Temptation
Hades’ Phoenix

Innocence. Ignorance. Undifferentiated individuality. If ever there was to be a sin, Zack mused, it was allowing a creature like the Lord’s newest creation to remain in such a…boring state. Waste of potential, really, and with such logical clarity he felt no guilt in looping his coils towards the creature. Guilt, after all, would presuppose a loss of innocence.

Think of it as…innovation.

“Hey, kid,” he hissed cheerfully, dropping lightly out of the tree onto narrow shoulders. “Come here often?”

“Yes,” the creature replied guilelessly. He hadn’t been surprised at the sudden arrival, because in the Garden there was no such thing as fear. The fur on top of his head was soft, very different from Zack’s smooth scales, and as wild and yellow as the sunlight that He poured down.

Tongue flickering, Zack twisted his body until he could peer into the creature’s face, seeing himself reflected in wide blue eyes. His tongue flickered again, telling him that this two-legged animal tasted like earth and green growing things.

Sudden laughter startled him, nearly tossing the serpent to the ground. “Stop it,” the creature said, looking as surprised at his unconscious reaction as Zack. “Your tongue feels funny when you do that.”

Interesting. Infernal knowledge made Zack’s grin widen to something a little more predatory.

“What are you?” the taller creature asked him curiously, tilting his head and derailing the kinky train of thought that might have damned Zack all over again.

“Zack, the biggest baddest beastie that ever convinced Genesis his wing made him look fat,” Zack told him happily. The creature blinked at him cluelessly.

“You’re so cute,” the serpent added, patting him on the head with his tail-tip.

“I am?”

“As a button. Not that you’d know what that is.” His flicked out his tongue again, and the creature laughed freely. “What’s your Name?”

“…My Name?”

“Sheesh, don’t tell me you went around Naming everything else and forgot to make up your own. How am I supposed to find you if I just yell ‘hey you!’ or ‘yo, sexy’? I’ll have half the Garden come running.”

The creature folded his two legs neatly beneath his furless body, looking thoughtful as he obediently held up his hands to keep Zack from tumbling into his lap. Not that Zack would have minded. “I’m…man.”

Hot piece of jailbait, more like, but Zack just nodded his arrow-shaped head encouragingly. “Great, we know what you are now, but not who.”

“…Cloud.”

“You’re an amorphous mass of condensed moisture?” Zack asked dryly.

Cloud blinked again, obviously not understanding. “No. I’m Cloud.”

Zack philosophically shrugged his metaphorical shoulders. Who was he to criticize someone else’s oddities? Embodiment of sin aside, he wasn’t a hypocrite, thank you very much. Those people lived down in the eighth Circle of Hell, and everybody knew that they were a shady lot. Couldn’t get a sincere answer out of any of them.

Besides, with the whole blue-eyes-yellow-fur this kid had going for him, he looked almost as much a personification of the sky as any sylph. Only cuter and less ditzy.

“How do you walk?” Cloud lifted him higher, giving the poor serpent a sudden sense of vertigo. “You don’t have legs.”

“I slither. Sexily, I might add.” His tongue tickled a snub nose, making Cloud’s face wrinkle up. “And no one’s ever complained,” he threw in with a leer and a wiggle of his tail, but snake faces weren’t made for leering and the innuendo was completely lost on the innocent. Wrapping a few black coils around Cloud’s forearm, he ducked his head beneath a pointed chin and tickled the hollow of the other’s throat with an agile tongue.

Cloud squeaked. Squeaked. And looked surprised again the strange noise he hadn’t known he could make.

“Wah! You’re so adorable!” Zack cried, tightening his coils around the limb he was possessing and reaching out with his tongue again. Cloud’s body shivered, but not in a bad way, and a faint flush was creeping up his cheeks.

“I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” a deep voice interrupted dryly, and suddenly Cloud found himself on his feet and strong arms wrapped around him.

“Hey, Seph, long time no see,” and why was Zack’s voice suddenly louder, more tense? Cloud tried to twist in the limbs that held him, wondering where Zack had gone and why this taller…man was standing at his back.

“Why do you sound like Zack? You didn’t eat him, did you?” Something—concern, he decided to call it—made his eyebrows pull together in a little frown. He would have reached up to peer into the stranger’s throat if he’d been able to move. “That’s not very nice.”

He didn’t understand why the person holding him started laughing, or why the one Named ‘Seph’ was looking at him so oddly.

“You’re very pretty,” Cloud told Seph, enchanted by all the silver shininess. But he was still concerned. “Will you help me find Zack, please?”

“…This is the greatest of the Lord’s creations?” Seph murmured. Cloud made that weird noise again when the man behind him, as naked as he was except for two wings and a tail, purred like a cat and nuzzled a nose into the crook of his neck.

