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Cloud’s hair was wet, soaking into the pillow under his head. His clothes hung over the shower stall haphazardly with a pool of water beneath them. He either hadn’t thought of asking for a towel or was too much of a mess to realize he would need one in the first place.
A mess really was a good description, even in sleep his expression was tense, heart beating a little too fast and hands twitching at his sides. His eyelashes fluttered, eyebrows knitting together as he made those small sounds of fear. He was wrecked. Helpless. Alone.
Not quite alone.
“Shh,” Sephiroth soothed, lifting the smaller man and sliding himself beneath him to rest Cloud’s head in his lap. It was the first time he’d seen him since what was unofficially called the ‘Nibelheim Incident’, and he wasn’t interested in a confrontation. Yet.
Cloud whimpered and one hand vaguely reached up to bat away Sephiroth’s fingers as he smoothed over the thick line of scar tissue in the center of his chest.
“Sleep now,” Sephiroth merely suggested , no Materia needed. Cloud was beyond exhausted, it only took the smallest mental touch to put him under.
Cloud subsided, his hand falling limp. Curiously his gloves were the only thing he wore, the leather discolored and damp. A thin blanket was wrapped around him, tangled through his legs as he’d struggled against a dream.
"That's it, just a little deeper," he slid his fingers through wet blond hair as Cloud's expression relaxed, breaths slow and heart rate lowering as Sephiroth pushed peace and rest into his mind, "good boy."
Cloud sighed and went all nicely open and compliant, perhaps the first restful sleep he'd had in years. Sephiroth knew Hojo, it was easy to see his marks on Cloud's mental landscape.
A scene of ruin, fragments and deep rifts caused by torture and regular dips in Mako a normal man shouldn't have survived and Sephiroth wondered again how and why he had. He didn't think there was a neatly packaged answer.
He felt like an archeologist sorting through a desecrated temple, making note of important memories and Cloud's reactions to them.
The older ones wouldn't have interested him in his previous life. The former Sephiroth, driven thoroughly insane, had no use for this man other than as a useful tool for one task and a vaguely amusing toy to torment and drive to a lesser madness himself.
But he'd surprised him. Cloud had, against all odds and logic and his own broken will, not only survived, he'd killed Sephiroth at what should have been the zenith of his power.
And somehow it always led to Cloud. He was important, possibly invaluable.
The moment Masamune had pierced the boy's chest, the instant Sephiroth had heard the strangled cry of pain, everything had become clear. In the seconds between running Cloud through and withdrawing the blade he'd lived the final years of his own life and watched himself go mad, die, continue his lunacy as a puppet himself and die again. And again.
And everything spiraled around Cloud Strife.
Sephiroth had to have him, and needed to keep him forever. But he had to work fast. A phoenix down revived him from the brink of death, the most powerful sleep spell he had kept him unconscious for the fate of his past to come to him - that part wasn't negotiable, he needed the experimentation to bring him under control.
The next days were a blur of trying to do everything in his considerable power to arrange things as much to his advantage as possible. The rescue of Claudia Strife, the destruction of every scrap of Jenova and its cells, setting a trail that insinuated to his dear father that he had indeed gone insane and disappeared. He was careful to remove Jenova from it's containment, taking it further away before destroying it - easier to make Hojo think he'd taken it with him to... be with. If anything could make Sephiroth feel ill, it was the thought that he'd believed a parasite to be his mother.
That chain of destruction and madness had been all by Hojo's design, although he didn’t know why in the least. It didn’t matter, but one day he’d take the time to drag everything out of Hojo while subjecting him to every torment he’d ever practiced on his ‘son’ and give Cloud a taste for his own revenge.
Hojo had raged at Cloud and Zackary to call Sephiroth, to force him to return. He wanted to compel him to connect to the two younger men, to bind him to them. Hojo had never understood the concept of companionship - seeking to replace Genesis and Angeal with Cloud and Zackary along with the benefit of Sephiroth being able to control them completely. If Sephiroth could control their minds, he could keep them from leaving. Hojo had thought if he could gift Sephiroth companions he could continue to have power over him.
The burning rage flickered to the surface and Cloud stirred, sensing the fury through their connection. Sephiroth reminded himself to breathe, in and out, deep and slow, guiding Cloud’s body to do the same until he relaxed once more.
Sephiroth gently dragged his hand down Cloud’s face, something he’d plucked from his memory - a childhood comfort, soothing him into deeper sleep with soft and slow touch. From the top of his forehead, down over his eyes, sweeping down to caress his cheek.
The storm in Cloud’s mind parted, slightly, allowing Sephiroth more access to those memories that weren’t totally fragmented. If Sephiroth were the kind of man to start some sort of false cult, Cloud would have been the perfect candidate for conversion.
Cloud’s childhood was lonely. Not as bereft of any comfort as Sephiroth’s had been, of course, but isolated. Scorned by most, ignored by the rest. No true friends, no matter what his current surface thoughts told him about the woman he'd known as a child. No matter that she hadn't disabused him of that notion. No matter that in the previous timeline she had never told him the truth until he was nearly dying. That would be a knife to turn against them, to sever Cloud's connection to her, but later.
Cloud yearned, deeply, for someone to love him. For someone to connect with. It was something he’d had in Zackary for such a short time and he'd latched on so desperately it had broken him in the end to lose him so traumatically.
So. Unloved, unwanted, spending years being tortured and his mind splitting apart - barely rebuilding itself to function more or less normally. He was, for lack of a less crude term, a manipulator’s wet dream.
Fragile, broken, corruptible .
Sephiroth would be the one to remake him. He needed to bend Cloud to his will, not just because he had plans to use him but because of the connection between them. It was a siren pull, dragging Cloud into his orbit. Sephiroth’s cells coursed through Cloud’s veins, even more powerfully than it had in their previous incarnation. It drew Sephiroth in just as much, the desire to touch and to possess was nearly overwhelming.
He sifted through the broken shards of Cloud’s time as a ‘guest’ of professor Hojo. Cloud had reached out unconsciously as something other than Mako was dripping into his veins. Sephiroth’s genetic material, left behind to replace Jenova’s, flowed through Cloud like a second blood stream. So powerful that Sephiroth had wanted to answer. The mind that had struggled against Sephiroth’s time and again was blown wide. A door ripped from its hinges in a storm, a chasm needing to be filled.
“You’re already mine,” Sephiroth promised, “we'll be together soon, pet. You’ll play your part, won’t you?”
Sephiroth spread his hand over the center of Cloud’s chest, feeling his heartbeat, “you’ll bring me the Black Materia. You’ll fall beneath my hand. You’ll come to realize your place is at my feet in this world as in the last …”
Sephiroth’s influence slipped into place. Not control, not possession. Not yet. Just a pleasant image, a deep and soothing voice, the feeling of stability beneath Cloud's knees.
Cloud answered with a faint agreeable murmur and Sephiroth smiled, “good Puppet.”