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"Would you ever want kids?" Squall asks him one day, out of the blue.
Cloud doesn't know where the question comes from. Very little about the undignified tangle of his and Squall's limbs beneath the scratchy, coffee-stained quilt Aerith gave him has anything to do with parenthood. He's even in his only clean pair of boxers. He's barefoot and wearing one of Squall's shirts (because all of his are in a jumbled, offensive pile [hopefully inside the laundry hamper]) and he'd been blissfully contemplating the freedom he now possesses in the land of freshly-dropped-out-of-university with all the graceless poise of a twenty-one-year-old who is probably nothing at all like what a parent should be. Children, however cute they may be, are nowhere near the gravitational trajectory of his day-to-day thoughts.
So he says, "Uh," to which Squall says, "Hm," before Squall's fingers resume their trail of light scratches near the newest of his bruising 'stigma-sores.
"Squall?" he asks. Because he does notice the way Squall's fingers slow (and little things like that tend to mean something).
Squall turns to look at him, eyes bright and serious and very [disarmingly] blue. "Is that a no?"
Cloud doesn't have a proper answer for him. "Probably?" tumbles out of his mouth before he can really think about it, creating an unexpected domino effect that flattens Squall's mouth into a firm line.
"Right," Squall says, a bit stilted, but otherwise very much the same as any-other-day Squall. He does turn away, though.
And that, perhaps, is where it all began.
-
"Yer not seriously leaving?" Cid gawks at him, in the present day.
He's good at that, gawking. He's got both of the twins strapped to him, hands busy with readying two bottles, and he gawks at Cloud in an incredulous, withering sort of way that immediately beckons guilt to the surface. Cloud had been in the middle of tossing a couple of his belongings into a beat-up duffle bag and preparing to leave the house.
"Yeah." He tries not to look at Cid. He rounds the bed, mongoose-fast, footsteps light (and quick [a bit like running away]), for fear of finding himself unable to spirit himself away from here after all.
“Cloud,” begins Cid.
“It’s not for forever,” Cloud mutters, ducking his head.
“Sure are a lot of things in there fer ‘not forever.’”
“Yeah, well,” Cloud says, pausing stiffly at the door. The weight of the bag cuts a welt into his skin, but it isn’t a lot. It’s just clothes, and his materia, and some notebooks, and his bathroom things, and a stress ball, and somewhere lost at the bottom is his favorite pen. It’s—
“A lot,” repeats Cid, looking smug.
The autumn air is sweet and light, like a newly ripened fruit. Cloud wants nothing to do with it. He steps outside anyway.
“Not leavin’ a note? He’s gonna worry.”
Cloud thinks about telling Cid that Squall hasn’t really got the time to worry, not about this, but the words catch in his throat, bitter and black. Behind him, one of the twins begins to stir. Cloud takes the steps two at a time and leaves before either one of their sleepy smiles can call him back.
-
He has no idea when it was he and Squall began to grow apart. Except, of course, that he does, but it never feels quite right to blame his crumbling relationship on a pair of year-old twins, even if it is the truth.
And, well, they were damn cute, no matter the chaos they'd brought into his—Squall's—his-and-Squall's?—life.
That’s the thing, though. The problem has nothing to do with Sora or with Roxas.
The problem is that they haven’t spoken in days, and that Cloud no longer knows how (or when [or why]) to begin anything with Squall anymore.
-
He hasn’t been home for a long time.
The ceiling lights click on, illuminating the space with a light warmer than Cloud feels. Dust floats and flies, falling in unpredictable arcs to rest upon a sheet of more dust. Zack hasn’t been here in a while, Cloud can tell, though surely not for the length of time Cloud has been away. Three steps into the apartment and Cloud finds himself stepping into older skin, feeling out once-familiar patterns (like tracing his usual path down the living room), attempting to settle into routines that were once his (like opening the creaky window to let in some air, just because).
And it feels foreign.
That is the most spectacular oddity, that everything feels askew, crooked and not-quite-right, even though he’d shoved the living room couch here and pushed the coffee table there.
