Hello people, it's Mengde again! How y'all doin'? Good to hear. It's been a while since I've written anything of this nature for this section. (By the by, if you're wondering about Loz And Yazoo Are Dead, it's over. Done. I got tired of it. Apologies to those who were reading it and enjoying it.) But y'know, when inspiration strikes...
So yep, let's keep this authornote brief. I'm rating this story T despite some bad language (read: f-bomb), because there won't be any explicit sex or anything else that falls into the mature category, but do beware that this is going to be a bit rougher and more graphic than some of my other stuff. Otherwise, if you like Vincent, Yuffie, Reno, or any combination of the above, read on. I encourage it. Also leave a review if you like what you see. I'll continue writing this as long as I feel like it, but reviews are nice. Let's cut loose!
Nibelheim, in a dark basement beneath the foundations of the now-elderly Shin-Ra mansion: something slept.
Fitfully.
The Red Cloak
A Final Fantasy VII Fiction
Written by Mengde
It was a peaceful enough town, Nibelheim, nested beneath the foreboding mountains that loomed to the north. Nothing of import ever happened here, with the exception of a barely-remembered incident that took place years ago. Something about a fire was all one would get if one queried residents of the town.
Being residents was essentially all they'd had to do for a good part of their lives, at this point. The incident was barely remembered because those who were present for it didn't care to recall it, and everyone else was formerly an actor hired by Shin-Ra to populate the town, pretend nothing had happened, and keep the few straggling survivors in line.
Now they were just citizens, same as everyone else. Shin-Ra was dead and gone, less than an unpleasant memory. They had to see to their own survival now that they weren't getting paid for pretending to be long-time members of the town. They couldn't pretend, not now that the lie had become the truth.
That, and the fact that their old bosses were all dead.
So it was a good enough life, certainly. None of them wanted to get caught up in the affairs of the greater world. The citizens of Nibelheim were content to tend to their everyday problems and let the world keep on spinning.
Sheep.
The thought crossed her mind over and over as she slowly trudged towards the Shin-Ra mansion. People stared at her, the outsider, invading their small sanctum, disrupting their comforting cocoon from the harshness of reality. There are people out there, she was telling them without words, and if there are people, some are bound to be bad.
She kept walking, feeling all of her twenty-six years. She was still young and spry and full of life, but she felt old and wearied whenever she thought of having to deal with the man she was about to meet. He'd been infuriating when they'd met, and that hadn't changed over the years. Sure, she'd been sixteen then, immature and inexperienced, but even a decade later he undoubtedly still had the power to annoy the hell out of her, always had – when he'd bothered to show up.
Their ten-year anniversary, and they hadn't even held a proper meeting. They'd stopped meeting up years ago, as life began to pull them apart. Cid had invited her to Rocket Town for a drink, saying that he thought others might show up. He'd certainly extended the invitation to them.
Nobody else had shown except for Red. Red was studying astronomy, so he had no excuse – the stars weren't going anywhere anytime soon. Everyone else had sent their regrets, saying they were too busy or too far away to make it.
Everyone else excepthim, who hadn't even bothered to reply.
The townsfolk didn't try to stop her as she let herself in through the gate at the front of the mansion and walked up to the entrance, hesitating a moment before pushing open the great doors and stepping over the threshold.
"It's Yuffie," she called. "Anybody home?"
Her voice echoed back at her and she sighed. She could try dialing his cell phone, but he never kept it on. It wasn't like he had a place to plug in the charger for it. The Shin-Ra mansion was dead, its power cut, gloomy during the day and pitch-black at night.
With a small shrug, Yuffie headed up the stairs towards the secret passageway. If he was still sleeping, she'd just have to wake him up.
The stairs spiraling down to beneath the building were long and hard to navigate in the near-darkness. She chewed at her lower lip, examining her options one more time again, but there were no two ways around it, a conclusion she'd arrived at over and over. This wasn't a matter of personal pride any longer; she had to put that aside.
It was pitch-black in the tunnel, and Yuffie pulled out a flashlight, deciding to take the risk of using it. Its beam flooded the tunnel and sent a multitude of bats screeching away, as well as scaring a myriad amount of smaller, crawling things on the floor and walls. Swallowing hard, Yuffie tried not to think about it and instead kept walking until she reached the door.
The door loomed out of the blackness, radiating an aura of menace, and she stood before it for a long time, long enough for the crawling things on the floor to take an interest in her boots, which spurred her on to the lesser of two evils… hopefully. She opened the door, expecting something like a rush of cold air, but nothing overly impressive happened.
Shining the flashlight inside, Yuffie saw a completely empty room except for the single coffin on a table in the middle of it. It was not an opulent coffin, plainly made without embellishment.
Taking a deep breath of the stagnant air, Yuffie crossed the distance in two long strides and rapped on the coffin. "It's Yuffie. Get up, lazy-ass."
Nothing happened. She pounded on the wood, harder, until her knuckles felt ready to split. "I SAID GET UP!"
Again there was nothing, and Yuffie was tired of this. She stuck the flashlight in her mouth, grabbed hold of the lid, and heaved it to the side. It struck the floor with a massive thud, even louder in the near-silence, that scared all the crawling things back again.
In the wavering beam of the flashlight that Yuffie gripped between her teeth was him.
He was paler than ever, paler than death itself, and his hair had inexplicably grown during his long sleep, even though he hadn't eaten or drank anything in years. His tattered red cloak was wrapped about his slim form, the golden claws of his gauntlet poking past the edge at one point.
His ruby eyes were open.
He was staring at her.
"You were awake the entire time?" Yuffie asked accusingly as she took the flashlight out of her mouth. "Vincent."