“I dunno, I rather like him,” purred the man. “I wouldn’t mind getting on my knees to pray.”

“Don’t be such a degenerate,” Seph said coldly. Cloud didn’t know what was going on, but he didn’t let that stop him. “Step away from the demon, child.”

Demon? Where? What was a ‘demon’?

“If that’s a fruit, it doesn’t sound very good,” he told them dubiously. The man holding him had to let go as he doubled over laughing, the shiny silver being sighing in long-suffering martyrdom.

“Zack is a demon, child,” Seph explained patiently.

“Really?” Cloud turned to look at the wheezing body behind him. “Zack? But I thought you didn’t have legs.”

The words “I can when I want to” and “you can eat me anytime” were gasped out between bouts of breathless hilarity.

Seph seemed to have had enough. He raised a hand and something that looked very dangerous appeared, long and thin and covered with white fire, and Zack immediately stopped laughing. “Leave this Garden, creature, or I will smite you.”

Zack immediately latched on to Cloud, wings fluttering.

“Why?”

Demon and angel paused to look at the little human. Cloud huffed, wondering why no one seemed to just listen. “Why are you going to smite him?”

“He’s a demon,” Seph pointed out.

“So?”

“…So I smite him.”

“But he didn’t do anything except make me feel a little funny.” Cloud didn’t understand. He’d once stubbed his toe on a rock, but there hadn’t been any smiting of rocks then, so why was there smiting of Zacks now?

“He will bring you nothing but ruin,” the angel said in a voice that echoed in the vastness of the Garden like the Voice Itself. “He will bring your anxiety to its zenith and destroy your innocence. He will birth death, and history, and sin.”

Zack raised a hand, keeping the other arm firmly around Cloud’s bare waist. “Don’t I get a say in this?”

“No.”

“…Bastard.”

“If he’s so bad, then why is he here?” Cloud asked, wondering why the angel was suddenly so quiet and why even the demon was looking at him a bit wide-eyed. (Funny how few people thought to ask the good questions.)

Then Zack grinned, leaning his chin on the fluffy yellow head and snuggling the human in a full-body hug. “Can I take him home, Mommy?”

“No.” But Sephiroth didn’t appear to be listening, and instead was content to scrutinize this bony little creation that walked on two legs and was essentially defenseless—no claws, tiny teeth, and delicate body that could bruise so easily. For being made in the Creator’s image, the human was rather…lacking.

“Aren’t you supposed to be guarding the gates or something?” Zack asked, and Seph gave him a Look.

“A little bird told me that one of my Host had been found wandering Chaos covered in liquor and cream-pie.”

Zack glanced at a nearby tree, where a poor tiny finch was watching with bright eyes. “Traitor,” he muttered, then said more loudly, “C’mon, Sephiroth, can’t we talk this out? For old times’ sake?”

“Old times’ sake would involve me in a situation not very different from my subordinates’,” the angel growled.

“Oh, yeah. Hey, that was pretty awesome.”

Sephiroth raised his fiery sword again, ready for some hardcore smiting, but then Cloud wiggled out from Zack’s grip and stood between them with arms akimbo, glaring.

“You’re both stupid,” he declared firmly, then turned on his heel and stalked away. The warm feeling on his insides—what was the word? Anger—made him stomp rather more harshly than usual.

Zack was reluctant to let his shield walk away. “Hey, Spike, where’re you going?”

“You’re being stupid,” Cloud yelled back over his shoulder, “and I don’t want to listen.”

The angel and the demon stood next to one another as the human crouched down by the bank of a river and started talking to the fish instead.

“Dude, we just got dumped for a bunch of sardines.”

Sephiroth sighed, and amended his previous thought; physically, this human looked nothing like the Creator would have if She’d had a body, but he certainly had Her stubbornness.

“He’s right, you know,” Zack continued. “The whole smiting thing? Totally goes out with the New Testament.”

“You got one of my men drunk.”

“Aw, he’ll remember to transubstantiate himself sober eventually.”

“Genesis is still angry with you.”

“Genesis rains hellfire when his cereal gets soggy.”

“You’re a demon.”

Strictly speaking, that might be true. Zack put a hand on a saucily cocked hip and gave Sephiroth his own Look. “You didn’t complain before the Fall.”

Well. Er. That might be true, but that wasn’t the point here. The point was that—

“Oh!”

Curled over the riverbank like a narcissus, the human had his hands plunged into the slow-moving water and was laughing aloud as the fish swam between his fingers. How curious, Sephiroth thought with an agitated rustle of his wings, to see one of the Lord’s animals act with the same sentience as an angel; how curious to see an entity in-between, neither really one nor the other.

