what about the moon and stars?

by meredactyl

Summary:

His dreams had fallen through his hands like stardust. Without anything more compelling to do with his life, he'd thrown in his lot with the little ragtag group of eco-terrorists attempting to overthrow a global megacorporation - and not just because of the strange, quiet man who lingered near the edges of everything. Now that the stakes had changed, he found himself attempting to save the world with them, instead.

No one could say his life had been boring, at least. What else could Cid Highwind accomplish, if he set his mind to it?

Chapter 1

Notes:

Understand, I’ll slip quietly
away from the noisy crowd
when I see the pale
stars rising, blooming, over the oaks.

I’ll pursue solitary pathways
through the pale twilit meadows,
with only this one dream:
you come too.
- Pathways, Rainer Maria Rilke

Adventuring in general, let alone adventuring to prevent some kind of apocalypse, was not the easiest undertaking for a thirty-something dude who’d spent the last few years tinkering at a workbench in the shadow of his aborted attempt to reach his dream. Oughta be illegal to expect a man to tromp all over goddam creation for hours and days and weeks on end, though the sky’s changing moods overhead made a nice distraction most of the time, as long as they weren’t tromping north towards that awful space rock.

Adventuring with a gaggle of twenty-somethings, though, always yelling or sulking or chattering or gossiping… he sometimes wondered to himself whether maybe they should just let the damn Meteor do its thing. And he wondered how Barret had endured it all, before other people his age had fallen in with their little ragtag crew, when the stakes had been so different. Save the planet from humanity’s disasters - sure. Save the planet from… whatever the fuck was happening now? Different bucket of bolts. He glanced up at the meteor and flipped it off, just on principle. Plus, as dedicated as everyone in the group was to saving the world, how often could one man be expected to mediate arguments over camp chores, to soothe wounded feelings after petty squabbles? To endure the off-key pop song singalongs that got going much too early in the mornings when things dawned especially sunny?

Cid thought about it as he walked, his spear threaded through his jacket and the whole assembly slung across his shoulders. Maybe there was some secret power associated with being a dad that made a guy immune to the annoyances of tantrums and soapy drama. Not that he had any intention of finding out first-hand, shit. Kids deserved parents who didn’t have even odds, on any given day, of blowing themselves up with some new invention, and probably people would expect him to clean up his language if he were gonna be around littles all the time. Clean up his language, his house, his failure of a career. He sighed to himself and trudged along.

The group’s arguments had changed timbre after the first trip north, of course. Fewer disagreements about where to put up the campsite each night. More raw barbs launched across the fire in an attempt to protect the fresh wounds they all carried from additional hurt, from the terrible loss of their friend. Barret had Cid now to help referee when the kids got into it too much, but sometimes… sometimes it really was just too goddam much. Especially when he considered that the work he and Barret split fifty-fifty ought to have been more evenly distributed among three people.

The third member of what Yuffie had dubbed the “Old Guys Crew” rarely said anything to break up an argument, though a pointed look from his eerie red eyes usually did the trick on its own. He never joined in the verbal melees. If Vincent kept his wounds and his thoughts to himself, well, that was his own goddam business, and Cid fuckin’ Highwind wasn’t gonna pry.

It had been another day of the same trekking as usual, westward towards the coast that eventually would lead to Junon and the ocean reactor there. The little forest came into view not long before sunset. Without any discussion - petulant or otherwise - everyone seemed to gravitate towards the shade and the shelter of the trees next to a fast-flowing stream. Tents sprang up quickly and, for once, the breeze and the cool evening seemed to settle everyone into peaceable silence. A good enough day, despite his aching legs and feet, that when Cait Sith offered to tell stories after dinner as the darkness stretched its fingers towards their fire, no one objected.

Cid offered to take the first watch so that the kids could enjoy themselves a little. He wandered back towards the prairie and found a good spot at the base of a gnarled, stout old tree to prop his spear, and he sat, facing away from camp, looking out across the terrain they’d crossed. It’d be a while before the moon came up over the Mithril Mountains, but he had plenty of time. It could almost have been soothing, if the huge fuckin’ space rock looming behind him weren’t there. He sank into moody contemplation, kicking the sole of his boot against the dirt. Small night sounds rose around him, crickets and a bird of some kind, and down near the stream he heard what might have been frogs. Been a while since he’d heard a frog.

Easy laughter drifted over from the fire. He shifted his weight, slouched against the tree, stretched one leg out. He found his lighter in a jacket pocket and fished the cigarette from behind his ear. It squashed in the familiar way between his teeth while he flipped his lighter open. “Gonna have to come down outta that tree if you want a drag,” he said, apparently to the air near his feet, as he bent his head to light the thing. He leaned back, resting his head against the bark and his forearm across his knee. Smoke drifted in lazy tendrils from his fingers.

“Those will kill you,” a low voice overhead replied. Cid looked up to meet the glowing eyes of the man watching him from not too far up the tree’s stout branches, but he didn’t move.

“Never seems to keep you from moochin’ a taste, though, does it?” Cid chuckled, closing his eyes again. A quiet clatter of twigs and debris was all the warning he had before the soft thump-clank of boots hitting the ground announced his friend’s arrival. Cid’s smile was languid as he handed the other man his prize. If his blue eyes watched the little orange glow too sharply as it met Vincent’s lips, if he focused too closely on the long fingers holding the cigarette delicately, if he flickered his attention upward just for a second and found his gaze trapped by a curious expression on the other man’s face, well, maybe it was just the darkness that had him looking so intently.

Could be. Sure.

After a moment, Vincent returned the cigarette and looked away, silent. The hem of his cape fluttered a little in the breeze.

“Starlight’s wastin’. You gonna have a seat, or just gonna loom there, blockin’ the view?” There wasn’t an audible reply, but Vincent turned to consider Cid again with that cool red stare. Cid looked right back and took a long, unconcerned pull on the cigarette. A shout of disbelief from the direction of the fire caused Vincent to startle and look over in alarm, his hand moving to the holstered gun at his hip faster than Cid could follow, but peals of laughter and an indignant yell soon followed. “Just Cait’s stories,” Cid said, talking again to no one in particular. “C’mon, sit down and rest yer barkin’ dogs a while.”

“I don’t have any dogs,” was the quiet response.

Still, he flourished his cape a bit and settled, boots clanking softly, just far enough to Cid’s right that their shoulders didn’t touch. He rested his back against the tree. The wicked claws of his left hand came to rest on his drawn-up knee, and he soon laid his chin across his arm, too. He fell still.

They sat in companionable quiet for a while, watching the sky. As taxing as Cid found the day-long treks with their gaggle of companions, he could only imagine the toll those conversations must take on someone who’d been a silent recluse for a few decades. Certainly it helped to explain the way Vincent disappeared into the darkness almost every night after dinner, though he always reappeared in the morning in time to help break camp down. Silence, and the stars wheeling overhead, were all the conversation he usually needed or wanted.

Hours later, a mostly-full moon peeked up over the mountains, flooding the world with its ghostly light. The laughter and conversation from the rest of the group had dwindled to almost nothing by the time Vincent spoke again, without preamble. “I had a cat.” Cid gave a start. When he looked over, the other man was watching him from behind a fall of his long hair. His eyes glowed brightly in the gloom. Cid wondered if whatever had made them do that had also done something to make them magnetic - it seemed that way, sometimes.

“A cat, huh?” He grinned and, lacing his fingers with his palms outward, took an opportunity to stretch his shoulders. When he finished, he shifted so he was facing Vincent more directly.

“Yes, a cat. A lifetime ago.” Vincent closed his eyes and fell back into silence.

Cid raised an eyebrow. “...Okay, then. Great! A cat.” He fished a cigarette from the pack and lit it, but the other man still didn’t answer. “You gonna tell me about this cat, or were you just checkin’ I hadn’t fallen asleep?”

Vincent opened his eyes again. “You were not asleep.”

“Seem awful sure of that.”

“You snore.”

“Like hell I do.” Cid scowled, but part of him wondered when - or why - Vincent had paid enough attention to notice. He pulled deeply on the cigarette.

The conversation ebbed again. Before Cid could figure out a way to try to prod the other man into speaking, Vincent’s head snapped up. He was on his feet and staring back towards camp in an instant, leaving Cid blinking and scrambling to join him, muttering under his breath at the pins and needles in his legs. Something near his left hip had apparently gone on break, the fucker. He winced as he tried to straighten to his full height. Fuck. Getting old could jump in a lake.

“What’s up?” Cid asked in a low voice. Instead of answering, though, Vincent fled into the shadows under the trees along the streambank. “...Vincent? Hey, what the hell?” He heard them then, footsteps crossing through the grass. Too small to be a monster. Cid relaxed his shoulders as Tifa emerged from the darkness with a little lantern in her hand and a smile on her face.

“Hey, Captain,” she called quietly. Though she was the same age as most of the others, she had a weight behind her eyes that often made her seem older. Maybe it came from running her bar in Midgar, or some of whatever the hell she and Cloud had gone through as kids. Cid had only caught bits and pieces, but shit, no wonder both of them always seemed like they were moving, mostly together, slightly out of sync with everyone else.

“Evenin’, Tifa,” he replied. He shifted his weight so he could lean on his spear. “Everyone all done with campfire songs?”

She laughed. “Yeah, they’re all asleep. Had some real doozies tonight - you missed the one about the first time Cloud went chocobo riding.” He raised an eyebrow and she laughed again. “It’ll come up again, I’m sure. It’s a good one.” She set the lantern down and looked out across the grass. “I think Nanaki is still awake, but even he seemed to be dozing. Should be safe to come back and get some shut-eye now, Captain.” His grin was sheepish, but he nodded in thanks.

“Quiet night so far out here, too,” he told her. “Not too cold, either. Dunno how you kids keep warm in your short sleeves and skirts and stuff.” She rolled her eyes and he grinned his most winning smile. “Next watch shouldn’t be too bad. Sun’ll be up in not too long, and we’ll be able to get a move on. First round’s on me, by the way, when we get to town.”

“What? Why?” Her eyes narrowed.

“One of us had a steady company paycheck until a couple months ago,” he chuckled. “And I owe you for helpin’ me out with my damn shoulder the other day. Thing’s got a mind of its own sometimes.” He moved it experimentally; the twinge he’d had was gone now.

“You don’t owe me anything, Cap,” she answered. “We all take care of each other. That’s how it all works.” She sighed, and for a moment it seemed like she wanted to say something else. It passed, though, and she looked up at him with a tired smile. “If you’re insisting, though, I suppose I could deign to have a beer with the famous Captain Cid Highwind. It’d be a nice break from…” She gestured widely. “From all this.”

He cuffed her shoulder affectionately. “You got it, kiddo. Say the word and it’s my treat. Meantime, holler if you need anything!” With a wave over his shoulder, he hefted his spear and turned towards camp. The trees closed in quickly overhead. The night was still, though, and the moon dappled everything underfoot. He had plenty of light to see, even without the glow from the pair of ghostly red eyes that followed him from a distance, all the way back to the embers of the campfire.
----

They made it to the airport outside Junon that morning. Cid swung his spear jauntily, humming to himself, pleased not only to be back among civilization but also to be among familiar machinery and buildings. He stopped to watch a formation of fighters as they accelerated down the runway and took off, circling lazily above the city before heading toward Midgar. What he wouldn’t give to be in the air with them right now.

“You should keep moving, Chief,” a quiet voice near his shoulder said suddenly. He jumped and found Vincent looking down from behind the high collar of his cape. Cid wondered if things would ever slow down enough for him to figure out how the man managed to sneak in boots with clanky metal toes. Vincent tilted his head. “It’s better not to linger anywhere when you’re a wanted man.”

“The hell do you mean, a wanted man?” He thought again about the cool curiosity in Vincent’s red eyes the previous night, and felt a heat rising on his face. But Vincent pointed to a bulletin board outside the nearby hangar; Cid looked, and saw the other man’s face, and his own, and all of the rest of their companions, staring back at him from freshly-pasted posters. “Fuck!”

He walked over to inspect his picture; Vincent followed him. “Wanted for terrorism, treason, and - hang the fuck on, destruction of sensitive military equipment?” He glanced over his shoulder at Vincent, who shrugged. Cid kept reading, his eyebrows climbing higher and higher towards his hair with each word. “Knowingly and willfully crashed Shinra aircraft. …Shinra aircraft? The fuck?” Cid’s face smoothed to perfect, murderous blankness when he realized what they meant. “The bastards are trying to say I’m guilty of wrecking my own goddam plane!” He grabbed a corner of his poster and pulled savagely, tearing it from the notice board. A string of muttered oaths accompanied the sounds of him crumpling it. “The fuckin’ nerve, trying to lock me up after they tried to fuckin' steal her like that. She wasn’t even theirs! The Bronco was all mine!”

Vincent said nothing, only took a step closer to the board to study his own portrait with quiet wonder. His hand - not the golden claws - reached up slowly to brush his printed cheek. Cid, his rant having petered out, looked from the poster to his companion. Vincent’s expression was distant and blank.

“What’s the matter, Vince?” he asked after a moment, grinning. “Did they not make you pretty enough on the posters?” Vincent’s arm pulled away from the poster as thought the picture had bitten him. He glared down at Cid, his eyes unreadable except for a sudden, simmering anger, and strode away in a swirl of red. He did not clank.

“Try to keep up, Highwind,” he called tersely, without looking back to see if Cid would follow.

“Hey, wait a minute!” With one last look at the posters - at Vincent’s and everyone else’s faces - he hurried after the dark-haired man. “Vincent, wait!” But he did not slow down or shorten his stride. Huffing and puffing, Cid caught him. “What’s wrong? What the fuck did I say?”

Vincent was silent and did not stop, or slow down, or look at him. He might as well have been on the moon for all he noticed Cid. The rest of the group had already disappeared into the city. Cid reached up and pulled hard on the taller man’s shoulder. “Answer me, goddammit!”

Vincent did stop then, stopped in the middle of the street and whirled, and Cid found himself staring down the business end of the hand cannon the other man called a sidearm. Red eyes blazed under his drawn-down brows. Cid's blue eyes crackled with anger right back at him. “Cut the shit,” Cid said once he’d caught his breath. “We both know if you meant it you’d have done it right away.” He reached up and pulled a cigarette from the pack tucked into his goggles, though he didn’t look away from Vincent’s face.

There was a beat, and then the revolver disappeared without a flourish into Vincent’s hip holster. Cid flicked his lighter.

“You gonna explain what the fuck just happened, or are we gonna pretend everything’s fine, and go catch up with our friends? Maybe face certain doom a thousand feet under the sea, get our asses handed to us by Shinra goons, posters or no posters?” He lit the cigarette and felt his nerves settling almost as soon as he took the first drag. Vincent inhaled slowly. He looked around, but no one was nearby, and even the few people passing did not seem to be paying attention.

“It is strange,” he finally said, “to see a face above my name that is thirty years younger than it should be. Like not a single day has gone past, except for the difference in my hair. Perhaps you are accustomed to seeing your face the way you expect it to look, when you pass mirrors and glance at photographs, but not all of us have that luxury.” Cid looked away, remembering the way Vincent recoiled from his reflection at most of the inns they stayed at, and how the little vanity mirror in his cabin on the ship was hidden behind a spare shirt. Vincent sighed. “Regardless of… how did you put it? How ‘pretty’ I may or may not be in these notices, or in mirrors, it’s just another reminder that my past and failures will always haunt me.”

“I didn’t think, Vince, shit - I’m sorry.” He looked back up and wasn’t surprised to see that Vincent had turned his head away; the pale man did not respond. With a huff, Cid clanked the butt of his spear a few times against the top of one of Vincent’s boots. He did turn back at that.

“You are always hot-headed,” was all he said. Cid blinked. “Perhaps it is my own fault for forgetting that recklessness can be just as dangerous as too much caution.” Vincent’s eyes remained cool, but his gloved hand reached out and snagged the cigarette from Cid. He took a single puff and handed it back, blowing the smoke out and up, away from Cid’s face. “Our friends likely are wondering where we are.”

He turned on his heel and set off again towards the central district of the city. Cid rolled his eyes and followed. Though Vincent did not slow down, he waited at the entrance to the reactor complex, squinting against the bright midmorning sun.

“They all downstairs already?” Cid asked. Vincent nodded. “Figures.” They made their way inside together. Cid fidgeted at the curious stares cast their way by Shinra employees and civilians alike; he hoped no one who’d been a passenger on a Highwind flight would happen to wander past. Wouldn't that just be his fuckin' luck. He tapped the haft of his spear on his shoulder as they walked through corridor after corridor of the base. If Vincent noticed the stares at all, he said nothing. His boots clanked on the concrete floors.

When they eventually reached the hall with the passenger elevator and its guard, Cid realized two things: one, that the guard looked like he might be fifteen years old. Two, that they had no cover story, no plausible idea for what a hotshot old pilot and a broody, tousle-haired vampire might need from an underwater industrial site. They had no time to come up with one, either, not with the guard standing right there. Another well-thought-out plan of attack brought to you by local planetary heroes, AVALANCE. Shit. But then, he remembered his face was on the wanted poster crumpled in his pocket. He grinned. What was a little recklessness, a little eco-terrorism among friends? It’d been a while since he had a good brawl. The hand holding his spear tightened its grip; he opened his mouth to speak.

Vincent beat him to the punch.

“Vincent Valentine of the Turks,” he said smoothly, walking up to the guard like he owned the place.

“Sir!” The guard saluted smartly.

“I have orders to escort the Captain to the underwater base,” he said, nodding in Cid’s direction. “Repairs to the submarine’s sonar system, apparently.” He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial growl. “Urgent repairs," he clarified, "that pulled me away from my other assignment.” Although Cid couldn’t say what changed, Vincent suddenly seemed to loom, there in that corridor of steel and concrete. His eyes held the young guard’s eyes in thrall, but it was the wide grin with too many teeth in it that seemed to have the most effect. The guard swallowed, stammered an affirmative, and hurried to step aside.

“Captain Highwind, please call the elevator,” Vincent said, gesturing with his claw for Cid to take the lead.

“Uh, yeah! Yep, you bet.” Cid scurried forward and hit the button once, twice. His spear tapped rapidly against the shoulder of his jacket. He gritted his teeth as he resisted the urge to look over his shoulder and make sure Vincent wasn’t laying it on too thick.

As though he could hear Cid’s concern, Vincent spoke again. “Corporal, I neither know nor care whether you have clearance to discuss what’s happening at the reactor.”

“...sir?”

“I do, however, care very much whether you share with anyone that I and Captain Highwind were here today.” The elevator dinged. “If anyone - anyone at all - asks, you have not let anyone unusual into this elevator today.”

“Understood, sir!” Cid heard the corporal’s boots stamp on the floor behind him; before he could wonder too much about it, Vincent’s claw was at his elbow and sweeping him into the elevator car. He slapped the ‘down’ button with his other hand and waited, statuesque with tension, until the door closed behind them and the car began its descent.

“Holy shit, Vince,” Cid breathed, leaning a hand against his face and letting out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. “Where the fuck did that come from?”

“My skills are very specific,” the other man replied, turning to face the door, “but what they lack in breadth, I made up with depth.”

“...care to repeat that, but in talking-to-my-reckless-idiot-friend words?”

