#● salvation: of souls devoured & darkened wings. [ verse diverged: breselin ].

[atlaslain]

Issues him to come a little bit closer to where he sits, using the same hand beckoning to then brush away hair from his face, the back of fingers brushing along Zack's cheek on their travel down~

@breselin

          here is how he begins to fall.  it’s a little slip, rather than a tumble: it’s the sudden sensation of weightlessness, and the half-certainty that should he let go of what tethers him to his hesitance, there’ll be strong arms and black wings to catch him. it’s the tiny intimacies sephiroth offers, like he’s sensed zack’s starvation for affection and has seen fit to give it, to open his arms and soothe what the world hurt. his motivations — are nebulous, zack can’t understand them, can’t comprehend why he’s here or if he’s the creature and the villain the stories say. he only knows the facts laid in front of him, the comfort curling about him when a gentle hand pushes the overgrown hair from his face and coaxes him nearer.

he feels warm where he’s touched. the scar criss-crossing his face tingles where fingers pass over it. he leans into it, face tilted to chase the sensation — and somehow, somehow, it clicks in his mind that he needs only ask for more and he’s relatively certain he’ll get it. deliberate now, he shifts nearer so he’s leaning across sephiroth’s seated form, palms set on the ground either side of the other’s hips. it’s the first time he’s been so openly bold. his heart takes up an uneven beat and he feels more himself than he’s felt since they riddled him with bullets. 

“hey…” he sounds thoughtful, as if slowly puzzling out what he feels. “can i kiss you?”

it feels important to ask. he’s trying to say do you want me to? because he just doesn’t know the answer to that. this version of sephiroth he barely knows seems inscrutable, near-impossible to read — does he want anything, in that way? 

zack reaches out carefully, and mirrors his touches: fingertips against the other’s cheek, stroking through silver hair and moving it back from his face. the man’s like an angel, like something ethereal made flesh, and it feels strange to bridge that distance and touch him. feels stranger still that he permits it. warily, zack inches nearer and brushes a feather-light kiss to the corner of sephiroth’s mouth. 

[atlaslain]

dissidia verse update ( before canon comes along and defies it ): zack’s a warrior of spiritus but, like jecht, he doesn’t consider materia’s warriors his enemies at all. he was chosen for spiritus due to his love of battle --- he fit among the more warrior-hardened god’s mindset. but he often assists materia’s warriors & befriends them, only ever fighting them for the cause of creating necessary energy to restore the world. this shouldn’t affect any relationships already built in dissidia verse, since he still acts as a friend to those he’s met. + verse tag dump. 

[atlaslain]

a hug where one muse stops the other from collapsing [ i hate and love them, so why not suffering 8> ]

hug prompts.      /      @breselin

          sunlight strikes with the force of a flare; it’s a jarring thing after exposure to only darkness and cold. zack squeezes his eyes shut against the burn, bloodied fingers shielding them. it takes far too long to shake off the disorientation, for senses to remember that there was a time before deepground leeched the light from his life. he feels the weakness grip him, knees shaking as if their very bones are fraying, and he knows he’s going to fall. a punched-out breath’s torn from him, the sound almost a name: almost his name, his saviour on gore-drenched wings.       zack stumbles. eyes squint open in time to register the ground rushing up to meet him.           and then — arms about his waist, like steel vises. they draw him inexorably up, up, up. ( they pulled him out of deepground and now they pull him against a body warmed from the sun, the sensation akin to flying. ) zack smells the copper-sharp tinge of blood and, desensitized as he is, finds himself gritting his teeth to remain conscious. they’ve spilled so much blood, fountains of it pouring from veins and from screaming mouths. they’ve soaked the rotten pits of deepground with it. something vicious and snarling in zack’s chest demands more, more violence on which to sate himself, and he nearly screams.           the world’s dizzied and the only solid thing to cling to is sephiroth.    thoughtless, he leans into the grip holding him steady and rests his cheek against the other’s chest. it feels better, and worse, to dig his fingers into hipbones and hold on, to close his eyes and feel the warmth surround him. the tension holding his shoulders rigid eases and it shouldn’t, he shouldn’t feel calmed. he does.          “i… i can stand on my own now.”

[atlaslain]

❝ If I cannot be better than them, I will become so much worse. ❞ 8>

a meme, somewhere.          /          @breselin

          “why can’t you be better?”          here is what eludes him: sephiroth is beyond anyone else zack has ever known — sometimes more entity than man. he exudes an air of infinity, of ascending power and iron-willed control. he carries with him the overwhelming sense that there is nothing he’s incapable of. ( zack recalls vividly their first meeting, sephiroth swooping in like an angel in flight to save him. he recalls sephiroth framed in moonlight and standing over the bodies of their foes, and the star-struck feeling of having come face-to-face with a true hero. ) it’s … crushing, in its own way, to imagine such a man choosing not to be better. to be worse.           zack’s head’s fuzzy with lack of sleep, his shoulders slumped with fatigue. he’s lost all capacity for mincing words, not that he had much of it to begin with. he shoots sephiroth a look far sharper than the usual dull-eyed gratitude and befuddlement with which he regards his saviour.           “i don’t understand it. back then —” back at shinra he means, at soldier. back when they were fed on false dreams, before they all shattered. “didn’t we all want to be heroes? don’t you want to be?”           he gets confused, sometimes. it’s difficult to reconcile this sephiroth with the man he idolised. ( he is still an angel, a saviour. but when zack looks at him now, he sees death clinging to him. deaths they caused together. maybe they’re both worse than everyone else. )          “i just don’t get it.”

[atlaslain]

▼+ reverse [ 8> ]

meme.     /     @breselin

          agitation hounds his footsteps.  he paces, hands sticky with blood, wishing quite vehemently to be elsewhere. hunting the last of deepground’s filth is supposed to make him feel cleaner, not dirtier. the scientist was a vile man; took perverse glee in sticking zack full of needles and defiling his system with tainted mako, laughed when the control chip spiked agony into zack’s brain for daring to consider fighting back. deepground is a stain upon the earth and he’s razing it. is this heroic? sephiroth, somehow pristine even after all the bloodshed, seems to tire of zack’s pacing and takes hold of his wrist, stopping him in his tracks. his pulse kicks up to something frantic, contrasts the tension easing from his shoulders. he lets himself be coaxed closer, pulled down onto a lap and soothed. zack’s spine stiffens; he wants to lean in, and he wants to break away. he always leans in. the comfort of his touch is more than zack’s willing to surrender right now. has sephiroth not freed him, kept him close, slaughtered his enemies? does he not offer these moments of softness, as if sensing some starvation in zack for this precise manner of touch? he wills the unease to stop ruining it. “i’ll get blood all over you,” he warns — he’s splattered in it. sephiroth seems not to care, and positions zack firmly against his chest. zack expels a slow sigh and inches nearer, cheek coming to rest on a shoulder. it feels so good, after all those years of pain and darkness, that he can’t help but let his eyes close.