aching cock. “Yes, please—”

A thoughtful noise comes from Vincent. He hooks his chin over Sephiroth’s shoulder and glances down, dipping his fingers behind the bodice and pulling that away as if he’s only now realizing the marks are there. But then he slides his thumbnail along one welt, creasing its pink to lively red as Sephiroth moans.

“Poor thing,” he says, kissing Sephiroth on the cheek. But that’s a decoy, because then his other hand is in the bodice now and it’s—there’s something on his fingers. Cool and oily so his fingers glide smoothly over the welt and—

“Cold.” Sephiroth jerks, shivers, then falls back against the other man, all resistance leaving him even as Vincent continues massaging the mentholated salve into his skin. Ice in it, ice that somehow doesn’t erase the heat so much as drive it lower, deeper, so even as it cools him he can feel the sweat beading along his hairline. “Vincent—it’s cold, it’s so cold—”

“You have marks. They need tending,” Vincent tuts. His thumb and forefinger catch Sephiroth’s nipple and roll it, making Sephiroth go trembling-still. He holds Sephiroth in place with no more than that as he withdraws his other hand, then returns with more salve that he starts to rub over the other pectoral. “This is how you look after them.”

Sephiroth moans wordlessly. His hands twitch against his neck, his elbows dig ineffectually against the imprisoning harness; he even cants his buttocks back to press against Vincent’s cock, and Vincent is far from unmoved despite the steady tone. But that has nothing to do with the man’s relentlessness, and so in the end Sephiroth can do nothing but submit to Vincent’s ministrations.

Once his chest is salved, its welts fully refreshed into delicious stinging, Vincent adjusts the camisole to lie in place. The lace is almost unbearable now, making Sephiroth mindlessly toss his head for lack of any better outlet—and then something bites a bright-hot burn into his right nipple.

His knees unlock. Vincent steers them both down to the floor, then rearranges them so Sephiroth is splayed over the man’s lap, head drooping nearly to Vincent’s shoulder. He doesn’t take the clamp off Sephiroth’s nipple, doesn’t intervene in the clash between its searing heat and the continued freeze of the salve. It’s on Sephiroth to adapt to it, to submit to it, to let it take him into that heady, encompassing fog of pleasurable pain.

Another clamp is attached to his other nipple, after Vincent ensures he sees its glint first. He knows how his agony is going to spike and when it rises, he drifts with it. Oh, he does make noise, groaning and whimpering as Vincent threads each clamp through slits in the bodice and then uses them to draw his trapped flesh after. He even begs a little, slurring Vincent’s name as thin black ribbons are tied into bows about his nipples, keeping them pushed out of the bodice and heightening the brutal throb. But he doesn’t try to move.

He doesn’t have to. Vincent holds him, Vincent soothes him, Vincent laps the sweat from his temple and waits till he’s quieter.

“Sore?” Vincent says.

Sephiroth starts to answer, but then Vincent’s hands press at his buttocks. He arches up—his nipples are so tortured the air almost feels like concrete smashing back against them—and then drops heavily, a ragged cry coming from him. “There—please—”

“Ah,” Vincent says, clicking his tongue. He squeezes Sephiroth’s buttocks again, his fingers sliding a little till they fit along the welts in a way that makes Sephiroth mewl needily.

Then he lets go. Sephiroth rasps in his breath, his vision coming in and out, as Vincent retrieves the salve and then carefully anoints each buttock with it. He does one buttock at a time, and while one hand rubs at it, he uses his other hand to stroke at the bruised insides of Sephiroth’s thighs. Sometimes his fingers stray up to shape over the panties, tormenting Sephiroth’s oversensitized cock through its bindings, until the silk is soaked with sweat and precome.

When he’s done there, he spares a minute to thoroughly wipe his hands on a small towel, and then he heaves Sephiroth, who’s barely able to lift his eyelids at this point, up his own body. He makes just enough room to push aside the panties and slide in a couple fingers—Sephiroth shivers violently, then goes slack just as violently when he realizes Vincent isn’t using the same salve—to open Sephiroth up for his cock.

“Please,” Sephiroth says as Vincent seats him in place. His voice is so torn that he barely recognizes it as a word. He tries to clear his throat but it sounds worse—he’s trying again when his chin is taken in hand.

He recognizes this and quiets till the bottle of water is put to his lips. Once he’s drunk some, he lets his head fall back to Vincent’s shoulder and looks on as the bottle is put away and something else is pulled from the box still on the desk.

“I know where it hurts,” Vincent says, smooth and steady, as he opens up the case of sounds. He selects one, inspects it—Sephiroth can just about shiver, but can’t manage above a thready whine—and then picks up the salve, the mentholated one. “But you aren’t dried out anymore.”