“Have you two made up yet?” Cloud called suddenly, standing up to glare at them as sternly as a wide-eyed newborn, apparently unconcerned with the mud on his knees or the water dripping from his hands. Zack coughed out something along the lines ‘resisting temptation, resisting, damn it…’

Sephiroth sighed. “It isn’t that simple, child.”

“Why not?” Casting one last look at the little fish, Cloud pointed first at the angel, then at the demon. “You’re shiny and mean. He’s funny and weird. Aren’t you two supposed to be like…like the sun and the moon? The owl told me you can’t have one without the other, even though they’ve got their own jobs to do.”

“You don’t understand,” and Sephiroth had to remind himself that this was Her favorite creation, he wasn’t allowed to smite it, “this demon wants to hurt you.”

“No, I don’t,” Zack piped up immediately. “Unless you want me to, in which case I’ve got the awesomest handcuffs I stole off of Reno—“

Sephiroth was about to whirl around and do some damn smiting already with his shiny fiery sword, but found his ethereally manifested body frozen in surprise at a wet touch against his chest.

“Did it work?” Cloud asked him, brows still furrowed in a frown as he leaned forward to lick him again. The angel quickly grabbed him by the shoulders.

“What are you doing?” he demanded.

Scowling, Cloud replied very slowly, as though speaking to the goldfish with the three-second memory, “When Zack licked me, it made me laugh, and you’re still being mean.”

Zack snerked into both hands, which were clamped over his mouth. When Sephiroth gave him a narrow-eyed snarl, he chirped, “Hey man, sounds like a great idea to me. Licking all around!”

Cloud obediently licked a long line from Zack’s clavicle to the spot underneath his jaw where he’d seen some of the wolves nuzzling each other. As though he’d spoken the magic words, Zack purred and wrapped his arms around Cloud’s smaller body, flaring out his scaled wings like a peacock’s tail and twining his forked tail rather possessively around one of Cloud’s legs. His eyes were heavy-lidded.

“Relax, Seph. No one’s going to be storming the Gates of Paradise, and you know the Creator would totally be filming us if camcorders had been invented yet.”

When the angel’s sword remained flaring with holy light and the feathered wings spread threateningly, Zack shrugged to himself prosaically and ran his tongue over the soft patch of skin behind Cloud’s ear. The human made a humming sound and tried to push closer, fascinated and intrigued, and Zack obligingly slid his hands down a leanly muscled back. He couldn’t help grinning when Cloud’s spine arched and a soft sound escaped, making him frown again.

“For being undifferentiated individual, you’ve got a lot of personality,” the demon commented. Then he yelped when clever fingers found the sensitive spot where his wings met his shoulders and practically melted in place. “Oooh…”

“Like a puppy,” Sephiroth snarked, half-expecting to see Zack’s leg start kicking spasmodically in canine bliss, but the brunet wasn’t fooled for a second. Instead of saying anything, he merely slid his tail higher to Cloud’s upper thigh and carefully tightened clawed fingers on the human’s hips, earning yet another sound of something quickly turning less than innocent. Gently he lapped at the line of Cloud’s mouth, tracing the pale softness until the other’s lips parted.

He should be stopping this, Sephiroth knew. He was a general of the cherubim, those terrifying creatures set to guard the entrance to Paradise, and not only had this demon gotten his guard drunk but was now…soliciting the Lord’s favorite creation. There was only one way this could end, and it was a bit more permanent than a few hours of coital bliss.

And yet…

In the beginning was the Word, and perhaps it was somewhat ironic that the human’s mouth was now doing things that innocence shouldn’t know about. Not that he was complaining, if the curious and intrigued sounds he was making as the demon tugged him down to the grass was any indication. Zack’s tail relocated to wrap around Cloud’s waist, holding him splayed over the demon’s lap—and no, there was nothing appealing at all about the thought of that fragile soul being held by sin incarnate, fair skin stark against the fire-tanned hide of the demon. Clawed fingers skimmed up Cloud’s chest, over his shoulders, once more down his spine, causing the blond to unconsciously try to press closer. Zack’s infernal purr and the reflexive stretching of his wings made Sephiroth’s own feathered ones twitch.

…Aeris damn it.

Cloud made a startled noise into Zack’s mouth when a second set of hands seized his upper arms from behind and something warm bit down on the curve of his neck. Frissons of something he didn’t have a Name for were making his stomach muscles tighten, his legs quiver slightly as he held himself over Zack, his body craving that Unnamed Thing when soft feathers brushed over his skin. He couldn’t seem to push himself close enough to Zack or feel enough of Sephiroth’s weight against his back; Cloud wanted to crawl inside their skins, wondering for the first time in his existence what it would be like to be Other.

