A FEW VARIOUS SENTENCE STARTERS

Aerith doesn't want to embarrass Cloud on purpose, but she enjoys teasing him so much. His reactions are always very funny, even if he doesn't necessarily think that way. Actually, she still hopes she doesn't bother him that much. But she's playful by nature, and nothing can change that. She was lonely for way too long, and she's much happier now that she belongs in a group of friends.

She can't help but chuckle at his question. "No... You don't!" she assures, offering him a playful smile as she lets go of him. "But I want to walk with you. Not on my own. I know we're pretty much done with that bodyguard thing, but it doesn't mean you should let me be on my own." Well, she doesn't mind that much, she can handle herself, but she needs to keep teasing him.

He looks at her as though he doesn't understand a single word Aerith just said. Well, the fact of the matter remained that he did understand - Cloud was a lot of things but he certainly enjoyed the belief that he wasn't stupid - but more the statement as a whole wasn't truly correlating with the current situation.

Because as much as Cloud wasn't stupid, he did take a lot of things quite literally. The here and now being a prime example of that.

"I'm... right here?" Spoken with only a smidge of irritation, the furrow of his brow mimicking his tone and presenting himself to her with the show of both palms and a non-committal shrug.

She was so confusing sometimes...

"Watch and learn!!" He's off before the throw is even finished. Cloud is not like Yuffie; Nanaki knows he can be trusted. As soon as he's pointed a direction, he's out of the gates. A crimson lightning just the way he'd been described in Costa del Sol. That silly competition was nothing to him; if his predecessors could outrun the arrows of Cosmo Canyon's enemies, then he would outrun Shinra's bullets.

Cloud's throw is not quite the speed of gunfire, but it's not a child's throw either. The beast spies the projectile in the air far above him. Threatening to touch the ground any moment now, but he would not let it.

With a growl he pushes his own full weight over a rock and jumps high, catching the prized treasure in his mouth and landing with an agile spin all-fours on the ground. His bite squeezes hard on the worn-out rubber and leather, and he relishes the feeling of that pressure against his teeth.

His tail rises high, and he turns around proudly, letting the ball drop to the ground to howl his own victory.

"See!? Nothing to it!" He calls after Cloud before returning before him with the ball again. Settling it down once more, he looks up expectantly. "Your turn now!"

Man... the mutt was fast and pretty good at catching. Cloud had cobbed that ball as hard as he possibly could, and there was a lot to be said when it came to Strife's right hook.

Still, he can't help but smile as Nanaki brought his prize back to him, dropped it at his feet and... sang the song of his people, probably. Cloud was not here to judge, or even make an attempt to understand the language of the Watchers of the Vale.

But it was the moment when he crouched to pick the ball up and repeat the process that the creature's words caught the blond off-kilter, causing him to pause and glance up at him with an expression of puzzlement.

"What do you mean... my turn?" It took too long for that penny to drop, and he straightened himself and took a rather cautious step away from that chewed-up rubber ball now covered in lab-rat-dog slobber.

"I ain't catching that thing in my mouth if that's what you're thinking." He bites, the arch of a single blond brow accentuating the bemusement. That thing was as hard as a stone, even if he wanted to try - which Cloud most certainly did NOT - it would probably knock a few of his teeth out.

"How the hell you gonna throw it anyway? You ain't got thumbs..."

Lips part to speak, yet her words are timid, hiding in fear of casting him away. Ruby eyes linger on him for a moment longer and she reminisces their past. Behind the veil of mako she can still see hints of pure blue, and framing his face, sculptured locks of blond hair. The boy she knew is still there, but at the same time he is a practically stranger. It's a strange feeling, akin to deja vu for he is so familiar yet so different all at once.

Tifa wishes she could sit him down, to straighten everything out and lay it all on the table --the confusion, the relief, the care... Yet she knows his presence in her life is akin to a candle in the midst of wind. Too strong of a push and he would be gone again, and Tifa would be all alone in this vast world.

Truly, she feels unworthy of that second chance, what after the way she implicated him after the incident at the bridge . As children, Cloud was always on the fringes of her life, and Tifa was never attentive enough to address it. All thoughts lead the fighter to a regretful conclusion; she has been selfish, and is selfish for choosing pleasantries and illusions to preserve this delicate 'connection.'

A hand lifts to greet his, but her gaze is cast to the ground. Such worries have compounded the turmoil in her heart, a struggle she vows to keep to herself. A quiet sigh lingers, and Tifa begins to walk, "Yeah... you're right... Hopefully they've been able to stock up on potions."