Vincent looked at him from the corner of his eye. The end of his lips quirked up in a smile that made Cid feel a funny little flip-thud behind his ribs. “I was very good at my job, a long time ago.”

Cid chuckled nervously. He was on an elevator, heading under the ocean (the ocean! the actual goddam ocean!) for some goddamn reason, with a distractingly handsome semi-retired assassin and spy who for the most part seemed to be alive only because dying was too much of a burden. “I’m, uh, grateful for those professional skills, Vince. It's a good thing teenagers don't think about why a repair man wouldn't have any tools with him." He grinned. "Thanks for getting us through it. Maybe I should call you Agent Valentine?”

“Do not.” Cid’s laugh was louder this time.

As the elevator descended, though, Cid couldn’t help but notice that Vincent, normally a study in stillness, fidgeted. His hand toyed absently with the grip of the gun holstered at his hip, and he shifted his weight back and forth from one to the other foot. His attention was focused entirely on the point where the closed elevator doors met, waiting, ready. Cid had a fleeting thought that descending hundreds of feet below the planet’s surface, in a little box, probably was uncomfortable for someone who’d spent decades closed up in a box in a tiny room far below the ground. Not for the first time, he wondered what exactly Vincent had endured, though of course he wasn’t about to just ask, especially not when they were busy.

Instead, Cid fished in a jacket pocket and found his spare pack of smokes and a book of matches. “Hey.” Vincent didn’t turn. “Vince.” Nothing. “Vincent, goddammit.” The red eyes flicked toward him with annoyance, noticed the cigarettes, and softened.

“We need to focus, Chief. There’s no time for a smoke.”

“Don’t gotta smoke ‘em,” Cid replied, “but maybe having ‘em will take the edge off for you." Vincent's eyes widened for a moment with surprise before he got them back under control. "Keepin' them handy works for me, anyway.” He held them towards Vincent, who reluctantly accepted them. As the car slowed and stopped, Vincent tucked them into some secret pocket of his clothing, and settled himself into his more typical stillness.

The door opened into a hallway almost identical to the one they’d left, though this one was empty of people. Together, they hurried down a few flights of stairs until they reached the end. A huge cargo elevator waited on the other side of a doorway. They exchanged a glance and headed in. Cid did the honors this time, flipping the lever that activated the platform. With a jolt and the rumble of heavy, well-maintained machinery, they descended slowly.

“Ever been in a submarine?” Cid asked, speaking loudly over the noise.

Vincent shook his head. “No. Hardly even an airplane, before, let alone something to go below the sea.” The rotating safety lights of the elevator platform threw lurid, wild shadows and light across the walls, and across Vincent’s face.

“Well, I’ve never been on a sub, either, so that’ll make two of us. But don’t you worry about the other thing - we’ll get your air travel deficit sorted toot sweet,” he declared, grinning. He hoped the lights didn’t make his grin into a leer. If they had, Vincent didn’t remark on it. He’d once again schooled himself to stillness; even the soft glow from his eyes was steady. Whether it was the cigarettes or just the slightly more open space that helped, Cid couldn’t say. He did his best not to pace as the platform approached the lower dock. The moment it seemed safe to do so, Vincent leapt from the platform to the panel and hurried through the door. Cid waited for the elevator to stop and chased after him.

The corridor outside the elevator was dim, lit solely by work lamps and safety signage. Vincent paid attention to none of it, striding through the same way he would have crossed the lobby of an office building in Midgar. Cid itched to investigate where all of the conduits and piping started and ended, to pry one of the panels off a box on the wall and see what made an underwater reactor complex tick. It'd been too long since he'd had a chance to be elbow-deep in machinery. From the corner of his eye, he saw a red cape disappear without a sound through the hatch at the end of the hall. Shit.

Neither of them felt like lingering in the glass tunnel on the other side of the hatch; it was damp, and cold, and dark, and Cid could see water seeping around some of the bolts connecting each glass panel to the next. At the far end of the tunnel, they found Cait Sith atop his moogle, both standing outside the reactor entrance.

“Left you out in the cold, eh, cat?” Cid quipped.

“Aye, lad - no shoes, no shirt, no service, and no pets allowed inside.” The little cat hung its head. Cid raised an eyebrow. “The radiation from all the raw mako makes it difficult for me to operate inside reactors. I’ll keep watch here and radio to you all if something happens.”

"Sounds good." Cid exchanged a glance with Vincent. "We goin' in, then?" The taller man shrugged and continued into the complex. “Stay dry, cat. Hopefully we’ll be back before too long.” He glanced uneasily at the tunnel, at the ocean overhead, and the reactor itself. With a wave to the little robot, he went inside.

Chapter 2

Being underwater, it seemed, wasn’t so different from being underground. Any number of horrors could be forgotten, could be permitted by negligence to thrive, out of sight in the darkness. Vincent had learned that a long time ago. It had been correct for the world to go on without him. Whether it had been correct for him to attempt to rejoin it, thirty years later, who could say? He still wondered, sometimes.

His foot tapped a quick clank, clank, clank staccato against the submarine’s steel decking as he leaned against a spare console and waited for Cloud to figure out how to pilot the ship. Despite all his bluster and swagger about his airplane and his beloved namesake airship, Cid had bowed out of driving the submarine. The two men argued in low, intense voices for several minutes until Cloud finally shrugged and flounced into the helmsman’s chair. Cid began pacing a hole in the floor, scrubbing his hand through his wild blonde hair and muttering under his breath about trajectories and velocities and other mysterious engineering principles that even Vincent’s good hearing couldn’t pick up.

After more than one lurching false start - “Sorry,” Cloud called sheepishly from the helm - they pushed away from the dock and finally got under way. Cid’s pacing did not stop, though, nor did his furtive glances towards the huge navigational display along the front wall. Vincent shrugged his mantle to adjust it on his shoulders, to bury his face more deeply in it until only his eyes peeked above it. The pilot’s restless fidgeting was making everyone else anxious, too. In one corner, Yuffie and Nanaki crouched uneasily, both looking more than a little unhappy as they irritably swatted at Cait Sith’s attempts to make them feel better. Tifa and Barret chatted softly in another corner, something about where the next Huge Materia might be, now that the Junon one was safely aboard. The strategy talk was interspersed with quiet conversation about Barret’s little daughter, Marlene, and worried glances towards Cid or Cloud. It was all a subdued version of the usual campfire banter, and in such close quarters, it grated on Vincent’s nerves more than ever.

The next time Cid reached a console and spun to cross the room again, Vincent stood and moved into his path. Cid stopped short and glared up at him, his eyes the steely, dark blue of summer stormclouds.

“The hell do you want, you spooky sonofabitch?”

Vincent's eyes narrowed. “I wish you wouldn’t call me that.”

“Well, maybe you oughta stop dressing like one, then.”

Vincent blinked slowly. Every training session he’d ever had as a Turk had underscored the importance of not rising to the bait in a heated conversation. He had, as a matter of principle, always applied his own discretion to that policy. Right now, instinct suggested that Cid’s explosive temper was a bad addition to the fact that an ocean’s worth of water was being held at bay by a glorified tin can. Vincent decided to lie. “Your pacing was making me dizzy,” he said.

The thunderheads in Cid’s eyes grew taller. Vincent’s own gaze narrowed. The air felt as heavy and loud around him as the sea. Time stretched.

“You’re doin’ a shit job of being one of the grown-ups, Valentine,” Cid finally muttered. But the anger that had been building in his eyes melted away until just their clear, frosty blue depths remained. Vincent looked down, before Cid thought to ask why he was staring.

“My apologies,” he murmured. “I’m out of practice.” He couldn’t stop a smirk at the edge of his lips, but maybe he had managed to duck his face behind his cowl before the other man saw. Cid hooted a laugh. Too late, then. The worst of the tension finally dissipated, and the loudest noise in the crowded space was once again Barret and Tifa’s conversation. Cid still looked miserable, though. He made to reach for the cigarettes tucked against his temple, but his hand stopped halfway as he thought better of it. He glanced at Vincent, daring him to say something, but the taller man remained silent, watching him thoughtfully. He let his hand drop back down to his side.

“Can’t even have a smoke down here,” he grumbled. “How the hell sub crews don’t lose their goddam minds, I dunno.” He gestured emphatically with his hands as he continued. “Cooped up in an awful little box like this, can’t look at the sky or feel the breeze, or see the time or where you are, or -”

“Chief.” Just the one word, but Cid fell silent, rubbing his elbows, his brows fixed in a scowl. Vincent tilted his head towards the navigational display. “What do you know about those numbers on the display? Are they coordinates?”

“Eh?” Cid looked over. His scowl deepened as he concentrated on the flickering gauges and numbers at the edges of the enormous monitor. After a moment, he nodded impatiently and turned from Vincent to face the bow directly. “Oh, yeah. Top left is coordinates. If there were any maps in here, I could probably tell you where we are.”

Vincent raised an eyebrow. “Only probably?” Cid glanced over too slowly this time to see the much wider grin on his face before he ducked again.

“There’s a few different coordinates systems, smartass, and I dunno which one Shinra’s navy picked.” He sniffed dismissively. “Some of us had taste when we signed up during the war.” Vincent spread his hands in an almost-shrug. “Yeah, yeah, you were busy taking a nap during the war, I know. Spare me.” He waved off Vincent’s indignant huff and turned back to the screen, pointing as he named each feature. “That one’s our current speed. Over there is something that looks like it’s probably our depth. And that one in the corner is a - wait, what the hell?”

Cid hurried to stand behind Cloud’s chair, frowning intently at something on the screen. Vincent also looked up. All he could see was the murky depths pressing around the edges of the submarine’s forward floodlights. But then he noticed it, too: something glimmering in the distance, catching the floodlights’ glow and flinging it back towards them, weakly at first, but more steadily as they approached.

By now, the others had sensed the shift in the mood, and also were looking at the screen. Cloud continued the sub’s careful approach, and the mysterious object grew larger on the screen, coming into better focus. “That’s…” Tifa murmured, at the same time Barret yelled, “...a plane?!”

“Looks like it’s still mostly intact,” Cloud said. “What do you think, Cid?” Over the back of the helmsman’s chair, Vincent saw the top of Cloud’s unruly hair turn as he glanced up and over his shoulder. Cid was laser-focused on the aircraft. Cloud shifted course a little so that they could circle above the wreck and get a better view.

“I think it looks like a crashed goddam airplane.” Cid’s voice was grim, distracted, far from both his usual bluster and the nervous energy he’d radiated only a few minutes before. He sounded shaken. Vincent pulled his attention from the screen and noticed the tension written across the set of Cid’s shoulders, the way one of his hands had curled into a fist on the back of Cloud’s chair. “Gelnika,” he muttered. “Transport plane, carries cargo mostly but sometimes it’s a troop transport. Sometimes some research material. Variable wing position. Mostly stationed in Junon, a few reserve units up in Midgar. A couple as a curiosity sometimes out in Rocket Town. Long range, for one of Shinra’s piece of junk designs. Five or six crew, usually, eight for research missions, plus whatever passengers are on a given manifest.”

Vincent couldn’t tell if Cid knew he was speaking out loud. His quiet string of specifications and details continued, then began to repeat. Nothing seemed in imminent danger; Vincent crossed his arms and settled in to wait for someone else to make a decision. He turned his eyes back to the screen.

The submarine slowly rounded the airframe, its floodlights doing their best to illuminate the wreckage. Where Vincent expected to see a wing protruding from the near side of the fuselage, however, there was only twisted metal and seawater. Barret swore softly, off to Vincent’s left.

“Seems like it hasn’t been down here long,” Cloud said after a moment. He glanced at Cid again. “And it looks like the main body is still basically intact. Sort of. Do you… think there might be survivors?” Cid drew a deep, shuddering breath and let it out again in a rush.

“Only one goddam way to find out,” he answered. “Head us over towards the starboard side of the fuselage. There’s a hatch there near the nose that we might be able to hook up to somehow.” Cloud adjusted the sub’s course. “Starboard, Spike,” Cid said. His tone was a toothless, hollow echo of his normal grousing. He pointed to the opposite side of the fuselage from where the sub was currently headed. “This side over here - you’ve got us headed to port.”

Cloud murmured an apology and made the requested changes to their heading. Cid tore his eyes away from the screen to glance down at him; Vincent glimpsed the side of a warm smile. “Ehh, no need to apologize, Spike. You’re doin’ great so far - can’t fault you for not bein’ up on all the navigational bullshit. I shouldn’t be calling the shots any more, anyway, now that you’re back and awake.”

“It’s okay, Cid,” Cloud replied, distracted by the delicate maneuvers he was making to bring the sub alongside the wreck. “I get it. Wanna see if you can figure out how the hatch connection will work?”

“Good thinkin’.” With one last searching look at the airframe, Cid turned away from the screen, and yelped when he found everyone else staring at him. “Shit!” He glared at each of them in turn; if he had seemed at a loss while looking at the screen, his eyes now held their usual challenge and bravado. One by one, he dared any of them to offer pity or trite concerns; one by one, they all looked away.

Vincent was the last to receive Cid’s scrutiny. He felt a little electric jolt when the pilot’s blue gaze met his own. Unlike the others, though, Vincent did not look away. He raised an eyebrow instead, and waited. The silence stretched, and the earlier weight in the air returned.

Cid cleared his throat. “Whatever.” He shrugged, then jerked his head towards the corridor outside. “Come on, Valentine. Let’s see if we can figure out this goddam boat’s hatches. If you’re gonna be a spooky sonofabitch, least you can do is be a useful one.” He disappeared through the door. After a moment, with a glance and small shrug for the others, Vincent followed the emphatic sounds of his boots stomping down the steel corridor.

They were halfway down the hall when Cid stopped short and spun to face him; he pulled up short, too, and the cape billowed a little around his knees. “The fuck were all of you lookin’ at in there? You think I’m funny, or pathetic, or some shit?” He marched into Vincent’s space, close enough that when he emphasized his words with gestures, his finger nearly stabbed Vincent’s nose and eyebrows. “Let’s all laugh at the dad friend as he sees one of his worst nightmares ten feet tall on a screen!” Vincent watched him quietly. His gestures grew bigger, more emphatic. “Ha fuckin’ ha, look at him, a sad old man who’s too goddam sentimental to be tagging along on this whatever-the-fuck you wanna call it world-saving bullshit.”

“Chief.”

But Cid wouldn’t be deterred. With his fingertips, he pushed hard against the front of Vincent’s shoulder. Vincent didn’t move. “Can’t handle seeing a plane sitting at the bottom of the ocean, yep, that’s Cid fuckin’ Highwind! Best fuckin’ entertainment you’ll find outside of the Gold Saucer, put him in front of a goddam tragedy and then watch him go!” A storm of helpless rage was building again in his eyes. He reached up to give Vincent another shove, to try to goad him into some kind of response.

“Chief,” Vincent did not raise his voice, but his tone was harder this time. He caught Cid’s wrist with his gloved hand and held it still in the space between them. “Cid. Enough.”

Cid glared up at him, jerked his arm in an attempt to free it from Vincent’s grip. Vincent’s hand hardly wavered. Cid glanced at it. “And what the fuck are you doing, acting like some kind of referee, or nanny, or some shit? Cut it the fuck out!”

Vincent kept his face blank, but the accusation hurt. Maybe his interventions were foolish and trite, but he didn’t want to think about the consequences - for all of them - of not acting. Not again. “No one was laughing, Cid.” The captive hand made another half-hearted effort to break free before it, and Cid’s shoulders, sagged in defeat. He blinked and looked down to the floor. Vincent tapped his fingers against Cid’s wrist to make him look up. “Everyone else was worried, too. About the plane.” He looked hard for the usual bluster in Cid’s face. “And about you,” he added, maybe a little too quickly or a little too slowly, judging by the surprised way Cid blinked. “Your distress was obvious.” He released Cid’s wrist and tried a small smile to lighten the mood. “Even Yuffie was concerned, despite how green she looks.” Vincent expected that would get a chuckle, or at least a humorless little bark of laughter, but Cid’s expression remained stony and hard. He rubbed his freed wrist absently and said nothing.

They stood facing each other in silence for a few minutes, Cid’s hands fidgeting and Vincent’s back ramrod straight with concern. He took a deep breath, tried again.

“Do you really think there are survivors?”

Cid flinched at the question, then somehow scowled even harder than before. “Who the hell knows, Vince?” He looked around the narrow, low corridor with distaste. The industrial lights near the ceiling reflected strangely off his goggles. “Who knows anything about this shit?” He waved his hand, absently now, drained of his earlier energy. “I’m a goddam rocket scientist. I don’t belong under the fuckin’ ocean, I shouldn’t be in a submarine, I know shit all about a cargo plane or why it crashed, and I know even less about whether there might be someone still alive after however the hell long it’s been down here.” With a deep breath, he stood up straight, then peered carefully at Vincent, who found himself unable to look away.

“I didn’t sign up for this shit, Valentine. Stickin’ it to Shinra, sure. Chasing whoever, or whatever, the fuck it is we’re chasing? Okay. I watched her die, same as you, same as everyone else. A little vengeance, a little retribution, seems like a reasonable pursuit of goddam justice.” Vincent bowed his head a little, his own memories of the young woman with the big green eyes and the bigger smile crowding up to the surface of his thoughts, threatening to bubble over and overwhelm all but the chiefest of his older sins. Another death he’d been unable to prevent, another senseless loss. Another name etched forever across his heart in fire.

He closed his eyes for a long moment, opened them again, nodded at Cid, who ran his fingers through his hair and paused near the pack of cigarettes tucked in near his ear, then dropped his hand. “Right. Obviously that part’s all well and good. But almost gettin’ blown outta the sky by whatever the hell happened in the crater? And then almost getting thrown in the goddam lifestream in Mideel - and whatever happened to Cloud? And now there’s that huge fuckin’ space rock just hanging in the sky like a second goddam moon? Nah. The end of the world is cordially invited to kiss my ass.” Vincent raised an eyebrow but said nothing. It seemed like the confrontation had worked; there was no place to run off physical nerves, but the corridor, where it was just the two of them, gave him plenty of room to let out all his thoughts.

And let them out he did. Cid shared a litany of griefs and perceived slights with Vincent and the passageway conduits. Some were personal: Cloud apparently had swiped Cid’s toothpaste a couple weeks ago and hadn’t returned it. Some were larger in scope, including a concern about the older folks in Rocket Town and what might happen to them if, heaven forfend, their little group of eco-terrorist heroes failed. Vincent listened with a quiet, secret smile, watching as life crept back into Cid and the horror of the plane’s existence retreated. As he rambled, Cid wandered down the corridor, examining panels and humming machinery with idle fascination, a study in motion and curiosity, so alive despite his unhappiness.

Leaning his shoulder against the wall, Vincent tried to think of a time he’d been as absorbed in anything as Cid now was with surveying the mechanical systems. Nothing came to mind. He enjoyed his terrible books, he was good at marksmanship and the other unsavory things the Turks had taught him, but none of it had ever animated him so completely as cheerful complaints and fiddling with something mechanical seemed to captivate Cid. The good-natured grumbling drifted down the hall and around him, an indistinct buzz that kept the sub’s ambient hum and rattles at bay. A few minutes passed, and then the metallic thump of boots against the steel deck broke into his thoughts.

