It’s finally happening. It’s here. It’s today. I finally get to announce what I’ve been sitting on for the last year: I wrote a book! And you can buy it on the Internet!
It’s a novel about friendship and how your surroundings shape what it means to be friends, especially when the world as you knew it no longer exists. It’s a novel about fighting and who the enemy is when it seems like every city is a death trap waiting to take your life last and everything else about you--your sanity, your morals, your body--first. It’s a novel about finding yourself when the world ends before you turn fifteen and everything you know, every history book you’ve ever read or algebra problem you’ve ever solved, literally means nothing now. What it means to trust, what it means to survive, what it means to live in a world where there are no rules, not anymore.
Charlie Cross doesn’t know that’s she’s scared; she thinks she’s Fighting The Good Fight, thinks she has the upper hand over the rebels who have taken over not just the government, but every last great city of the once free world. The libraries, the grocery stores, the suburban cul-de-sacs all overrun by lawless, faithless “rebelutionaries.” She’s on the run from everyone, including herself. Learning about herself--who she is, what she values--drives the narrative and Charlie’s journey in search of how to find peace after chaos, how to find the concept of home.
Anyone who has known me over the years knows that it’s always been my goal to be a writer, not just in name but in practice. Guess what? I am one now. I’m a writer, and this is my first published novel. I’m writing under my pen name, Bailey South, for various Reasons, but mostly so that I can keep my private life exactly what it is, private. I’m sharing this with all of you here, but in order to spare your timelines, feeds, and dashboards of marketing and bookish clutter, I ask that interested parties follow my writing Twitter and Tumblr for the latest and greatest.
Thank you all so much for your support. I can hardly believe I’m typing this right now. I can’t believe that it’s not just a dream anymore.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Kingdom Hearts
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Axel (Kingdom Hearts), Roxas (Kingdom Hearts), Xion (Kingdom Hearts)
Additional Tags: Post-Kingdom Hearts III, Angst, Regret, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting
Summary:
Post-KH3 feels that you know you've been missing. If the canon won't do it for you, be the change you want to see in the world.
Everyone's favorite Sea Salt Trio in a messy, fractured AU that will satisfy your need to explain all that crying and hugging.
His comeuppance takes the form of a court mandated 90 day inpatient rehabilitation clinic where he will “learn to love the sober self.” Eying his reflection in the floor to ceiling windows, tinted against the glare of the sun bouncing off the Malibu coast, Cloud wonders what's not love. Good genes and actual good jeans, a scruffy pair of slim fit Diesels sitting low on his hips, surfer skin courtesy of the perfect commingling of pedigrees. There's a slew of groups to attend for every ailment meant to explain away his rebellious, uncouth behavior. Groups meant to admit weakness and let go and let God while Cloud wonders why anyone thinks the necessary tenet of wanting to get sober should be ignored in favor of appeasing the courts. A monumental waste of time, he thinks, slouching in his chair while addicts trade horror stories of shooting up in dirty bathrooms on Sunset, of hitching a ride with a limo bus full of hookers to Vegas for a three day bender involving drugs he doesn't think he's heard of before. It's a sleepy circle of coffee-wired has-beens and starlets, everyone taking their turn like standing under a spotlight. So much of sobriety in Hollywood is about being the center of attention.
“My name is Aerith.” Cloud looks up as the girl smiles decadently. “No, I don't have a lisp.” She has an obnoxious flower crown on her head, handmade from the looks of it. “I guess you could say I'm the poster child for affluenza. People don't think it's a real disease, then the son of a box office blockbuster trilogy shoots up his college campus and people throw the term around on CNN.” A clatter of bohemian bangles clutter her wrists, tiny tattoos adorning her forearms. “If only after school programming actually worked as a babysitter, designer drugs would be much less alluring.”
The counselor tuts lightly under her breath, scribbling a series of pencil marks on her clipboard. “It sounds like you're doing a lot of finger-pointing, Aerith. What about taking ownership of your addiction?”
“I take ownership of the fact that I was born bored and into too much money,” the girl says, rolling her eyes in this aggravating way Cloud finds that he dislikes and craves. The easy dismissal, so similar to what he would do. He knows his faults, has his father speaking an itemized list of them endlessly in his head. He knows how obnoxious the entitled youth look, how he looks. “I take ownership of texting and driving while drinking and driving while popping ADHD meds and drinking. I take ownership of my totaled BMW and my revoked driver's license.” The girl glares daggers at the room of addicts. “I won't take ownership of your disdain or your patronizing. You don't know me. You don't know my life.”