@azure-steel

So they'd been reduced to small talk already; an aspect of socialisation in which Cloud still had so much to learn. It was in moments like these, left alone with people he thought he knew well, people he thought he loved - at least once - and struggled to find that much-needed connection.

Still, there was hesitation, not only to release the grip of her hand as they walked, allowing his fingers to linger there for longer than he knew was appropriate, but also in her.

The way she spoke to him, how her gaze would falter and fall when she looked at him, a feeling which left him feeling hollow and writhing all in the same instance. A thousand needles pushed beneath the skin with no one to blame but himself.

For he and Tifa had walked this path before; the collapse of the Mt.Nibel bridge had brought blight and ruin to whatever they had been kindling back when they were little more than children attempting to make sense of a world which seem so cruel and unjust.

And again... within the crumbling carcass of the Gongaga reactor. Strife had hoped that if he didn't speak of it the incident would just... go away; that the issues he'd created that day would right themselves like they always had done before.

But this wasn't going away, was it? A festering sore upon whatever relationship Cloud had once hoped to cultivate with this girl which he continued to poke and pick at until it grew bigger and harder to heal.

A wrong he had no idea to fix, not merely a simple wound he could wrap a bandage around. Not this time.

Cloud's steps began to slow, causing him to gradually fall behind as they walked, and he offered nothing to fill this new fog of uncomfortable silence hanging in the air like thick, wet cotton. All of this before he eventually came to a stop and offered his own words threatening to choke the air out right out of his lungs if he didn't speak them now.

And it had to be now, or never.

"Are you afraid of me...?"

@sweettifalockhart

"This is what they really look like. They look strange, and they make a lot of noise, but they're not very smart. So they take the shape of things and people they think might trick you." S explained calmly, crouching down, arms folded atop his legs while in perfect balance on the balls of his feet.

"But even when they do that it's obvious they're not real people. They can't really talk like a normal person. Look."

He leaned forward then, until his hands touched the floor. Bringing himself between Cloud and the pumpkin-headed monster, he stared with intensity into its eyes. The boy focused every bit of his mind on him, the one he knew best. He pictured his gaunt nose and dark rounded glasses. The long and greasy black hair fell around the frame of his sickly olive-green face, sharp and knotty like one of the withered plants in the vivarium.

And there he was, the Doctor, hunched under the desk with a whimpering frown behind the dark shades. Shaking inside his white lab coat, hugging his jagged knees, grunting, but unable to speak a single word. As far as S was concerned, it was an improvement from the original.

"You try now." He said, shifting back on the floor to give Cloud space to see and run his own test. This could be a game, too.

"Oh, eeeewwww!! He's so uglyyyyyyy!" Though it should be noted that the statement - as true as it was - was not delivered in horror, rather, the young blond was all but falling about himself in a fit of laughter. Astonishing perhaps for a boy who had been fearing for his life only moments ago. His belly was actually hurting, and enough to warrant the need to hold himself around the midriff, at just how funny the silly man looked just quivering and making stupid noises under the desk.

He didn't even think to ask who it was supposed to be, assuming that S was just thinking about an ugly man. At least that was what his six-year-old mind could deduce from this little exercise.

But when it came to Cloud's turn to make the monster look like something or someone 'tricky', not only was he now drawing a complete blank, but he was still giggling rather mindlessly at the ugly man crying under the table. It took a little while longer to calm from that, even long after the poor pumpkin-shaped monster had turned back into its original form.

But suddenly he had it!

Mimicking the silver-haired boy, leaning forward with his hands on the floor, he thought long and hard about what he wanted the pumpkin to turn into, or rather didn't want it to if that made any sense at all. And the thing under that table began to morph; huge feet which stretched all the way from under the table and between the two boys, a ginormous head hunched into a square and overly thick chest, and humongous arms, with equally huge hands making its squat beneath the table almost impossible.

"AAAAH!" A high pitched squeal as the small blond would jump to his feet and point, all giggles and mischief, at the monster he'd just created.

"He's ugly toooooo!!!"

The creature in question was in fact supposed to be the milkman who'd confronted him at his front door literally that morning; the man had been terrifying then but was now reduced to this image of hilarity cowering in a dark corner of a room.

Though in reality, it didn't really look like a person at all, at least... not any normal man walking the streets of Nibelheim. It looked more like someone had attempted to draw a human, without having ever seen a human before and was given only a vague description.

But at least he was having fun.