His room is familiar (but not the same), messy with stacked papers and manila folders and a couple empty boxes of cereal he’d never gotten around to throwing out. His bed is (small [and fitted for one]) messy and undone. He lays in it, eyes shuttered, breeze fluttering in, and thinks about nothing (something [everything.])
It occurs to him sometime after three in the morning that he's fallen entirely out of the habit of living here. That he is the oddity, that somewhere along the line this has become Zack’s apartment and not Zack-and-Cloud’s.
It’s a very bizarre thing to realize when this, and not the little house on the sleepy road beneath plush, verdant vines, is actually—technically—his real home.
-
At four A.M., he finds himself wondering about Squall.
-
The twins, Cloud had come to learn, had lungs like a swimmer’s. Probably because babies were swimmers before they were anything else, but also because they screamed astoundingly loudly, and for astonishingly long breaths at a time. At their mere five months of age, Squall already seemed on the verge of a breakdown.
“You’re never going to see them go through puberty at this rate,” Cloud muttered, prying the baby monitor from Squall’s hand and pushing him down.
Squall had bags under his eyes, bruise-blue, so deep that they probably traced the sharp of his bone. “Don’t think I even want to.”
“Because you don’t ever want to see them grow up?” Cloud wondered. ”Already?”
However exhausted he might have been (and he was, from the way it was written, plain as day, all over his face), Squall had energy enough to roll his eyes with pronounced exasperation. Moments like these, Cloud remembered why he stuck around him so much. “No,” he said, struggling against Cloud’s hand. “Because it’s already too much trouble without the added clusterfuck of adolescent hormones.”
Guess you’re right, Cloud thought to say, but said, instead, “I will punch you.” He pushed down on Squall’s chest, willing him to stay put.
“Sora’s crying,” Squall said mulishly. His eyes swivelled to the baby monitor.
Cloud stuffed it in his pocket. “It’s Roxas, actually.” He was met with an obstinate squint.
“You can tell?”
“Probably,” Cloud lied, shrugging dismissively. “Point is, you need to go the fuck to sleep. I can check on them.”
Squall sighed. “Go home, Cloud,” he said, without thinking.
Cloud felt his fingertips go numb. Felt the numbness travel along his wrist, up his arm, twine around his heart. He felt it drop uselessly into the pit of his stomach. Felt Squall’s heart beat persistently (arrogantly [ignorantly]) against his hand.
For a moment, all there was between them was the ticking of a clock, counting down each lead-heavy second.
“Cloud,” Squall began, thickly. Squall’s heart skipped a beat. Cloud felt it through the thin of his shirt. He snatched his hand back and got off the bed.
“I am,” Cloud said, without looking back. He heard the mattress squeak as Squall shifted on it, sitting up. Heard Squall’s heart drop too, landing in tandem with his own. There were syllables stuck to his teeth, sharp and tremulous. He swallowed them down, afraid of what words they might have formed. “Just go to sleep, Squall,” he said instead, and settled for feeling quite numb all the way down the darkened hall.
-
What hurt the most, Cloud tried to tell Tifa in the early hours after the first of many fights, wasn’t what Squall had said.
She sat with him in the backyard, watching the shuddering fence-vines tremble in a crisp April breeze.
“Did he apologize?” she asked him, without even knowing what it was that had happened between them in the night (because in spite of everything, Cloud had never picked up the art of spilling his heart.)
“Yeah,” Cloud said, miserably. Squall had, profusely, in solemn words (and light touches [and painfully blue eyes.])
The shape of her hand found his back, and patted the space between his shoulder blades in slow, comforting circles. It didn’t matter then that she didn’t understand. For an hour it was only him, and Tifa, and spring birds flittering through the single, thick-trunked backyard tree.
And the guilty look on Squall’s face didn’t haunt him until she had to leave.
-
—But Cloud doesn’t like to think about their bad days.
-
Dawn bleeds in, bright and brittle, and even though he feels tired enough to collapse on the spot, Cloud leans his forearms on the railing and watches the sun rise.
He can still remember the look on Squall's face the day Squall told him about the twins. He dreams about it, sometimes.