Sephiroth instinctively clenches his thighs, whimpering. It’s a feeble effort, and it’s far more psychological than anything else, the way he seems to feel his skin going taut all over. He doesn’t have that much in him…but Vincent is right. His cock is pearling out precome when Vincent turns to it, drawing it out of the panties and then carefully smearing salve about his cock slit.

Then the sound goes in. Sephiroth gasps, and his vision suddenly seems both magnified and deeply narrowed, seeing what it sees in exquisite detail but unable to redirect to anything else. The tiny spasm across his cock head, the gleam where the salve catches onto the side of the sound as it disappears into his flesh—he sees that all and nothing else. Shining silver, ripe red flesh, streaks of precome and salve pale against black leather.

But he feels—he feels it everywhere, not only his cock in Vincent’s hands but all of him. Wrapped up and tied down, worked up and down, in and out, sliding back and forth until finally the sound comes all the way out and pulls everything else out with it.

Sometime later, Sephiroth’s in the shower and mindlessly moving his legs. Vincent tilts the spray away, then raises his chin to look into his eyes. “Too hot?” the man asks.

“Hot,” Sephiroth repeats, and then, vaguely, thinks something about that is inaccurate. “No…Vincent, please…”

“No.” Vincent moves the spray back, then sighs as Sephiroth paws at his knee. He doesn’t move away. “You’re—”

“Cold,” Sephiroth grunts, and then manages to maneuver his heavy limbs so that he’s pushing his head against Vincent’s chest. He feels Vincent nudge his hand away from the man’s cock and doesn’t fight that, but does drag it to Vincent’s hip rather than letting it fall to the floor. “Please, you’re—warm, I want…”

The water is fine. To be honest, Sephiroth hasn’t even registered what temperature it is, and Vincent can tell from the way he sighs. But he loops his arm around Sephiroth anyway, and though he’s batting up water over their bodies, it’s half-hearted. “Eat and then sleep, Sephiroth.”

“Do your report in bed,” Sephiroth says. He lips a little at Vincent’s chest, then at Vincent’s hand when the man tips up his head again. “Yes, Vincent.”

“Insatiable,” Vincent says, half-smiling. He brushes his thumb across Sephiroth’s mouth, then rests his chin on Sephiroth’s head as Sephiroth kisses his hand. “All right.”

Notes:

Sephiroth needed some mental resets after having all three of the other Firsts waste an afternoon doing fight karaoke in the simulator, and Vincent didn't have time to go shopping for new toys. Anyway, it's always good to revisit the hits.

Chapter 86: Side Story: No Pets at SOLDIER

Notes:

Ran out of tags so can't add Reeve Tuesti there.

SOLDIERs technically aren’t supposed to have pets, at least as long as they’re living in Shinra-provided quarters. Pets aren’t scoped into the health and safety standards and given the types of mutagens that can commonly be found near SOLDIER-designated areas, this isn’t mere bureaucratic joy-killing.

That said, people and pets go back to time immemorial, and no amount of genetic tinkering that Reeve’s ever seen has managed to remove that. Privately, he thinks the morale-boosting effect is well worth it, as anyone who’s ever come home with him to meet the original Cait Sith (and clones—long story, still not fully disclosed to Dr. Crescent) can attest to, although he’ll also admit that calling it cost-effective might be overstating things (as anyone who’s realized just how much of his robotics is dedicated to, er, experiential enrichment efforts can also attest to). Publicly, he toes the party line, and having lived through a couple accidental mutants rampaging on the work campus, has some sympathy for Lazard’s strict take on it.

He does wish it wasn’t up to his teams to be the first line of detection. They’re in charge of water quality sampling and thanks to various incidents including those mutants, have developed a wide battery of tests for organic matter. It was never Reeve’s intent to pick up a sideline in biology, but getting R&D’s assistance for mundane matters like ensuring clean water for all was such a production—and then getting them out of the pipes, without leaving behind all sorts of under-the-radar devices that had him stacking five filters on his own water, was frankly appalling. So his team ended up with their own lab, doing the day-to-day samples and only calling up R&D when something completely out of bounds appears.

In Reeve’s opinion, this is a far better state of affairs, not the least because it keeps him from having to face down Dr. Crescent’s impatient condescension whenever he tries to explain how involuntary experimentation invariably backfires and how the resulting wreckage does, in fact, impact his area (as well as general ethics and morals, but he’s long since learned the futility of that sort of appeal with her). But unfortunately, it has resulted in him having to interface far more often with SOLDIER leadership.

To be clear, he has only the highest respect for SOLDIER’s top officers, especially General Sephiroth. And they’ve always been willing to cooperate with his teams, albeit from the lens of their own objectives. It’s more…the conversations he has to sit through.

