Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. We here at Club Mengde would like to welcome you to a very special film noir event. We do not own any of the intellectual properties of Final Fantasy VII. The narrator of this story, however, is ours, and we like him.

That is to say, I felt like writing some kind of gritty film noir/pulp fiction-esque mystery story set in the FFVII-verse and narrated by an OC private eye (private eye and private dick are both euphemisms for private detective, if any of my readers are unfamiliar with the slang).

No worries - on my writer's honor I promise you that this particular OC is not a Sue or Stu, is not a forgotten relative or long-lost significant other of one of the main cast, or guilty of any other grievous OC offenses. He of course has a past, and of course he knows the main cast in some capacity - otherwise, their cameos in this piece would be just plain strange, wouldn't they? Yes, this fic features plenty of our favorite canon characters, with emphasis on Yuffie and Vincent.

I'm rating it T for a little language and violence. Also, if you feel that the narrative is a little florid with the strange descriptions and similes, it's a stylistic thing. Trust me.

This piece was originally a oneshot, but it came out very long for a single-chapter thing, so for your reading convenience I've split it up into three chapters; the latter two will be posted in a little bit when I feel the story's caught at least a few eyes. By the by, if anyone is wondering, the French title for the story translates as "A dream in red and black," which may or may not be significant. Without further ado, then...

Walking through Edge City in the rain…

Un rêve en rouge et noir

OR

Dancing in the Rain

A Final Fantasy VII Fan Fiction

Written by Mengde

Sometimes life kinda takes you by surprise. I mean, it's interesting to think about. In one night, I've learned that the world is about to end, and it's AVALANCHE's fault.

I'm crouched in a little hidey-hole between two stacks of crates in a warehouse, my .357 magnum clutched in my wet and trembling hands. I'm down to eight rounds, two in the chamber and six in my pocket. It'll take a full thirty seconds to shuck the empty shells from the pistol and get the live rounds in, so I'm essentially down to two shots before I'm screwed.

My head hurts, my mouth tastes like blood, and the warehouse smells of wet wood and rot. I can hear the heavy breathing of the man who is trying his very best to kill me, as well as the occasional peal of thunder from the storm that's still raging outside.

The irony of the situation is that it all started with a single question, though it wasn't posed as such. If I had known that trying to find the answer would have brought me to this insane place and told me about the end of the world, I might have considered staying home. The question, unlike the situation I'm in now, was simple.

Where is Vincent Valentine?

It was around five in the afternoon when she walked into my office, but you couldn't have told it by looking out the window. It was storming, a black bank of clouds like the wrath of God coming in fast. An endless drumbeat of raindrops beat out a melancholy tune against the building's roof, punctuated by the occasional tinny rattle of the leak in the far corner hitting the bottom of the pail I'd set up to catch it.

Who am I? My name's Dick, short for Richard, and despite all the shit I took for it when I was a kid, it's a good name that I'm proud to have. It also describes my profession pretty perfectly. Most people would look at me and say I'm nobody special, and they'd be right – unless they counted being the only private eye in Edge as criteria for special.

So, this girl walked into my office. I would tell you that my secretary informed me that I had a guest, and I told her to send the guest inside, but I don't have a secretary. What I do have is a small, leaky office on the corner of Ninth and Falcon Streets. When I first opened, the sign read PRIVATE DICK FOR HIRE. I thought it was a pretty good joke.

I changed that soon after people started showing up with the wrong ideas about my profession.

The dame was a little more than five feet high, Wutainese features. She wore a pretty heavy coat, what with the rain, and carried an umbrella that she shook out before she came in with it, which was nice. A little courtesy goes a long way, I figure.

By this point I was kinda depressed. I took one look at her, sighed, and went back to my pulp fiction. "If you're looking to investigate your boyfriend's fidelity, I've done that for three different people this week," I told her. "I'm tired of it. Go find someone else."

She didn't say anything. She leaned her umbrella against the wall, flounced over to my desk, and snatched the book out of my hands, then sat herself down on the edge of my desk. I kept silent too and watched her look it over. She had grey eyes, the color of the sky on the days when you get up and look outside and figure that there's no reason to go anywhere or do anything.

"People actually read this stuff?" she asked me after a minute.

"If by 'this stuff' you mean pulp fiction, then yes, people do," I told her. "Although not as much anymore. It was kinda before your time."

She put the book down and looked at me. "When d'you figure my time was, huh? I'm not that young."

I smiled apologetically. "No need to get flustered." After a moment's consideration, I reached into my breast pocket and pulled out my cigarette case. "You smoke?"

"No."

"Mind if I do?"

"With the company I keep, I'd be crazy if I did."