“Oh, boo hoo,” Cloud says, mirroring her rolled eyes and lazy disdain. “Oh, I'm so rich. Oh, my mommy and daddy make too much money to spend diverting their attention from me.”
The girl with a lisp for a name turns to study him, taking stock of his designer jeans, his spoiled director's son contempt. “Let me guess,” she says, tapping her chin in mock thoughtfulness. “The cops rolled up on you smoking a blunt on Santa Monica with some late 90s gangster rap rattling the windows of neighboring motorists.”
Cloud allows her the benefit of a chuckle. “Gangster rap? I'm almost offended.”
“Almost?” Aeirth says, clapping her hands. “Getting an almost anything out of a stoner like you is like like raising the dead.” She nods at the counselor. “There you go, boss. I've performed my miracle for the day.” Her bangles jingle as she gets to her feet. “I'm out.”
Cloud's impressed with the length of her hair as she exits the room, a cascading unruly mane around her shoulders. He bets she smells like Banana Boat and lipgloss.
–
They're out on the beach for “recreation” which amounts to a pitiful game of half-assed beach volleyball and aging, overwrought or underweight, pasty bodies laying out for more of a sun-slapped look as opposed to sun-kissed. Aerith is sitting right where the waves meet the shore, feet buried under sand. She toys with a clump of wet sand, picking out the mole crabs before they scurry out of her hands and back into the surf.
“Gross,” Cloud says, plopping down beside her. She flinches at the sound his body makes against the wet sand. “I heard you could boil them and eat them if you caught enough.”
“Murderer,” she says, looking right at him. So few people look right at him anymore, there's something almost alarming about the way she does it.
“What?” he says after she does it long enough, the sun beside him going right into her eyes.
She shrugs, realigning her gaze with the distant horizon. “You're nice to look at.” It's a compliment, sort of. Logically Cloud knows he's good-looking, has fucked enough boys and girls to know he's good-looking. Somehow the implication of being “nice to look at” is different.
Aerith is pretty, but she's much less nice to look at. There are terrible raised scars on her legs, an ocean of them on her thighs, angry looking tattoos drawing the eye to them. A cupcake, a ribcage, a lipsticked kiss. They're small, mostly black ink as if she's done them herself. He imagines her pussy tastes like vanilla frosting and salt water. Like a lot of lonely nights in rooms full of people. Her nails are chiseled into points, painted black and adorned with trinkets. The Chanel logo, gemstones. She inhabits herself well, he thinks, dragging a hand up the length of her arm and watching the salt fleck off. The gesture gets her attention.
“I don't mind looking at you,” he says, maybe sneering a little. Whatever his face does, it works well enough to get her to agree to walk along the beach with him, a counselor shouting at them to keep two feet between them like they're second graders at day camp.
She's intelligent and prone to self-flagellation, calling herself names with the air of someone who has spent years convincing themselves that they are worthless. Her laughter when he says something charming or something accurate is brittle, like it might break into a sob.
“But that's enough about me,” she says, winding down her tale of adolescent intrigue and hedonism. The counselors are waving them back, calling in the last of the stragglers. “What about you? Besides smoking pot and being bad, what's the deal with you?”
They turn back toward the others, walking slowly to avoid the inevitable drone of evening meetings before dinner and quiet “reflection” time. “Got kicked out of grad school for never going to class... which was really just a cover story for being the campus pot supplier. I'm staying at my mom's place in Venice—can't really say I moved in since there was never any discussion about what I'm even doing there—and... that's it, really. I don't know what I'm doing, and I don't know where I'm going.” He catches her looking at him with that dead on stare, seeing through him. “Really, I'd just like to smoke a fat ass bowl with you and fuck in the sand. That's pretty much my top priority right now.”
She laughs like candy glass and tugs him toward the steps back up to the buildings. “Reign it in, Cassanova.”