“Shit, well, I’m glad we caught this early. This is what, the size of a…” Hewley mutters upon finding Corel Mountain Dog on the breeds page. Then he pauses for a moment, squinting. “…it gets how big? Gaia, well, any later and we’d be looking in the garages rather than the locker rooms.”

“Well, sir, actually, the test indicates it’s probably an adult,” Reeve coughs. “And, er, it’s…likely pregnant.”

Hewley’s expression is only visible reflected on the computer screen, but even so, Reeve is rather glad that he’s left out of the following discussion with that particular team lead. The puppies are adorable and are easily relocated to some willing families in the countryside, and while the SOLDIER team is rather downcast at first, they eventually strike up a semi-unofficial partnership with one family for regular mascot visits. So all in all, it’s one of the easier problems to resolve.

But then there are the Kalm fancy crows. “On the one hand, I’m glad we’re not having another outbreak of aural hallucinations,” Fair says, staring up at the I-beams above them. “On the other hand, baby sister thought I was homesick and sent me one without telling me my ass. How many do we have to catch again?”

“We’ve picked up ten on the scans so far, sir,” Reeve says, wincing proactively.

Fair grimaces. Then sighs and starts looking around himself. “Fine, well, catch them first and give those idiots a tongue-lashing later…uh, so, that is the plan, right? I don’t see any nets…”

“Well, sir, security cam footage suggests that this flock has learned how to use tools.’ Reeve puts out the tablet so that Fair can see. “Specifically, how to manipulate the circuit breakers for the guard lasers.”

“Fuck,” Fair says before he even watches the clip. Then he does, and his eyes slowly close in disbelief. “Fuck. And Seph was so fucking happy we were gonna close out quarter with no major disciplinary…okay. Okay, right, well, we’re gonna do this one way or the other before I go talk to him, so tell me you’ve got something, Reeve.”

That particular incident did have the happy effect of gaining Sephiroth’s support for officially creating an inspection drone program within Urban Planning. Still, the number of debriefs Reeve then had to sit through where people analyzed how a bunch of birds outmaneuvered SOLDIERs was excessive. So when the feline urine popped up in the test results, he was expecting the worst.

“Yes, I did inquire into its origins, Tuesti, and am aware of the documentation,” Rhapsodos says. He’s irritated but evidently more concerned with whatever is scrolling on his phone, since he barely looks over at Reeve. “As should you.”

Reeve pauses. Generally he tries not to schedule an appointment with Rhapsodos without Lazard or at least one of the other Firsts included, but Lazard had had a conflict and Hewley had been pulled away to a last-minute emergency. When he’d heard, he’d debated long and hard about rescheduling, but in the end, duty had won out since it did involve a sensitive weapons facility. “Ah, General, I…the documentation…what…”

“What? Have you forgotten that we’ve submitted requests for two quarters running to deal with the infestation there?” Rhapsodos says, head finally coming up as he swivels sharply about to face Reeve. His hand with the phone drops to the desk between them, not shielding the screen at all so Reeve can see there’s a grainy live feed of what appears to be Hewley stalking through a dark hall. “If we’ve had to take matters into our own hands because Procurement can’t seem to actually procure an exterminator, that’s hardly a surprise.”

“Oh, those—well, General, apologies for the oversight. But…I do recall those requests,” Reeve hastily says while he collects his thoughts. Unfortunately, he can’t help but collect them, while others probably would’ve just taken the opportunity to exit the conversation entirely and let Procurement take the blame. “About rats. Which aren’t the, uh, usual prey for a Banoran Pard, at least after they’ve grown up. They’re a little small.”

“So when she outgrows them, we’ll detail her to another facility, the same as we would for any specialist,” Rhapsodos says. He appears to have already lost interest, as he pushes back in his chair again and resumes frowning at his phone. “She’s been fully onboarded so I suggest you check the certification on file, Tuesti. Or let Procurement be the one to whine about it, and then we can finally talk about how they can’t do their job.”

Reeve not being an idiot, he does withdraw at that point. Upon consultation, it appears that the baby Banoran Pard has been properly documented under SOLDIER regulations dealing with on-site presence of working animals (how long these regulations have existed is a question Reeve carefully doesn’t inquire after). And as such, the Pard is not classified as a pet and instead qualifies for the stipend that supports Urban Planning’s renovations to the drains in its team’s barracks to accommodate it (the fluffy beds and remote-activated feeder and custom scratching posts are entirely funded by SOLDIER and thus not Reeve’s problem to justify to Finance).

He also happily takes the invitation to step outside during the follow-up meeting he has about the renovation plans where Rhapsodos seemingly informs Sephiroth about the Pard for the first time. The paperwork is still in place at the end of that, and the renovations do go forward, and Reeve can reconcile his water testing results again. After this long working for Shinra, he recognizes when he needs to just bow to the bureaucracy.

