To Hell and Back

Chapter Two: Beg for Sweet Damnation

I'll be with them asleep and dreaming
I'll be there when they wake with screaming
At the hour of death then I will nurse them
To have a moment more to curse them

—The Pogues, "Rake at the Gates of Hell"

day one;

For once, there weren't any visible guards on the wall. Vincent smelled a trap, and from the expression on his face, Sephiroth did as well. The only one of them who was looking at the horizon without hard suspicion—or any suspicion at all, for that matter—on his face was Zack, but then, that was classic Zack. Always an optimist.

Vincent narrowed his eyes and handed back the binoculars, which Sephiroth promptly shut back in their case with motions as silent as Vincent's own. He kept his voice a bare whisper as he asked, "Is there a leak?"

"Not possible." Sephiroth's voice was just as quiet, but there was a hint of steel in his tone. He apparently didn't appreciate any questions, however subtle, about Zack Fair's loyalty.

A pause. They all stared at the wall some more.

"Can you work around it?"

There was something in Sephiroth's tone. It was neither grudging respect—which Vincent would have accepted—nor concern. Apparently, Sephiroth still didn't like the fact that his father had let the only experiment kept a quieter secret than Sephiroth himself out of the coffin, and was using him in a war.

Considering he could name five thousand places he would rather be, such as in his crypt, or killing Hojo, Vincent agreed.

Pity he had awakened here, with Sephiroth's sword at his throat.

"It shouldn't be a problem."

But when they looked back to the wall, they could see a slight figure sitting atop it. Was he trying to get shot? Did he simply not know any better? The figure kicked his legs like a bored child.

Sephiroth let out a low curse—interestingly enough, a low Wutaian curse—and grabbed the binoculars out of their case. He focused on the figure and choked out another curse.

Zack looked at him with quiet trepidation, as if he expected Sephiroth to say, Yes, the shoe has dropped. "Is it..?"

"It's her."

Vincent wondered if he should give up on understanding the Shinra soldiers of this time. Did they intentionally speak in code, or was this simply the result of being far more familiar with the current situation than he was?

"Her?"

Both Sephiroth and Zack turned to look at him. Zack shook his head, as if disappointed or perhaps amazed that he didn't know. Sephiroth simply gave him a sharp look.

Lucrecia's son practically drawled his disdainful response, as if it should have been self-evident to a man who hadn't even known the names of Shinra's current President, much less the names of Wutai's current rulers. "Yuffie of the Kisaragi, currently called the Akekoukennin, the Red Guardian. The heir apparent and a Wusheng Mighty God in one fashion or another."

Well. That certainly made things interesting.

day one;

Vincent landed in a kneeling position, his impact making only a faint noise. They'd constructed the wall from stone, then tiled it with their strange green tiles. Now that the leg-swinging figure had gone, he'd had no qualms about climbing a stone outpost.

Despite his attachment to it, he'd abandoned the dull red of his cape, leaving it in Sephiroth's care. Now, he was a shadow amidst shadows. The dark oil in which he'd rubbed his boots oozed through the gaps in the boots' metal plating, dampening his socks. That was no concern, though. He needed to get to the other side of the wall and find a chink in Wutai's greatest armor. That was the only thing he needed.

A shadow amongst shadows. He moved slowly, carefully, silently along the stone, crouching to present a smaller target.

"You know, people think black doesn't show in the dark. But it does."

The voice was young, casual, startling. His hand went immediately for his gun, but he had no idea where the speaker was. And he wasn't going to waste ammunition on a target he couldn't see.

The tap to the back of his head was just as sudden as the young girl's voice in the velvet darkness. When he didn't fold into unconsciousness, something buzzed against his shoulder with a strange electric jolt.

Vincent fought against useless fury as his knees gave out beneath him. The pinprick that felt like a bolt spell sounded again on his shoulder. His eyes sank closed.

day two;

Vincent woke in a dusty stone room; the only light came from a candle worn down to a nub. His body groaned in protest at the effort to open his eyes. Someone had shackled his wrists above his head, in such a position that the arms were virtually immobile. The position hurt his aching shoulder.

