01 But where's the glory without a little gall?

The self-conscious beat-beat-beat of Cloud's heart pounded in his ears: she moved like a man. She sucked in breath through her teeth, through the cracks and exhaled hot on his neck. Her fingers dotted and traced like she made stars and constellations, using only the freckles and thin hairs on his stomach as her sky. Her fingers were slender but assertive. His fingers were like water on her skin; malleable, subject to her interpretation.

She could move them and they would move to her whims. When he touched all of her body it was more of the same. When she touched it was like bird packing debris into her nest; she padded him with outside paraphernalia. With anything she could find.

They fucked like birds might. It was loud only to those who might pay attention but went unnoticed by most.

She drew white rows of teeth along his shoulder, neck, ear. She bit and he sighed and wondered if he could bite. Instead his mouth planted seeds in the mounds of earth on top her chest, with care, with love. She became frustrated and whispered encouragement and spoke of his rough hands; rough from battle; why couldn't they be rough with her.

They knew how to be, she pressed.

02 I smell the open grave.

Cloud came back to the lake. Movements child-like, he crouched by its clear shore and spread all ten fingers in the dirt and water. His name meant sky and she lived in its opposite now and forever. Gloved fingertips made clouds underwater by mixing up the dirt and pebbles— so that clouds might exist underneath the earth. So that clouds still existed with Aerith.

03 You dug your teeth in.

Aerith pressed her teeth into his jaw, slicked her tongue across light stubble. Her mouth breathed into his ear: treat me like a sword. Cloud closed his eyes and considered the request. He wrapped his large hands around her frail waist like it was a weapon, rubbed his thumbs over her stomach like he would rub the hilt as a fighter's tick. He said: so if I lifted you up and slammed you down, could you shatter the room?

She said, lift other things up and slam other things down, shatter me.

04

Cloud fucked the dirt with his spit and vomit. Penetrated with glove the ground, drew mad circles and swiped and spat until mud joined what his body excreted in holy matrimony. They were stopped outside, stopped flying because Cloud felt sick and because it was sixteen days after Aerith sank into water, as deep as and deeper than the sword sunk in her back.

Deeper even than the time he sank into her. It infuriated him to think such a strange thought and he stood to kick at the ground, to kick at his vomit, vomit fucked earth by the force of his boot and that was Cloud fucking Aerith in a nutshell.

He was something that went down bad and the healthy ones would rid their systems of him. He wasn't sky, but a forceful expulsion from the stomach.

05

She left behind smells in the morning— his closed eyelids caught new sunlight and slid open— scents sharp through the fog of awakening. Potent and distinctively his, but really hers, ultimately. Cloud shifted onto his bare stomach and buried his face into the pillow, wrapped his arms around its edges, hugged. It was a quiet space on the Highwind because it was almost a bedroom, with small, circular holes of thick glass for windows and a bed that was more of a cot.

Through displaced, pale bangs he glimpsed the sky moving outside, knew it moved around him and recalled her want to feel the breeze from this high up.

From this high up he felt sick.