Vincent Valentine sat up, bones cracking, the flesh stretched tight over his now-skeletal frame. He coughed as he expelled year-old air from his lungs and he swung his legs out from the coffin, levering himself into a standing position.
"Yuffie," he croaked, licking cracked lips with an equally dry tongue. "I'm thirsty. Move."
He shouldered past her back out into the tunnel. For a moment he stood poised, listening, and she stared at him, wondering what the hell was going on. Then he struck out with the lightning speed she remembered, catching a bat in his hand.
Yuffie felt her stomach tighten as she realized what he was going to do.
The rodent screeched and bared blood-sucking fangs at Vincent, sinking them into his hand a moment later in a vain attempt to free itself. His expression blank, devoid of pain or irritation at the bite, Vincent snipped the creature's head off with his claws, tipped back, and drank.
He wiped his mouth a minute later and discarded the little cadaver, watching with acute interest as Yuffie heaved in a corner over what had been a light lunch. She finally managed to straighten up and turn around again, staring at him. "I wish you wouldn't do that, Vincent."
"I slept too long," he deadpanned. "A year between breaths, two years since my last drink of water. This will hold me until I can get something proper."
Yuffie shook her head and tried to calm her stomach. "I would've brought you water if I'd known."
"Not a problem. The blood has enough water in it for now and I don't have to worry about pathogens the bat might have had."
Vincent Valentine. Quite a bit less than human.
It was the first sunlight he'd been exposed to in quite a while. He felt his skin pucker and then flare, absorbing the ultraviolet and converting it to energy. There was quite a lot about his enhanced body that he didn't understand, even after decades of inhabiting it. The effects of his unwelcome guests' habitation in his skull for so many years, not to mention what Hojo had done to make that possible, were probably too variegated and numerous to catalog properly.
Vincent took it in stride. He might be capable of some bizarre form of photosynthesis, but he wasn't a vegetable yet. Give it another ten years, perhaps.
What he wanted right now was water. The little vampire bat's blood had tasted terrible, and while he was sure its water content was enough to sustain him, he wanted to get the aftertaste off of his tongue. The moment that he and Yuffie emerged aboveground, he leapt out a window at the back of the mansion and made his way to the spring in its backyard.
He could feel Yuffie's eyes on him as he knelt at the spring, drinking greedily from it, spitting occasionally to kill the horrid aftertaste. In terms of instant nourishment, the blood was still a sight better than the creepers. Sometimes they stayed alive long enough after being swallowed for him to feel them.
"Done yet?" Yuffie asked pointedly.
Vincent stood, feeling his muscles begin to fill out again and his strength returning as the water rushed through his system. Truly the stuff of life, even for him.
"Much better," he said, unconsciously flicking his cloak a bit to accentuate the words. He turned and looked at Yuffie, who looked back for a moment before becoming unnerved and looking away. "What do you want?"
"You didn't come to AVALANCHE's tenth anniversary," she said.
"That was months ago. If you were angry about my having missed it, you would have come then, not now. Not to mention," and at this he began to pace, circling her, "I very much doubt that anyone else, except perhaps Red XIII, showed up."
His intuition was sharp as ever; he could see the surprise registering on her face. Then she shook her head, angrily, and said, "You're right. That's not why I'm here. Vincent, do you know what's been going on? Do you have any idea what's happening in the world today?"
"I don't care."
That was like a slap in the face to her. She flinched, shocked. "You don't care? Vincent, what the hell's wrong with you? Last time I checked, we live on the same planet."
"And when was that?" Vincent asked. "When did you make that check, Yuffie? It seems to me that we live in very different worlds. You should go back to yours." He stopped circling her, instead striding back towards the mansion and the window from where he'd leapt out. "It was good to see you."
"Vinnie," she tried. He stopped, the diminutive hitting him and crawling up his spine. "I didn't come to debate with you."
"Then what?" Vincent demanded, whirling. "Why did you come, Yuffie?"
She visibly steadied herself, summoned up her will. "I came to ask for your help, Vincent."
He gazed inscrutably at her. "You want my help."
"Yes."
Vincent's expression twisted itself horribly, his lip curling and his eyes flashing, head curving back and twitching, and he made a deep noise in his throat. Yuffie watched in mute and somewhat frightened fascination until the display ended with the short and wet sound of him spitting, with perfect accuracy, on the toe of her right boot.
"Fuck off," he said.
Yuffie could do nothing except stare at him, openmouthed in shock, until he was nearly at the window again. Finally she summoned the presence of mind to shout at his back, "I'm not taking 'no' for an answer, you asshole!"
He looked over his shoulder at her, eyes flashing again. "Ask Reno for help," he said, his voice slipping back into its familiar monotone.
"This isn't about Reno, Vincent, it's about you!"
"What about me, Yuffie? I've already failed to give you anything he can. There's nothing more to it than that. I'm worthless to you. Now let me sleep. Open my coffin again and I'll throw you out."
Yuffie stared twin daggers into his red-cloaked back as he leaped back through the window into the darkness of the mansion and shut it behind him. He wasn't getting off that easily.
She pulled out her cell and dialed without looking, her fingers knowing the number before she even called it to her mind. Two rings was all it took before Reno picked up. "What's the report, sugar?"
"He told me to fuck off."
A hissing sound; that would be Reno sucking air in through his teeth, an exasperated gesture he was fond of. "Right, guess that's that. You coming home?"
"Not yet. I have an idea."
"Yuffie, if he told you he wasn't helping, there's not an issue left open for debate. You can't do jack about it, you know that."
"We'll see about that, Reno. We'll see." Yuffie eyed the old mansion, analyzing it, laying plans in her head. "You know the old Wutainese saying."
There was a moment of hesitation before Reno realized the path her mind was taking, and then he chuckled and supplied the phrase.
"You can't smoke out a dragon without getting burned."