He spends the day cleaning the apartment, and spends the next clearing his desk. Straightens furniture (like Squall would), throws things into the trash (like Squall would), and fluffs all the pillows (like Squall would, for him, every night when he could) for no real reason other than that he can. He arranges the disorder of a barely-lived in apartment into a functional order, and wonders why he can’t recognize himself even in this new, dustless space.
-
“It’s not that I miss him,” he tries to explain, from beneath a flickering lamplight down the street.
“Okay,” says Zack, solemn even if Cloud can tell he doesn’t believe him.
“It’s just—“ Cloud doesn’t know what just is. His neck is cramping from the angle at which he’s been keeping it tilted. His jaw is pressing his scuffed and disused Nokia to his ear, and for the whole of three minutes all he does is listen to the crumplecrinklecrease of Zack’s clothes against the mouthpiece.
Eventually, Zack’s voice cuts in through the silence, soft with sympathy. “It’s tough with kids, isn’t it?”
Cloud finds himself shrugging to no one, to a chorus of crickets at the edge of daybreak. The sky above is beginning to speckle and dust with baby-gray-blues. He can’t even remember the last time he slept.
“You’re doing okay though?”
“Yeah,” Cloud says.
“You sure?”
“Yeah,” Cloud says, again.
Because even if he’s (miserable [and aching]) exhausted, grubby with sleep tugging vainly at his eyelids—well, at least he’s still here.
-
But he does, though.
Miss him.
-
He doesn’t like to think of him and Squall as a pair prone to squabbling. They never had been, not even at messy seventeen, when they couldn’t decide on a mutual idea of public, or at nineteen, when Cloud roomed with Zack, and Squall roomed with Irvine. There had always been a secret kind of pride about the two of them, nestled somewhere within Cloud’s chest.
He supposes all lovers must feel this way eventually, like there is something about them that is different from everybody else. According to all their friends, they're quiet-different and serious-faced different, but to Cloud, the thing about him and Squall is that they’d never had a rhythm for fighting.
If it’s a dance (if this is their dance, right now), then Cloud doesn’t (want to [ever]) know it.
-
(But the end, he’s the same as the rest of them, anyway, different only in his silent adamance and earnest belief in all the ways he and Squall are a different kind of them. Even if his mouth is clumsy, and stumble around the shape of the words 'meant to be', finding the taste of them far too sweet, far too foolish. Nevermind that he thinks so [knows so]. Even if they haven’t spoken in days. Because he and Squall were gathered from the same bits of the same hardened star, and stitched together like so, messy scar to bruising sores.)
-
A week down the road (many roads away) he finds himself blankly following cracks in the sidewalk.
“Sora’s crying all the time,” Aerith tells him, a bit like an afterthought. He snaps back to attention, jolting out of his daze at the mere mention of Sora’s name.
“He’s got his first molar,” Cloud tells her promptly. The explanation comes so automatically that it makes him feel a little like Squall, overprotective and on edge. “He’s teething worse than Roxas.” Besides, he’d seen it before he left, milky white in the pink of Sora’s gums.
He gets the impression that Aerith is only here because she’s worried about him. He also gets the impression that Zack has bounded back into the apartment—on temporary vacation from Aerith’s, he declared sunnily, as he dumped a bag of much-needed groceries on the table—only because Aerith is very worried about him.
But she hasn’t got any reason to be. Cloud isn’t the one burning himself out with too many work hours and even more stubbornness. He wants to tell her that, but Squall is her brother, and he figures it might not be the kindest thing to pick at him like a scab.
The September sunset trails blazing orange in the sky, painting a dull, dying sort of fire that beckons nighttime to drape over it and snuff the colours out. Cloud has grown tired of sunsets. Each day has begun to bleed into the next, and perhaps it’s the sleeplessness seeping deep into his bones talking, but every moment has become more difficult to discern from another.
“Maybe you’re right,” Cloud admits, eventually.
“That does tend to happen, doesn’t it?” Aerith laughs, kindly. She leads him away from the edge of the curb, and rests her hand in the curve of his elbow.
He lets her guide him back, takes one step, two step, three steps four, steered by the small of her body, eyes at half-mast. “Funny how that works out.”
