#daddy!seph

[ardwynna]

Is there a word for that feeling you get when you find something you weren’t even looking for, but now that you have found it you can’t imagine why you weren’t looking harder for it to begin with?

This is Daddy!Seph’s ringtone.

[ardwynna]

Xanadu

Marriageverse ficlet/Also on A03

***

So close. So. Damn. Close.

  Sephiroth wasn’t one to seek unnecessary medical attention, but this was necessary, dammit. “Put me back under, Doc.”

  Dr. Delano stepped back. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “No, you don’t understand.” Sephiroth swung himself out of the bed, gripping the side as his head spun. He sat a moment, glancing down at his injury while he caught his breath. Perfectly healed, as usual. “Whatever you gave me, I could see things clearly. I had it. The solution to turning back this whole invasion. I had the answer.”

  “Yeah, we know, Dad,” Ella said from the desk, busy playing some phone game.

  “You do?” Of course she did. Sephiroth looked at the doctor, who only shrugged.

  “You spoke in your sleep,” Delano said. “Kept saying you knew how to end the war.”

  Sephiroth leaned forward. “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Did I tell you?” Gaia, for the answer to come this way, while he was swimming in his own subconscious.

  Ella sighed. “Yeah, Dad, you told us.”

  The doctor cleared his throat and handed Sephiroth a notepad. “Ella wrote it down for you.”

  Sephiroth snatched the notepad out of the man’s hands, flipping through to the last written page. There in the middle of the page, written large and neat and clear, was the simple solution to the Planet’s woes.

  ‘Teach the dog to read, so he fetches mission reports instead of eating them.’

  ***

While there continued to be no end in sight to the onslaught from space,, personnel were quick to laud the General’s decision to eliminate the paper trail. War wasn’t nice, but at least going digital made it efficient.

[ardwynna]

Rei: Why does Dad grow wings out his butt sometimes? Aeris: It's to flap really big farts away, sweetie.

[ardwynna]

“Is Red Lake No. 40 a vitamin or a mineral?”

[ardwynna]

“Back in Midgar if a young man was dancing like that ‘for the ladies’, one of them was getting married soon and the rest were shoving twenty gil bills down his pants.”

[ardwynna]

Cloud, with Tifa’s full approval, names their first child ‘Zack’. From the dusting of dark hair on that soft infant head, from the stubborn uplift of even those downy strands, he can tell that Zack Lockhart-Strife will have a fair enough resemblance to his namesake. It’s been so long since Cloud’s headstrong, boisterous childhood and he’s become a much quieter man, but he hopes he can raise little Zack to have something of the old Zack’s spirit. ‘Big Zack’ grins from his Lifestream perch, too pleased for words.

Tifa names the next one ‘Brodrik’. The clerk stumbles over the Old Nibel spelling. He’s much like his brother, Brody is, though Cloud likes to think the Lockhart genes have had a taming influence on the hair. The boys are close enough in age to do everything together. If the media had not already made it known otherwise, they could be taken for twins, two peas in a pod.

The pod is getting bigger, making room for a blond. Cloud and Tifa choose ‘Westyn’ by mutual agreement, and Tifa is happy though she had been hoping for a girl. There’s no time to dwell on it. With three young children in the house, a restaurant and bar to run and Denzel occasionally popping home from college, their hands are full.

When Kaydn comes along on the heels of the others, they realize they need to take steps. Tifa puts her foot down. Her body has been through enough. She wants to be able to kick a man’s tailbone into his cranium again. She misses her abs. Cloud spends two months in quiet dread and one afternoon with an ice pack on his groin. When the kids are all old enough to run, when they start recreating his battles with sticks and every high surface, he considers it the smartest thing he’s ever done. He never did like being outnumbered. It’s been years since he last glimpsed Zack Fair in the Lifestream, but Zack is there beside him all the same, promising to have his back.

After years of being the happy aunt, of bouncing the boys on her knee and ‘glowing’ away their scraped knees, Aerith gets her turn. She brings her pale daughter into the world and even Tifa has to admit, the child is cute, although the infant squirms in her arms and refuses to settle down. Maybe something of her old longing for a girl has stirred, but things are what they are. Cloud is surprised how the child quiets in his arms, content with Uncle Cloud as she is with few others.