–
The days aren't less or more interesting now that Cloud fantasizes about touching every part of Aerith with his tongue and his hands, they just take on a different tenor, a different lens flipped down for sedated viewing of his still same, stalled existence. There's a touch under the table at dinner, the way she licks the four cheese sauce off her fork after taking a bite of macaroni. There's the perfumed air that surrounds him as she walks by right after they cross paths back to their respective rooms for reflection time: grassy, sweet, and damp like spring mornings and thunderstorms. There's something so reckless about her, and it's this curious fixation that Cloud doesn't think he's ever been sober enough to understand. Sure there were other lays—other girls with perfect, firm tits and other boys with gloriously strong hands, slender desperate wrists—but there was no one with all those mysteries written on their bodies, marks made to stand the test of time. Hurt that is forever. Whatever it is speaks to something in Cloud, that place inside him where echos of the past whisper to him when things get quiet and clear.
His suitemates keep to themselves, nodding off like clockwork around 11pm every night, long after reflection time gives way to lights out. They aren't allowed TVs, but there's a bookshelf in one corner where self-help books and all sorts of religious texts line the shelves. Threaded through the pages of a New King James is where Cloud finds a hypodermic needle. No syringe, no fix, just the needle kept safe, kept holy, for late night nefarious uses. Upon its discovery Cloud thought he might try to slice open a vein, bleed out his stupid existence into the sink. That first night after finding it, just a handful of days into the program, he didn't think he could even feel the needle passing through his skin. There was a prick, the welling up of blood. Where was the pain? Had he forgotten what pain, real bodily pain, felt like?
It became a game: how much pain can a single needle elicit? For the first couple weeks it was a sweet, sharp relief, but as time went on, as the chemicals left his body, as things reattached in his brain and began firing anew, things felt different. A prick became a stab became a wound became a hurt, a real shooting pain. So maybe he was dead to things before, numb under a suffocating cover of pot and pills and piss poor liquor.
But no one ever used drugs and alcohol to mask a happy, healthy life.
–
What's weird about any environment that exists in a bubble, be it college life or prison or detox clinics, is that it's easy to keep swimming. Your body adapts to that new world, a metal plate inserted between joints and fusing seamlessly, becoming integrated with new bone growth. Pop the bubble open and reintroduce that single metal plate back into the real world—that newly graduated college student, that newly atoned ex-con, that newly sober addict—and then you see what sinks and what swims. Real life isn't about wake up calls at 6am, a delicious and nutritionally-informed breakfast ready and waiting for consumption. Real life isn't about addiction support groups and one-on-one therapy. Real life is your kid brother and father sitting in the visiting room because it's your birthday. Real life is your mother sipping Ketel and tonics in Monaco rather than sit in rehab with overpriced Sprinkles cupcakes for your 25th birthday.
“Son,” Cloud's father says, clapping him squarely on the shoulder in greeting. Hayner looks a little squirrely like they might be admitting him next, the telltale haze in his eyes like he just lit one up in the parking lot.
“Come here, dude,” Cloud says, pulling Hayner into a hug. “How's that little friend of yours?” he asks, remembering that sexy piece of ass. So desperate, so needy. God, filling that ass was like pouring hate into a black hole.
“Since when do you do hugs, dude?” Hayner asks, shouldering out of his embrace. “That friend is off the market,” Hayner says, glancing at their father. Far be it to insinuate that either of his sons associate with homosexuals. That kind of distancing that begs for a bowl a sticky, crystal-laden weed. That kind of silencing that made everything Cloud did, everyone he did, Not Right. Not Okay.
“I could've made an honest man out of him,” Cloud says steely, staring right at Hayner. It's a trick he's been learning from Aerith: how to really look at someone. Their father casts a concerned glance at Cloud, frowning.
“Are you talking nonsense already?” their father asks, setting the box of cupcakes down to cross his arms. That's the signal that the topic is closed for discussion. “I've had enough nonsense from you. We're here to celebrate your birthday with these cakes.”
“Cupcakes,” Hayner interjects.
“These cupcakes, ridiculous things that they are. You like these things?” their father asks, popping open the box. “These sweet, cloying sugars and creams and cakes. This is your mother's business, your mother's doing.”
Cloud reaches into the box and lifts a cupcake to his lips, tongue darting out to whirl around a lick of frosting. “Yeah, I like cupcakes, dad. I like cupcakes and surfing and smoking pot and listening to music.” His dad throws his hands up, turning to walk away. Cloud just talks louder. “I like kissing boys and eating pussy and reading books and quoting Stephen Crane and watching foreign films.” Hayner gapes at him, hands spread wide and questioning. “You've tried to erase every part of me that doesn't work for you. I'm not a film you can edit or a script you can write. I'm a fucking person. I'm your fucking son. I exist. I'm allowed to be human,” Cloud shouts at his father's retreating figure, a hand shooting out to glance the ideas away as if fanning the wind would make the cries disappear.