“I said, that gonna be okay with you, Vincent?” His name and Cid’s puzzled tone grabbed his attention and hauled him from his reverie. The pilot stood nearby in front of a wall panel lined with small dials, buttons, and gauges. He was watching Vincent carefully, with a friend’s casual concern. “You gonna give me a hand with this shit, or what?” He suddenly grinned wolfishly, all teeth and mischief. “Not that I’m complainin’ about the view, but I didn’t ask you to come out here so you could just be an especially broody part of the furniture.”

Vincent scowled, but he stood up and wandered over, standing just behind the other man. He peered over Cid’s right shoulder and watched as Cid explained how the airlock worked, in what sequence the buttons and switches needed to be pressed or flipped, what problems to watch out for. It was a lot to take in on such short notice; Vincent’s head was already spinning a bit when Cid began explaining the fourth switch in the sequence and its effect on what happened when the third and fourth buttons were pressed simultaneously. His attention drifted.

Standing so close, he found himself focusing on the close-shaven hairs near the base of Cid’s skull, peeking out above the collar of his jacket. His eyes idly followed patterns of whorls and waves up into the longer hair behind his ears and at the crown of his head, wild and splendid above the band that kept his goggles in place. Just as he started wondering whether Cid’s hair might be as soft as it looked, the pilot puffed out his chest triumphantly.

“And then, boom! A watertight seal and equalized pressure! All that’s left then is opening the hatch.” He propped one hand on his hip and pointed a finger-gun at the last button in the sequence. That part, at least, was easy to understand: the button was huge, and very red. “They even made it your favorite color.” He grinned over his shoulder in Vincent’s direction, the very picture of contentment.

“Why does it matter that it’s my favorite?”

Cid’s smile faltered a little. “You been daydreaming, Valentine? I just explained you’re gonna be the one pushin’ it, once Cloud finishes dawdling around with this parking job. Which, hey, probably we oughta go check out what’s takin’ so long.” He clapped Vincent on the shoulder and wandered back down the hall towards the bridge, his swagger back in his step as though nothing had happened, as though nothing could hurt him. With a glance back at the big red button, Vincent followed him.

Chapter 3

Notes:

heads up for significant horror/dread, gore, and a queasy stomach in this one

All things considered, Cid thought, probably the interior of the Gelnika could’ve been worse.

The unspeakable, misshapen horrors lurking in the rafters and in the shadows weren’t great. The way they reeked of formaldehyde and other chemicals was pretty goddamn awful, in fact. And holy hell, did they pack a punch. He rubbed his shoulder where one had managed an especially awful bite through his jacket. At least that one hadn’t been flying, what the hell. The little chunks of monster that he flicked off his jacket landed on the steel deck with a wet plop noise he didn’t want to think about.

As terrible as the monsters were, though, they hadn’t found any people. No dead crew members, no living crew members, no one caught in a terrible place between the two options. Small mercies, he supposed, bopping the butt of his spear against the deck with each step as they continued exploring. Just inside the door off the main hallway, the room labeled “Shinra Science Department - Research and Development” was especially dim, though something within it glowed with soft blue light. Vincent read the sign and glanced down at Nanaki, who bared his teeth silently before shaking his head in a shudder. Vincent nodded. Together, the three of them walked in, ready for anything.

The wreckage of the heavy-duty tanks Shinra had used to contain the experiments for transport gleamed on the deck, despite the low lights. Vincent and Nanaki noticed the tanks first. Both flinched and shied away from the broken glass and twisted metal, skirting along the edge of the room instead of exploring its center.

“Y’all are actin’ weird,” Cid muttered. He glanced between the two of them in the darkness. “Somethin’ wrong?”

“I do not need to be reminded of my captivity,” Nanaki growled. Vincent was silent, but his shoulders were rigid under his cowl, and the dim light from Nanaki’s tail flickered along his brass claws as he flexed them at his side. Cid stopped near the door.

“...shit, right. Sorry. C’mon, then - we don’t have to look through this one. Let Yuffie and the cat take a peek instead. Plenty of other corners for us numbskulls to poke our noses into.” His friends glanced at each other. A whole conversation took place in the soft glow of their eyes, silent and explicitly without inviting his input, before Vincent nodded at him. They passed him in single file and returned to the relative brightness of the hallway. Something creaked in the cargo hold beyond the light’s reach, echoing down the corridor. Nanaki flicked an ear towards it, then padded wordlessly towards the hatch, and towards the submarine on its other side.

“Hey, what the hell? Nanaki?”

“Let him be, Chief.” Cid raised an eyebrow, but Vincent’s expression and tone were as neutral as ever. He glanced in the direction Nanaki had gone. “It is difficult, when pain is fresh, to be confronted by your memories of it.”

“Guess you’d know, huh.” Vincent’s eyes flashed. Without a word, he swept past Cid, heading further into the plane, towards the large cargo hold. Despite the man’s metal boots, the only sound Cid heard was more of the same distant creaking. The hall’s shadows swallowed the red cape.

Vincent was… touchy at the best of times when things were tense like this. Cid spared a thought to consider the odds of meeting the terrifying creature that lived in Vincent’s head before any of them saw the sky again. And he shook his head, hoping that the odds were low, that Vincent could stay in control and not let the beast claw a hole in the plane. Death by torrents of ocean water was not what Cid Highwind had in mind for himself. As dangerous as Vincent could be when he was jumpy like this, though, Cid preferred the odds of friendly fire over being alone with whatever else was lurking in this hell. He hefted his spear and followed into the gloom.

The dim fluorescent lights of the hall receded behind him, and his eyes sure were taking their goddam time to adjust. Soon, he could barely see his hands - his feet were long gone, and even his boots seemed muffled at each step. Probably that was some trick of the water and acoustics, though. More and more, he was regretting not paying more attention in his fluid dynamics classes. It turned out that the answer to why a mechanical engineer needed to know about fluids was because you might someday find yourself exploring a sunken goddam plane. It was not a comforting thought. He rubbed again at his wounded shoulder and kept walking.

After another few steps, his eyes still hadn’t adjusted. He wondered idly how long this corridor could possibly be; felt like he ought to have reached the hold, or at least found Vincent or one of the others, by now. It also, he realized, was too quiet. His boots were silent, as quiet as Vincent’s somehow. He stopped and gave it a try, deliberately kicking his heel hard into the metal floor, but rather than the satisfying stamp he expected, he simply felt the jolt of the impact in his ankle. He squinted down towards his feet, trying to make out what might have changed, but the darkness was absolute.

Glancing over his shoulder, even the lights of the hallway seemed to have dimmed further, a square of almost-reality in what seemed more like a nightmare with every step. He hunched lower into his collar and faced forward again, to continue and maybe find Vincent. Or Cloud, or Barret and Tifa, or anyone at this point.

A hollow voice echoed in the distance, a clear, even litany of sound cutting through the oppressive silence. It was not a voice he recognized.

“...the fuck?”

The uneasy feeling crawling between his shoulders grew sharper with each step, the same way the tinny voice got louder. The same way the darkness grew more and more oppressive, until he pulled a cigarette from his pack and realized he could hardly see his hand as he brought it to his lips.

He did not click his lighter to life, though. A little voice in the back of his head, one that he usually ignored, wondered if it was truly dark in this hallway, or if gasoline or other chemicals leaking were making him hallucinate. He didn’t ignore it, exactly, this time around, but he squashed it to a dull buzz. No need to panic about things he couldn’t change. If it were gasoline, or any number of other things, the last thing he wanted to do was bring fire into the equation. Even for a cigarette. Cid Highwind was a reckless sonofabitch, not a stupid one.

A different part of his mind worried about what the little flame’s brave light might show him, if he did. He ignored that little voice as hard as he could. Instead, he chewed on the unlit cigarette’s filter. The tinny voice continued speaking. He recognized the cadence: a radio’s speaker, then, was the source. Which meant he must be near the cockpit, which meant maybe he could find a log or - a longshot, to be sure - maybe even someone from the goddam crew, holed up and awaiting rescue.

That thought - that a fellow aviator, even a Shinra lackey, might need help or rescue from this hell of a wreck - spurred him forward. With a firm nod, he set off again towards the voice. He did not look over his shoulder to try to find the source of the crawling itch on the back of his neck.

The butt of his spear should have tok-tok-tok’ed against the metal floor, just like his boots ought to have done, but they both remained silent. He could feel through the impacts of each that the floor was still even, still metal, but the only sounds he heard were the roaring of his blood in his ears and the loop of the radio transmission.

He came abreast of the voice. Tapping carefully along the wall with the spear, he found what he thought might be the hatch into the communications suite. He reached out with his hand: just normal, metal cladding under his fingers, probably painted with that bullshit insignia Shinra insisted on using like wallpaper on every goddamn thing they touched. His hand found the doorjamb and showed him the way forward as he felt along the surface until he found the handle. He grinned around the cigarette.

A heavy hand landed on his other shoulder.

Cid Highwind did not scream. He did not shriek. If he happened to shout in an unseemly way for a thirty-something year old man, well, it’d been a weird-ass fuckin’ day. He spun, sweeping the spear’s butt in a low arc in an attempt to push his attacker off their feet. When it stopped abruptly, as though it had run into a wall, Cid staggered.

A low chuckle answered his second, more frustrated cry, and Cid saw the gleam of red light in a pair of narrow eyes at the same moment he realized what was happening.

“You silent goddam bastard, what the fuck do you mean, sneakin’ up like that? And in this gloomy-ass murk of a hallway, too! You tryin’ to kill me?” Red eyes widened in concern.

“What gloom, Chief?” Vincent tilted his head.

Cid scowled. “...Don’t have to be so smug about those damn high-beams you got, Vince. Not all of us can see in the dark like you, remember?”

“Are you having trouble with your vision?” Vincent took a step closer.

“Are you not havin’ trouble with yours?”

“No, but even without my… ‘high beams,’ as you put it, I would think the illumination here would be sufficient.”

“It’s a black soup, Vince.” The little voice in the back of his head, the one that a few minutes ago had been chattering about safety and gas fumes, started up again. He ignored it, focusing instead on the bright red eyes that were even closer now.

“It isn’t, Chief.” The red glow flicked downward. Cid listened as Vincent holstered his gun. “Here.” He looked back up at Cid and waited. When nothing happened, those red eyes narrowed. Cid felt the claw hand grasp his arm above the wrist. “Hold out your hand.”

Something small landed on the palm of his glove. Cid closed his fingers around it and found that it was a little vial, maybe made of glass. “Do you need assistance opening it?”

“I’ve used eye drops before,” he grumbled. Tucking his spear against his shoulder, Cid opened the lid and turned his face towards the ceiling. “Here goes nothin’.” The liquid was cool as it splashed across his eyes and face, dripping down his cheeks. He blinked hard, several times, then lowered his head again to find Vincent’s eyes still glittering in the darkness. The eye drops ran along his jaw and fell onto his shirt. His cigarette, he noticed with a grin, had been left out of the line of fire and remained dry. It was a lousy consolation prize.

After a few more blinks, the hallway began to resolve into… still nothing special, but a corridor lit at both ends by emergency lighting like what he thought he’d left behind when he set off after Vincent. He grinned around the cigarette when he saw that the walls and floor were indeed covered with that stupid diamond-on-a-square logo he hated so much. Whatever the fuck else had happened here, Shinra at least was the same dull bullshit as always.

Vincent’s face was concerned behind his cowl. “Better, Chief?”

“Yeah, Vince. Much better; thanks.”

“You were following the radio’s sound, weren’t you? You should use caution, if you want to investigate it more closely.” Red eyes darted to the door, then back to Cid’s face.

“Ain’t a starry-eyed kid.” Vincent’s huff of reply might have been a chuckle. Cid scowled. “Pun not intended, jackass, you know what I mean. I’m not some green recruit fresh outta flight school. Not gonna shatter at a little danger.” He tried one of his smiles, but between the oppressive near-silence and the crawling in his skull that hadn’t gone away when his eyes woke up, he wondered how winning his grin really might be. Vincent just blinked at him like always. The fine brows above his eyes still looked softer than usual, though.

The fineness of his friend’s eyebrows was a funny goddam thing to think about at the bottom of the ocean.

“You are more than capable of holding your own, Cid. Still - take care.” Vincent drew his sidearm again. Though he kept it pointed at the floor, Cid watched as his gloved thumb casually flicked the safety off and lowered the hammer. “I’ll be right behind you.”

Now that his heart and blood weren’t racing so loudly past his ears, Cid found he could hear the actual words in the radio transmission. When he turned to face the hatch, he saw that it had been left slightly ajar. A soft red glow, like an emergency light, snuck around its edges. “Mayday, mayday,” the transmission’s tinny voice called. “This is Gelnika AB-2213, Shinra Sierra Ramuh Delta, radioing Junon or Costa del Sol towers, mayday. Have taken heavy fire from unknown hostile craft. Engines two and three disabled. Unable to reach Costa del Sol Airfield, attempting emergency landing outside Gongaga. Notify Shinra Administrative Research Division. Message will repeat.” There was a pause. “Mayday, mayday,” it started again.

Despite the other man’s care for stealth, Cid heard Vincent’s boots move softly to stand close behind him. “Steady, Chief.”

He tightened his grip on his spear and, with a deep breath and a nod, he pushed the hatch open.

The communications suite was small. In its current state of utter disarray, it seemed even smaller. Wires that normally would be routed along and inside the ceiling instead hung loose, dangling and, in at least one case, sparking still, throwing faint blue-white strobes across one corner. Cid’s eyes roved across upturned shelves, battered and smashed radio equipment, and splintered, almost unrecognizable furniture.

He took a deep breath and let it out in a low, whistling exhale.

“Alright?” asked Vincent.

“Yeah,” he said softly. “Fuck it, let’s go.”

There was barely room for both of them to maneuver, but Vincent somehow managed to move through the wreckage as gracefully as ever, more like a cat or a bird than a man. He stepped delicately over a ruined chair here, then ducked smoothly below a hanging light fixture there. The red cape flowed behind him and it was easy to mistake it for something alive as it caught the low lighting. The crawling sensation intensified along the back of Cid’s neck. Only the certainty that the monsters in this fuckin’ place reeked kept him from looking over his shoulder to see whatever had decided to haunt him.

Instead, he poked idly at the flotsam with his spear as Vincent moved through the puddles shining darkly along the room’s edges. It took them only a few minutes to find the speaker whose sound they’d been following. The transmitter wasn’t nearby. Cid met Vincent’s puzzled stare with a silent shrug. They kept looking.

In a far corner, in a deeper and wider puddle than the others, someone had dragged a few of the desks and tables together in a makeshift barricade. A handful of wires snaked from the transmitter’s speaker around the edge of the desks and disappeared behind them.

“Vince.”

“I see it.” Cid scrambled over a mostly-intact chair and paused, out of arm’s reach of the desks. He felt rather than heard as Vincent came to rest behind his shoulder. “...anyone back there?” Cid called. “Y’all called in a mayday, and the goddam cavalry’s here. C’mon out, if you can.”

There was no reply. The transmission continued unchanged. Cid tried again, with both more and less diplomacy.

“Hey, jackasses, we came all the way down here just to getcha.” He tapped the front of the overturned table with his spear, gently at first and then more firmly when there was no response. His head was full of images of wrecks, of twisted metal and roaring infernos, of things he did not want to see being placed so efficiently onto gurneys and spirited off to waiting helicopters. The spear’s tapping fell into rhythm with his racing heart, and everything else fell away, just the haptic feedback in his hands at each little thunk against the wooden surface.

“Chief.” Vincent’s voice was close to his ear, low and smooth and warm. “Let me do it.” A metal hand on his sleeve pressed gently until the spear’s percussion stuttered to a halt. He blinked, blinked again. Only then did he realize how hard he was panting. The red lighting, the red cape, the red eyes peering at him with concern, all swam a little in front of him.

“Not feelin’ so hot,” he muttered. His hand tightened around the haft of the spear until his glove’s leather creaked.

Vincent did not reply out loud. Instead, his claw fell away from Cid’s arm as he seemed to… not melt, exactly, but to flow, every inch of his form taut with caution and care as he sank to a crouch. The cape billowed and settled behind him. Cid wasn’t sure what help he might be able to offer Vincent, but he shifted his feet wider apart and relaxed his knees, willing his joints and limbs to loosen up, just in case. His shoulder twinged from his earlier wound, but he couldn’t stop to soothe it. He’d need to get a potion for it sooner than later - maybe Vince had packed one. Ignoring it for now, though, he leveled his spear at the little barricade, and waited.

Without any apparent effort, Vincent shifted his weight to one leg and gave one of the desks a vicious kick with the heel of his brass-booted foot. It splintered under the impact and clattered across the floor in a few pieces. Cid drew his spear up to counter anything that might have been planning to burst out of the corner towards his face, but… nothing happened.

No cowering member of the crew leapt out in manic, starving gratitude. No crafty monster burst from the darkness at some urge from basic predatory instincts. When the pieces of furniture settled, the room became otherwise as it had been before. The continued drone of the mayday message grated on Cid’s nerves.

He stood again, though he kept the spear low. Vincent did not relax from his crouch and did not look around at Cid. Instead, he waggled his claws low, behind the remaining desk, then pointed and gestured in a complicated way. It only took a moment for Cid to figure out the plan. He crossed behind Vincent, careful of the trailing edges of his friend’s cape, and grabbed the desk far enough forward that Vincent would be able to see his glove from the corner of his eye. He tapped a finger in a ready? signal. At Vincent’s terse nod, he pulled backwards, hard, clearing the obstacle from the line of fire in one smooth motion. It ground along the floor, through the puddle, kicking up splashes onto his and Vincent’s arms and faces.

They finally had a line of sight into the corner, though Cid couldn’t make sense of the murky shadows. Vincent seemed not to have the same trouble. He remained frozen, tense, aiming into the darkness for a few moments, until he decided that nothing was planning to attack them. In a smooth motion, he eased the hammer of his pistol back into position. He did not holster it when he stood. Vincent’s expression when he glanced over his shoulder and caught Cid’s eyes was more grim than usual.

“You should wait outside in the hall, Cid.”

“Fuck no, I’m gonna find that transmitter.”

“It’s here.” Vincent gestured with the gun barrel so Cid could follow the line of his arm. “Just there, on the floor in the corner, in the puddle.” Cid looked down, squinting, following the wires. Sure enough, there was the little box with its simple array of switches and dials. Something lurked near it, shrouded in deeper shadow than the rest of the room, something Cid’s eyes could not make out but which once again set off the uncomfortable feeling that he was being watched. “Please, Chief, you should wait in the hall.” Cid looked over at the unexpected tone in his friend’s voice. He never spoke loudly, and now was no different, but there was something insistent in his low words. Vincent did not plead with people. “I can take care of things here.”

“What’s the matter?” Cid asked, narrowing his eyes. When he tried to step towards the corner, Vincent moved - silently, without any signal, one moment in one place and the next in the other - to cut him off. Cid tried to sidestep around him, and Vincent was there, too, holstering his sidearm. “Get out of the way, jackass,” Cid muttered. He brought his spear vertical in his hands to push at Vincent with the haft. “Fuck off!”