There are more children to the mix. Aerith’s. Yuffie’s. Cid’s. Marlene has become the big sister that Aerith had been to her and Barret glows with pride at the young woman she’s become. Seventh Heaven gatherings have become family friendly, for all that they used to be a bunch of terrorists. Correction, a bunch of terrorists and one homicidal maniac, who screams ‘Stop smacking your brother’ like all the rest, has unspoken vegetable chopping contests with Tifa and sits in the corner with the cat in his lap until the cat is good and ready to leave.

They go home with plenty of cake after the Cetra twins’ birthday. They have some that night with a bottle of wine. Life is good. Until Tifa complains that her breasts are sore and that she’s suddenly tired all the time and the smell of orange juice is making her stomach turn. They stare at the blue line on the stick and wonder what happened. Seems vasectomies sometimes reverse themselves, given enough time, and Cloud always did heal up pretty well. They name the little one ‘Jessica’ and try to figure out a new plan.

[ardwynna]

I'm growing very interested in the whole marriageverse but I don't know where to start as I only see snippets and drabbles here and that one fic on ffnet where their child died.

This one’s a bit difficult. The marriageverse really does only exist as a series of short fics and drabbles at the moment because it’s not the most epic segment of the larger Path Timeline. There are a few major incidents and I’m working on those, but for the most part the plot is ‘Aeris and Sephiroth raise their family’. It’s a sitcom in the middle of the epic drama.

Most of the older shorts and drabbles are still here at my LJ. If those don’t quite make a coherent picture of the family dynamics yet, a few of the WIPs I have on my plate are meant to help. 

[ardwynna]

Just wanted to let you know I am enjoying the snippets daddy!Seph says immensely! You especially got me with 'mopping the ceiling. *cackles* <3 <3 Would love to see all of these gathered together (maybe along the lines of 'texts from last night'?) because they are utterly hilarious. What are the odds? :D

Sorry, vinvalen, it took me a while between one thing and another, and I’m not certain any of the lines from the longer WIPs actually made it in here, but here’s Seph being a dad. I forget how new Daddy!Seph and the marriageverse are to Tumblr since they (and I) were LJ-only for so long. And I don’t have them in very good TFLN format. Anyway, snippets of Daddy!Seph? Here you go. ^^

-.-.-.-.-.-.-

“I’ve got the latest schematics here,” Sephiroth said, hitting the projector function on his tablet so Cloud could see. The tech specs in question warred for his attention with a desktop background that was clearly a photo from home.

“How come you’re so muddy?” Cloud asked.

“What?” Sephiroth looked up. “Oh, the pic. From when the boys were little.”

“Ah, yeah, I remember now,” Cloud said. “Those mud pie battles you used to have.” Sephiroth’s face had softened even as he scrolled to the relevant numbers. “Whatever happened to those?” Cloud asked. “Kids outgrew them?”

“No, not really,” Sephiroth said, hand hovering over the keyboard. “Ari started putting rocks in his.” He shook his head and maximized the window. “I’d have smacked him upside the head if I weren’t also kind of proud.”

-.-.-.-.-.-.-

She was sitting on the edge of the roof again, the way she did when she wanted space. Sephiroth wasn’t worried about her falling, or even trying to jump, not from this height. It had never done him any harm. She did not say much, but her feelings lay in the open in other ways.

Gaia, he thought, so old already, and still too young. “Ella,” he called, “I’m coming up.” He leapt and landed like a cat behind her, soft enough to do any dancer proud. Ella nodded but did not turn. Her shoes lay beside her, pale pink satin the only color left in her new wardrobe choices of black and charcoal grey. Sephiroth sighed.

He sat down some distance away, out of arms reach, but close enough to study her hunched form from the corner of his eye. She looked like she could use a hug but she was prickly about such things these days. Softness was not weakness but people thought it was, so she hid any she had left, his little warrior.  

Sephiroth charged right into the fray. “How was school?”

She shrugged. He waited. She sighed. He felt the boiling frustration on the edge of his mind, seething behind the barriers that puberty was putting between them. “They’re calling me ‘Ella the Kella’,” she said.

“That’s stupid.” The words flew out of Sephiroth’s mouth before he thought about them. “They can’t even rhyme properly.”