For now, escape was impossible. And even if he managed to leave the building, he might still have to fight through an entire town, or worse, encampment of deployed ninjas. He had no doubts he could.

But would it be worth it? He might be able to gauge their knowledge of the currently… fluid… situation from the questions they asked.

He gauged risks and cost and reward, juggling possibilities in his mind. Normally, he would not be so indecisive. He would immediately find the best way and act on it, smoothly carrying out his plans.

This situation required delicacy.

day five;

The candles were burning brightly for once. His sense of time told him it'd been about three days, in the sense that he'd fallen asleep three times. It could just as easily have been less than that as it could have been more.

Servants ferried in more candles. He watched them and said nothing. They did not speak to each other as they carried out this task.

They did not speak to him as they unlocked his shackles and moved him to another section of the wall. He didn't struggle, because there was no handle on the inside of the door, and he'd seen enough of it to know he'd have to destroy it if he wanted to leave. But this was new, and one of them smacked the side of his head when his stiff limbs would not quite cooperate.

He did not want to be turned away from the door. But they smacked him in the head again, this time with the flat of a tiny blade. If he irritated them too much, they would likely cut off an ear or slit his throat. Or knife him between the third and fourth ribs.

He cooperated. The shackles clicked closed around his wrists, his elbows, his upper arms. At least his shoulder no longer hurt.

And then the servants were gone.

Vincent shifted just enough to look over his shoulder. The candles burned so intensely for a few moments, brilliant sparks of light that made his eyes burn. Left after-trails blazing and popping on his retinas. Just having his eyes open was like having a particularly terrible LSD trip.

The door opened. A girl stepped in, dressed in red. She was young, so young. And the steel whip in her hands was startlingly incongruent with the unmarred olive skin her qipao revealed. Such a dark, ugly object to be held loosely against such pretty, pale thighs. The door closed.

"We're going to start with the simple stuff," she told him.

He jolted in his shackles, the surprise tingling up and down his body the same way her Bolt3-in-a-pinprick had. That voice was the one that had mocked him on the wall.

"No rules?"

She grinned at him. "No holds barred. I'm going to ask questions. When you answer them, you'll get water. When you don't, I'll hit you. Pretty standard tactic."

"The basics," he agreed.

"What's your name?"

day seven;

Vincent could just barely move enough to itch his back against the wall. He would never again doubt descriptions of the exquisite agonies of Wutaian chain whips. Supposedly, the Wutaians had even named a drink after these whips, the plum blossom. He'd heard it said it tasted like a kick to the back of the head.

He itched his back against the wall again, this time in the opposite direction. The very tip of the plum blossom was a sharp bit of metal, and the links of the whip combined to give it a peculiar snap. The girl in red had drawn lines of fire down his back.

Eight lines today. Six of them came from silence. One had been an "example shot" so he would understand what sort of pain she could make him feel. The last, she had given him just before she'd left, even as she'd whispered words he'd loved and hated to hear. He didn't want to experience that sort of pain, even as he almost, in a twisted way, looked forward to the challenge not to say anything.

Tomorrow, we'll use the barbed tip.

day ten;

When had her voice gone from tormenting to soothing? She was crooning something to him and he found himself wanting to answer.

But no. If he answered— If he answered—

A conditional was a logical chain relying on an "if, then" argument. If p, then q.

He couldn't finish his conditional. There were too many reasons. If he started talking, he had betrayed Shinra (who had betrayed him. She had given him a smile for a poker face as she told him, First they break faith with you, then they break your faith). If he started talking, he would eventually be returned to Sephiroth. To Hojo's son. To the coffin.

The serrated knife dug into his back. Dug and tugged, parting his flesh easily, digging its little knives into his nerves.

And then the stampede of Bolt1 down his spine, making his every nerve ending twitch with unbearable jolts far beyond simple terms like pleasure or pain. In the end, it wasn't identifiable as any one sensation. Not when they were both this far gone.

It was a tide.

He bowed to it, slumping in his chains, allowing his body to go slack. He didn't even fight to remain conscious.

day fourteen;

They'd have given up on him by now, wouldn't they? Assumed he'd defected or died. Or perhaps they were even now assuming he'd been compromised and changing all their plans.