He has no idea how long it takes for them to walk back to (his and?) Zack’s, but he blinks for a long, spun out moment, and then finds himself in his bed. His curtains flutter in the breeze, carving out the shape of Aerith’s face in the moonlight. He has no idea why he’s got tears in his eyes. He can’t remember the last time he cried.
“You can’t avoid him forever,” Aerith murmurs, repeating her initial advice, and takes his hand.
Cloud has absolutely nothing to say. Because even if Aerith is being unfair, picking sides and all (but not really [because there aren’t any sides]), she may have a point.
-
Vaguely, he knows it’s a dream.
He knows he’s not actually at Cid’s house, in Squall’s childhood room, dressed in the clothes he used to wear when he was a teenager. His hands right now are smaller, not entirely his hands, and his hair is longer, differently jagged and yellow. He should have outgrown sixteen. He shouldn’t fit in this body. He should be pushing at this skin to find himself. He should be twenty-two.
Despite the acute prickling in his bones, the sheer absurdity of being young again, Cloud doesn’t fight against it. This body doesn’t fit him, but all the mismatched feelings do, all white noise and confusion. He remembers sixteen (even if he isn’t), and knows that it feels a lot like this.
The room, though.
The room is perfect.
Every line in the room is the same as Squall's real old room. The desk pressed pressed straight into the wall, the bookshelf aligned perfectly next to it, the organized geometry of Squall’s tidiness. Squall is the only person he'd ever known to be so tidy. He'd always had designated spots for everything. Like schoolwork on his desk, Triple Triad cards in his leather binder, medals and trophies on a shelf, and Cloud, apparently, in the whole of his room, like Squall'd decided he belonged here from the start.
He has no idea why he’s sitting in front of the door until a voice on the other side begins to speak.
“Cloud,” says Squall, quietly. His voice is (higher [not quite his Squall’s bass]) barely louder than a murmur. “Open up.”
“I can’t,” Cloud says, placing his hands against the grain of the door, just to feel the vibrations of Squall’s voice through it.
“Not like that, you can’t.” He hears Squall’s palms flattening, and were it not for the separation between them both their hands would be pressed flush, fingerprint to fingerprint, skin to skin. “C’mon. I want to see you.”
“I can’t.”
Inexplicably (dream-logically [believably]), his trembling hands cause the door to rattle. It rattles so violently that the lock clicks shut. Squall doesn’t sound even a little bit angry. “You can’t? Or you won’t?”
“I tried,” Cloud attempts, wetly, “but you just won’t look at me.”
There’s a pause, where Squall doesn’t speak and the dream begins to flicker.
Cloud raps at the door. “Squall?”
The door remains firmly in place, undisturbed by his knocking. The lock won’t unclick. The words somehow come warm and rich against his ear anyway. “You never know. I might surprise you."
-
Cloud wakes with a jolt, and gasps out, “Shit.”
The sun is up, streaming a yellow light through the window so bright that Cloud flinches away from it. Slowly, very slowly, sounds of all sorts fill Cloud’s ears. An unruly branch tapping at the glass. Cars down the street. Late-morning birds chirping out a cheerful song. Zack and Aerith’s voices filtering in from a room away, warm with laughter. His phone, ringing noisily, imperiously, begging to be picked up.
He glances warily at the name, then stuffs it under his pillow.
Thirty missed calls over the course of a (forever-long) week, but he’s not yet ready to talk to Squall.
-
The thing is, none of this has anything to do with a lack of affection. Part of the problem is that he cares too much. Squall doesn’t just take up a sliver of his heart—he’s everywhere, sprawling over like all of Cloud’s tiniest veins.
Two weeks down down the line, Cloud is lost in dirty laundry, struggling with an empty closet.
“It’s almost like you have no clothes,” Tifa says, sniffing mournfully at his shirt.
“I’ve got plenty,” Cloud argues back, angling his shoulder away.
“Just not over here?”
He doesn’t take the bait. And even though he is the one being pelted with silent judgment (at his clothes [at his never-answered phone]), Tifa levels him with a look.
“What are you really mad about?”
Cloud opens his mouth.