“That’s what Ocean said.” Ella’s voice was more animated now. A good sign.  

“Well, if Ocean said so too, must be true. He knows more about high school than I do.” Sephiroth let his wing out with the pretence of stretching. A flap or two and it settled on the outskirts of Ella’s personal space like a shield. Hugs were too much sometimes but every warrior appreciated a good defence now and then.  

He drummed his fingers on the roof. “I… don’t have a lot of advice on how to handle this kind of thing. Never was there myself. But I suppose…” Sephiroth considered the possibilities and got lost in thought.

“Suppose what, Dad?” Ella said, tired of waiting.

“Oh. Remind them that it’s true? I’m not sure how that would work out.”

Ella sighed, hugging one knee to her chest. “I’d probably get in trouble.”

“So?” Sephiroth shot her a smirk and edged his wing in closer. “Let the Principal call me. I’ll back you up.”

Ella’s eyes lit up from within. “Sounds like a plan,” she said, returning his smirk. People were starting to say her smile looked like his.

People said a lot of things.

-.-.-.-.-.-.-

“Boy, why is your hair blue?”

Ari rolled his eyes. “It’s not blue,” he said. “It’s cerulean.”

“Hmm.” Sephiroth circled around. “Rei,” he called out.

“What?” Rei hollered from upstairs.

“What’s cerulean?”

“A shade of blue,” Rei answered.

“Thought so, thanks,” Sephiroth shouted back, folding his arms and fixing Ari with an expectant glare, waiting for the explanation he knew the boy didn’t have.

-.-.-.-.-.-

Sephiroth tossed and turned and finally sat up in the dark. “Somebody hates me.”

Aeris groaned, nestling further into the covers that he had thrown off. “We’re used to that.”

“No, I mean somebody seriously hates me.”

“What are you going on about?” Aeris rolled over.

“Can’t you hear it?” Sephiroth asked, eyes lighting up the night. Out in the old barn that they only used for storage, he could hear cymbals. And a snare drum. And a bass.  Their latest addition to the family had a constructive way of working out the grief over his old one.

Aeris sat up and listened. It was distant and faint to her. “He’s got skills.”

“I’m not saying he doesn’t,” Sephiroth said, flopping backwards into his pillow.

Aeris curled an arm across his chest, molding her soft curves against his side. “You’re the one who said he could bring his drum kit.”

“I know, I know,” Sephiroth said. “But there’s an old Wutai curse about this. ‘If you hate your neighbor, buy his son a drum.’ Somebody hates me.”

-.-.-.-.-.-.-

“Boy, why is your hair green?”

“There wasn’t any red dye in the store.”

“Oh. Okay.”

-.-.-.-.-.-.-

“Sit still, Dad.”

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Sephiroth insisted. “Just let me get a look at it. I can fix it myself.”

Rei stood with his syringe prepped and ready. “You don’t have to. Just let me numb you up so I can straighten it before it heals all crooked.”

“Crooked toe never stopped anybody,” Sephiroth said, inching away. It was nothing, really, just a silly little accident. He had cracked a few bones before.

“It’ll make your shoes fit funny and you’ll get corns and bunions and bursitis,” Rei said, shifting to block the exits. “Now just a couple of sticks…”

“I can straighten my own toe,” Sephiroth said. “Really.” It didn’t hurt that much, no, it didn’t.

Rei sighed and set the needle down. “Okay. But Mom will laugh her ass off if you do it wrong.”

Sephiroth considered his options. Needles on one hand. Aeris constantly snickering on the other. He sighed. He shook his head and gestured to his wayward toe. “Dope me up, Doc,” he said, “and don’t tell your mother if I cry.”

-.-.-.-.-.-.-

“What’s in this cake?” Barret demanded.

“Amaretto buttercream filling,” Sephiroth said, cutting himself another slice. “And I might have poured some liqueur over the cake.”

“Da hell,” Barret said. “That ain’t your baby girl’s birthday cake.”

Sephiroth shrugged. “She’s not a baby girl anymore.”

Barret paused, fork in his new cybernetic hand. “I guess not. Damn. Seems like just yesterday…”

Sephiroth contemplated the span of years and felt reality come crashing in. “I feel old,” he said suddenly.

Barret snorted. “You’ll get used to that.”