“He's gunna kill you, dude,” Hayner says, reaching for a cupcake to cram into his mouth.
“Nah,” Cloud says, peeling away the paper liner from a cupcake. “He'll just pretend I don't exist. But I do, dude. I do, I have a right to, and I'm not going to edit myself for his benefit anymore. He was a shitty busy dad who tried to buy our love with stuff. You can't buy love with stuff. You can't buy love at all.”
“Ok, Mr. Self-Help. Happy Birthday. Chillax. I brought you a blunt.” Hayner digs in his pocket, is just about to pull the blunt out from the hypothetical space of non-being and into existence, when Cloud swats his hand away. He wants it, he does, but he wants a lot of things. That's the glory and despair of existing: you want so, so many things.
“No, dude. I'm clean. You'd quit that shit too if you knew what it was doing to you.”
“Pot is a plant, man. God made plants.”
“You sound like a fucking moron.”
“Yeah, well, God made plants and shit and it's all natural and can't kill you, so your brainwashed guru bullshit won't work on me,” Hayner says, glaring angrily.
“God also said do that shit in moderation. Tell me where in the bible it says Thou Shalt Wake and Bake Every Damn Day. I'll tell you where, Hayner: NOWHERE. You're doing that shit every single day and you're missing out on what things even feel like anymore.”
“You're so brainwashed, Cloud. Smoking weed is a sensory experience. It enhances sex. It's a stimulant.”
“Ok, dude. No judgement. If you smoke for stimulation and enhancing your jerk sessions, that's all well and good for you. I didn't smoke pot for any of that shit. I smoked it and smoked it and smoked away all my concern and all my fear and all my inadequacy. I smoked to cover the fact that I turned you on to drugs and I'm supposed to be your big brother. I'm supposed to watch out for you and stop you from getting into shit, and instead I fucked you up along with me.”
Hayner looks offended, throwing his hands up in exasperation. There's a smear of buttercream on the side of his mouth and Cloud feels the crush of failure, of disappointment in himself more than ever. Without a vice to numb the shout of guilt, it rings clear, stings with its gravity. A pin pressing every day into your skin: guess what, you're alive. Guess what, being alive hurts.
“I smoked because mom fucked all our married neighbors while dad was at Tribeca and at Cannes and at Sundance. I caught her on the tennis court with what's his face from two doors down. He had a tennis racket in her vagina, Hayner. God knows how fucking drunk they were. How do you unsee that when you're twelve years old? You don't, so you cover it. Cover your eyes, Cloud, cover your eyes, Hayner. Aren't you tired, man? I'm tired of hiding from all the shit they put us through. And not just them, me too. All the shit I put my body through, all the people I put myself into. Your little friend? What's his name, Alex? I fucked that kid for months and I can't even remember his fucking name.” Cloud covers his mouth with a fist, fights the urge to punch himself in the mouth. “He was sad and hurting and I was sad and hurting and I ruined everything I could touch. I was a mess. I am a mess.”
Hayner, who is high, says, “A hot mess. A heated mess.”
“You stupid fuck,” Cloud snarls, grabbing his brother into a hug.
“Ouch, dude, my back,” Hayner says, stiffly, swatting him reassuringly across the shoulders.
–
There's only a week or two left in his program when Aerith walks into Cloud's room in the middle of the night. He is, thankfully, between suitemates. People come and go like the tide, being kicked out for this reason, admitted for another. She's as quiet as a ghost when she slides in, Cloud glancing up from a Gordon Ramsay cookbook he found on the bookshelf.
She holds a finger to her lips, gliding over to where he's laying propped up in bed. Her cutoffs are short enough to leave all the right parts to the imagination, a draping, nearly translucent racerback leaving nothing. “Run away with me,” she whispers next to his ear, tongue lapping at the lobe. Her breath smells like mouthwash and licorice.
“No,” Cloud smiles, closing the cookbook. Two weeks to go, and here is this wild creature of the night, flirting with disaster.
“Ok, fuck me,” she exhales, lifting her top away from her body. Cloud's hands move automatically to cup her breasts, fingers rolling against her nipples. She seems a little manic, her body humming at a different vibration than his own. He'd love nothing more than to swallow her whole, mimic in reality everything he's already done in his dreams. His whole body is a want, the way her mouth is open, lips glossy in the lamplight.