-
“Twins?” he’d repeated, feeling absolutely dumbstruck. “You’re adopting twins?”
Squall’s mouth twitched, and incredibly, he managed to look more shattered than Cloud felt. He wasn’t quite looking him in the eyes, was staring, instead, at the shape of his face.
“You can’t just adopt babies out of nowhere, you have to plan for these things—“
“I have been,” Squall said, stiffly. “For a couple of months now. They’re not due for a few weeks more.”
“For a couple of months,” Cloud repeated. “For a couple of months.” It seemed as though it was all he’d been doing for the past few minutes, repeating after Squall like a broken noisemaker. He was trying to break out of it, trying to summon his own words to the surface, but his brain was caught on every word Squall’d been saying, reverberating chaotically between his ears.
“Cloud,” Squall began. Cloud felt the weight of Squall’s hands pushing him gently onto a chair. They were the only things still tethering him here; Squall’s hands, Squall’s (stupid [stupid]) words.
“I don’t know anything about babies,” Cloud said, with terror. “I barely know how to take care of myself, I’m—we’re twenty-one, Squall. We’ve never.” He stopped there, unsure of what he wanted to say. There were a lot of things he and Squall had never (said [or done]). They’d been together for four years now, and never planned beyond that.
Squall’s hands grasped his quivering fingers, knocking their joints together. The look on his face was closed-off and distant. “I’m not making you do this with me.”
A chill struck him just then, not unlike being dumped with basins of ice water in numbing succession.
“Oh,” he said. He was remembering their conversation now, the one on the couch, months ago. Squall wore the same look then as he did now.
“Wouldn’t force you to be a parent,” Squall muttered into his shirt.
“Oh,” Cloud said again, unsure about how that made him feel.
Squall made a low, vague sound, and rested his forehead against Cloud’s chest. Cloud’s fingers left his to find the curve of Squall’s back. It couldn’t have been comfortable, knees pressed to the floor, knelt between Cloud’s legs, but Squall didn’t utter a single sound of complaint, and remained there until the chaos in Cloud’s head settled into something other than a broken and confused loop.
-
He hadn’t been that upset about it, not at first. They weren’t breaking up, after all, and Squall’d said that the master bedroom in the little house he was moving into was Cloud’s as much as it was his own, if that was what Cloud wanted. Squall was giving him their relationship, and freedom from parenthood. He was free to be twenty-one and rudderless, not anchored down by responsibility. It made sense at the time.
It was what he (thought he [definitely]) wanted.
-
“Opinions can change,” Tifa says, gently, back in present day. “You’re a part of that family, the same as we all are.”
“I’m not supposed to be ‘the same as you all are,’” Cloud says wretchedly, bracing his forearms on the counter. He thinks about a grown-up Sora and Roxas calling him Uncle Cloud, and hates the taste it leaves in his mouth. “I should be something else.”
“You’re practically their parent too.”
“But I’m not.”
Tifa pushes the phone towards him, expression kind. “Have you told him?”
He shies away from it like it could cut him. “Well,” he says, awkwardly, and looks away.
-
Of course he hadn’t.
He doesn’t know how.
-
Two weeks and a day after he leaves, there’s a sharp series of knocks on the door. Cloud opens it, dressed in a worn, oversized sweater emblazoned with HOLLOW BASTION U that definitely doesn’t belong to him. His heart sinks into his stomach, heavy and swollen, the moment he sees who it is.
“What do you want, Leon?”
Squall's face contorts into an expression caught between confusion and discomfort. “You never call me—”
“It’s Leon until I'm not pissed off at you anymore.”
“Could be a while,” Squall—Leon—grits out after a beat, jaw tight like the words are rocks he's forced to tumble backwards out of his throat.
“Could be,” Cloud agrees. It feels like rocks for him too.
For a drawn out moment, neither one of them speaks. He supposes that by now he should be used to these silences, and he is, normally, but things aren't exactly normal right now. Not their kind of normal. The kind that Cloud wants back. The kinds that weren't punctuated by babies screaming or low jabs about exhaustion or stubbornness all the time.
They used to speak in silences, before. He used to understand the language of Squall's hands.
