#trauma bonding with your boss/ prospective. boyfriend

[strayheartless]

There is a wonderfully loud three year old in my house and while my sensory issues don’t think it’s a vibe, my fic brain is now thinking about how baby Cloud just wouldn’t be like that.

Three year old Cloud is, first of all, tiny. Like, he’s properly, properly small. His Ma really doesn’t have much in the way of money so they rely on hunting and foraging, which didn’t always garner the best results so Cloud was skin and bone for most of his childhood.

Cloud didn’t speak for a long time. He could, physically he actually had quite a developed vocabulary on account of Claudia constantly talking g and reading to him. But he didn’t want to talk for a very long time.

Cloud didn’t play like other kids. It’s my personal headcanon that Cloud is on the spectrum so I often imagine him lining up his tin soldiers, but I also imagine he was obsessive about brushing his Sephiroth dolls hair.

He had dolls of Angeal and Genesis too that he played with, but he took the Seph doll everywhere. To the store? Better take sephiroth in case of monsters. To the Forest? Better take Sephiroth in case of monsters. Bedtime? Sephiroth will keep watch.

Baby cloud wasn’t cuddly. He wanted to be. God was he desperate to be cuddly, but adults have smacked Cloud in the face for less. Not Claudia, never Claudia but one of the first memories Cloud has from his childhood is being three years old and struck across the cheek by a lady in the general store for being ‘rude’ and not answering her.

The times Claudia can coax him into her arms are special because they are the times Cloud talks. He sits in the circle of her arms and plays with her fingers and speaks just above a whisper about the new newspaper pictures of Sephiroth, or chatters placidly about the vegetables in the allotment and the ones he wants to grow in the summer.

I feel like actually Seph and Cloud would bond over how badly adjusted both of them were as children. Cloud shares being dragged in front of the town council and publicly caned and humiliated after saving Tifa. Sephiroth shares the time that Hojo injected with a test drug in front of president Shinra after he dared to question orders. Angeal, Genesis and Zack sit in silent horror though the entire conversation.

Cloud giggled very rarely, and the first time Claudia ever heard him laugh in delight was the birthday he got the FIRSTS dolls. He immediately enacted the latest Wutai defence strategy that was in the papers, going outside to draw battle lines in the sand and set up a battle front against the vegetable patch.

Clouds has a problem with authority… the problem is he’s scared stiff of it. There are certain words that will have Cloud lock up and not be able to speak or move. The firsts learn this the hard way. A single ‘don’t’ is enough to pull him up short, but the first time Genesis yelled at him as his mentor Cloud reacted so badly he disassociated hard. All Gen said was ‘how dare you…’ but it was enough. One second he’s angry about insubordination, the next he’s following a sprinting cloud into the bathroom to rub his back through panic induced nausea.

One day I’ll stop torturing him. Today… is not that day.