Notes:

For 'Corel Mountain Dog," imagine a St. Bernard or Bernese.

Some crows in Japan have been observed stealing candles (sometimes still lit!) from temples, and yes, this has caused fires. Which probably still would've been less of a headache for poor Zack.

In a world that doesn't have to rebuild itself from the ashes of Meteor, Reeve absolutely has a bunch of cats at home that inspired Cait Sith. I bet he fosters.

Chapter 87: Interlude: Vincent Makes Tea

Notes:

Comeplay ahead.

“I think I’ll have milk with this one,” Vincent murmurs, reaching for the long flat box next to the softly-steaming pot of tea on the side table.

Sephiroth is unable to do anything but shudder, a long liquid motion that doesn’t seem to stir his nerves so much as melt them even more, send them all running to pool helpless heat in his groin. Vincent caught him when he was only waking and still sluggish from earlier use, twisting him onto his back as he groaned weakly into the sheets, body going from sleep to aching, longing awareness in slow inches.

And now he’s locked within the other man’s arms, secured for whatever Vincent wishes. Wrists taped behind his back and ankles to each other, more tape stretched over his lips to keep him nursing his own moans as Vincent’s nail slides into the divot on the side of the box and cracks its lid. His chest and buttocks are still bruised under the brief white silk slip he’s wearing, so tender that the intricate black cord woven about his pectorals and upper arms is almost a boon, the way that it holds the lacy bodice in place so that it doesn’t rasp. Only then, as Vincent fingers first this and then that shining silver sound, Sephiroth can’t help but twist in anticipation. And the ropes tug over the silk at his stiff, sore nipples, pressed out through the bodice slits and tied to present their reddening tips to the air, and then under the silk too, under the taut, taunting panties teasing at his cock and balls. Vincent bound him there as well, knots placed maddeningly behind the flare of his cockhead and scattered across his scrotum and then the one that feels like a fist, like he’s sitting on a fist pushed up against his perineum, precisely where the plug inside of him pushes down.

He watches, heavy head drooping against Vincent’s jaw, as Vincent sweeps up the hem of his slip and then drags two fingers down over the front of his panties. It’s almost someone else’s body, almost too unreal to believe in its exquisite framing, the flushing pink cock with its curving black cords shading through the white silk. The colors seem far too vivid, even before Vincent hooks a thumb into the panties and pulls them down, shows Sephiroth how truly ripe his own prick looks. Like a votive offering, a painted representation to stand in for the real thing.

But then it is real, is very real and bare and unfiltered, the way his entire body simply—opens for that thin little rod. Thin, thin silver rod, sliding into the middle of his red, red cock, and with its movement Sephiroth is drawn back into his own straining flesh. Trembling against Vincent, whimpers piling up behind his gag, held up by his bonds and the other man rather than anything resembling independent will, as Vincent idly tweaks the end of the sound. Swivels it between two fingertips, as if each turn isn’t twisting into Sephiroth’s very center, winding so tightly that there’s no room for his blood, his breath—and then catching it against his thumb, his chuckle echoing distantly in Sephiroth’s ear as he allows Sephiroth a much-needed shiver and dragging inhale.

He’s real, but only for Vincent’s pleasure. Squirming and sagging in alternate measures, his slip so soaked with sweat as to be nearly transparent, until finally Vincent decides to withdraw the rod from him. And then he can only look on as Vincent puts a hand out and pours the pot’s contents into a waiting mug, then brings the mug over and dips the streaked rod into it.

Vincent stirs a few times, then lifts the cup to his lips, absently nudging Sephiroth’s head out of the way. He ponders for a moment before lowering the rod back towards Sephiroth’s cock—and laughing again, as Sephiroth mewls and rubs his gagged mouth against Vincent’s neck. “No, I don’t need that much more,” he says, using the end of the rod to merely scrape a little more precome off the head of Sephiroth’s cock. “I still like to taste the tea, you know that.”

He puts the rod back in his cup and stirs, stirs, the swirling liquid drawing Sephiroth’s exhausted gaze into its center. Then Sephiroth blinks, but his vision hazes rather than clearing. For a little while he lets it—it’s softer on his mind, he doesn’t care how his thoughts never cohere—and then he blinks again. And the rod is in its case and his lips are free of the tape, stinging in the air before warm lips cover them…he drops his head back onto Vincent’s shoulder, tasting the sweet-bitter tea and then the salt of himself, so heady that the world blurs again, and he's more than happy to let it.

After all, as he knows, Vincent always has a second cup.

Notes:

There are tea styles where salt is added, and they're actually older than the sweet ones. And yes, Vincent is enough of a tea nerd to know that, not that that's why he's having his cuppa this way.