“No.” Vincent’s single word reply was as implacable as the strength in the gloved hand that reached out and grabbed the spear.

“Let -” Cid jerked the spear, which did not move “- go -” and then he pulled more steadily; still no results “- you bastard!” Vincent blinked.

“No,” he repeated. After a pause, he added, “you have something on your face.” Cid rolled his eyes. “Something splashed on your face just now, Chief.”

“Just water from the puddles,” Cid muttered. “Gimme back my goddam spear.”

Vincent shook his head. “It’s not water.”

“The hell do you mean, it’s not water?” Cid brushed at his cheek, where he could feel some of the wetness. The gloomy light was shit for trying to see anything, but the fingers of his glove were indeed dark. Not surprising for suede and water. He glanced at Vincent, who was watching him with razor-sharp concern. When Cid rubbed his fingertips in a little circle against the tip of his thumb, and tapped them against one another, the glove’s fingers tried to stick together.

Water wouldn’t do that. Cid met Vincent’s eyes again. He did not look into the corner where the desk had been.

“Let go of my shit, Vince,” he said quietly. Vincent narrowed his eyes, considering, but he gave Cid back his weapon. “Ain’t gonna just walk away and leave you to do whatever the fuck. We gotta find out if anyone responded - maybe there’s a journal back there, a transmission log or some shit.” He started to scuff his boot against the floor, but stopped his toe short of disturbing the edge of the pool of dark liquid.

“There may be a journal,” Vincent agreed. “I could not see well enough, under… the rest.” Blinking, he looked back towards the corner. He laid his human hand on Cid’s arm again. “You don’t have to do this.”

“I do, though, Vince, that’s the thing.” He took a deep breath, sighed, and pulled his arm away from the other man’s gloved hand. “If…” Another breath. “If any of the sons of bitches who were in this goddam crew are still alive, and here, they oughta wake up lookin’ at someone who knows field medicine isn’t just stuffin’ someone with potions and zappin’ ‘em with materia. Friendly face that knows about the sky might do ‘em just as much good as the rest. And probably the log’s in a cypher, if it’s even still around, given…” He gestured widely around the room. “You might be all spooky mister spymaster, but did you ever learn any military cyphers?”

Vincent scowled. “Not military, no,” he eventually admitted.

“Goddam right. Ain’t a comms officer in the world who’d give up their secrets to someone outside the service.” Cid grimaced. “No matter what y’all woulda done to ‘em tryin’ to get it.”

“I’m formerly of the Turks, Cid,” Vincent hissed. His scowl deepened. Cid cleared his throat. “But that’s irrelevant here. There is something upsetting in the corner. Are you sure you want to keep going?”

Setting his jaw in a hard line, Cid nodded again. “Fuck it.”

“Very well. Let me go first. This… I think this will be difficult for you.”

“Already told you I ain’t made of glass, Valentine.”

“No.” His low voice was softer around the edges this time.

“Go on, then.” Cid waved his hand breezily, there in the gloom, and did not light his cigarette to calm his jittery nerves. The red eyes watched him for a moment, looking for something, but eventually gave another small nod. Vincent turned and knelt, taking care to keep his knees and feet out of the horrible liquid.

Cid couldn’t see what Vincent saw, but he could see Vincent. Dull black clothing and glossy brass arm stood out even in the red glare of the emergency lights. When Vincent’s hand reached the transmitter, it closed briefly on the equipment, but opened again a moment later. Cid couldn’t see what, exactly, Vincent touched, but he worked with… tender care, almost. It was a combination of motion and emotion that Cid hadn’t observed in his friend before.

“...what is it, Vince?” he asked in barely a whisper.

Vincent paused in his little movements. “Do you want me to tell you?” he asked, and his voice was just as soft. He did not turn to face Cid.

“Think I’m gonna lose my goddam mind wonderin’ about it, if you don’t. Ain’t a machine or busted piece of furniture or anything. You’re coddlin’ whatever it is too much.”

Vincent’s shoulders heaved in a tired sigh below his cloak. He still did not turn. “I’m sorry, Cid. It’s… we’ve found the crew.”

Cid blinked. “Like hell we did,” he shot back. “Not enough space behind those desks for one person, let alone all twenty-odd folks who’d have been on board while she was in the air.”

“Always logical,” Vincent replied, and this time he did turn his head to glance at Cid sidelong with the ghost of a sad smile on his lips. “And always correct, too. There is not room for that many bodies here.” He returned his focus to the corner, leaned forward to pick something up, then brought it oh so carefully out of the gloom. “This space is where the last one hid.”

For once, Cid thought, the other man seemed to truly feel the weight of all of his years. Vincent moved so both of his hands were supporting the weight of whatever it was and, turning at his shoulders, he laid it gently on the metal decking near his hip. He did not look up at Cid, and did not immediately turn back to the transmitter. The message continued looping.

In the gloom, in that dim, horrible red light thousands of feet below his sky and his airplanes and his stars, Cid willed his eyes to resolve the narrow, oblong object into something recognizable. At one end, it was a tattered mess of fabric shining wetly like the puddles. Cid’s eyes followed along the object’s length. A pouch for someone’s tools, maybe?

…no.

When his mind resolved the blotchy, twisted and bony stumps at the object’s far end into fingers, curling skyward in some mockery of a plea for mercy, Cid retched. He twisted quickly away from Vincent and upended his meager breakfast into some of the wreckage in the middle of the room. He gagged, retched again, and spluttered a cough. The smell wafted up from the floor and the slow drip, drip, drip of what had been in his stomach until a moment ago joined the maddening loop of the radio transmission. Cid grimaced at the sour taste coating his throat, his teeth, his lips, and the sensation of something dripping and sticky in his stubble. He dragged the back of his hand across his mouth and grimaced at the taste of the filthy suede, too.

It took him a moment to both convince the world to stop tilting quite so far off its axis and to catch his breath, but eventually he planted the end of his spear against the floor. Leaning heavily on it, he looked over at Vincent again. The pale man was watching him, distantly but patiently. Cid held Vincent’s gaze as though he were drowning. Maybe he was. With considerable effort, he did not look at the arm lying on the floor. Neither of them spoke.

Vincent’s red eyes were cool, back to measuring and cataloguing everything they saw. When he seemed to decide that Cid would not continue to be sick, and would not collapse, he turned back to the task at hand. Once again working with profound reverence, he moved the sad remains a little further from himself. A wide chunk of the desk he’d kicked made a makeshift, but effective, tomb. Claws and gloved hand reached back into the murk. There was a soft scratching sound as Vincent felt through the inky darkness with his metal claws. A moment later, Cid heard a familiar kind of mechanical click, a switch of some kind being turned to its other position, and then, miraculously, he did not hear the radio transmission any more.

As near-silence descended on them like a pall in its place, though, Cid almost told Vincent to flip the switch back. Vincent stood and turned on his heel. “There’s nothing else in the corner. Just…” His face twisted in disgust as he flicked his gloved hand - away from both of them, Cid noticed, and away from the sad little reliquary he’d made. The droplets that flew off his fingertips landed with echoing splashes. Cid’s chest grew even tighter, somehow, as though his lungs and his heart had somehow grown too big to fit behind his ribs.

“Let’s get the fuck outta this room, then.” Without waiting to see if Vincent would follow, Cid clambered back over and past the wreckage of equipment and supplies, back into the hallway, back into light that didn’t cast them both in terrible, unrelenting red. He stepped into the hall, a few steps closer to the world and whatever passed for normal life these days.

Compared to the dim horrors of the communications room, the hallway might as well have been Rocket Town on a summer afternoon. Leaning against the wall, he braced his hand on his knee and let himself take a few deep breaths of the slightly less rancid air. Vincent appeared next to him in a swirl of red fabric.

Cid looked up at him, but didn’t straighten. “Now what?” As though he and his knees hadn’t spent thirty years in a coffin, immobile, Vincent suddenly dropped to a crouch next to Cid so that their faces were almost level. His cape billowed behind him, just like it had done a few minutes ago in… in the other room. Cid closed his eyes and shuddered as his stomach registered its unhappiness for a second time.

He opened them again when he felt something warm and smooth pressing against his face, just above his cheekbone. Vincent ran his thumb back and forth along Cid’s skin, his red eyes watching thoughtfully. Cid raised an eyebrow, though he didn’t pull away.

“You had…” Vincent began, but his attention snapped to the far end of the hallway, toward the cargo bay they had not yet explored.

Cid looked in that direction, too, ignoring the sense of loss he felt when the motion caused Vincent’s hand to fall away. “What’s up? Hearin’ somethin’?” He straightened back up.

“Shh.” Even standing right next to the man, Cid couldn’t hear him moving. No jangle of metal in his claw or his boots as he stood again, no creak of leather along his arm. The loudest sound was the rasp of steel against leather and a heavy click as Vincent drew his gun. He stared silently down the hall as though whatever horror he’d heard would simply traipse out toward them because he’d called to it.

…maybe he had, Cid thought uncomfortably. He was beginning to realize, here in this godforsaken hellpit of an airplane, that he really did not know very much about his companion. Tall, a crack shot with whatever firearm someone handed him, quiet, a little spooky sometimes - no, a lot spooky sometimes. Like when he was eight feet tall and bristling with fur and teeth and claws. Or like now, his weird detachment from everyday life seeming to shift into some… animal. Something hungry and predatory, lethal. The human warmth that had been in his eyes just a few seconds ago was gone, replaced by something almost feral.

When Cid shuddered a third time, it wasn’t because of his uneasy stomach.

Further reflection, though, was interrupted by the shuffling, wet sound of something approaching. Vincent stood silent and tall as he raised his arm to point the barrel of the gun towards the cargo bay. He was hunting, Cid realized. Quietly, he fell into his own fighting stance, and waited. Anything that got past Vincent’s initial salvo would meet slicing, stabbing pain well before it got within reach of either of them.

The wet noises gathered volume as they approached. The darkness meant Cid could not make anything out at first, but the smell confirmed that whatever was coming was not human. Vincent’s gun went off with a roar and a flash that left him seeing spots. His ears rang. He shook his head to clear it, blinking furiously, still unsure of what he was actually looking for but much more able to smell it. The acid tang of formaldehyde clawed across his senses. Vincent rarely missed.

His marksmanship did not seem to deter the creature, however. As Vincent lined up for a second shot, the monster finally emerged from the gloom. Cid blinked when he saw it, then blinked another time. Maybe his eyes were giving him the wrong information again. Squat, heavy legs supported the long, low cylinder of a body that seemed made of pure muscle and… “What the fuck?” The front end of its body consisted of huge, serrated teeth pushing out of a mouth too small to contain them. “What the hell is this thing?” he yelled, jabbing his spear towards one of its many, many eyes. His blade found its mark with a wet, popping squelch that might have made him queasy some other time. He pulled the spear free and hopped out of the way just in time for Vincent to fire another shot. The creature’s left arm-like appendage burst into a fine mist of gore and meat.

It screeched, and leapt forward towards them. Cid dashed to meet it, bringing the point of his spear up to meet the part of the creature he might’ve called a belly if the thing had looked more coherent and less like a bag of butcher’s leftovers. It hit home, squashed into the soft flesh, and… stuck there.

He only had time for one very heartfelt “shit!” before he and the creature and his spear hit the deck and tumbled across the hall, clattering and spattering and squashing and spurting as they rolled together. Pain lanced through his sore shoulder each time it connected with the floor, until he felt more than heard a peculiar crunch and then exquisite, bright hot agony. Rational thought left his brain, leaving only the panicky need to escape, to free himself, to get out of the way in order for Vincent to get a clear shot.

They came to a stop against one wall of the corridor, with Cid trapped below the monster’s snarling, snuffling, snapping bulk. It bit mindlessly in his direction, the huge teeth clacking inches from his neck as he pushed it desperately away with both hands. His injured arm spasmed with the effort, but he’d be goddamned if he was gonna let a heap of bad-attitude hamburger get the better of him. Not to-fuckin’-day, thank you. Hot breath blowing across his face was a miasma of rotting science. Somehow, he managed to shift its weight enough to bring his knees up to his chest. With a roar, he planted a two-boot kick in the center of the thing’s mass.

The creature flew through the air, towards Vincent, before crashing against the wall again in another spray of things Cid did not want to think about. He twisted up from his back and tried to scramble to his feet to rejoin the fray but his injured shoulder had him off-balance. The viscera and muck painting the floor around him offered little traction. He only managed to make it to his hands and knees. It gave him plenty of opportunity to watch Vincent work, though.

The pale man had turned to follow their progress down the hall, and stood facing Cid, his sidearm pointed casually towards the ground. He was perfectly still, completely unruffled except for the rage simmering in his eyes, wreathed in shadows that seemed to welcome him into their midst, caressing his shoulders. Shit. If Cid could see his eyes glowing so far away, there wasn’t much time before the other raging beast in this hallway made an appearance. Before Cid could intervene, though, the fight ended. Vincent brought his arm up and tilted his head just slightly to sight along the barrel. Cid, his shoulder protesting loudly the whole way, tumbled out of the line of fire. A gunshot, another flash, another bang that left his ears ringing. There was a wet crash, and another shot, as Cid found his footing again. This time, when his vision cleared, a motionless heap of meat lay on the floor near Vincent’s feet, oozing something black and unknowable. Though it had been… alive? just a second ago, it already was rotting away, blackening and turning green, shriveling in some places and bulging in others. Cid gagged.

Vincent stared at it without emotion before holstering his weapon without his usual flourish. Only then did he look up at Cid. As easily as he might have crossed a street in the middle of Midgar, he skirted the remains, his boots silent again as he walked over. He ignored the other muck, too. The only sign that he noticed any of it was the way his nose wrinkled when his heel landed in something especially soft and moist-sounding.

“You’re injured.”

“Just my damn shoulder, from one of the earlier whatever-the-fucks,” Cid muttered. “Nothin’ that’ll keep me grounded.” He examined his glove closely, looking for a patch that might be slightly less muck-stained than the rest, with no luck. Grimacing, he grabbed the suede fingertips and pulled the glove off. The hand underneath was sweaty and hot, but it wasn’t coated in monster guts. He ran his hand across his face and scrubbed up through his hair, trying very hard not to think about the reasons why some places felt slick and viscous while others were unusually… chunky. Reaching under his jacket, he probed gingerly at the muscle and joint of his shoulder. The result made him hiss unhappily. He did not look to see whether Vincent’s eyes were full of I told you so.

“We are not in your sky, Chief,” was all the man himself chose to say.

“Sure the fuck ain’t.” He took a quick mental inventory. Shirt: soaked and probably best just to burn the damn thing, really. Jacket: also soaked, but maybe denim was sterner stuff and he’d be able to get some of the mess out. Somehow. A problem for another day. Pants not great, but he had spares of those in his bag back in Junon. Were they going back to Junon…? Also a problem for another time. Spear: …somewhere nearby. Toes all wiggled as expected inside his boots, and everything seemed fine with his hands, too. Teeth good, face just fine, if chunkier than he preferred it to be. Just his shoulder, really. Could use a cigarette, but with the amount of formaldehyde and other chemicals he was marinating in, probably not yet.

“Would you like me to look at it for you?”

“No. I’m fine.” Cid shrugged out of his stinking jacket as gingerly as he could, but he couldn’t stop a groan escaping between his gritted teeth as he pulled his sore shoulder out of its sleeve. Vincent crossed his arms silently. From what Cid had seen, the posture was the closest Vincent got to obvious annoyance. The raised black eyebrow spoke volumes.

“Let me look,” Vincent insisted.

“I said no, dammit! Quit fussin’.”

They glared at each other in the gloom, an unstoppable force and a stubborn jackass, until Vincent sighed with exasperation. “Very well. Give me your hands, then, and I’ll help you up.” He held out both of his own, claw and human, in what seemed like a peace offering.

Cid narrowed his eyes. Peace offerings were not something he generally associated with Vincent. But then, plenty of weirder things had happened since they’d opened the submarine hatch. He reluctantly reached up and took Vincent’s hands.

The other man hauled him to his feet suddenly, without warning, pulling hard on both of his shoulders. Cid shouted his surprise as loudly as his outraged shoulder bellowed its renewed agony. As Vincent’s claw closed around Cid’s uninjured arm, his black-gloved hand grabbed the jacket before it fell into the slime that surrounded them.

“What the fuck, Vince? Cut it out!” But the taller man was silent. He wadded the denim jacket into a ball and tossed it down the hall; Cid watched it sail past most of the muck. It landed on what seemed like at least a less fucked-up spot on the floor. “Hey! I said enough, goddammit!” He tried, with no effect, to twist out of the claw’s grip.

Vincent leveled a cool stare at him. Cid jutted his chin out and gave an icy glare right back. He did not think about the way that Vincent’s pupils grew very large. It occurred to him, though, that his own might be doing the same thing. He closed his eyes and looked away. When he opened them again, his attention came to rest on a now gore-spattered copy of that stupid Shinra logo across the hall.

“Look, Vince, my shoulder’s fucked,” he said after a minute. He looked back at Vincent, whose eyes still gleamed like he had eternity to finish this conversation and expected to need most of it. “You don’t have any materia to fix it.” Cid jabbed his finger into the red cloak over Vincent’s chest. “Potion’s not gonna cut it.” He barked a laugh, then winced as it jostled his shoulder. He rubbed at it absently as he continued. “Fine fuckin’ pair we are, wandering into this damn deathtrap without so much as a handful of band-aids between us.”

Vincent did not smile, but when he ducked his head, something twitched at the corner of his mouth. “Your shoulder repair does not require materia or bandages.” Cid blinked.

“How’d you figure?”

“You dislocated it when you rolled with the creature.”

Cid gave this some thought, tried to rotate the joint in question, and winced again. “And I bet you’re gonna tell me you know somethin’ about fixing fucked-up shoulders.”

“Even former Turks have some useful skills, it would seem.”

Cid chuckled. “Alright, then, Vince, do your worst.”

“You will have to hold still.”

“No shit.”

“And I’m sorry to say it will hurt.”

“Can’t be worse than what’s happening now.”

Vincent frowned and let his claw drop from Cid’s shoulder. “...I could break your arm, if I do it wrong. Shatter the bone trying to push it end-on into something it does not want to do.”

Cid flashed a grin, sly and more sure than he honestly felt. What he wouldn’t give for a goddam cigarette. “Bedside manner could use some work, Vince.”

Vincent snorted. “Enough. Face that way. It’ll be a little pain while I line things up, then a jolt, and then it should feel… better.” Cid did as he was told, but as Vincent held his forearm between both his claw and hand, he couldn’t help but look nervously at the red eyes narrowed in concentration. Those instructions had seemed very… generic. Like something out of an instruction manual.

“...you’ve done this before, right?” Cid asked. Vincent, frowning in concentration, did not reply. The little voice of health and safety that Cid had ignored earlier suddenly roared back to life in the back of his head, chittering at a thousand miles an hour. “...Vince? You’ve done this before, right?”

Several things then happened very quickly.

Instead of answering, Vincent adjusted his grip on Cid’s elbow, braced the palm of his claw against Cid’s collarbone, and gave a sharp, powerful shove.

Cid saw stars, and not the kind that he spent most of his evenings contemplating.