A minute unfurls into two, and blooms, tensely, awkwardly, into three.
“He said your name,” Squall-Leon ends up blurting out. His voice beats the little ones in Cloud's head, preventing them from embarking upon a fairly standard internal debate of let-him-in-or-leave-him-out.
Cloud frowns up at him. “Who did?”
“Roxas. He said—nevermind.” Leon shakes his head, jostling some of his jagged fringe so artfully it may as well have been a calculated move. He tilts his chin down low enough that the dark brown of his hair covers the blue of his eyes. Leon hasn't looked him in the eyes, not for several days now. “Will you let me in now?”
Cloud is nearly still angry enough with him to leave the door chain on. Nearly. He hates the easy way he caves (and hates more how much he hates only being able to see Leon through a crack, no matter how upset he might be) but the chain clicks off, and the door swings open.
Only a couple inches of threshold separate them. Leon's boots are half a foot apart from his own. Feet, inches, miles—they could be nose-to-nose, and Cloud thinks that he would still feel so far away.
“Talk,” he says, rather than align himself to Leon forehead-to-forehead, heart-to-heart, “or I kick you back out.”
“When have you ever kicked me out before?”
“There's a first for everything,” he says warningly.
Leon doesn't push it, steps inside, and talks.
-
They don’t do much talking, far too distracted by hands and lips and teeth.
But Leon becomes Squall again, and convinces him to come back anyway.
-
“I do love you, you know,” Squall tells him, without shame.
Cloud’s throat closes up, blocked by his heart, such that he finds himself unable to swallow down the word. “Shut up,” he says, rather than I know or Me too. Above them, the sky is in flames, and Squall looks (beautiful) tired against the fading light of the sun.
They walk in tandem to the car, step matching step, and say nothing else the whole drive home.
(Because, Cloud knows, Squall understood his rapidly beating heart, and held it [held his hand, twined between his fingers] without bruising it.)
-
He's still a bit angry, though.
-
The room is messier this time around, with more overlarge stuffed animals and squashy number-letter-blocks strewn haphazardly around the floor. The crib is new, too, longer, dark wooden bars going down the middle to separate the twins. Sora's snoozing quietly, head turned to his side. His heart swells immediately; Cloud didn't think it was possible to miss anybody this much.
In the space of a second, Roxas spots him and beams.
“Clah! Clah!” he gurgles, smiling a wide, toothless smile. Cloud's stomach begins an awkward series of somersaults in his belly, and each happily shrieked attempt at his name drives something like nails right into his heart. He wonders if happiness normally hurts this much. If perhaps this is a side-effect of parenthood, and if Squall had been trying to keep the kind pain of it away from him. He wonders if Squall feels this way every day.
“Hey, kiddo,” he murmurs. “Guess I can't call you Thing Two anymore, can I?”
“Clah!” repeats Roxas vigorously.
“Cloud Strife, yeah,” says Cloud, taking one of Roxas's pudgy little fists and shaking it like it's the first time Roxas has ever seen him. Roxas squeals at the handshake, and waves their linked hands like a rattle toy. “This is what good-mannered people do. Shake hands, introduce yourself. You should also say ‘nice to meet you.’”
Roxas doesn't do any of that. He burps at him instead and dribbles spit-bubbles down his chin.
“I guess that's fine too.”
Wiping the drool off Roxas's face is an easy and automatic gesture—he’s done it so many times by now it feels practically second nature. Roxas even leans into his hand, wide eyes fluttering closed before blinking back open with the kind of open, innocent glee only children seem to manage. The proverbial nails drive into his chest with a cruel and renewed ferocity; Cloud can't help but think that it just really isn't fair.
Roxas's hands find his face. “Bah?”
Cloud doesn't speak baby. From the look on Roxas's face, 'bah' could mean, 'what's wrong?’, the same way it could mean, ‘why do you look so sad?’ But the thing is, he's never been good at spilling out whatever hurts, and he’s never been good at figuring out the reasons behind his moods either. He’s not sure he knows how to tell Roxas that in Baby.
"Bah," says Roxas again, insistently.
