Beneath the Red

Beneath the Red

Chapter Four
Wistful Secret

Cid was restless. It was early. Or late. It was that time of night
when the hour numbers were small, when the drunk with the most
fortitude turned in and the insomniac awoke, unable to do anything
but watch infomercials until dawn.

He was smoking a cigarette, leaning over the railing of the Highwind
and scattering ash over some untamed and unnamed section of
Cosmo Canyon. He couldn’t sleep. He hadn’t been able to sleep for
days, since he had seen Vincent’s dreams, so uncensored and vicious.
Not very well anyway…

He was so close…

It just maddened him that Vincent had been there, in his arms and
had squirmed out of his grasp. Why he couldn’t guess. The expression
perplexed him. The only indication that Vincent had acknowledged the
connection and hadn’t severed it was a sudden jump into battle to
accept a possible critical blow to the head for Cid. He usually wasn’t one
to do something like that, given how frail he really was. It proved to
Cid that he was at least thinking about him, which was far more than he
had expected from the enigma.

Cid felt eyes staring at him from a dark corner. He had grown used to
the presence whenever Vincent approached, making startled ‘Jesus Christ!!’s
less common. “Hey,” he said. What in the world was he supposed to say
after something that intimate??

“I believe I owe you an apology,” the silken voice said, followed by the
figure deeply shrouded within his cloak.

“Huh?” Cid asked, befuddled. “The hell for?”

Vincent sort of struggled to find words. Cid had come to recognize his
eerie silences when verbally approached as such. It wasn’t that he didn’t
want to communicate, it was that he couldn’t. Not very well. “You were
exposed to something… rather traumatizing. I feel that I have… contaminated
you in some way. Please forgive me.”

Cid laughed suddenly. Maybe it surprised Vincent, he wasn’t sure. “Christ,
Vince! Why do you blame yourself for the stupidest shit? I offered, remember?”

Vincent’s lips twitched as he too leaned over the railing. The wind caught
his hair and a bit of cloth and played with both, whipping them about in a
random, billowy dance. “I suppose,” he finally said.

“Hey Vince?”

“Hm?”

“What does… ‘the senate is still corrupt and the emperor remains insane,’
mean?”

Vincent sort of thought about it. “It’s a metaphor to ShinRa I suppose.”

“Huh. Creepy, but accurate.”

“You think I’m creepy.”

Cid smirked. It mattered to Vincent what he thought of him. It sort of
swelled inside of him, filling up with a sort of giddiness. Damn, he was sexy
like that, no matter how insecure the guy was. “In a good way,” Cid said
lightheartedly. “Life really isn’t all that bad, you know? It’s not all sorrow,
though sometimes it kinda seems that way—like that big fireball in the sky.
That’s depressing enough. The past is important, but it’s over.
There comes a point where we all just need to move on… you know?”

“Is healing even possible at that point?” Vincent asked wistfully, more to
himself than to Cid.

“For sure,” Cid assured. “Never said it was gonna be easy, speedy or pretty.
But definitely possible. I’m not gonna be the one to tell you what to do
though. It ain’t my place.”

Vincent scratched his nose. One more gesture that made him human and
not some intangible phantom. Cid repressed a shudder. More human than
any of them in fact, with knowledge of things so black that he had done the
very human thing—withdraw. Cid’s thoughts drifted in ad out of the vague
fantasies that had developed loosely over the last day or so. He wanted to
prove just how human Vincent was to him by making him croon and moan
under pleasures best described in the smutty novels that Shera used to read.
Those thoughts threatened to give Cid a hard on.

“Do you…?” Vincent began, but faltered. Cid waited for him to feel out what he
was going to say, but nothing came.

“What?”

“Nothing…” he replied, drawing away from the railing as the sky began to lighten
in the east. “Nothing worthy of anything…”

Cid didn’t realize what he was doing. As Vincent turned to leave Cid’s hand
reached out on its own accord and weaved through his thick black strands, slipping
through the well groomed gossamer like water. Vincent stopped and looked at
him. It was that expression again, the one Cid couldn’t really decipher because
pain was semi-absent in it.

It was Vincent who initiated, which caught Cid completely off-guard. The spice
cabinet scent overwhelmed Cid as Vincent swept in close and pressed his face
against Cid’s in a brief but elating kiss. His pale face was deceivingly hot against
his, and so incredibly smooth.

Cid’s hands struggled to pull them closer and to find a place that wasn’t awkward.
A jolt shot strait from his bone to his heart when he felt Vincent’s arousal against
his. He wanted this, it hadn’t just been a passing tolerance. He wasn’t sure if this
was pure lust, a gesture of understanding or simply two men expressing the
deepness of what they had shared. He wanted to tear away the shell of clothes
and barriers and make Vincent scream his name—to force him to believe he was
human.

These were illusions of grandeur apparently. Vincent wrenched himself away once
again, as quickly as he had pressed in. There was an exhilarated tinge of color to
his face as he caught his breath, but then a hasty gain of composure had him
brisking away back into the living quarters.

“Dammit, Vince!! Why d’you keep DOING that?!” Cid shouted desperately, grabbing
a fistful of cloak.

Vincent turned, his face hard and resolved again. He gently pried Cid’s fingers
away and studied them with a cool grace. Words were suddenly very easy from
him. “Your dreams, Cid. Didn’t they come true?”

Cid was sort of taken aback by the question. Yes, his heart’s desire—to see the
stars from a throne well above the stratosphere—had been fulfilled in a hasty
but thrilling moment of glory. “I… yeah. You were there…”

“What stopped you before?”

Cid took his hand back, tingling from the contact. If the urge wasn’t going to
be satisfied, there was no need to feed his cock images of Vincent bringing his
lips to those fingers, teasing… offering… “Uh… circumstance, I guess.”

“Ah. Circumstance,” Vincent approved with a nod. He turned again, this time
without a protest from Cid. “Then you have your answer.”

Circumstance? Vincent had a circumstance he was worried about??


End of Chapter Four
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*ooh, kinda short and URS, but that’s okay. Next chapter will be longer with more resolution ^.~*