I shrugged at that and lit one up, feeling the back of my throat instantly turn into a parched wasteland filled with smoldering coals. It tasted like death and the promise of redemption that's never delivered upon.

"So like I already told you," I said to her, "I don't care if your boyfriend's unfaithful. I'm not interested in finding out."

She snorted. "Please. I know that he's faithful. That's not why I'm here."

I look at her and slowly exhale the smoke through my nostrils. "Why are you here, then?"

"I need you to find him." She pulled a photo out of an inner pocket in her coat and handed it to me. It was of a pretty strange-looking guy – he was wearing a suit, but it looked like a torture device on him instead of clothing. He had pale skin, intense features, long black hair. The photo was in black and white, like everything in my life seems to be. "I need you to find Vincent Valentine."

There it was. I told you that the question wasn't posed as such, but that was when she put it in my head.

I looked at the picture, looked back at her. "Vincent Valentine. Head of WRO black ops and Reeve Tuesti's personal trashman." I blew a succession of smoke rings that brushed by the girl's face, which didn't seem to faze her. "And that would make you Yuffie Kisaragi, head of the WRO's espionage and intelligence branch."

Her expression didn't betray anything, but she nodded. "Yep."

"Why does the most well-informed woman in the world need a private dick's help in locating the scariest man in the world?" I asked.

"I can't go through official channels for this," Kisaragi told me. "Nobody can be trusted right now. I need a third party, someone who doesn't know Vincent and isn't involved with the WRO. Besides," and at this she leaned forward and brought her face to within about an inch of mine, "you are a detective, right? Don't you ever wanna test those powers of deduction?"

I exhaled some smoke in her face, which made her eyes water. "You're, what, twenty-one? Drop the femme fatale act, sugar."

She rolled her eyes at me and got off of my desk. "You're not the only guy who calls me that, y'know."

"I'm distraught. My fee is twenty-five thousand gil, half in advance." When she looked at me like I was stupid, I added, "And if I find Valentine, you throw in a bonus and send out somebody to fix my goddamn roof. That leak is irritating."

"Fine… on one condition." She pulled a wad of bills out of her coat, counted out twelve thousand and five hundred, and plunked it down on my desk. "You have to find him by tomorrow morning."

I held one of the bills up to the light out of habit before putting most of it in the secret drawer of my desk and sticking the rest in my pocket. "Right. A rush job, huh? Any particular reason?"

"Let's just say that the time limit isn't just me being crazy. I have a good reason."

"Fair enough. You got any suggestion about where I should start?"

Kisaragi shrugged and gave me a grin that I would describe as 'impish.' "You're the private dick, you tell me."

"Of course." I got up, pulled my gun out of the drawer I keep it in, and checked the chamber. "By the way, I have one question for you."

She seemed to consider it. "Okay, one question. Shoot."

"We've never met before, and I've never done any work for the WRO. Why'd you decide to come to me, even if I was the only private eye in the city? People don't walk in to the office of somebody they've never met, ask him to find their missing boyfriend and partner in helping Tuesti rule the world, and put twelve and a half thousand gil on their desk out of blind faith."

"No blind faith here, sugar," she told me with a wink as she walked out. "Like you said, I am the most well-informed woman in the world. I know I can count on you… Hydra."

So. You're probably saying, "Hydra? Oh, no. Dick has a mysterious and tragic past where he used to be a stone-faced killer and that was his nom de crime." Well, that's not true at all. Mostly.

Just bear with me.

I started with the usual suspects. Valentine, as befits the head of the black ops branch of the WRO, usually does a lot of hands-on work, and I figured that he had gone missing during the course of his duties.

I hate Edge City when it rains. It smells like rust and sewage and shattered lives, barely pieced together with spit and string and a prayer or two. The wreckage of old Midgar is what makes up this dark metropolis, memories of what came before, and it returns to haunt us whenever the skies cloud over.

As I said, on that night it was storming like the wrath of God, so I put on my trenchcoat and hat and stumbled out into the gale, making sure my .357 was secure in the coat's waterproof lining. I've had guns seize up on me before and not fire because of rust, so I'm always careful about that.

The skies poured endless drops of dank, stagnant water, and I shouldered past the winos, deviants and general scum of the eastern north side of the city. Someday I'm going to get an office with a better location, but this is the best I can afford, and besides, the ambiance is kind of fitting for the work I usually do.

There's one bar that's always open, even on nights like this when the heavens are lashing us all for our sins with scourges made of rain, and I knew that the people I was looking for would be there. If I needed to talk to any street scum, they'd be there too – when their normal haunts were closed, they would invariably drift to this place, like sewage spiraling around a drain.