And Zack couldn’t stop the purrs, not when he had a pure soul straddling his lap and making such lovely sounds as his barbed tail circled intimate places, not when Sephiroth’s wings were pushing against his own in the facsimile of dominance. The demon hadn’t come to the Garden with any other idea in mind save sheer curiosity—why couldn’t he come inside? Rules were made for breaking, and it wasn’t very nice of the Lord to make an exclusive club like that—but he wasn’t complaining. He’d forgotten the burning touch of the eternally angelic, and was now discovering the addictive fragility of a created soul that lived entirely in the moment…

All this was realized upon later reflection. At the time, all Zack was concerned about was pressing his tail against that spot inside Cloud (boneless, prehensile limbs had never been such fun) and convincing Sephiroth that hey, Falling could actually be pretty fucking awesome.

It wasn’t until the three had fallen into a tangle of exhaustion and slept away a few eons that Zack figured out maybe listening to his demonic instincts wasn’t always the best idea.

“Cloud?” he said muzzily, absently pushing aside Sephiroth’s stifling wing as he sat up. Grass had gotten stuck in places he really didn’t want to think about.

“…I’m going to Hell.”

“Aw, lighten up, Seph,” Zack grinned at his former comrade. “If you were damned, you’d already be down there. Personally, I don’t think our lovely Creator wants to give up the eye-candy.”

Their Creator was a pervert of the worst kind—one of the virtues, or vices, of being omniscient—but Sephiroth couldn’t exactly say that aloud. Never knew when She might be having one of her fits and decide to smite him Herself.

“And speaking of eye-candy, where’s Cloud?” Zack continued, rising up to his knees and shielding his eyes from the sun. He finally spotted the yellow-topped human near the same tree that Zack had dropped onto him from, contentedly munching on a red fruit.

“Cloud, stop!” Sephiroth suddenly cried, all traces of lazy satiation gone as he leapt upright. Cloud blinked at him when the apparently insane angel seized the fruit from his hand and tossed it aside.

“What?” he asked calmly when Sephiroth seized him by the shoulders.

“You fool! What were you doing?”

“You told me not to eat demon-fruit, but it tasted good. I wanted to know what those tasted like.”

He pointed at the tree, hung with a small sign declaring TREE OF KNOWLEDGE—KEEP OFF. Sephiroth felt his wings droop with impending doom as the sky overhead darkened.

“…Shit.”

Zack put an arm behind his head sheepishly. “Um. Oops?”

xxx

Closing the heavy book in his hands, Cloud looked at the children sitting in a circle at his feet staring back at him with wide eyes.

“And that is why we live in Hell on Earth rather than Paradise,” he finished dryly.

“What happened to Mister Zack and Mister Sephiroth?” asked one little girl, the pink bow in her hair threatening to flop over into her eyes.

“Zack went back to Hell and Sephiroth got to stay an angel. They still showed up sometimes, though, just to remind us that they’re always there, watching.” Usually when you’re naked in the shower.

“Mister Strife!” one of the mothers cried, “That story is not appropriate for our children! How dare you bring such—such blasphemy into our Sunday School!”

Shrugging, Cloud stood up and set the Book of Genesis onto his chair. When the mothers in the Nibelheim community had asked the wayward traveler to do some storytelling in their children’s Bible study, they hadn’t been specific about what they wanted. Several thousand years later and humans still didn’t want to hear the truth.

The children protested, of course; this had been better than most of their boring classes, lectured by the dry, creepy Father Hojo. But with the mothers giving him looks that clearly wished him a fiery death on the stake, Cloud found it best to pat the kids on the head and vaguely promise that he might be back one day.

The sun was setting outside the tiny church, a chill wind just beginning to lift, and he pulled his black leather coat closer to himself. He only had to wait a few minutes before warm breath puffed against the back of his neck.

“Happy now, Zack?” he muttered wryly, strolling down one of the solitary lanes towards the village inn. Rich laughter came back to him.

“Shit, yeah,” the demon snickered. “I’d forgotten how absolutely adorable you can be.”

“Fuck off.”

“You’re getting crotchety in your old age, kid,” Zack grinned. “Maybe I should—“

“One joke about the word ‘crotchety’ and I’m telling Sephiroth that you’re the one who dipped his flaming sword in lighter fluid,” Cloud interrupted, trying and failing to suppress a smile as phantom arms slid around him from behind.

“Do not worry, Cloud,” a deep voice whispered on the breeze, accompanied by the warmth of divinity. “I already know.”

“Fuck,” Zack muttered, and the arms around Cloud’s waist tightened. “Save me, oh beautiful light of my life? I’ll be your willing sex slave for eternity.”

“You already are,” Cloud reminded him. “Or have you forgotten the last six thousand years?”

If Zack had anything to say to that, it was lost when a flash of something brilliant in the dusk zipped past them and the demon squawked in surprise. Cloud continued walking with his hands in his pockets, rolling his eyes.

“Sometimes it feels like I’m the one keeping the universe in order,” he sighed to himself.