The stress of the day - the wanted posters, the trip through the base, the submarine, finding the plane and finding the crew and whatever it was that had happened in the hall with his eyes, fighting back unspeakable horror after horror for hours - caught up with him all at once. His knees buckled. He had a glimpse of wide red eyes, and then the jolt of something catching him, a strong arm behind his back, cradling him. Then, red eyes again, very close to his face, worried.

“Cid? Can you hear me?”

“Shoulder doesn’t hurt,” he murmured, smiling wide and lazy. “Thanks, Vince. I owe you one.”

“Foolish,” Vincent replied quietly. He chuckled. “Think you can walk?”

“Dunno, but why not try?” He could feel himself losing his grip on being awake. When he tried to get to his feet, his feet had other ideas, and he nearly collapsed in a heap again. He laughed; Vincent had the grace to look startled. “Got a poster someone at the office gave me one year for my birthday. Somethin’ inspirational and shit about landing in stars if you aim for the moon. Supposed to be encouraging or somethin’ about trying no matter what.” Cid pulled on Vincent’s cowl until the other man had to lean close enough that he could whisper into his ear, behind all that pretty hair. “Thing is, if your telemetry’s off bad enough that you miss the fuckin’ moon, probably you’re just gonna cook yourself in the atmosphere - if you even get liftoff in the first place.”

Vincent pulled Cid’s hand away. He looked down and frowned again. “No moonshots today, Chief.” Cid felt the arm behind him shift, felt Vincent’s weight shift, too, as the taller man leaned to grab something off the floor. “Here, take your spear - I can’t carry it and you at the same time.”

“Thanks, Vince.”

“Don’t thank me yet. Someone still has to retrieve your jacket from the floor.”

Cid’s voice was dreamy, drifting from the middle of negotiations with himself about being awake. “Aren’t you the jackass who threw it over there in the first place? Seems like a shitty thing to do, chuckin’ a guy’s stuff halfway across the room without even a kiss hello.”

“Enough.” Vincent’s claw slid under Cid’s knees, then, and he stood. Cid felt the arm behind his back move until his head could rest against the front of Vincent’s shoulder. There was a solidness underneath the red fabric that soothed him even as the rest of the world seemed to be distant and swimmy.

“Cape’s real soft,” he mumbled. “Never noticed that before. ‘S that why you like wearin’ it so much? Like a big ol’ blanket to swoop around in. Shit. I want one.” He closed his eyes as they set off down the hall, towards the submarine, but he opened them a moment later as Vincent stooped again.

“Grab your jacket, Highwind, if you want to keep it once we leave this nightmare.”

“You bet. Lucky jacket. Hasn’t steered me wrong yet.” Cid reached and snagged it from the floor. “Lucky jacket’s gonna take me to space one day,” he said as Vincent stood back up.

“Space later. Rest now.”

“Good idea,” he replied. He closed his eyes again and clutched his spear and jacket tightly against his chest. Long strides created a gentle rocking motion as he walked. Cid dozed. Vincent did not wake him, even when he turned his face a little closer into the cape and Vincent’s chest than he strictly needed.

Notes:

thanks to @squeemu for the beta read ♥

Chapter 4

Nanaki had taken one look at the pair of them and activated a materia in his headband without a word. The tingling magic had fallen around them both in a haze of green sparkles as Vincent deposited a sleeping Cid gently in an out of the way corner of the submarine’s bridge. He himself had hardly needed it; his clothes were the worst for wear, and magic couldn’t fix laundry problems. Cid, though, shifted on the floor in his sleep now that his shoulder was less of a wreck. After a moment’s hesitation, Vincent swept the cape - mostly clean, somehow, despite everything - from his shoulders and draped it over Cid. The younger man sighed and slumbered on.

Vincent met Nanaki’s curious, golden eye. He did not tell him about the monsters, about Cid’s strange blindness, or the crew; Nanaki had had a difficult enough time with just his ghosts. No need to add to his distress with unsolvable mysteries. After a moment, the lion blinked and nodded; Vincent nodded in reply.

“Have the others returned?” he asked quietly, as Nanaki took up his seat near the helm again.

“Not yet, though Cloud sent a message that they were heading this way.” Nanaki cast a cool look over his shoulder. “I see that your hands, of course, were full.”

“Carrying our friend to safety seems like as good a reason as any to fail to use this horrible device,” Vincent replied. He fished the little phone out of one of his pockets and held it up so Nanaki could see that he did, in fact, still actually have it. Nanaki chuckled and shook his head.

“Of course, Vincent,” he laughed. “I didn’t mean anything by it.” He looked past Vincent then, down at Cid. “Will he be okay?”

Vincent glanced at his sleeping companion and thought back to similarly messy, horrific missions he’d endured before his long sleep. Suit coat stiff with blood and other things best not named, scratches and worse along his face and arms, a squelch in his shoes. He looked back to Nanaki. “He suffers from nothing that a little sleep and a long shower will not fix.” Nanaki nodded thoughtfully, and the two friends settled in to wait.

Only a few minutes later, the rest of their gaggle returned, boisterous and alive and apparently unscathed. One by one, they noticed Vincent’s lack of cape, and one by one, his eerie, cool stare dared them to say something about it. Barret and Cloud looked at one another and shrugged on their way to the helm; Tifa looked like she wanted to say something pithy, but thought better of it as she opened her mouth. She turned towards the enormous display and studied the nearby consoles carefully. Who could say what Reeve was thinking, behind his robotic creation’s mechanical eyes? Yuffie, though, planted her feet and stared right back at Vincent, the way he’d done earlier when Cid had a tantrum. Nanaki nudged her elbow with his nose.

“I’m not scared of him!” she hissed. “He can be as spooky and weird as he wants, I’m still gonna ask him about his cape!” Nanaki nodded at Cid, still asleep; Yuffie followed his gaze, then looked back at Vincent. He blinked and waited as several thoughts crossed her face at the same time. Finally, she crossed her arms emphatically and huffed. “Whatever. Old men are so weird sometimes!” She turned to rummage noisily through her bag, grumbling under her breath about some perceived injustice or slight. Vincent nodded a silent thanks to Nanaki, who winked.

Cloud had them underway in a moment. The whole world lurched briefly, and then the familiar hum of underwater engines resonated around them. Cid, still asleep, did not seem to notice. Vincent leaned against the wall nearby, crossed his arms, and watched everything. He was confident nothing would happen here - but then again, he’d had that same thought about this entire errand, earlier this morning, and that had turned out not to be the case.

The trip passed uneventfully. An hour or so later, they approached a cove near Junon that Tifa had noticed on the map. Vincent looked down at a still-sleeping Cid, curled now on his side and with a length of the cape’s fabric clutched in one of his hands. The man was so fierce in his waking hours, always one extreme mood or another, but in sleep he was the same as anyone else. His goggles were coming loose where he’d pushed them into his hair. Vincent eyed the pack of cigarettes tucked behind the strap there; the way the goggles had shifted, Cid’s beloved smokes threatened to fall out. Cid would be devastated if he woke up and they’d become lost.

Vincent crouched down near Cid’s shoulders. With his gloved hand, he gently pushed some of the wild blonde hair out of Cid’s face. He closed his fingers around one lens of the goggles and pulled gently. The cigarettes came loose. With a clatter, the little cardboard pack dropped to the steel floor, right below Cid’s ear. Blue eyes blinked open at the sound.

Vincent froze.

Cid glanced up at Vincent’s fingers, then frowned when he met Vincent’s guarded expression. Narrowing his eyes, he looked around, taking in the room behind Vincent and seeming to notice the display on the front wall. “...Where the hell are we?”

Vincent lowered his hand; his knuckles brushed the floor. “We’re aboard the submarine. I believe we are almost back to Junon.”

One blue eye peered out between Cid’s fingers as he scrubbed a hand against his face. “Shit.” He pushed himself upright, causing the cape’s red fabric to pool near his hips. He looked down at it in confusion, then back up at Vincent. As with their other teammates, he needed a moment to register that Vincent was not wearing it.

He raised an eyebrow as he crossed his legs. The fabric of his pants, still covered in gore that was now mostly dried and cakey, creaked and crackled. Cid’s lip wrinkled.

“You looked cold,” Vincent said simply.

“Not gonna freeze to death in this tin can, though. Here.” He gathered some of the cape’s fabric and draped it across his arm. “Take it back, I don’t need it any more.”

“If you’re sure..?”

“We’re headed to Junon, Vince, not some tundra or a glacier. I think I can manage without it.” He paused, and gave Vincent a careful, sidelong look. “Thanks, though.”

“It was no trouble.” Vincent took the cape and twirled it back onto his shoulders without a flourish. It settled into its usual comfortable weight around him as he quickly fastened the buckles at his throat. Between the cowl’s tall collar and the hair falling past his bandana, he once again was little more than a shadow in the corner with strange, glowing eyes. The cape wasn’t the only weight he felt, though; when he glanced down, Cid was still watching him carefully.

“Alright, Chief?”

“Better’n I was,” he answered. He picked up the pack of cigarettes that had fallen and eyed it with suspicion. “Need a smoke, some clean goddam clothes, and the sky.”

“Hn.”

“You, too, huh?”

Vincent grimaced. “An hour below the earth may as well be a decade. I’ve had three decades, which may as well be three eternities. I do not need to spend any other time here.”

“Shit, Vince, didn’t mean to stir up old shit.” With a snap of the goggles’ strap, Cid secured his beloved cigarettes in their customary place. He looked up again when he’d finished adjusting the lenses against his forehead. The usual curiosity in his blue eyes had returned, though his smirk was more guarded than it had been. “Gotta ask, though: what were you doin’ just now, before I caught ya red-handed?”

A creeping heat spread across Vincent’s ears and neck and threatened to wash across his face. He hoped that his hair and cowl, plus the dim lighting overall, would conceal it. What could he say in reply to Cid’s question? He thought hard, but no answers came to him except the truth. “Your cigarettes were falling. I missed catching them.” Cid blinked and drew his knees up. He propped an elbow on one, and rested his chin on his hand.

Neither of them pointed out that Vincent failing to catch something within his reach was as likely as Vincent bursting into song at the campfire some night.

“Huh,” was all Cid eventually said. Vincent blinked, wondering what depths and layers might be hidden below that single word.

The commotion of their arrival on the Junon coast made any further discussion impossible. Everyone was eager to be out of the submarine’s tiny metal confines, and to put as much distance as they could between themselves and the hell they’d endured in the Gelnika. The submarine finally lurched to a stop - the absence of the engines’ hum was a roaring silence in Vincent’s ears.

Cid glanced around as he stood, and for a moment his eyes caught Vincent’s as the others rushed past. Vincent raised an eyebrow.

The other man patted his pockets. “Makin’ sure I’ve got everything, is all. Lookin’ forward to never bein’ in this goddam tub again.”

Vincent nodded towards the still-fouled jacket, folded into some approximation of tidiness and laid in a corner.

“Shit, can’t forget that,” Cid agreed, bending to pick it up. He winced. Vincent waited for him to mention how lucky the jacket was again, but Cid only pressed his free hand against his lower back.

“Still sore, Chief?”

“Nothin’ a long soak in a hot bath won’t fix. Hot meal wouldn’t hurt, either - gonna wreck whatever someone puts in front of me when we get into town, ‘specially if it’s cheeseburger-shaped.” He tucked the folded jacket under his arm and caught up his spear. “C’mon, Vince. Let’s get the hell outta here.”

Vincent followed him off the bridge, a shadow among shadows. He hid a small smile behind his cowl. He’d told Nanaki that Cid just needed rest and a shower. Of course Cid would swap out sleeping in favor of a hearty meal. Vincent could almost smell the grilled meat and something fried as he clanked into the corridor.

The air grew more fresh as they made their way to the hatch. By the time they reached the pool of silvery light at the foot of the ladder, Vincent’s head was light with the smell of the ocean and, apparently, the night. For a fleeting moment, watching Cid practically vault himself up the ladder to freedom and his beloved sky, Vincent wondered how much time had passed while they were below the sea.

After so much time in the dim lighting meant to prevent glare and eyestrain, even the gentle glow of the moon left Vincent squinting as he emerged from the submarine. By chance, they had docked in a way that meant the meteor was behind him. He did not look for it. It would still be there, inescapable and heavy as the nightmares and sins laid across his heart, whether he saw it or not. Instead, he watched his companions. The others were ashore already, stretching and laughing in the chilly evening air, Tifa and Yuffie giggling together about something. Barret and Cloud huddled together to frown at a map. Cid stood off to the side, leaning a little on his spear and watching the thin clouds drift in front of the stars that the glows from Meteor and the moon hadn’t hidden.

Vincent crouched on the lip of the hatch and pushed off it explosively to launch himself into the air. With a graceful twist, he came to rest not far from Cid. His cape billowed around his knees. Cid gave a quiet, low whistle.

“Nicely done,” Cid deadpanned. “Do they teach all the Turks that fancy flip thing?” He waggled his eyebrows in a taunt. “Shootin’, spyin’, and spin moves, or somethin’?”

Vincent scowled back at him, but did not take the bait. Not everything was life or death in this new life he’d received. There could be teasing without malice, banter without wounds. Cid had no reason to want to hurt Vincent; most likely this was simply conversation. Vincent pushed the instinctive sour, cutting retorts down. Radiating more nonchalance than he felt, he went to stand near the other man. Cid met his angry red eyes with unflinching, cool blue ones.

“My childhood in the circus gave me significant advantages during my time in the Turks.” Vincent finally said. He hoped they could move on, that Cid would find something else to grouse about. As ever, though, Vincent realized he had misjudged the conversation. Cid’s face lit up with mischief and a kind of understanding in reply.

“I knew there had to be a reason you wear those damn clown shoes all the time!” he hooted.

Vincent flinched. Before Cid could get another quip in, he spoke in a low voice. “I wasn’t actually in the circus, Chief.”

Cid’s expression softened into something warm and genuine, something a little more tired than his usual bravado and bluster. “Nah, I know you weren’t. Got a little carried away there roasting our old jobs. Sorry, Vince.” He reached up as though to scrub a hand through his hair, but seemed to remember at the last moment that glove and hair were both still full of chunks of filth. His palm slapped against his leg when he let it drop. “Didn’t mean to poke you someplace tender.”

“Perhaps, if we are successful in our quest to stop the meteor, I will have time to re-learn how to joke and tease.”

“Y’already got sarcasm covered, for what it’s worth,” Cid replied with a chuckle. Vincent blinked. Cid gave a broad wink. Before Vincent could come up with a reply, though, raised voices from the direction of the main group caught his attention. Both he and Cid turned to look that way.

“Guess we oughta go see what all the hullabaloo’s about,” Cid said. He adjusted the grip on his spear and nodded at Vincent. “C’mon. You can banter with me on the walk over.” They set off.

“It’s not much of a walk, Chief.”

“You’re the one who just told me he’s not much in the banterin’ department.” Cid slashed the grass with the butt of his spear as they approached the others. “Can’t have you gettin’ overwhelmed your first time out, tryin’ to think of witty shit for miles and miles and me sufferin’ the whole time.”

Vincent eyed him sidelong. “Is that so?”

Cid’s return glance was warmer than Vincent expected, less-guarded, full of less bravado, accompanied by a careful smile as their eyes met. A funny little silence opened between them, one that Vincent did not know how to fill. So much of his life had been silence, and briefings and debriefings, and listening. Keeping up with conversation, let alone with someone whose thoughts flew along like a stakes race at the Gold Saucer, sometimes left his head spinning.

Before he had a chance to gather his thoughts and redirect their chat, Tifa noticed their approach. She waved enthusiastically. They were within easy earshot of most of their friends now. The thought of anyone else overhearing his clumsy attempts at conversation dried up even the little trickle of words Vincent had managed to collect.

The moment passed and their conversation ended with a ragged hem rather than a clean break. Cid scrubbed the back of his hand along his chin before he cleared his throat. He nodded towards Cloud and Barret. “Where we headed, kids?” he called, back to his usual jovial good humor. Vincent drifted to a stop nearby and crossed his arms to wait.

“Got two years and some change on you, wiseass,” Barret crabbed back, “so cool it with the ‘kids’ nonsense.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Cid waved his free hand dismissively, but his lazy grin stretched wider than ever. He rested his spear against his shoulder and nodded towards the city lights not too far off to their north. Barret scoffed a laugh and waited for Cid to continue. “Maybe the kids’ll take pity on us old folks and let us shack up in town for the night. Real beds, real fuckin’ showers, somethin’ hot to eat that isn’t instant oatmeal outta the Highwind’s coffee makers.” Cid turned his grin to Cloud. “Whaddaya say, Spike?”

Cloud didn’t answer right away. Instead, he made a show of folding the map correctly, and waved off Tifa’s hands as she reached to help him. Once he’d gotten it to some semblance of the correct size and shape, he tucked it into his pocket. He looked at Cid, then Barret and Tifa, and then around the rest of the group. Nanaki watched him patiently in return. Yuffie made a point to yawn and stretch to the fullest extent of her gangly arms, while Cait Sith leaned on one elbow from its perch atop its mog. Vincent couldn’t tell if the little robot had drifted into idle mode.

Cloud’s softly-glowing eyes were sharp when they found Vincent’s equally unsettling stare. Despite the darkness, Vincent suspected Cloud could see him just fine. Cloud tilted his head first one way, then the other, in a silent question. What do you think? it seemed to say.

Vincent lifted an eyebrow, picked up his chin so the cowl would not hide it, and allowed the corners of his mouth to twitch upward. With only the moonlight to see by, no one else would notice his slight headtilt toward Junon. Cloud’s eyes narrowed, but he gave a similarly subtle nod in return.

“Been a long couple days,” Cloud said. He grinned at Cid. “You don’t need to be an old guy to appreciate a bed that’s softer than a sleeping bag. And we’ve got plenty of cash to cover it, too. If they’ve got the space,” and here, Cloud lowered his voice to a stage whisper, “we might even be able to spring for enough rooms for everyone to get their own beds.”

A promise of showers did a lot to motivate them to move tired legs the last mile or so into town. The flame on the end of Nanaki’s tail bobbed like a lantern through the grass as he padded along, smiling a wide, toothy grin. Even Yuffie couldn’t hide her delight behind a mask of teenage indifference, running back and forth between everyone else to chatter about the things she planned to do in her own room - room service, fancy television, “those little bottles of stuff to drink that they put right there in the fridge for you!”

The others foisted her off with varying amounts of grace. Cid snapped something harsh, which caused her to screech in dismay and taunt him. He swung his spear at her in a low arc, lazy and teasing; she dodged it with a laugh. When she darted towards Vincent afterward, her enthusiasm broke against his stern exterior like a wave against a jetty.

“Bet you’re looking forward to a nice shower, right, Vinnie?” She tried to walk backwards in front of him for a moment, but a combination of his long strides and his overall indifference soon had her shifting to an almost-jog alongside him.

“It will be nice to wash some of the horrors of the Gelnika from my skin,” he replied. He did not look down at her.