Somehow, he couldn't see Sephiroth being merciful to someone he even suspected of breaking under torture.

No breaking, then. Vincent would not give Hojo's son any more power over himself than the general already had.

No breaking. He breathed in and out and reviewed the consequences, dissociated himself from the body whose fists the girl was currently making clench and unclench. Dissociated himself from the entire process.

Manipulate materia meant no pain for the day. Manipulation was a process of empathy; in order to become a puppeteer, one had to feel what the puppet felt. Flesh must become wood, to continue the analogy.

Vincent was almost disappointed.

His right hand slapped his left cheek.

The girl giggled. "Look what I can make you do, red-eyes. Whatcha think I can make you say?"

"I won't break," he told her. His right hand slapped his left cheek again, and then his mouth opened. "I do not like Sephiroth."

The girl tilted her head and gave him a cat-that-ate-the-canary sort of smile. Smug. Happy. Her eyes glinted with something strange.

He swallowed.

"Tell me a story," she said, then dropped the Manipulate materia, set it on the floor and kept her hand on it. She scooted closer to him, trailed a few fingers along his cheeks. "How do you know Sephiroth?"

But Vincent simply told her, "I will not break."

"Black shows in the dark," she replied.

"I was sure I would not be seen," Manipulate offered through his lips.

"There you go," she told him. "Never be sure of anything."

In movies, he thought but managed not to say, this would be where he gave his big reveal. I know something you don't know. I am not left handed! Or, rather, This was all part of my master plan.

Only it wasn't.

The girl rolled the Manipulate on the ground.

"It's time for the big reveal," it made him say.

She grinned. "I'm cool with that."

"I'm not left handed," he told her.

"No shit, Sherlock," she said, eyeing his claw. Then, with a wolfish grin, she told him, "Today's my day off."

Vincent stared. Her day off. She had come here, to this wretched little hole in the ground, and cast Manipulate on him… for fun? As some sort of—

His right hand slapped his left cheek.

She laughed. "Red-eyes, stop hitting yourself."

His right hand slapped his left cheek again, and this time, he wasn't sure if that was her childishness or his spite.

day sixteen;

Vincent stared at the wall, refusing to twitch as the girl's chain whip snapped, cutting thin red lines into his back.

They'd already done whips. Three kinds of chain whips, two bullwhips, and a nasty steel-tipped riding crop, in fact. Rather than wary, he was now simply tired of them.

"I promise you, you'll break."

But it was entirely too easy to bite his tongue—literally and figuratively—and say nothing at all in response to her questions.

In fact, the only thing remarkable about this session was that it ended early. The girl had just begun her swift slice into his back on fresh, untainted skin when the door groaned open. She let out an Eastern curse.

"Akekoukennin," one of the servants said, voice sharp as the whip the girl had just struck him with.

And now he knew her name, Vincent realized. This girl must be Yuffie of the Kisaragi.

And now she was gone, out the door.

The servants maneuvered him back into his usual position, while Vincent wished he spoke Wutaian, or knew anything at all about Wutai beyond the facts that it was primitive, had strange definitions of honor and nobility, and was ruled by the Kisaragi.

day twenty;

Today, they blindfolded him before setting up the room. That could mean any number of things; either his primary torturer was laboring with the servants—and it would be so very Wutaian to conceal this fact —or she was trying to instill dread.

Hojo had sent him so very far beyond dread.

The blindfold was jerked away suddenly. Once again, the candles seemed so bright that he saw spots and dizzying trails of color. But the brightness burned and he closed his eyes in response, squinting them open gradually until he could stand it. If just barely.

Candles. Too many candles. And some were oddly shaped.

"Wax?" he asked.

The Akekoukennin smiled at him. "Got it in one! Today, we're playing with hot wax."

We're? He wondered, before realizing that the yellow stone in her hand was a Manipulate.

The force of the spell hit him with the same sharpness of the whips. He blinked, winced, caved under to it. Manipulate broke you in ways torture never could. If it worked at all..

"I really liked the way you took Manipulate," she said.

His mouth moved with hers and he tried to give her a look of disgust—but his face remained slack. He shouldn't have been surprised (he couldn't do the things she didn't want him to, after all), but he was.

