Chapter 7
When Vincent next opened his eyes, his first reaction was confusion.
He found himself standing in the ancient forest that surrounded the Forgotten City, under a sky nearly as bright as the bioluminescent trees that surrounded him; this told him that it was sometime towards the middle of the day, but he was at a loss as to what kind of compelling memory had brought him here. The previous flashbacks had been to momentuous occasions in his life. Why was he here?
He was confronted with the answer when he heard the tell-tale sounds of someone running; the flap of clothing in the breeze, the puff of air through overworked lungs. Turning around, he came face to face with Shalua, who was running through the woods as if her life depended on it. She was still in her usual high heels, however, which caught on an exposed root and sent her sprawling; Vincent at least had the good grace to look away.
"Crap..." she moaned, pushing herself up off the ground after regaining her senses. As she did, Vincent could see that her face had struck a rock, and a newly-made blotchy red mark was visible on the left side of her face. Vincent understood at that moment: he was seeing what happened to Shalua before he had heard the gunshots that brought him to her.
This, of course, only confused him more. He was over half a mile away at the time this was taking place, so there was no way he could have been watching this as it happened. Was his brain making this whole thing up?
Confused as he was, however, Vincent continued to watch with arms folded over his chest. If there was some purpose to this incident, he wasn't going to let it disappear on him.
Having pulled herself into a sitting position, Shalua looked around as if searching for something. Vincent was vaguely curious what she was looking for, and got his answer as he heard the fluttering of a wing behind him. Shalua looked straight through him, and as Vincent turned, he saw Genesis descending to the ground slowly...almost leisurely. One of Weiss' katana-rifles was already in his right hand.
"I'm tired of running. Tell me who you are!" Shalua's voice broke the silence that had befallen the forest. Before Vincent could turn around to face her again, he could hear the 'whoosh!' of something being drawn rapidly, and then the click of a hammer being drawn back. Genesis grinned, bringing his weapon up so fast that Vincent saw blurry after-images in its' wake; he fired, and Shalua screamed.
That would explain the gunshot...
He couldn't help but frown as he looked over his shoulder and saw Shalua clutching her good arm with her robotic replacement. Blood was seeping between her metal fingers, and it looked like she was biting her lip to keep from crying out. Nevertheless, she gathered herself up to her full height and glared at Genesis with admirable resolve.
"What...do...you...want?" she bit out, locking her one remaining eye on the man before her.
"None of your business," Genesis shot back, breaking into a run that carried him right through Vincent. It still bothered the gunman, but he managed to ignore it as he turned to follow the motion. In the blink of an eye Genesis was on Shalua; Vincent heard a wet slicing sound, and saw a spray of blood arc out onto the ground. Genesis had come close to disemboweling her in one stroke. Shalua's eye widened in shock, and she teetered unsteadily on her feet. Then gravity, and her wounds, won out and she hit the ground.
"Why...?"
Genesis simply grinned as he walked over to her dropped gun, and stomped on it. "Because you, and your sister, and my brother...you all have your parts to play. I have the little girl, but..."
"Shelke?"
Vincent watched as she tried valiantly to claw her way along the ground to Genesis, but halfway there her strength left her. She passed out, and that was just as Vincent himself burst onto the scene.
As he was facing the incongruity of watching himself enter a memory that had already started, everything faded to white. Vincent threw his gauntleted arm up to protect his eyes from the glare.
"..."
This time, when he opened his eyes Vincent found himself in a place he had never seen before, even in passing. He was lying in a bed in what appeared to be an inn, somewhere in Wutai if the exotic wood flooring and rice-paper walls were any indication, and he was completely nude from the waist up excepting his clawed gauntlet and the underlying glove. This last revelation brought a frown to his face, and he began to look around for his clothes.
Seeing both his cloak and shirt hanging from a hook on the door, Vincent immediately pushed himself out of bed and strode over to retrieve them. Just as he was reaching up to take his cloak, there was a sharp stab of pain in his right arm. Looking down, Vincent could see that the ugly black lines had reached all the way up to his shoulder and were snaking off towards his neck and heart.
That can't be good...
"When were you going to tell me that you were sick, Vincent?"
He was shaken out of his reverie by Shalua's voice. Turning to face her, he could see she was slumped over a desk in the far corner, her head now raised to look at him as she spoke; he idly wondered how long she had been there. "...I'm not," he replied, hoping it didn't come out sounding as lame as it felt leaving his lips.
"It's normal for your veins to pop out on your skin as black lines?"
Vincent sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose with his clawed hand; a bad habit of his. "Nothing about me is normal, Shalua."
She immediately stood up and fixed him with a searching gaze. "But you didn't answer the question."
He frowned, tossing his cloak over onto the bed as he pulled his shirt over his head. "I'll live."
Shalua folded her arms over her chest. She said nothing, but she clearly wasn't buying Vincent's explanation.
"The last time I saw you, you were in a coma that they thought you'd never come out of. So what are you doing up and around, Shalua?" Vincent was nothing if not adept at steering conversations away from his personal matters. She seemed to be a little surprised at the question, her arms dropping back to her sides as she turned to look at the window.
"I...still had things to do."
Shalua couldn't help but smirk a little at Vincent's non-response. The look in his eyes told her that he was still curious, but he couldn't bring himself to actually say so. "I remember seeing the Lifestream, and a woman with brown hair told me that I had to go back. She said..." Her expression turned wistful, then, as her mind travelled back to the event in question. "'The living don't belong with the dead. You have to go back.' And then I just...woke up. I was standing in a stasis tube in the middle of a ruined lab, and it was raining mako. I'm still not sure how I managed to avoid getting mako poisoning...maybe the glass enclosure protected me..."