“Just like… a regular shower?” She tilted her head, but the strange angle plus not watching where she was going meant that she soon stumbled. When she recovered, she focused again on the ground ahead of her. “What about, like… washing your hair? Or sitting in the tub up to your neck with the water as hot as it can go, and tons of bubbles? Doesn’t that sound sooo relaxing?” She flung her arms wide with enthusiasm. They fell heavily to her side a moment later. “But wait, hang on a second. Relaxing doesn’t sound like you at all. I bet you’ve never been pruney from a bath in your whole life!” She stopped short for a few steps, and he did look over then. Her face had wrinkled with disgust. He stopped, too.

“Are you alright?” he asked. She didn’t show any of the usual signs of confusion, but he couldn’t be sure. Sometimes he found himself struggling to read her expressions and gestures; it had been a long while, longer even than his sleep, since he’d spent any appreciable amount of time with a teenager. She squawked indignantly at him.

“Ugh, yes, I’m fine!” Yuffie’s face looked as though she’d just tasted something she did not enjoy. “Grossed myself out thinking about old men being all pruney and naked, is all. Ugh.” She cast a critical eye on him, from hair to clanky boots, and parked her hands on her hips. “You’ve got a nice face, Vinnie, but… bleh, no thanks.” She waved one hand dismissively before she spun on her heel to bound away in Cloud’s direction. Vincent watched her go and hoped his head might stop spinning soon.

“Can’t say I miss havin’ that much energy,” said a low voice on Vincent’s other side. He turned and found Cid with a cigarette hanging off his lip as he stomped through the grass. He was within arm’s length, though the end of his spear made an effective fence to keep everyone out of his space, especially as he shrugged. “I usually just wound up needin’ to burn it off at the end of the day. Easier to start with less of it in the first place.” He grinned at Vincent.

“Far be it from me to get between you and your armchair naps, Chief,” Vincent agreed.

Cid stopped short and his mouth fell open. Without thinking, Vincent snagged the tumbling cigarette before it could hit the ground. Cid blinked down at that, then again at Vincent. For the second time in a handful of minutes, Vincent wondered if his companions had all sustained some kind of lasting confusion effect during their trials in the sunken aircraft. The others continued towards Junon’s lights, but he stopped and repeated the question he’d asked Yuffie.

“Everything alright, Chief?”

Cid nodded and clapped a hand on Vincent’s shoulder, grinning fiercely enough to rival the sun. “Vincent fuckin’ Valentine, I think you mighta just bantered at me.”

Rather than reply, Vincent ducked away from Cid’s hand and resumed his walk. “We are falling behind again.”

Cid scrambled to catch up and fell in next to Vincent’s left side. If he was puzzled by the abrupt change in subject, he didn’t show it. “Nothin’ new there. Inn’s not goin’ anywhere; we might as well take our time.” After a moment, though, he peered around Vincent’s shoulder and noticed the cigarette Vincent still held in his right hand. “Hey! Gimme back my smoke.”

“Finders keepers, Highwind,” he replied. He took a drag from it and blew the smoke out. It drifted away from Cid’s grasping hand.

“You’re a real cold fish sometimes, Valentine,” he grumbled, grasping at air as Vincent played a lazy game of keepaway.

“Perhaps we should hurry, then.” Vincent held the cigarette high overhead, completely out of the shorter man’s reach. Cid made one last half-hearted attempt to recapture it before he settled back into grouchy plodding.

“Why’s that?”

Vincent didn’t answer. He took one more pull from the cigarette, then tapped Cid on the shoulder with his claw to get the other man’s attention. When Cid turned, Vincent offered him the cigarette and the ghost of a smile. Cid snatched it and jammed it between his teeth with a triumphant little huff of laughter. Silence enveloped them both, and they continued walking.

Eventually, the grass gave way to dirt. The dirt became a road that led toward the airfield at the edge of town. They’d started along this road the other day, Vincent realized with surprise, when they first came into Junon. He and Cid had trailed the others then, too. It seemed like a lifetime ago. They weren’t as far behind this time, though - Cloud, Tifa, and the others were only a few hundred feet ahead. The airfield’s harsh yellow lights were an assault on senses more attuned to the gentle light of the wilderness.

Cid eyed each aircraft they passed with something like hunger. From the corner of his eye, Vincent noticed Cid’s fingers twitching, as though he longed to grab one of the planes and stuff it into a bag.

“I can be a cold fish,” Vincent said into the silence looming over the airfield. His booted feet stamped a steady tattoo against the pavement.

“....What?” Cid tore his eyes from a squadron of intact Gelnika to look at Vincent instead.

“I agree with you. I can be a cold fish,” he repeated.

“Okay. Uh, good to know; thanks.”

“You asked why we should hurry along.”

“Vince, that was half an hour ago.” Cid’s voice was quiet for now, but Vincent could hear his usual bluster building behind his teeth. “If you’ve got a point you wanna make, now’s a good time to spit it out.”

“It is,” Vincent agreed. “My feet are often cold.” He lengthened his stride a little; the armored toes of his boots started to clank with each purposeful step. The airfield soon gave way to the city’s streets. They hurried along the empty streets, in and out of pools of streetlight glow.

“Goddam icicles is what they are, you’re right. But seriously, Valentine, enough with the drips and drabs. Get to the fuckin’ point already.”

Vincent looked at Cid as they approached the next pool of light. He pulled his cowl down with one hand, and tapped again with his claw on Cid’s shoulder. Cid looked over at him. They did not stop walking.

“It’s likely the inn will have a limited number of vacancies. If you would prefer not to have to share a bed with my icicle feet, Highwind, then we should try not to be the last ones in the door.” He did not wait to watch Cid’s reaction, but pressed on instead towards the rest of the group.

The sound of Cid’s rapid steps on the pavement behind him suggested that Cid preferred not to share, too.

Chapter 5

To Cid’s mild disappointment, it turned out that the first inn they found had no vacancy at all, let alone enough rooms for everyone in the group to get their own bed. The second and third establishments were similar stories. He was finishing a sixth cigarette by the time they approached a fourth place. It looked… fancy.

Built into the hillside at the far end of modern Junon, the building huddled low against the ground amidst a surprising amount of greenery. A narrow stream wound its way across a garden which seemed to be just a natural growth of trees. Cid had seen its like before, though, in Wutai. Someone probably had spent a long time placing each tree and flower and shrub with the same sort of precision he usually used with circuitboards and schematics. Maybe that fine-tuning and measurement was where the ‘science’ part of ‘environmental science’ came in. With a chuckle, he stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray near the door and headed inside.

The woman at the front desk was surprised to see them arriving so late at night, but assured them they had vacancies. To her credit, she did not blink at the sight of the group’s dishevelled, somewhat ruined clothing, and she did not wrinkle her nose at the clinging, sour smells that hung thickly over them. She explained that they did not have enough vacancy for everyone to get their own bed, but the rooms themselves were enormous, and each fully furnished with every luxury they could want.

As she and some of the others in the group tried to convince Cloud that he needed several fancy upgrades and optional services, Cid drifted to read the signs on a nearby table. One advertised an extensive, elaborate breakfast that could await them in the morning. Another indicated the availability of a laundry service. He grimaced at his jacket, which had dried and was now a worrying crunchy texture against his glove. Laundry service was definitely a priority.

Most intriguing, though, was the little handwritten sign that announced each room came with an hour of reserved time in a private, outdoor bath. Cid rubbed his chin thoughtfully and smiled to himself. Maybe he’d have to share a bed, but he could do so after a long, hot soak in a tub the size of his old roadster. There were worse things.

The group had spent enough time on the road by now that roommate assignments were obvious and needed no discussion. Tifa and Yuffie drew the lucky straw and got the one room with two beds. None of the men begrudged them for it, though; likely, Cloud had taken pity on Tifa and rigged the choice, knowing Yuffie’s tendency to starfish across any surface while she slept. The others split up as normal until only Vincent and Cid remained in the lobby. Vincent held the key up and tilted his head in a question.

“...Gonna tell me we oughta head up to our rooms?” Cid asked.

Vincent didn’t say anything. He watched Cid closely for a moment before sweeping away.

Cid sighed. Before he could follow, though, he had to take care of something. When he thumped his jacket onto the desk, the receptionist finally let her professional smile waver. It melted entirely when he asked about laundry, though she recovered her poise as he continued to name his other requests, grinning to beat the band the whole time.

When he finally made it upstairs to their room, he opened the door to find that Vincent had kicked off his boots. He was stretched full-length on his back in the middle of the floor, arms at his sides and staring at the ceiling. The receptionist had told the truth: the room was very large, furnished the way the traditional inn in Wutai had been, with plenty of open floor space and a low table and chairs in one corner. A lamp in the corner cast a low light across everything, including the small tea set on the table and the glass sliding door to a balcony. Cid noticed with a start that the receptionist also had told the truth in another way: there were not two beds. There were not any beds.

He frowned. “...D’you think they -”

“There are futon mattresses in the closet next to you,” Vincent said without moving. “The staff will be in shortly to set them up for us.” He turned his head away from Cid, towards the wide window on the far wall. “Our room has a bath on the balcony in addition to some reserved time in the shared bath downstairs.”

“Yeah?”

“You should claim the shared bath now, before the others have a chance to do so.”

“I mean, sure, but…” Cid ran his hand through his hair until he could rub the back of his neck. Someone had told him that etiquette in this sort of place included communal bathing. Part of him was excited to have the whole enormous tub under the stars to himself; a small part, though, was disappointed. “Not gonna join?”

Vincent turned his head sharply back towards Cid. Bright eyes peered up at him from under the tangles of dark hair, full of a challenge and curiosity. “I mean, it’s your room, too, Vince,” Cid continued, speaking too quickly. “You’ve got just as much dibs on the thing as I do.” He ducked his head and wondered if the low light hid how hot his face had become. “All of us are more than a little funky fresh, after everything today.” His last words were more of a mumble delivered to the ground at his feet.

“No,” Vincent finally said. Cid did not raise his head when he lifted his eyes back to Vincent’s face. “I’ll wait here and help to set the room up for sleeping.”

Vincent turned his head to look up at the ceiling again. A few moments passed. “I prefer the bath here in the room, anyway,” he added. With a deep, weary breath, he drew his legs up and pushed himself upright. This time when he looked at Cid, his eyes were quiet again. “Go, Cid. Enjoy your soak.” Vincent stood and walked to the window. He crossed his arms and stared intently out, giving Cid as much privacy as he could.

Cid didn’t need to be told twice. He shrugged out of his ruined shirt and wiggled out of the filthy pants. Those, he could probably save; he shoved them into a plastic bag, to deal with later. The shirt was not so fortunate. With a grimace, he chucked it into the little wastebasket near the vanity. A moment later, though, he considered the smell, and how much he preferred that the room not reek of horror in the morning. He found another spare plastic bag and wrapped the shirt in it before dumping it back into the wastebasket. A sorry end for what had been a pretty comfortable shirt, all things considered, but in the scheme of things, it was a laughably minor loss.

In his bag, he found a spare pair of pajama pants and some boxers. Someone had told him that this sort of place often had robes available for guests to use in public areas of the hotel. Sure enough, when he rooted around in the drawers along one wall, he found two thin, hip-length cotton robes with wide sleeves neatly folded in a stack. He pulled one on; the fit wasn’t too bad. A little woven basket with toiletries also made a neat carrier for his change of clothes and his phone. He grabbed a towel from another of the drawers and laid it on top of the rest.

“I’m gonna take the room key, Vince, okay?”

“As you like,” was the distant reply. Cid took a minute to look at him again - still in his cape, minus his absurd boots, and radiating a need for silence. Nothing Cid could think of to say would be helpful.

“Back in a little while.” Vincent gave no indication he’d heard. He had not moved by the time the door closed gently behind Cid.

The shared bath was outside, near the lobby, and consisted of a small portion of the garden within a tall fence. The door to the space was built into a small structure along one side of the fence. Cid unlocked it and went inside. It was sparse: a small vanity sink with a narrow counter, and a low shelf where he dropped his little basket.

Past the threshold, in a space as casually but precisely designed as the gardens near the front lobby, steam rose gently off the surface of a huge cypress tub full of hot spring water. Cid stared at it, imagining how it would feel to sink into that water up to his neck and doze until he got pruney.

First things first, though. He shrugged out of the cotton robe and began at the vanity by washing his face with the fancy-smelling soap from the hotel’s toiletries kit. The worst of the filth and grime sluiced away down the drain. Next, he hefted the little razor from the kit and made threatening motions at the stubble along his jaw. Time enough for something more thorough when he was back in the sky and had his own stuff to hand.

Next up was the shower. The night was fairly mild, but the thought of an outdoor shower made him shiver nonetheless. Even the way the moonlight danced across the bath’s surface nearby did little to encourage him, and it took forever for the water to run hot. After several minutes, his patience wore out. He ducked into the lukewarm spray and worked up a lather in his hair. He tried not to think about the muck and the discolored water swirling between his feet. As he finished scrubbing his skin, he took stock of everything. Limbs all good; face still the way it should be; joints achy and tired. His shoulder in particular was especially tender where he’d fallen in that goddam airplane. Cid Highwind had never met a piece of machinery he didn’t like, but the Gelnika at the bottom of the sea had certainly made a case for putting itself at the top of his mental list of things to send enthusiastically to the scrap heap.

He pressed the fingers of his other hand against his shoulder and shrugged it in a circular motion to try to loosen everything up there. No luck. He flipped the shower’s tap off. Gasping with the sudden chill, he grabbed his towel and hurried to climb into the tub.

The water was hot. There were hot showers, and then there were hot tubs, but this outdoor bath was truly hot. Cid hissed as the soles of his feet, then his ankles, then his calves and hips made contact with it. But as he settled in it up to his neck and came to rest sitting against the side of the tub, his body reached the same conclusion that his mind had realized the moment he stepped into this little garden under the moonlight.

“There’s worse things to do while you’re savin’ the world,” he muttered, grinning to himself.

He tipped his head back and stared upwards. As the stars crossed the little patch of clear skyhe had, and he adjusted to the heat seeping into his muscles and bones, Cid could think of only one problem with the whole thing. There was no one to share it with. Yuffie and Tifa almost certainly would check it out together, and Barret and Cloud… maybe. Cloud was doing a damn better job these days of rolling with things instead of picking fights with everyone. Cid had a feeling that a hot spring bath like this would wipe out most of Barret’s reluctance to hop in alongside someone else.

And then there was Vincent. Cid sank lower in the tub, almost to his lips now, and frowned. He turned the events in the Gelnika over and over in his mind, trying to work out how Vincent had known about the crew, and how he’d somehow avoided the worst of the gory mess without avoiding any of the work they’d done. Despite everything else that had happened, Cid couldn’t shake the unsettling way that the shadows in the hall had embraced Vincent, had seemed to curl around him and beckon for him to join them. He closed his eyes and thunked his head against the lip of the tub. Everything had happened so quickly, even the fight near the end. Except for the now-subsiding twinges in his shoulder, most of the rest of the encounter with that damn horrorshow of a monster was a blur.

Cid’s thoughts meandered again. He wondered why his other memory of the plane involved a strong arm behind his shoulder. He sat bolt upright at one point, sloshing the water over the side of the tub and into the gravel of the garden bed. Vincent would never fail to catch something within his arm’s reach. What the hell had he been doing in the sub, then, when his hand was so close to Cid’s face? Might’ve been anything. As prickly as he could be sometimes, though, Vincent never seemed to lie. Not outright, not if someone asked him something directly.

With a frown, Cid slapped his hand against the water. Chasing these thoughts around and turning a puzzle back and forth in his head was doing absolute fuck-all for helping him relax. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and sank back into the water until his head bumped against the edge of the tub again. With the smell of the cypress and the burble of the water surrounding him, he made himself count slowly backwards from ten. By the time he got to three, the only thing he cared about was moving his feet along the bottom of the tub to find little eddies of warmer or cooler water. His hands floated listlessly next to him. Every ache in his muscles and bones faded away to a distant, insignificant twinge.

It was bliss.

He did not let himself fall asleep - too much danger there of someone banging the door down when his allotted time was up, or of getting a lungful of hot mineral water - but he drifted along with few cares. Every so often he’d open his eyes, to check on… what? He couldn’t remember. It didn’t matter. The sky was still dark, except for the goddam doom hanging overhead to the north, but dawn couldn’t be far off at this point. For the first time in a while, he didn’t want to watch the stars go by. He closed his eyes again. The quiet sounds of the night around him faded.

From the direction of the door and the little vanity, Cid thought he heard soft footsteps approaching. But the door was locked, at least for another little while - must’ve been his mind playing tricks. Maybe some animal was out looking for its breakfast in the pre-dawn gloom. It didn’t matter; he did not open his eyes to look.

Someone inhaled sharply at the same time that Cid heard something settle into the water. There was a rustle as the bath’s surface was pushed aside to accommodate the newcomer, and then everything was silence again for several minutes. Cid still did not look.

Nearby - very close, within arm’s reach maybe - there was the sound of metal coming softly to rest on wood, a small thunk followed by a gentle scrape and a few quiet clinks. Someone had set something down on the lip of the tub. Carefully, so carefully, Cid opened his eyes. Vincent had sunk to his shoulders in the warm water. His hair was piled loosely on top of his head; a few loose strands clung damply to his cheek and the secret part of his neck behind his ear. The brass claw stretched along the tub, safely out of the water.

Vincent’s unsettling eyes were closed in an expression as close to bliss as any Cid had seen on his face. Cid very deliberately did not look anywhere else. After a moment too long with even that indulgence, he flushed and turned away. The flush spread from his face down his neck; something coiled in his belly, low, near his hips, but he ignored it. That was the last goddam thing he needed to have happen. He wasn’t too sure about the finer points of etiquette in one of these inns, but locker rooms were part and parcel of flight school, and hotshot aces learned real quick to keep their eyes to themselves if they didn’t want a trip to the infirmary.

More recently than flight school, it wasn’t uncommon for him or anyone else to see too much skin sometimes as they made camp and peeled sweaty, fouled clothing off for the night. Cid figured the glimpses came with the territory, that they were just one more shared opportunity to tighten whatever odd little family bonds they all were developing. Despite their differences, they all sort of had a sense that with the world in the balance, someone getting an accidental eyeful of tits or ass probably didn’t matter.

Vincent, though, was never part of those exchanges. He drifted in and out of camp like the smoke from their fires, silent and unpredictable. Who could say how Vincent might react to a careful, but lingering, stare? Cid’s mind wandered. Still facing away from his companion, he frowned into the water.

“Thought you were gonna coop yourself up in the tub upstairs,” he said eventually, examining the little flower bushes running along the fence behind the tub. Vincent was silent. Cid did not turn around. “It’s nice, though,” he continued. “Good to have somethin’ like this -” he nodded at the little garden “- in the middle of all that.” He lifted one arm from the water to gesture broadly at the sky. When his hand reached the approximate place where the meteor lurked behind the inn and the hillside, Cid flipped the thing off. Just for good measure. He huffed a chuckle towards the surface of the bath. Impulsively, in a low voice, he added, “...real nice to share it with someone, too.”

Vincent remained silent. Cid turned away completely, then. Facing the edge of the tub, with Vincent still seated behind him, Cid rested his arms on the side and laid his head atop them. He watched the little eddies of steam rising from the droplets on his skin for a little while.

“I didn’t mean,” he started to say, then stopped. “Didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable, Vince. And now I went and made it fuckin’ weird. Sorry.”