"You know," she said through his lips and then they both let out a casual sigh, "we have a different word for Manipulate, here in Wutai. We say Haseru or Cheng. It means 'to ride'."

And he could see why. He could feel her astride him, despite the fact that she was physically three feet away. Could feel her control over him, as easily as if she had been gripping his shoulders.

Did she feel the same way? Could she feel the body she controlled? She held him within her grasp, that much was clear… But if such a child, who smiled as she tormented others, could know it—that was a mystery.

"Well, Akagan?" Yuffie asked, her tone wry. "Getting scared yet?"

He didn't answer; she wasn't actually asking him to.

A yellow haze descended on him. He reached out, passed his hand through the flame of a candle. Didn't jerk back. And smiled the vacant, meaningless smile of someone who had yielded to Manipulate. (That hideous yellow materia always found a way to make it worth your while.) Smiled even as he tried to pull his hand back, tried involuntarily to whimper, wanted to bite his tongue.

"My name is," she sang, and they were playing Mad-Libs. Because of the yellow haze, because of the bright spark of his own blood on his tongue and the pulsing, pounding pleasure at having obeyed an order, because of everything, he liked Mad-Libs.

"Vincent Valentine," he said, and she laughed at him. He laughed with her.

"Say it again, Akagan," she said.

"My name is Vincent Valentine."

His hand withdrew from the candle. He sank to his knees from the sheer agony of the burn. He had his nearly indestructible body to thank for it not being worse than it was. For it not being life threatening.

And even in the midst of the burning, consuming pain, the Manipulate sent jolting moments of pleasure along his spine. He closed his eyes against the shivers of arousal, the tiny waves of comfort.

When he opened his eyes, he saw Yuffie rubbing her arm. But she was shifting her weight on the balls of her feet, and her face looked faintly ill. When she saw him watching, she swallowed, throat moving with the effort of it, and lifted her head.

"I will break you." She snapped her fingers twice. A servant scurried forward with a Restore materia.

The taste of mint filled Vincent's mouth, even as his hand began to burn all over again. Hot, painful knives twisted in every nerve ending in his hand, even as the blisters on his skin slowly receded.

And then it was over. She smiled down at him, but there was something sick in her eyes. Her skin was pale, her teeth caught on her lower lip, which trembled.

She'd run hard over their limits. Run right over his ability to accept pain, found something that he couldn't stand. And gone to a place in herself where no human liked to go. He could see the sickness, the pain. Found himself wanting to reach out to touch her, to offer comfort, to kill her. To do to her what she had done to him.

Shameful, what humans did to each other. To themselves.

She snapped her fingers again. Servants helped him stand. Shackled him with his face against the far wall. They spread his arms up, over his head, the chains that held them in place dangling from the ceiling, then attached the neck restraint. He let out an involuntary noise.

Not again. Not the unpreparedness again.

Yuffie herself tied the blindfold around his eyes and slipped a gag into his mouth. He knew it was her from the small, slim fingers and the fact that he couldn't hear her move.

day twenty-two;

The door opened with a heavy sound. Four people marched into the room. Either the fifth was Yuffie or there was no fifth. Vincent strained his ears, trying to distinguish which servants had come. If they were carrying anything heavy.

But he really couldn't tell. He'd gotten rusty at this.

The shackles came off before the neck restraint. They hauled him from the room, half-dragging, half-helping him through the building's halls. He could see nothing. Of course. Just the way they liked him, after all.

Stone slid against stone and Vincent suddenly had an idea of where he was. Sephiroth had mentioned something about this place once. The heart of Wutai: the Caves of Da Chao.

Several stone doors were pushed open before metal grated against the cold stone floor with a harsh scraping noise.

The blindfold came off and Vincent blinked. The light was dim, but then, he was now used to dim lighting. He blinked hard for several moments anyway, though, because Yuffie was seated in a hard wooden chair, her legs spread on either side of the seat. It was an eastern-style chair, hard-backed.

Between those olive thighs was a heavy metal basin. She was barefoot, he noticed. And the sick, wan smile was gone; the smile she wore today was the same happy, brilliant grin with which she had teased him to stop hitting himself.

