Miasma

Chapter 20

Sephiroth felt like he was living an illusory dream.

He supposed the phraseology was contraindicative, but there was nothing for it. Every moment spent with Saoirse was something washed in a pale...featherlight sheen that shivered from his extremities to his soul. It was quiet...placid, and so terribly innocent...innocent in a way that made him feel like he could shatter it with the flick of a finger. When he slid his palms over the soles of tiny feet...up over the arch to even more miniscule toes...he felt helpless. When his daughter cried for one of them in the middle of the night; tremulous and searching and small...he felt like he was spiraling into something uncontrollable and all-encompassing. The urge to heed her was compulsory...made him feel sick to his stomach if he ignored it for too long. Something in her tugged at him, pulled him to her in a way that was terrifying and beautiful at the same time. He hadn't known...had never fathomed that he would ever love someone so much...had never thought it was possible to love someone more than he loved Genesis...but he did. It didn't-of course-change the fact that his affection for the redhead's had perhaps increased tenfold since the birth of their child...but it was still an undeniable truth.

And Genesis was good to Saoirse.

Really, Genesis was besotted with Saoirse. Sephiroth supposed that if he was a jealous man he'd have been green with envy, but he wasn't. The redhead spent his days toting their daughter around the small hotel room like some type of expensive designer bag; one that he'd gotten at the very last second, signed by Gaia herself. He knew-realistically-that the former Commander's faith was severely dampened by the years and what they'd gone through, but it didn't change the fact that the blue-eyed former First looked at their child like she'd come from the stars only to be put in his arms. It became apparent that she had green eyes, which the younger man tried not to be too smug about. They were slightly lighter than his...edging more towards aquamarine than a deep...dark emerald. Her hair remained her other father's fiery scarlet, and he was quite happy with that if he were perfectly honest with himself. It fit her...fit them...and he'd never wanted her to look like him because the more she looked like him the more she looked like Jenova. Sephiroth would have loved her no matter her appearance, but her semblance to Genesis was a dear thing, something he was desperately grateful for.

They were never going to be what the world might designate as 'normal' parents. When Sephiroth was tired enough he caught himself slipping into field lingo when he was trying to get her to settle down and Genesis was rather overfond of using magic to create twinkling astral illusions to get her to fall asleep. Neither of them sang lullabies and the only nursery rhymes his partner was familiar with were ancient and just on the edge of playfully morbid. Still, when he had Saoirse were curled up in an armchair with the fire going, the lilting tenor of his voice was a soothing thing...and the baby listened to him raptly; like the words falling from his mouth were priceless gems scooped from the ground to fall in verbal form over her tiny ears. There was something so beautiful about it it was almost painful; the way the light from the flames would catch the older man's cheekbones until they glittered with an ethereal, shimmering highlight. The glittering fire of his hair and their daughter's hair...the shapely curve of his lips...the graceful stroke of long...pale fingers as they played in the soft down of the swaddling blanket. And there was a softness to those sapphire eyes that no one but Saoirse would ever know...like the warm, clear depths of a hot spring...overflowing with affection.

He was fairly sure that they wouldn't have any more children.

As collected as he had been about the birth...it was painful. Painful in ways that were difficult to really elucidate on a scale that was comparable. Bringing life into the world was a monumentally difficult task, was ultimately something that he had-in the throes of it-thought that he would not be able to do. Every push was a dark kind agony woven into a pulsating, hot kind of instinctual purpose. It was intimate in ways that sex was not...deeply personal and inherently frightening. Merely having Genesis by his side was almost too much for him; as his body worked to accomodate an act it was not necessarily built for, Sephiroth acknowledged that more than he was afraid, he was embarrassed. And not because he was groaning loudly to the rafters or because he was pushing a living being out of his nether regions...but because it just felt too private. Add to that eighteen months of pregnancy, and he would be perfectly happy to put childbearing out of the equation of his life indeterminately.