There was still no answer. Cid closed his eyes again but startled awake at the heavy plop of a splash on the water. When Cid turned to look at Vincent, the tub was empty.

Cid blinked. He glanced at the door - closed and locked. He peered over the side of the tub at the flagstones set into the gravel - dry, with no sign of footprints. There was no sign that anyone else had been there.

“...Huh,” was all he said out loud. Probably it was as good a sign as any that his time in the tub was expiring. With reluctance, he gathered his feet below himself and stood. Water rushed off him in sheets, leaving him fully exposed to the chilly evening air. Once he had climbed out of the tub, he snatched at the towel and quickly draped it around his shoulders. In the relative shelter of the changing area, he finished toweling himself off. Boxers were next, and the pajama pants.

As he left the little enclosure, Cid nearly collided with Tifa, who was standing on the path near the door, twisting her hands at her waist. She also wore a cotton robe, but hers was longer and more carefully belted than his, and her hair was piled in a messy, loose knot on top of her head. Like Vincent’s had been, came an unwanted thought across his awareness. She answered his sudden scowl with an uncertain smile.

Get your shit together, Highwind.

He pulled his face into something that maybe resembled his usual grin. “Spyin’ on me, Tif?” he asked. His voice was lighter and calmer than he felt. Her eyes moved across his face like questions, but she shook her head with a little laugh.

“Hardly, Captain. We just crossed paths out here, that's all.” She looked around at the gardens and the little lanterns lining the path from the main building. “Yuffie fell straight into one of the beds, so I get a little time all to myself for once!” She grinned.

“Sorry to keep you waitin’, then,” he said.

“It’s no trouble at all - it was nice to be out under the sky for a little.” Tifa’s eyes slid sideways to watch him. “I guess I don’t need to tell you that, though, huh.” She laughed again, carefree and easy.

“Always love meetin’ a pretty lady with excellent taste, kid.” He gave her a roguish wink. “But you don’t need this old fool around for your stargazin’ tonight. Enjoy yourself - water’s great!” Hefting his basket, he nodded his head towards the private bath’s door.

“Get some sleep, captain. I’ll see you at breakfast in the morning.” She waggled her fingers at him and headed on in. He made his way back up the path towards the main building and tried to organize his thoughts. They were no less jumbled by the time he stood at the door to his room and fumbled through his basket for the room key. If organizing them weren’t possible, maybe he could at least try to slow his mind down enough to get a couple hours’ sleep.

As the door swung open into the mostly-dark room, Cid remembered that the only bed awaiting him was a futon on the floor. He sighed, kicked his shoes off, and waited for his eyes to adjust.

The same quiet lamp did its best to illuminate the space. Sure enough, a pair of admittedly fluffy-looking mattresses had been laid out neatly in the middle of the open expanse. His belongings had been placed neatly along one wall near the chest of drawers, out of the way but easily to hand if the need arose. He thought perhaps he could just make out a pair of armored boots near the far wall.

The room contained a distinct lack of tall, dark-haired men in red capes.

“...Vince?” Cid called. He set his basket down near the rest of his belongings and moved carefully across the room, toward the window and the balcony. The boots were indeed tucked politely under a low shelf below the window, and resting in a neatly-folded pile on the shelf were the cape, a black shirt, and a pair of black pants. The handgun in its hip holster was laid across the rest of it.

Awkward certainty crept up Cid’s neck to settle somewhere behind his left eye. If the gun was still here, then Vincent hadn’t disappeared into the wilderness, and he was not far from the room. That mostly left just the one possible place he could be.

Carefully, Cid peered through the window at the tub on the balcony. Through the fogged glass and the gloom, he could make out the hazy shape of another cypress tub, and something that might be a brass gauntlet draped carelessly across its lip so that the fingers and hand dangled in open air.

Cid looked away quickly.

He hurried to finish getting ready for bed, keeping his back to the balcony door and most of the room. If Vincent walked in, Cid didn’t want to take any chances about getting an eyeful. It’d been a long goddam day already. He spat toothpaste into the sink and, keeping his eyes on the floor, turned his attention to the two futons. They both seemed the same.

With a shrug, Cid crouched low, then crawled under the fluffy blanket. As he sank into the soft mattress and the blanket’s comforting weight settled on him, he tried again to pump the brakes on his racing thoughts.

The meteor. The end of the world - maybe. Whatever the fuck had happened on that goddam sunken plane today. He wondered if the Highwind was still okay, if the crew was taking good care of her and how her supplies were holding out. She was meant for long hauls, but they couldn’t bring her to Shinra-controlled Junon for reloading, and it’d been a while since they’d been to Rocket Town. Maybe that oughta be the next stop - might be nice to head home for a minute.

He rolled onto his side. The meteor. The end of the world - maybe. Shera would be in Rocket Town, hopefully holding down the fort while he was away, probably working too slowly again but maybe that didn’t matter, if the world was gonna end in a couple days. What was an internal company deadline when the world had a goddam space rock hanging over it all the time? His thoughts did not seem to want to slow down.

Cid drew his legs up and pushed one arm under his pillow. The meteor. The end of the world. He hadn’t made it up to space like he’d wanted, and his failure was slowly rotting in the field behind his house, rusting and teetering a little further to one side every day. He curled himself a little tighter, drew the blankets up a little closer to his ears. A sour hiss of a laugh escaped him. Cid Highwind hadn’t actually gone to space, no, but that was okay, because now space was coming to him.

The balcony door hissed open, bringing a gust of cool air and quiet footsteps into the room and interrupting his train of thought. He stared at the wall as hard as he could, but he couldn’t help but hear the sounds behind him. Feet crossing the room to where the bags were stowed; the rustle of fabrics; briefly, the tiny firecracker percussion of several joints popping in succession. When the lamp clicked off, the room’s shadows drew closer, in a way that might have been cozy if it weren’t the end of the world.

Cid closed his eyes while Vincent brushed his teeth. The water hissed, startling and loud, into the sink when he finished; despite himself, Cid jumped a little under his blankets. So much for being more relaxed. He took a deep breath and pushed his face deeper into the pillow.

A moment later, Vincent’s footsteps stopped almost directly behind Cid. The rustle of the other futon’s blankets did not immediately follow; minutes passed. Just as Cid decided to roll over and see what the hold up might be, though, Vincent spoke. His voice was low as ever.

“You can look, if you’d like.” The blankets rustled as Vincent slid under them. Cid blinked but did not move. “You will not see anything… unseemly.” Vincent’s voice might have been sad, but he was speaking so softly that Cid could barely make out the words. Cid sighed heavily.

“Ain’t about likin’ or bein’ unseemly, Vince,” he grumbled. He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling. “It’s about late at night, or early in the goddam morning, and some of us need our goddam beauty sleep.”

“I am sorry to have interrupted your ritual,” Vincent said quietly. “You were not asleep, so I thought…”

“Awful dark to be able to tell whether someone’s sleepin’.”

“Your snoring is difficult to misidentify, Chief.”

“Fuck you,” Cid said, without any anger. He snaked a hand out from under the blanket to rub his palm against his face. The bath had left his muscles feeling tired and relaxed, but hadn’t done much to help his smothering fatigue. He sighed again and turned his head to look at his friend. Eerie red eyes peered back from under a heap of blankets. “Was there somethin’ you actually wanted, Valentine?”

Vincent said nothing for a while. Listening, or chatting if that was what Vincent needed, was all well and good, but the dark square of sky outside the window was starting to become noticeably less dark, and all this non-conversation threatened to undo even the cursory relaxation he’d managed. Cid began to wonder if he’d ever get anything better than a catnap in, before the world ended.

“No,” Vincent said, as suddenly as dawn breaking across the horizon. He closed his eyes.

Cid frowned, but it was a conversational pattern Vincent often relied on. He turned back to his side, facing the wall again, and reached for the sleep that had eluded him all night so far.

Whether the quiet words that drifted past him as he fell into slumber were real or not, he couldn’t say. He’d heard a murmured “sleep well, Chief,” most nights over the last few weeks and months. Maybe tonight was another new one, and not just a remembered echo of one from before.

Maybe it was just another dream.

Chapter 6

Morning sunlight across his face woke Vincent a few hours later. The futon was soft and warm and clean. Since he’d woken from his long sleep, there had been other inns, with bedding just as luxurious, and he had deserved those nights of rest and comfort as little as he deserved this one.

He pulled the fluffy blanket away from his shoulders. There was no snoring nearby - Cid must already be awake in the room somewhere. Vincent sat up quietly and glanced at the other mattress: empty, just as he’d suspected. But the room was silent. Even with his careful ears, Vincent could not hear anyone else moving in the space - no brushing of teeth, no adjustment of clothing, no breathing, heavy or otherwise.

Cautiously, he peered out the window onto the balcony, steeling himself against the possibility of seeing something he ought not to see. But Cid was not in the tub, either. Vincent frowned and kicked the blanket the rest of the way off. Re-packing his belongings was the work of a moment. He noted that Cid’s bag was missing, too.

In fact, the only sign that there had been anyone else in the room at all was the rumpled bedding of the other futon. Cold panic crept up Vincent’s back from somewhere low in his gut, grasped at his ribs and climbed them like a ladder until it could settle around his heart, hooting and jeering. Perhaps they had all left him behind. That was how people treated relics, wasn’t it? Kept around for their beauty or their function, and discarded when they reached the end of their utility.

Maybe he was still dreaming. If so, it was an elaborate nightmare, but in the thirty years that the others said had passed since he fell asleep, he had certainly had others that were just as vivid. Others that were equally elaborate and all-encompassing. Others in which he, for reasons he could not explain, had friends and more than friends, the way he never truly had in his past life.

Vincent hefted his pack onto one shoulder and went to the door. If it were a dream, he would simply continue to go through the motions of the story his mind had invented, and he would be none the worse for wear. What was one more nightmare added to the litany he’d already endured? He wondered, though, if that were the case, where his mind had come up with someone like Cid.

Cloud, Nanaki, Aeris, even the little robot cat: they could be anyone he had met. Everyone’s dreams had heroes and magical animals. Vincent’s dreams, especially, were home to a doomed woman with long brown hair and sad eyes. He thought backwards, thought about what sort of man he might have met in his life that could have planted the seed for what his mind had turned into a brash, no-nonsense pilot with a storm in his eyes and the wind in his hair.

He could not find an answer.

In the lobby of the hotel, he found that pilot holding court with the rest of their little gaggle. Cid was gesturing wildly with some spear that Vincent didn’t recognize, and carrying on about how nicely weighted it was. Vincent knew little and less about polearms; he wondered, again, where the idea for these dream details had come from.

Swinging the spear in a flat arc, Cid spun and noticed Vincent. “Heya, sleeping beauty!” he crowed. Vincent scowled. “Nice of you to join us!” Cid continued, as though Vincent hadn’t made a face. He propped the butt of the spear on the floor near his foot and gestured at its length with his other hand.

“Didja see this last night? Cloud says he found this damn thing in the plane!” He tilted his head to regard his new weapon with a critical eye. After a moment, he cast the same look at Vincent. He said nothing, but Vincent watched his face closely, saw several thoughts cross it.

“Cid,” Cloud said, before the pilot could find more words. Cid blinked and looked over. “Well, Cid and everyone, I guess.” The others’ chatter dwindled; they drifted over to listen. “I wasn’t sure when to mention this, but…” Cloud frowned and rubbed his shoulder. “A friend here in town says the company bigwigs headed west this morning on a chartered plane.”

“You got friends here in Junon, and you never said nothin’?” Barret rumbled.

“From when we snuck onto the cargo ship,” Cloud answered. “We marched together in the parade.” Barret glowered but said nothing. “Anyway, my friend mentioned something about Rocket Town. And more huge materia.”

“More huge materia?” Tifa asked, but her surprise was overwhelmed by Cid’s outburst.

“Headed to Rocket Town?” Cid barked. “The bastards couldn’t get their hands on my plane, or my goddam airship, so now they’re gonna take my rocket instead?”

Cloud nodded. “My friend said that’s what it seemed like, as they all waited at the airport. He couldn’t hear much, though, before their plane arrived and they boarded.”

“Fuck!”

“Cid, we need to stay focused on the bigger picture,” Nanaki said. “Maybe now isn’t the best time to -”

“Like hell I’m gonna let ‘em waltz on into town again and wreck our lives on another of their fuckin’ whims!” Cid said, cutting Nanaki off. The lion’s ears flattened. “The Highwind maybe can’t outrun whatever bucket of bolts they’ve got, because of their head goddam start, but I’ll be goddamned if they think no one in Rocket Town’s gonna say boo to them about commandeering my rocket. And if we start now, maybe I can get there in time to be third or fourth in line to say it.”

“Sounds like we have ourselves an itinerary,” Cait Sith chirped from the corner, before anyone else could take the bait. The little cat waved cheerfully at the rest of the group. “Perhaps we ought to make our way back to the Highwind, so that we can plan in more detail while we fly.”

“The little guy’s right,” Yuffie said. “Cid might wanna kill anyone who looks sideways at his precious rocket -” she ducked his playful shoulder punch with a laugh “- but the huge materia isn’t exactly small potatoes, either.”

Cloud considered everyone for a few moments. “That’s true. We know there’s more huge materia out there,” he said slowly, “but we don’t have much about Shinra’s plans. Probably there’s not any better leads than this one, I guess. And even if there isn’t any plot to steal the rocket,” he said with a meaningful look Cid’s way, “Rocket Town itself has the supplies the Highwind needs to keep us going long-term. Anyone have any objections to heading that way today?” A chorus of ‘no’s and ‘uh uh’s answered him. “Great! Let’s mosey, then.”

With a roll of his eyes, Cid jerked his head towards Cloud. “Yeah, if y’all wanna get movin’, I gotta get my laundry from the front desk. It shouldn’t take a minute. I’ll catch up with ya in not too long.” Cloud narrowed his eyes but he nodded. Nanaki leveled a curious gaze between Cid and Vincent. The end of his tail twitched back and forth as he followed Yuffie and the others out the front door.

Vincent watched them all go, then returned his attention to Cid. “The new spear is very handsome,” he said after a moment.

“Sure is!” Cid’s usual grin had returned, aimed first at Vincent and then at the weapon itself. “Can’t believe Shinra was just gonna let the damn thing rot at the bottom of the ocean. Lucky we were there to find it, eh?”

Cid’s bluster was not anything new or remarkable, except for the tight lines of worry near his lively eyes. Vincent nodded at the spear. “I’ll guard it while you collect your things, if you’d like.”

“Nah.” With a practiced, easy motion, Cid settled the thing into the straps across his back.

“The clerk probably will not appreciate an armed man approaching their desk,” Vincent continued. If personal experience were anything to go by, few people in general appreciated the approach of armed men. Maybe dream clerks were different, though. If this all was a dream.

“Already got my shit,” Cid said. He nodded towards the wall, where his well-loved dark blue duffle huddled in a side chair. Cid’s beloved flight jacket was folded neatly atop it, clean and renewed like nothing had happened.

Vincent frowned. “Is there a reason, then, that we are not accompanying the rest of our party?”

Cid lowered his voice and took a hesitant, small step toward Vincent. It brought him within arm’s length. “It’s just… we’re goin’ back to Rocket Town. Home, for me, I guess.” He shuffled his feet on the carpet

“And this needed to be a secret from our companions?”

“What? No!” Cid made a soothing motion. “Y’all’ve been there already, goddammit, you’ve seen the town and the house and hell, even the rocket itself. There’s nothin’ secret there except the shameful state of the dishes in the damn sink. Our course is gonna take us right over the mountains, is all, and that means…” He trailed off and scrubbed a hand through his hair.

Vincent blinked. “We will pass the cave,” he said slowly.

Cid nodded. “Yeah. Probably late in the afternoon; would add most of a day to go around in either direction, not to mention the weather’s always a little dicey over the main Nibel range.” A bright blue eye watched him from behind Cid’s arm, then looked away. “I just thought… maybe you’d want a little heads up about it, without everyone else hearin’. Even if you really are okay with whatever you saw in there last time, thought maybe I’d try to keep it from bein’ a surprise for you.” He let his hand fall back to his side with a sharp slap. “There’s enough goddam ghosts rattling around the planet these days, least I can do is try to give you a heads up about one I know about.”

Vincent tilted his head in thought. He watched Cid for a long minute, long enough that Cid grimaced and began to fidget. Eventually, Cid looked away. The hand that had rubbed his hair reached up and settled on his opposite shoulder to fiddle with the wrinkles in his t-shirt.

Neither spoke as the seconds spun themselves into minutes, but Cid’s fidgeting under Vincent’s scrutiny grew more and more pronounced. He looked back up. “I shouldn’t have -” he started to say.

He stopped short as Vincent’s hand fell on his shoulder. Cid was wound tighter than a clockspring for some reason. He looked down at the heavy hand atop his own, then back up at Vincent. Unasked questions pushed his eyebrows around, came to rest at the corners of his mouth, and were swallowed again.

“Thank you, Chief,” was all Vincent said. He squeezed Cid’s hand - solid, real, not a dream - and let his own fall again.

“Nothin’ to it.” Turning to go, Vincent nearly missed the way Cid flexed his fingers. Perhaps he was convincing himself he wasn’t dreaming, either. Vincent squashed that thought. There were more important things to hold his attention. Cid muscled past him and beat him to the door of the inn. “C’mon, you old gargoyle,” he said, once more full of his usual bluster. “We gotta get a move on - it’s a long walk back to where she’s moored, and a long flight after that.”

Mild weather and the fresh air were welcome distractions from the cosmic doom hanging overhead as the group made their way back to the airship. Most of them walked a ways ahead of Vincent, Cid included, but a breeze toyed with the hem of Vincent’s cape, making it flutter in a way that Yuffie seemed unable to resist.

“It’s like,” she crowed at one point, darting in to try and grab a corner of it, “it’s like it’s alive, almost!” The red fabric snapped away from her fingertips, only to swirl close again a moment later. Vincent did not slow his pace. Her one-sided conversational chatter settled around him like a stone in his boot. “We don’t have a lot of capes or things in Wutai,” she continued, “but I’m pretty sure the ones we do have aren’t like. Sentient or anything.” Her skinny teenage arm darted out towards the cape’s hem at an especially opportune moment.

Vincent shifted his weight ever so slightly away from her, quickly, to snap it out of her reach again. When her commentary stopped, he glanced over and found her scowling at him. He raised an eyebrow, though he admonished himself for forgetting how observant she was. “Is something wrong?” he asked.

“When you dodge around like that, you’ll interfere with my important ninja training!”

“Hn,” he replied.

“I’m working on evading and engaging with non-human enemies, Vinny!” she whined. “Your cape is a perfect sparring partner, with all the swooping and the whooshing and the everything!” She emphasized each of the cape’s motions with big arm gestures that Vincent pretended not to notice. “And look, you might be, yanno, super weird, but I’m like. Pretty sure you’re still human at the end of the day.”

Vincent returned his attention to the path in front of him. “Right? You’re still human?” He did not reply, not even when she made a frustrated noise somewhere between a squawk and a growl. Though she had always been less wary around him than most of the others - Vincent’s eyes flicked sideways towards the other exception, and found Cid tromping with his usual gusto through the taller grass on the verge of the road - she still usually stayed out of arm’s reach.