"Welcome to my lair," she intoned in a voice much deeper than usual. Then she threw back her head and laughed. "Know what we're going to be doing today, Akagan?"

Vincent didn't want to guess, though he had an idea. Turk training included, of course, standard anti-interrogation briefings. If by, "standard," one meant, "hellishly gruesome." He'd seen this before.

"I can guess," he told her.

She laughed again, rising gracefully from the seat. Vincent swallowed at the way the thigh slits on the dress shifted as she moved. "Are we going to do this the easy way or the hard way?"

Vincent looked at the chair, thought about the long sharp knives the guards carried, the likelihood that Yuffie would be prepared for battle. The countless new scars on his back, the way the guards had needed to help him walk here.

"I'll cooperate."

Her answering smile was radiant.

day twenty-three;

Vincent tried to move his legs and failed. The shivers had long set in. They were convulsions, now. If this continued much longer, the shivers would stop. He would experience the euphoric, dizzying emptiness of late-stage hypothermia.

His throat was raw from begging. He hadn't thought he'd say a word. But it was funny, the things you'd say when your body was wracked with shivers that wouldn't stop. When your legs were a painful mass of burning, freezing, tingling horror. When you were almost convinced that you had begun to hallucinate.

He heard that metal scrape again as servants heaved the doors open. Vincent looked up, but the blindfold prevented him from seeing anything but darkness. Four steady pairs of booted footsteps, the sound of a fifth pair in something wooden that clacked against the stone, and the soft whisper of leather of a sixth person. The sixth was walking unsteadily. He could detect the whisper of leather and the occasional odd footstep.

And then cool skin brushed against his cheek. The blindfold slid away in a murmur of heavy black silk, scratching against his cheeks and temples as the Akekoukennin jerked it away.

He blinked against the four torches, found himself staring dazedly up at a woman who looked remarkably like Yuffie. The same high cheekbones, the same full lips, the same carefully arched eyebrows. Her eyes were a hard steel gray, harder even than Yuffie's, and they glinted with something Vincent recognized. He'd seen it in the eyes of older Turks. Men who'd betrayed and been betrayed alike, who were intensely self-destructive in an extremely controlled way.

No wonder Yuffie could tease even as she tortured.

Yuffie's voice was a rasped whisper against the top of his ear. "Ready to start talking?"

But the woman held up a hand. It was a graceful hand, pale olive, with short, lacquered nails. She wore no jewelry.

"Akagan, Vincent Valentine. We are prepared to offer you an opportunity." Her voice was hard and sharp and tinged with distaste. Speaking with him was beneath her.

"You want me to join you."

The woman inclined her head. "Exactly so."

Vincent felt his teeth chatter. Involuntarily, his jaw locked. He almost winced.

"Perhaps we should let him warm up before we expect an answer." The woman laughed for a moment, tilting her head back just the way Yuffie did, covering her mouth in an unfamiliar gesture. It was not a pleasant sound.

Yuffie rested her hand on his shoulder, protectively. She no longer completely trusted this woman, Vincent could see that just as easily as he could see that she obeyed her. That she had always obeyed the woman with the gleaming eyes.

"Take care of him, daughter." Yuffie's mother gave a smile that was more a vicious baring of her teeth. "Take very good care of him."

"Of course, mother."

day thirty;

Vincent walked out of the Caverns on his own power, a bowl of hot green tea in his hands. The city was a glimmering blur from the top of the mountain. Yuffie was perched on one of the outcroppings that had been carved into Da Chao, balancing a giant ninja star on her shoulder. The metal was thin and gleaming and looked wicked; he made a mental note never to disobey orders here.

They might turn the tide. Without him, they stood no chance. But he could take on large numbers of soldiers at once, and probably even most of SOLDIER. He'd survived the Wutaian version of the third degree.

Yuffie turned around, gave him a smile. "Isn't my city gorgeous?"

He looked down at the gleaming green rooftops, at the plumes of smoke visible from Shinra encampments on the Plain of Aizen-Myo. The River Leviathan sparkled in the sunlight, swirled straight through the town.

"Yes," he answered.

And it was.