“No,” Cloud says, hands stilling against her waist, holding her in place.
The hum of her body quiets and she looks him, pierces right into the center of him. “I'm so bored, Cloud,” she says in a soft little wail, collapsing down around him. Every part of her is soft and quaking, her descent like exhaustion after making love. He carefully smooths her hair as she shakes against him. “Nothing is exciting, not sober and not high. Nothing tastes good or smells good or means anything. There's you and your body and my body. That's what there is,” she whispers, hands moving down to grab hold of him. He's hard because he's a fucking animal, and her grip is vicious, cunning. She knows how to move her hands against him, unlocking the things in the pit of his stomach. The things he would do, tasting each and every sound coming out of her mouth...
“No,” Cloud says again, holding her tighter against his chest. She deflates almost immediately, limbs dying in his arms.
“You're no fun,” she says tonelessly. “And I leave tomorrow, so this was definitely your last chance.”
There's a twinge of regret firing all along his new nerve endings. “Why, you don't want to hang out on the outside?”
“You don't know me on the outside. I'm not this nice.” She heaves herself up and away from him, pulling her shirt back on. “I'm a bitch in the real world, Cloud. I'm a spoiled, self-righteous little brat and I won't have time for you in between Coffee Bean and barre class. I won't have time to smoke on the beach with you and suck that thick cock in your little boy bedroom.”
“I'm not this broken on the outside,” Cloud says, sitting up. She stands at the side of his bed and does her stare. “I'm cold and uncaring and terrible at texting.” He stands, grateful his erection has calmed down enough to not look ridiculous standing there in boxers. “But out there or in here one thing doesn't change. I don't mind looking at you.” She rolls her eyes and goes to turn away, head out the door, but he catches her hand. “I don't mind looking at you because I think you're beautiful.”
“Liar,” she responds without missing a beat.
“Your skin is beautiful because it talks to me without you even having to open your mouth. Don't think I haven't got this on lock. I've been thinking about everything I want to say to you for the last 80 days. Your eyes are beautiful because there's a color in them that only exists when you're looking at me and the sun is setting. There's so much more I want to know about you. You're so beautiful, Aerith.”
Her hand goes up to hold the back of his neck when she pulls him down for a kiss. Red Vines, it tastes like, and some kind of cotton candy lip gloss that she shudders against when he goes in for a taste.
“I'll forget your name in two weeks,” she whispers against his lips, hands sliding up the angles of his back. “I won't even know my own name in 24 hours.”
The baser instincts in him win as he reaches in up under her cutoffs to push a finger into her, her body rocking against his hand.
more cloud/aerith for anon who is probably the person who won this all those years ago, but without a name i'll still call anon. 2k/10k done.
It's two weeks or two months later, the lazy slide of beachside days running together like watercolors blurring under the weight of a heavy hand. Cloud's skin takes on the golden, lavished upon hue of his much younger youth, long days running across the sand of Venice Beach, dodging the sellers of odds and ends, up into Santa Monica, dashing through slats of sunlight from under the pier. There's less running now, less diving ahead as if a fire was catching from behind. Instead he burns, designer hoodie balled up under his head, while the sun beats down, Pacific surf raging all around. It's early autumn—still warm enough to be almost bare skin out on the wind-whipped shore—but he's been fairly adept at lighting joints in even the harshest Santa Anas. Some time after he went north for school, Venice passed a law that made smoking on the beach illegal, something about litter and hazards and a chihuahua who choked on the wood tip of a Black and Mild, so he's cautious about his use.
Not cautious enough, apparently.
“Sir, I'm going to need you to extinguish your cigarette.”
There's a black shape obscuring his sun. Even with his eyes closed, Cloud can see the voice attached to the hand hoovering above a gun attached to a belt. Posturing. The Alpha Male come to hoist his dick around.
“What cigarette?” Cloud asks, his voice the exact kind of arrogant candor that pig-faced cops love kicking the shit out of. Before Cloud can finish smirking, he's being forced over, arms wrenched behind his back.
“Stop resisting! Stop resisting!” the cop shouts though Cloud has a face full of sand and zero use of his arms or legs, the cop's meaty knee jammed down against the back of his thighs. Someone, another upstanding officer of the law, perhaps, gets in a solid punch at his face for good measure before Cloud loses track of where, when, and who.