The sign above the door was barely legible through the pouring tide, but I managed to make out Seventh Heaven and knew that I was in the right place. I stepped inside and immediately felt a multitude of hungry eyes on me, like lions watching something small, cold, and shivering entering their den.

Behind the bar was the owner of the place, Tifa Lockhart, as well as her squeeze, Cloud Strife. You'd think that he would be the owner and she the squeeze, but I could tell that it was just the way things worked around here. Strife served up drinks with the look of a man who's seen things that he'd rather forget, things that haunt him and make him wish that it'd been different. It was a vacant, wall-eyed stare and an occasional sheepish grin that concealed something that was eating him from the inside.

It was only when he looked at Lockhart that his shoulders lifted and his eyes matched his mouth's smile, and I could see why he was with her. She did something for him, something that made the long sleepless hours of the cold morning bearable. She was the salve for his soul, which would be otherwise left cold and bleeding on the side of the road.

I'm only an occasional patron of their establishment, but Lockhart knows me by sight if not by name, so when she saw me come in she gave me a shout and motioned me over to the bar. I brushed past the human rubble of a city that's rusting faster than it can be patched up and took a seat.

"Evening," I said.

"Evening," Strife said evenly, and Lockhart also said hello. "What'll you have?"

"Bourbon," I replied.

"Straight?"

"The only kind of bourbon there is."

He nodded and poured me a shot, which I tipped back immediately. The warm, familiar burn worked its way down my throat, and I gave a contented sigh and savored the feeling before I said, "So. You two are friends of Vincent Valentine, right?"

Strife stopped halfway through pouring me another shot, and Lockhart paused while cleaning out a mug. "You could say that," Strife finally said, finishing the second shot.

I tipped that back, too, gave a small shake of my head when he got ready to pour me a third one, and said, "I'm looking for him. An acquaintance of yours, Yuffie Kisaragi, walked into my office not half an hour ago and told me he was missing. Any ideas where he might be?"

Both of them shook their heads. "We don't really work for the WRO, so we don't keep in regular touch with Vincent," Lockhart told me. "We see him occasionally, and every year for the reunion, of course, but other than that…"

I nodded. "Of course. Thanks for your help anyway." Getting up from the bar, I left a note on the table for the drinks and surveyed the rest of the establishment until I saw the man I originally came here to see.

His name is Tseng, and I know him from my previous line of work.

He was sitting in a corner booth, nursing a Bloody Mary, the discarded celery stick sitting forlornly at the edge of the table. I sat down across from him, and he looked up from his inspection of the tabletop, a "go away" clearly on his lips until he saw who I was. When he recognized me, he slowly took a measured sip of his drink and then said, "Dick."

"Tseng," I replied. "Been a while."

"Yes, it has," he mused. "What do you want?"

"I'm looking for Vincent Valentine," I told him. "Any hints?"

Tseng pretended to look as though he was mulling it over, or maybe he was and just doing a bad job of it, but after a minute he nodded. "You didn't hear this from me, Dick…"

"…since you technically don't have any say-so or need-to-know status in the WRO and are just a secret operative…"

"…but there's been a big shakedown going on in the WRO R and D department. It's a shame, but the weapons development program had a few… problems."

I raised an eyebrow. "Problems?"

"Problems like the tester for the experimental rifle not being who he said he was. Problems like said subject blowing his way out of the building with a hundred million gil's worth of experimental technology in his hands. Problems like him now being at large somewhere in Edge."

"Those are some pretty big problems."

"Reeve figured that the only WRO operative capable of apprehending the subject without damaging him or the rifle too much was Vincent. That was three days ago; we haven't heard from him since."

I shifted a bit in my chair and felt the heavy piece of lead in my pocket. If Vincent Valentine hadn't been able to take down this guy, what good would me and a .357 be against him?

"Feel like you're getting in a bit too deep?" Tseng asked me, picking up on my body language. "All I know is that Vincent was convinced that the perpetrator wasn't working alone. It would take a lot of luck, coincidence, and very careful planning to get this guy as a volunteer tester if he was working alone. If there was more than one person involved…"

"A plant," I said.

"Exactly. By whom, we don't know." Tseng sat back and resumed nursing his drink. "That's all I have for you."

"I appreciate it."

That got me started on this whole crazy chase. Other people being involved in what was essentially corporate espionage told me that it was either a conspiracy within the WRO or an attempt by a rival entity to gain an advantage. The world is a big place, now, and there are lots of powerful corporations out there that would love to get their hands on experimental WRO technology.

I needed to see someone who was in on the corporate scene, to figure out who was moving and shaking and might be responsible for the plant. One name came immediately to mind.