There it was. Cloud defiantly turning the corner back to finish off the five strokes was already a good sign but for him to continue onto the next corner and still cut in increments of five was even better. Even Cloud being annoyed was good news. All of it was. He knew what Rain wanted, he could remember where he left off when he stopped and, more importantly, he was feeling something. Had Rain not come by to jostle him back into the present, who knows how long Cloud would've been sat there staring at nothing and how far he would've drifted away from them.

Rain watched the moment as it all seemed to click for Cloud, he's not trying to fix him but to just guide him out of wherever he wandered off to. It was obvious that there was a lot going on in that head of his but Rain doubts he'd ever be fully ready to open up about it... But that was okay. All Rain could offer was to be a rock in turmoiled waters for Cloud to reach for, to hold onto until the fog faded away.

As Cloud continued to round off the wood into a textured cylinder, Rain reaches into his bag and pulls out another block of wood with some guidelines for Cloud as he pulled out his own work in progress model.

"Want something a bit harder?" His gaze and tone were softer now, back to normal, no longer watching for any signs of dissociation. Unless they have another incident like in Gongaga, Rain won't pressure Cloud into talking about what's going on. It didn't matter. What mattered is that Cloud was back with them.

Cloud didn't particularly want the more challenging thing, no; he would have been quite content just sitting there chipping away at the original block used originally to drag him out of his daze - which was beginning to look like a rather uneven... bean shaped... thing. Not that it was the shape that mattered in this instance so much so than the technique he was using and the purpose for doing so.

Still, he didn't really feel as though he had the liberty to refuse, all things considered it didn't feel right to turn down Rain's offer, and Cloud would simply accept the offering with a deadpanned "Yeah, sure."

He still doesn't quite understand how the pattern worked or what exactly this model would turn into, but he took it anyway, chiselling away with what knowledge he'd actually managed to absorb during their many lessons.

But the moment didn't really last; the motivation to keep going begin to ebb away with the lethargy which would often follow these strange dissociative episodes he'd been experiencing lately.

'Say sorry to your brother, Cloud!' their mother would scold when it was time to make up and put problems to bed. How he missed... what he wouldn't give to talk to her right now.

Just one more time...

But this one wasn't going to just go away was it? Not a simple tantrum thrown when Cloud couldn't get his way, or Rain had stared at him for too long across the table. Oh... if only things were just that simple nowadays.

Rain had already said it. Sorry simply wasn't going to cut it, not this time.

He lowers the project, barely started into the fold of his lap with another sigh, deep and so very tired, before he would unceremoniously lean to the side, brow colliding with his brother's shoulder. The impact was hard enough to possibly jostle his twin to the side.

An immature action that would hark right back when they were both children, when Cloud had taken something too far and was seeking forgiveness for whatever it was he'd done. When mom told him he needed to apologise.

Cloud always did have an issue with 'sorry'.

 day by day , he was getting used to the looks he received from the doctors , from the other shinra workers that seemed less keen on having a remnant join their ranks and treated him like a bomb to be blown up whenever they felt the urgency — yazoo was lucky rufus didn't kill him for their little rebellion , and he didn't want to die . he didn't . . . he could take humiliation and hard work as long as they allowed him to go out at night . wander around the city as a half normal guy– months had passed . yazoo would often find a lonely rooftop where it was too high for people to look up , and didn't see him . he hasn't seen cloud either , he hasn't seen anyone but rufus shinra and the strangers outside that yazoo never quite socialized with . [ @azure-steel ] cold gaze painted emerald , glancing at the glinting lights of the ruined city as he sipped his drink . alcohol wasn't good for him , not that it made him drunk but it fucked up his stomach it seems . ❛ don't you have anything better to do than stare ? ❜  he could know him by the heaviness of his steps . it was an odd kind of comfort ; yazoo was a suicidal weapon in the morning and a nobody by night , but he didn't have to be something anymore – didn't have to be sephiroth . his eyes close , long legs dangling from the edge of the building . ❛ so creepy . ❜

"Speak for yourself."

There was an odd kind of quiet surrounding the ruins of Midgar. A strange melancholic tranquillity which saw to the blond's return when the bustle of Edge City would begin to fray at the nerves. There really was only so much socialising and small talking he could perform in any given day.

But to find that one remaining remnant of a demon long dead was, in short, a touch surprising. Still, Cloud would err on the side of caution as he dares to approach, a healthy distance did he choose to park himself next to his unlikely evening guest.

Just the two of them... here... sitting on the very edge of the world.

"Surprised Shinra allows you to roam on such a long leash, hm?" A jibe at the former president more so than anyone else, even if Strife was indeed privy to the facts that Yazoo had to be considered dangerous and wholly unpredictable.

Much like Cloud really, if one wanted to break him down to his core, a staggering similarity.