He comes to midway through booking, his fingertips being rolled against the digital imaging device an ugly bitch cop is using to forever erase his anonymity.
“Welcome to reality, Sunshine,” she says, unsmiling.
“They didn't,” Cloud coughs, sputtering over the grains of sand still in his mouth, “they didn't read me my rights.”
“Sure did,” the pig says, jostling him into a corner where she takes what has to be the world's worst picture of him, half of his face like bruise.
The part of Cloud that doesn't have a problem with authority tells him to shut the fuck up and keep his head down. The other part, the one who sees his father's face in every condescending professor, every disinterested dismissal from a semi-significant other, raises its face to spit at the overweight and overwrought cop.
It's much, much later, sitting in the back of his mother's BMW, that he comes to.
She's already in her alternate, vaguely congruent timeline, muttering to the rearview about the atrocious Antigona the “blonde headed boobjob” two houses down carries around. She uses the word “ostentatious” but pronounces it wrong, her left-hand turn signal on for three of the last five minutes without a left turn in sight. Cloud listlessly turns to stare out the window, can already hear the dismissive remark his father will offer, a shamble of papers in one hand.
“To think I actually expected more of you,” his father will say, not bothering to look up. The dizzying jazz will be on pause for a nanosecond before tinkling erratically once again, Cloud left to study the impeccably stained wood on the door of his father's closed studio door.
like i promised, here's more of that cloud/aerith set in the LB universe for you, anon. slowly but surely, i guess.
There's something supremely humbling about being kicked out of your graduate program to move back in with your parents. Four lukewarm cans of Miller High Life, a sloppily rolled blunt or two, and six hundred and fifty miles of California coast later, Cloud finds himself leaning bodily against the gate buzzer of his mother's home. She's in there somewhere, probably drunk, attempting the Crow Pose with a tumbler of Eagle Rare perched precariously on the arm rest of a couch. She would messily adorn his face with bourbon kisses, prattle on about her day's activities while leading him to the kitchen for a glass of milk or a plate of deviled eggs, seamlessly abandoning one timeline where Cloud is away at Humboldt State for another timeline where Cloud went surfing and made it home in time to help her figure out the damned remote to shutter the three floor to ceiling windows in the master bedroom. But Cloud is not so lucky.
“Figures,” his father says, buzzing him in without another word. Cloud imagines his father peering at his face in black and white, security cam chic, before turning back to the script he's annotating—something biblical, which seems to be current now—resuming play on the frantic jazz cued up on his iPod. There won't be a serious talk, a concerned sit-down where they congregate, clasped hands, around the formal dining table to discuss his ousting from the family home. At most there might be a monetary decline in his monthly funded expense account. That he had one at all is half the struggle: people think affluenza isn't a real disease. Then a director's son goes and plows down a busy street fair. Then an industry love child shoots up a sorority house. At most his allowance dries up a little; more than likely, however, there will be a complete refusal to acknowledge his presence. The cold shoulder and the continual pay off. “Sorry I missed your sixth birthday. I was in Tunisia shooting a film.” Deposit a hundred dollars. “Sorry I missed your high school graduation. I was at the Oscars.” Deposit a thousand dollars. “Sorry I—sorry.” Deposit a college education, deposit off campus rent, deposit a paper substitute for love.
Cloud punches in the code to a side entrance, a useless stream of numbers he's had committed to memory since skipping high school to smoke pot and surf became a near daily pastime. He navigates toward Hayner's room, glancing in like his kid brother might be hammering his thumbs across an Xbox remote, but there is no expletive-spouting sidekick of old. Hayner, stupid turdface that he is, still has more sense than his big brother. Finding the door to his room ajar, Cloud toes it open, slides in and leans backward, closing the door. Enshrined in darkness, his room smells like nothing at all, the shadowed outline of his bed both familiar and strange. A tell-tale glare on the ceiling means his father made good on the threat of installing a smoke detector in his room; somehow, despite the hundred and one encounters wherein Cloud caught his father putting out joints while watching dailies, his father still sees fit to police the substances deemed worthy enough for his son to put into his body. Cold-pressed kale and avocado smoothies sprinkled with spirulina and chia? Yes. Drinks and drugs and all things unholy? The answer, glaring down at him like the Tiny Red Ass Eye of Sauron, is pretty clear.
