Listening to Change
"How did you know?"
Vincent watched the stars sometimes, as if amazed that they were
still there after so many years. He glanced down, mild, cool.
"I mean, how did you know that you had changed? After...what Hojo
did." Nanaki rearranged his paws against the cool ground; he was
fidgeting, and felt a little silly.
He had found Vincent's thoughtful pauses disconcerting at first,
but now wondered what went on in the man's head. Vincent smelled like
old things, like dusty research logs and cellar soil and temple stone
-- wise things.
"Change speaks," he finally said, quietly, "You would know if
something were not right."
Nanaki looked at his paws, at the thin lines his nails carved in
the sand. His tattooed shoulder burned, probably mako-bright; he
thought of shuffling, moaning black figures that smelled like chemicals
and death and had burning tattoos of their own. "I don't think I
do."
The breeze changed direction, rustling wiry prairie grass and
carrying news from the Highwind, bits of people's voices and a trace of
acrid cigarette smoke. The land was so open, spreading away until it
met distant mountains, like the earth had been smoothed in this spot by
great hands.
"The Galian Beast spoke at first."
Nanaki looked up at Vincent -- his red eyes still lingered on the
stars. Maybe he knew all the old stories about the stars, all the
legends held in them. Nanaki had been told about the stars, when he was
too young to remember it.
"He whispered, saying something I couldn't understand." A dark
little chuckle, the shadow of laughter. "That is the beginning of
madness, I would imagine. Voices. Sounds that aren't real for anyone
else."
To think that Vincent's transformation, his human body skewing
suddenly into a thing of claws and shrieking and the sharp smell of
blood, had begun as just a few quiet words in his head. Simple
beginnings, so simple. A shiver ran down Nanaki's spine and bristled
his fur.
And he listened hard for a moment. There was just the wind,
dabbling in the grass and fluttering the edges of Vincent's cloak.
Sometimes Nanaki could hear a faint buzzing sound, like a room full of
machines and electricity, and he wondered if that was what Cloud heard
when he clutched at his head and rocked.
"I...don't really hear anything yet." Maybe one of Hojo's needles
or procedures had been something terrible, something that would lurk
silent in him until it was too late. If only he had known, if only he
had thought to pay attention.
"There may not be anything. Hojo...is arrogant, he likes his test
subjects to know their fate." So much bitten-back spite in Vincent's
low voice. "But you know to be wary now. That's all you can do."
And they could all be wary for each other, too. Nanaki nodded, and looked to the stars' light.