Title: Doubt

Theme: 10, Comforting

Notes: Done for ffthreesomes on LJ. Forcefully doing something with the time that would otherwise be spent stewing over writer's block.

*

Sometimes Sephiroth felt uncomfortable around those two.

No, not sometimes. Oftentimes.

It was a painful feeling, when he thought on it, one he tried to ignore for their sakes. But it was there, when he saw Zack wrestle Cloud into a chokehold and poke fun at him before kissing him breathless, when Zack cheerfully and tirelessly helped train the boy with that mortuary slab of a sword, when he slipped into their double room during a mission after a late-night inspection to find the blond curled up asleep against Zack's chest in a futile attempt to wait up for him.

Like he didn't belong.

Sometimes he thought they knew. And then that made it worse because they just tried so much harder to let him in, bring him closer, and that made him wonder if that was asking too much of them.

Sometimes he thought of leaving and letting that perfect camaraderie exist unmolested and uncontested. But he was just a little too selfish for that, and it made him happy to see Zack turn to him and wrap his arms around him and call him 'Seph' with no concern whatsoever as to rank, decency or decorum, to hear Cloud's clarion laughter ringing clear and unfettered the few times the boy rode behind him on his chocobo and had the temerity to relax in his presence.

He needed them. When he went stumbling back to his quarters in the dead of night after hours of Hojo's probing questions and experiments and evaluations to find Zack with hot chocolate a blessedly understanding silence and a warm embrace, when Cloud gathered enough courage to lean up and kiss him as if it were explanation enough for all his doubts, which at the time, always felt like it was. When they managed to drag him into their bed and fall asleep in a tangle of limbs and warm bodies and beating hearts and slow breathing.

They filled him; a part of him that had always stood empty. So, more than he felt like he didn't belong, he felt like he wanted this never to end.

They were his family.

And he might almost believe they would always be there for him.

*

Forcefully doing something with the time that would otherwise be spent stewing over writer's block.