"That was at least half a year ago. How come it took me this long to find out you were still alive?"
The question took Shalua aback. Contacting Vincent, frankly, had been the last thing on her mind; she had half expected him to give one of his trademarked elliptical responses ("Hi Vincent! Long time no see!" "..." "Nice talking to you, too."). She couldn't suppress a rogueish grin. "Why, Vincent Valentine...I didn't know you cared."
She sighed. The look on his face was one of quiet mortification, and it was about then that she remembered he had a previous love who he still hadn't gotten over. That brought a pang of jealousy to her heart, which she quickly swatted down. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have teased you. It's just...well, I kind of wanted Shelke all to myself, you know? It had been ten years and we were finally able to catch up like normal sisters..."
"...so that's what she was hiding."
Shalua smiled wistfully. "She wanted it to be a big secret. I think she was going to blab when she went to go see you, but..."
Vincent's expression was sober as ever, but he recognized the shadow that suddenly passed over Shalua's face. "...I'm sorry," he blurted out suddenly, looking confused. Where had that come from?
"What for?" she replied, curiously.
"...for your loss. For not being there to protect Shelke. For...a lot of things." Not quite knowing why, he took a step closer to Shalua.
The smile that appeared on her face was genuine, albeit tinged with sadness. "Thank you."
Vincent nodded resolutely, tugging his cloak on and buckling the belts that held it on his body. "We're going to find her. Where's Cerberus?"
Shalua looked at him blankly.
"My gun...?" he offered, looking around to see if he could find it himself.
"Well, about that..." she suddenly looked bashful, glancing down at the ground and trailing off. An awkward silence descended on the room.
...only to be interrupted by a knock on the door. Well, on the wooden frame of the door anyway.
"Hey hey, missing something?" a voice called out from the other side of the door, before it slid open and a red-haired head poked into the room. "Hope I'm not interrupting," Reno said with a grin, before sliding the door open fully and stepping into the room. He was holding Cerberus in both hands, and clearly having difficulty with the massive weapon; he held it out to Vincent as if eager to get it off his hands, and the ex-Turk accepted it gladly. He couldn't help but look it over for signs of tampering, a gesture which caused Reno to put up his hands defensively. "Turk's honor, I didn't touch the thing. ...except for bringing it up here."
Vincent frowned. "I didn't know the Turks did favors," he said, glancing over to Shalua; her expression was serious now, arms folded over her chest as she glared daggers at Reno. Evidently she didn't trust the Turks either, something Vincent couldn't fault her for.
Reno waved his hands dismissively as he turned his back to the pair, preparing to leave. "Yeah, well, you may still be an asshole, but we've got our orders." The red-haired man grinned at them over his shoulder, before turning to walk through the door and around the corner.
Nothing was said, until Vincent slid Cerberus back into the holster at his hip and began to approach the door that Reno had just left through.
"I've got some things to take care of. Stay here."
And just like that, he was gone, before she could even say a word.
"He wasn't very happy to see me, y'know. I'm lucky he didn't try and blow my head off, yo."
"I'm aware, Reno. You do remember that he was a member of AVALANCHE...?"
"Yeah, yeah..."
Reno sighed and shook his head. Sometimes his boss had this way of making him look like a total idiot. Elena would have said that was just his natural state.
His boss hadn't really changed that much since the incident in Edge. Rufus Shinra still got around in a wheelchair, but at least he had abandoned the stupid sheet over his head. The injuries he suffered thanks to Kadaj's gang had healed nicely, and except for the faint scarring on his wrists from his old Geostigma infection, he didn't look much different from when he was still running the most powerful corporation on Gaia.
Reno couldn't stop a frown from spreading across his face, so he turned aside to conceal it. Despite appearances, he really did love his job as a Turk, and it saddened him to know how far the Shin-ra had fallen. Sometimes he wondered if Rufus wanted to bring the company back at all.
As if noticing his employee's sudden discomfort, Rufus cleared his throat. "You know..." he began, before tilting the arm-mounted joystick forward and wheeling his electric wheelchair closer to the door. "It's already been a few days, and I've heard someone looking like that man in the red coat was already spotted near Gongaga."
Reno blinked, confused. Where was this all coming from? Rufus wasn't any help; he just grinned as he watched confusion spread across the Turk's face.
"Well, you see..." Rufus suddenly turned his attention from Reno, and rapped his knuckles on the rice paper wall. "It's not very nice to eavesdrop on people, now is it...Mr. Valentine?"
Reno's jaw dropped. For a second he was sure that his boss had finally gone off the deep end, but when he went to open the door...sure enough, there was Vincent, red cloak and all.
"...I thought I smelled a rat," the ex-Turk said in his usual monotone.
"What did you say?" Reno wasn't sure what Vincent was driving at, but he sure as heck wasn't going to let that insult slide. "You're the one spying on people, yo!" His hand immediately went for his Electromag, but he stopped when he saw Rufus waving a hand in the universal gesture for 'wait'.
"After all that's happened, I suppose I deserve that..." the former president said, looking at the ground for a moment before locking eyes with Vincent. Unlike the former Turk, his eyes glowed a faint blue, a legacy of the mako enhancements that had ended up saving his life. "...but, we all have our sins to atone for. Come in, Mr. Valentine, I have nothing to hide from you."
Against his better judgement, Vincent decided to take him up on the offer, keeping his hand near the handle of his gun just in case. Striding into the room with the clap of metal-shod boots on wood, he paused just long enough to close the door behind him.
Rufus smiled, apparently unfazed by the gesture of mistrust. If anything happened, Reno was always there to help. And so he smiled, as warmly as he could given the circumstances, before holding his arms out in a welcoming fashion.
"Well then...let us talk."