“This is kind of hard for me,” Cloud admits, placing three fingertips over the hand Roxas has on his cheek.
“Ba-ba-ba-ta, pfflat,” continues Roxas solemnly.
“I guess you’re right,” Cloud reasons, swallowing past the lump that has somehow managed to lodge itself in his throat. Roxas’s hands are so warm, he can’t help but think, through the pain in his chest and the weight on his eyes. So warm and so small. Everything about Roxas and Sora is small. He’s never been so afraid to break anything before in his life. And, well, “I want to be yours,” he confesses at last. The words tumble out before he can even think to catch them and swallow them back up. “I want to be yours for real. Your—dad, or something, you know?”
The door opens behind them.
“Da!” Roxas shrieks. His hands fly off Cloud’s cheeks, reaching up behind him. “Dada!”
Cloud wipes away a final, errant smear of drool, mouth flattening into a line. “Yeah,” he mutters, “There’s your dad.” He lifts Roxas, careful to support his head through his excited flailing, and deposits him in Squall’s arms.
He doesn’t meet Squall’s eyes even though he can feel them on him. He has no idea what Squall has or hasn’t heard. He doesn’t want to know.
“Cloud,” Squall attempts.
“I’ll go and grab Sora,” Cloud says, and tries to slips away before Squall can grab a hold of him. He can’t help but think that maybe ‘bah’ meant nothing more than ‘bah’ after all. He feels the flush crawl up his neck, burning his ears.
“Cloud.”
Squall grabs him anyway, fingers curled around his wrist. “You are,” he says.
Cloud’s not entirely sure he understands. “What?”
“You are his dad,” Squall repeats, unable to escape his own embarrassed uncertainty. “I want you to be. I always have, it’s just that—I mean, if you—”
Cloud can’t hear past the rush of blood, the overwhelming emotion that crashes over him like a delinquent wave. His first thought, ridiculously, is that he’s glad he didn’t have Sora in his arms.
“Clou—mmph—”
—because he knows himself, and knows he might’ve dropped him in his delight, or might have too-tightly pressed him and Roxas both between his and Squall’s kiss.
-
That night, tangled in their bed, Squall touches him like he's afraid he'll disappear. Like he's a real cloud, transient, all wisp and vapor, about to fade away.
"Don't be stupid," Cloud admonishes, melting into Squall's hand just to prove he's skin and flesh and a heartbeat. “I’m right here.”
“Believe it or not,” Squall says, with gentleness, “I’m afraid you won’t always be.”
Cloud’s heart floods. “It wasn’t for forever.”
“You brought a lot of things with you for ‘not forever,’” Squall admonishes back, sounding a lot like Cid (reminding Cloud how sometimes, [this one time,] sons are a lot like their fathers).
“I’d have come back anyway.”
Squall’s voice is quiet in the darkness, boyishly unsure. “Yeah?”
Cloud nods, cheek brushing against cheek. “Yeah,” he says, with unshakable certainty. “Couldn’t forget to come back for you.”
-
“Dad-dy,” says Yuffie, extending the ‘y’ with insistent mirth. “Dad-dee. Dah-dee. C’mon, say it, squirt!"
“Bah,” Sora says, bouncing gleefully in his walker. “Bah, bah, bah, bppfhht, da!”
“Well, I s’pose that’s close enough.”
“What are you doing?” Cloud can’t help but ask, feeling tired already. He’d only just managed to get Roxas to stop crying, and doesn’t need Sora’s excited babbling to wake him into another round of tears.
“Squally’s already ‘dad,’” she explains, with exaggerated exasperation. “You’ve got to be something, too!”
He hides his pleased flush by ducking his head, bending down to pick Sora up. He presses his cheek into Sora’s downy hair.
“Bah, bah, pah!” Sora squeals, tracing chubby fingers happily all around the edges of Cloud’s face. “Pa-pa-pa!” Just like that, Cloud’s heart bursts, blooming into a flower in his chest. He kisses Sora’s forehead and shuts his eyes without caring that Yuffie’s making obnoxious noises at him in the background.
He’s already sure about it, and can’t wait to tell Squall.
“Pa sounds nice.”