Cloud goes to fling himself on his bed, but a small voice in his chest stops him. Hey, it says. Hey, listen. Maybe you don't get to sleep on a fancy bed. Maybe a graduate school expulsion warrants a little self-flagellation. Cloud wants to smoke a blunt. Cloud wants to climb out onto the roof, light up a fatty, and smoke until the sun comes up. Hey. Hey, listen. Maybe you fucked up too many times. Listen, you've got to get your shit together, kid. Get your shit together. Shrugging off his backpack, Cloud slides to the ground, back still against his door, and puts his head in his hands.
Hey, this is out of the blue. But if you ever feel like you can’t write because of that stupid 10k Cloud/Aerith fic that a young, naive girl “bought” from you looming over your head. Don’t worry about it. I was donating that much with or without a fic. I’m just sorry for expecting too much from you. Didn’t realize it then and I was too cowardly to say something sooner. Lesser Beauty is still great by the way and I can appreciate where it came from a lot better now.
i wish it had been true kh characters. that’s the only thing i wish. i wrote this for you, and i’ll write more as time allows:
That burning sensation at the back of his throat, just an instant, before letting the lighter fall away, then the constant breath, breath, breath—lips pursed, kissing glass—until a cough breaks free. It’s a tired routine, a ritual as commonplace as breakfast. Your buttered toast, your cold cup of milk. Your wake and bake. Cloud spreads his arms and legs as wide as they’ll go (what a novel morning: waking up alone), stretching like he can reach all four corners of his mattress. What, exactly, had happened last night? There was some dark-haired girl, nice tits, who gave some truly sub-average head. Enthusiasm. He could definitely do with a little of that enthusiasm from a certain green-eyed unmentionable with the pep of a slutty cheerleader. Sliding his fingers around his phone, Cloud realizes things are probably over with that particular piece of ass.
“Fuck,” he sighs, one eye open against the streaming light cutting through the cheap plastic blinds. Some barely intelligible text from the guy in question—“Hairy balls?” Really?—which ends on a note sour enough to warrant another toke or twelve.
“Cloud!” Someone pounds on his door with the force of a small army. Had he been drinking last night, too? Funny how things bleed together. Unbidden, a memory of him as a kid, elementary school jokes about ADHD awareness: “Squirrel! Ball! Cloud!” How his name inevitably evoked a stream of word salad, like entire swarms of Southern Californian school children contracted schizophrenia in one fell swoop of poor hippie parenting choices. Cloud makes a noncommittal sound, fishes around for the boxers he knows are laying somewhere under the sheets.
“The fuck, man,” Cloud says through a yawn, throwing open the door. He pays a pittance in rent for the storage shed in the backyard of a truly decrepit frat house that he may or may not still be a member of. “We burning down, or what?” Nondescript Frat Guy stands on the other side of the door, wry expression narrowed to focus on the envelope he bears aloft like a gavel.
“You’re out, dude. The university shipped out your walking papers.” Cloud reaches for this thick, creamy paper sticking out of the already opened envelope.
“Opening someone’s mail is a federal offense, man,” Cloud says, frowning. We regret to inform you, blah blah, academic probation past extension, blah blah. His dad was going to be so pissed.
“Yeah, well so is paying $40,000 to suck dick and smoke pot all day.”
Cloud brazenly scratches his nutsack. “Nah. It’s not.”
“You can’t stay here anymore, man. The brothers decided on a different supplier, and you like, don’t even go here anymore.” Nondescript Frat Guy looks like a tool in a button down layered with a sweater vest. He looks like a Trevor.
Cloud wants to feel angry. He wants to feel fear, uncertainty. Some kind of sign that there’s a heart in his chest that works beyond mere beating. Instead there is only mild annoyance at this preppy piece of fuck swagged out in his Lacoste and boat shoes. “Fuck you, Trevor,” Cloud says, swooping down to pick up a backpack by the door. Laptop, sack of kush, and a Sartre text. He pulls free the power strip at the side of his bed. Chargers, cell phone. He shoulders past Nondescript Frat Guy before stopping to size him up. He could definitely fuck this bitch up. “Fuck you, Trevor,” Cloud says again, bristling.
“Who the fuck is Trevor?” The guy asks, throwing his hands up. “And what about all this shit? Clothes and bed and shit?”
In response Cloud throws up a finger, back turned. “Burn it.”