Not today. Before Vincent knew what was happening, Yuffie had darted in front of him and, hands on hips, planted her feet in the dirt. His choices were to stop short or to run her over. Vincent sized up the indignant teenage petulance scrawled across her face and the set of her shoulders and made his choice.

To her credit, she did not flinch or blink as the edges of the cape swirled past his suddenly-stopped frame and brushed her elbows. And though the breeze from the fabric ruffled her hair for a moment, she ignored it. They stood that way for a long moment, stock-still in the middle of the grassland outside the city, Vincent in his imperious silence staring down at a colorful dynamo of life and emotions.

“I am,” he finally said. “I think.”

Yuffie’s face softened. “Aww, I know you are,” she said quietly. She cuffed his arm above the brass gauntlet; he blinked down at the point of contact. “If you weren’t human, what would keep you coming back to camp at night after you get all… hairy and stuff? Beasts don’t need an excuse to leave, and humans don’t need one to come back.”

Vincent blinked. “That’s… very insightful of you, Yuffie.”

She giggled, a high and clear sound that sang under the morning sun. “Don’t sound too impressed, old man,” she said. She pointed at her temple. “There’s more up here than just schemes to steal everybody’s stuff, yanno.”

“Of course. We shouldn’t underestimate you.”

Her face flushed. “That’s not - I mean, no! You shouldn’t!” Puffing out her chest, she drew herself to her full, if still unintimidating, height. “But you still shouldn’t be impressed about what I said.”

“No?” Vincent raised an eyebrow.

“Nah.” She waved her hand dismissively. “I got it from one of my comic books, it’s something the princess says to the werewolf knight in the royal guard.”

Before Vincent could think of what type of response that revelation might deserve, a shouted “Hey!” carried across the field. Vincent looked over to find Cid waving his spear, trying to get their attention. When he saw that they’d noticed him, he turned and pointed toward the woodbelt ahead, where the Highwind’s silver skin could just be seen above the trees.

“Get a move on, you lazy jackasses!” Cid hollered. “Daylight’s wastin’, and we got a flight to catch!”

“You heard the old guy,” Yuffie said.”Let’s race! If I get there first, you gimme one of your materia! And if you get there first, you can pick which one it’ll be!”

“My excitement cannot be overstated,” he deadpanned. Still, he stepped around her and waited. “On your signal, daughter of Wutai.”

“Yeah! Okay - here we go! On your mark, get set -” and she was off even before the word ‘go.’ She disappeared into the forest after a moment. Vincent watched her go, then resumed his own walk. His long legs caught up to Cid’s plodding pace in no time. Smoke trailed behind him like a banner. Despite his earlier impatience, he grinned around his cigarette. The weather perhaps had taken the edge off his earlier towering mood.

“She give you the old ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ routine?” Cid asked.

“Mm.”

“Whatcha givin’ up?”

Vincent shrugged. “Nothing important.”

“Kiddo always threatens to take my materia. Guessin’ it was the same for you?” Vincent nodded. After a few strides of silence, Cid swatted the grass with the blade of his spear. The cigarette bobbed on his lip as he spoke again; Vincent realized with a start that most people, especially those watching from the corner of their eye, probably would not have noticed how quickly it had turned to ash. He focused again on the path ahead and tried to settle his thoughts. “Materia isn’t important to you, then?”

“It isn’t unimportant,” he replied. “But I don’t usually equip any of the vital ones, on account of… how I can be, sometimes.”

“...Sorry.”

“There’s no need to apologize.”

“Still,” Cid began, but he drifted into stony silence. A few strides later, he stopped and turned, sticking his spear out low so that Vincent would stop, too. Blue eyes flashed below his heavy brows, though Vincent couldn’t read their expression. He wondered if he was only imagining the electric current he sensed behind them. So many people seemed to take Cid only at a surface level, seeing just an uncouth failure of an astronaut. They missed his lightning-quick mind at their peril. “I give you shit all the time about your big, hairy, slobbery purple problem,” he continued. Gloved knuckles rapped gently against Vincent’s chest. He resisted the urge to skitter backwards. “Never wanna actually pick a fight with you about it, though, alright?”

“Alright.”

“And Vince?” Cid said as he set off again on the last little distance to the ship.

“Yes, Highwind?”

The butt of the spear made rhythmic thumps where it rapped against the dirt. Cid watched the ground as he spoke. “I just… The flight time to Rocket Town’s about six hours from here. We’ll cross the mountains about two hours before that.” He glanced sideways, and Vincent felt that little jolt again as their eyes met. “They ain’t much in terms of comfort, but the cabins oughta be made up, if you wanted to get some sleep on the way.”

Warmth overwhelmed Vincent as they approached the rest of the group at the foot of the gangway. Yuffie, animated as ever, leapt to her feet when she saw them. Even if his emotions hadn’t crowded in his throat next to his heart, there was no time to say the things he wanted to say. Instead, he settled for pulling his cowl down below his chin for a moment, so that Cid could see the small, fleeting smile he managed. “...Thanks, Chief.”

The group fell upon them then, and in the cheerful din Vincent thought he might have been the only one to notice the way Cid flushed and looked away. Despite everyone’s best efforts, and Yuffie’s squawking dismay that Vincent had only shoddy materia to give her, they somehow managed to set off westward without too much delay. Under the looming red doom to the north, the horizon beckoned.

Chapter 7

It was easy to forget, up above the wispy clouds, what was at stake. Only too easy to ignore the looming glow on the northern horizon in favor of chasing the sun across a wide expanse of blue, reaching for it, stretching out his hand when he thought no one else might notice.

The wind called him, sang in him, and the moment they’d lifted off outside Junon, a burden he hadn’t noticed on his shoulders had simply… disappeared. Cid leaned his elbows across the helm of his namesake and indulged in letting the sky wash over him.

Most of the others had gathered on the bridge, talking quietly or peering out the windows at the world below. Somewhere belowdecks, Yuffie probably was curled up in a corner regretting her breakfast. Cait Sith’s moogle was lifeless in front of an auxiliary console on the bridge, but the cat itself was nowhere to be seen.

Vincent, too, was missing. Cid glanced at their heading, then at a map he’d laid out earlier. Far below the ship, the river snaked its way through the mountains north of Cosmo Canyon. They’d passed the basin with the waterfall an hour or so ago. Whether his eerie companion had taken him up on the suggestion of a nap, or he was perched on the flight deck railing like a gargoyle to brood, Cid couldn’t say. A shadow piercing the distant horizon ahead, to their north, kept him from pondering for too long, though. He straightened and took the helm in hand; the time for reverie had passed.

“Gonna be makin’ our approach in a few minutes,” he announced, spinning the wheel slowly to adjust their heading. “Hang onto somethin’ - the lady’s graceful, but she tends to swoop sometimes.”

Cloud braced his feet wide before glancing Cid’s way with disbelief in his eyes. “This thing can swoop?”

Cid met his incredulity with a swaggering grin. “You’re gonna second-guess Captain Cid my-name’s-on-the-damn-thing Highwind’s assessment of his ship?”

“Well… no, but it’s just…” The floor lurched under their feet.

“Just what, Spike?” The tall, skinny shadow on the horizon was dead center in the windows now; Cid let the helm straighten itself out as Cloud flushed and looked away with a scowl.

“Didn’t think a ship like this would be… acrobatic, I guess.”

Cid clapped the younger man on the shoulder, hard enough to make him stagger. “Oh, the old girl’s got lots of surprises up her sleeves, kid.” Cloud rubbed his shoulder. “Maybe once all this bullshit is over and done with, I’ll get a chance to show ya.”

“You’re on, old man,” Cloud laughed, dancing out of reach of another good-natured swing of Cid’s arm. “How long, do you think, until we make it to Rocket Town?”

Cid took in the shadow’s position, then glanced at the instrument array before him. Chewing on his lip didn’t help in any meaningful way, when it came to thinking through answers to questions like that, but he’d found it didn’t really hurt, either.

“Half an hour, maybe,” he finally replied. “Probably good for everyone to start roundin’ up their stuff, if they want to bring it into town.” He nodded towards the shadow. “And if they don’t have anything to pack, folks can watch the rocket gettin’ a little closer, bit by bit. Nice day for it.”

With a nod, Cloud turned to relay the news to the others, leaving Cid alone again with his thoughts and his sky.

The next interruption, a few minutes later, was his radio crackling to life. “Rocket Town control, Rocket Town control, calling all incoming traffic, please confirm receipt of transmission. Confirm craft identification, heading, and airspeed. Rocket Town control, Rocket Town control, calling all incoming traffic.” Cid glanced down at it with suspicion. Transmissions from the tower weren’t fishing expeditions - the folks directing all the traffic knew who everyone in the air was, and where they were heading, at all times. He was an adrenaline jockey; the controllers were the cool customers keeping him and his fellow hotheads in the sky.

He reached for his headset absently and clicked the feed over to its little speakers. With a quick glance around the room - no one else, except his trainee pilot, seemed to have noticed the radio at all - he slipped the phones over his ears.

If his friends hadn’t heard the call, though, all the air traffic nearby certainly had. The radio all but bristled with anxious callsigns responding to the tower’s inquiry, everyone tripping over everyone else until the whole thing was a cacophonous shitshow. Cid grimaced and pulled one can off his ear. He didn’t recognize the voice from the tower’s side of the conversation, but he was damn sure he was gonna give ‘em a strongly worded letter - in person, and loud - once he got his boots on the ground at the airfield. Confusion at the point where everyone needed to land was how people got hurt, dammit.

Things died down to a dull roar once everyone nearby had answered, and in one of the resulting pockets of relative quiet, Cid noticed a familiar voice cutting across everyone else. That wasn’t so unusual in itself - Rocket Town was only so big, and even if every other person at the grocery store was a gearhead, it still didn’t take long to start recognizing the radio shitroosters and those who were more responsible. This voice in particular, though…

“Spectacles, this is Spectacles calling Kettleblack. Kettleblack, are you receiving?”

He’d recognize that voice anywhere. It was the old callsign that got his attention, though. He hadn’t been Kettleblack since flight school. Cid gestured for his trainee to take the helm as he fumbled at the transmission button on his headset. “Gimme some easy donuts outside of town here for a minute, kid,” he said. “Gotta take a call.” The trainee’s wide eyes were full of stars as he scurried to adjust the heading accordingly. Cid had no doubt the Highwind’s coming loops over the field south of town would be the most technically perfect maneuvers she’d made since he took her to the sky the first time.

The bridge was designed so that everywhere could be seen from everywhere else. Despite this, Cid found a quiet corner away from his friends’ conversations and his crews’ work. “Kettleblack to Spectacles, receivin’ you loud and clear,” he said, as quietly as he dared.

“Ah, glad you’re there, Kettleblack. Can you swap to channel 208.4? I need to confirm some readings with you.”

There wasn’t really a channel 208.4, Cid knew… but there was a secure band far enough from the main chatter that they could talk. He clicked over to it and waited.

“Kettleblack to Spectacles, you there?” he said into the silence.

“Oh, it’s so good to reach you!” Cid could hear the breathless relief in Shera’s voice despite the tinny, flat quality of the headset’s audio. “Between the meteor, and the Turks snooping around…” She stopped, regrouped, and tried again. “A lot’s happened since you left, Captain.”

“Start with the tower. What the hell’s goin’ on with the controller?” he asked, before she could wax too sentimental.

“Shinra’s in town,” she said. “They want to use the rocket for… something. I don’t really understand it. But they commandeered the airfield, even though I’m pretty sure none of them can tell the nose end of a plane from the tail.”

“That bad, huh?”

“Yes.” Her voice was quiet. Even for mousy little Shera… too quiet.

“You okay, Specs?” he asked.

“Oh, don’t worry about me!” There was a pause. “You’re the one coming out of Cosmo Canyon and the southeast, right? Radar had you making pretty much a beeline for town, here, but it looks like… Captain, are you doing donuts? In an airship?”

“Why’s everyone so goddam convinced my girl’s some graceless behemoth?” he barked. “The Highwind’s plenty agile, whether it’s swoopin’ or turnin’ on a gil, and it’s about damn time y’all remembered that!” Shera was quiet again, but it was a more familiar type of quiet now. The kind like when he got too loud, too intense in his ranting. Cid pinched the bridge of his nose with a sigh. “Shit, Shera, I’m not talkin’ and drivin’, if that’s what you’re tryin’ to say.” It wasn’t an apology, but then, she never asked for one. He smacked his fist against his leg and continued. “Got a trainee pilot on the crew - come to think of it, kid’d probably love any pointers you’ve got from your screens, once we’re in town.”

“That’s just it, Cid,” she said. Maybe it was a trick of the radio - had she really slipped up, used his name instead of his rank? His annoyance vanished, replaced by a creeping concern. “You can’t bring the Highwind to town. It won’t be safe here. Can you leave it at the old hangar?”

Cid blinked. The old hangar hadn’t been used since… he couldn’t remember exactly. Before the rocket program got its legs under it, for sure. They hadn’t really understood the necessary scale of spaceflight until the first three prototype rockets, launched from the hangar a few miles southeast of the main drag in town, had fizzled and failed before they left the atmosphere. It would be an ideal place to leave the Highwind, but it would take so much goddam time compared to just landing in town and waltzing over to the house. Leave it to Shera to suggest the slow, careful way forward. He shoved his anger down in hopes that doing so would clear his head.

“So I gotta hide my goddam airship now?”

Cloud looked over, concerned, until Cid waved him off.

“Hide it or have it taken, Captain,” she replied, once again mild and unruffled. “Shinra doesn’t think anyone’s out there except the usual civilians, and they’re so focused on whatever’s happening with their rocket plans that they don’t have anyone to spare to make sure.”

Another mention of the company. The way she told it, Cid thought, it seemed like the town must be absolutely crawling with company idiots. “Shera,” he said slowly, “what kinda shitstorm am I flyin’ into here?”

“You’ll understand when you’re here,” was the only answer she gave. “I need to go - I have a meeting with some of the top brass in a few minutes. I’ll try to stall them as much as I can, but… please don’t dawdle.”

“Not gonna let ‘em fuck up my town again, Specs, don’t you worry. I’ll be there soon as I can.”

“There’s a buggy in the hangar with a full tank of gas; I’ll leave the keys in the kettle on your old workbench.”

“Hey, no shit? That’s… thanks, Shera. Good to know even a slowpoke like you can see the need for speed sometimes.”

“We’re counting on you, Kettleblack.”

“Yeah, yeah, don’t go gettin’ all sentimental and shit on me now.” There was no reply; Cid clicked back over to the main channel, where at least the chaotic transmissions meant no one would know right away that Highwind had never actually responded. With luck, no one had noticed she was even nearby.

Cid nodded in Cloud’s direction. On second thought, it’d be good to have the other folks on the same page, too. He waved Barret and Tifa over; Nanaki ambled behind them. “C’mere a second, you numbskulls. Little change of plans.” As the ship continued its graceful loops over the grass south of town, Cid filled the others in. To their credit, none of them seemed to mind the extra foot distance - especially once he mentioned the buggy.

They landed at the old hangar not long afterward. Bringing up the tail of the group, Cid couldn’t help but linger at the foot of the gangway to pat his namesake with a gloved hand. He managed not to say out loud that he hoped she’d stay safe, away from town and whatever fireworks they were about to set off. Hopefully it’d be enough that he’d thought it real hard to himself.

Just as Shera had promised, Cid found a set of keys inside the old black kettle on his workbench. They jingled from his pocket when he waved the others over to the buggy.

“Nice not to have to hoof it into town again, like last time,” Barret muttered. The buggy rocked on its suspension as he took his place in the passenger seat. Cid, sliding behind the wheel, nodded with more than a little distraction. Barret noticed. “Oughta be there real soon, Cap, but only if you agree not to drive like a bat outta hell.”

“We already got a bat outta hell,” he quipped. The buggy’s doors thumped closed as the girls found their seats; Mog and Nanaki would follow behind the main group. Cid started her up with a glance in his rearview mirror. “Hey, speakin’ of - anyone see our resident bat since we disembarked?”

There was a chorus of ‘no’ and a belated, warbly ‘nope’ from a still green at the gills Yuffie.

“Nobody? Well, shit.” Cid thought fast. Vincent hadn’t been on the bridge for the change in plans, and Cid hadn’t seen him haunting any of the corridors belowdecks either as everyone made their way to the gangway. Reluctantly, he met Cloud’s eyes in the rearview. “We don’t wanna leave him behind or anything. You mind drivin’ into town, Cloud? I’ll go sweep the ship real quick and find him, we’ll catch up with you.”

Even as he undid his seatbelt to swap into the driver’s seat, Cloud tilted his head. “You don’t want to be with us when we get into town, Cid?” Tifa unbuckled herself, too, but before Cid could ask what she was up to, she was already hefting Mog into the now-empty middle seat. Nanaki apparently decided he also had room now, too; he hopped into the cargo spot in the back and watched the proceedings with his head on the back of the seat.

“I want it real bad.” He hopped out of the buggy and handed Cloud the keys. “But I wanna make sure a certain someone’s not building himself a goddam sadness nest in some vital part of my ship’s machinery, too.” Cid hefted his spear, then slapped the buggy roof. “Head to my house, find Shera. I’ll be there soon as I can.” Cloud nodded; the buggy’s engine started with a roar. “Oh, and Cloud?” Cid shouted.

“Yeah?”

“If Shera asks, tell her y’all like your tea at 208.4 degrees!”

“I like my… what? Why?”

“Trust me, goddammit.”

Cloud narrowed his eyes, but he nodded. “See you soon, Cap.” The buggy trundled away.

Cid turned back to the Highwind, which waited as dignified and silently overhead as he was not. The realization that a ship her size had probably miles of places for a professional skulker like Vincent to hide suddenly dawned on him. Knowing Vincent’s ability to melt into the shadows when he felt like it, Cid began to think maybe it was foolishly optimistic that he’d be able to find him at all, let alone quickly.

So when a smooth voice right behind him said, “Thank you for not leaving me behind,” Cid nearly jumped out of his skin with surprise. He whirled, spear at the ready, and found his quarry standing there plain as day, his cape wafting a bit in the afternoon breeze.

“Shiva’s icy tits, Valentine, what the fuck?” Cid yelled. “Where the hell - no, forget it, what the fuck?”

Vincent blinked mildly in reply.

He had appeared quickly enough that the buggy was still audible as it headed towards town. Cid looked from Vincent to the dust plume behind it, then back to Vincent’s cool red stare. “Missed our ride on account of comin’ back to find you, jackass,” he grumbled.

“I’m here now.”

Cid opened his mouth, closed it, and tried again. “No shit. Thank you for that, by the way.” Brittle sarcasm laced his voice. “I figured I was gonna have to come search the nooks and crannies in the cargo bay ceiling, that I’d find you with all the other goddam bats that my crew swears aren’t really there.” With one last glance up at the Highwind, Cid stowed his spear again. He sighed. “Might as well get a move on. More trompin’ through the grass at the end of the world, just what I wanted from this trip home.” Whether he was crabbing at Vincent or just to hear himself mutter, Cid couldn’t say. He didn’t wait to make sure Vincent followed.

“I was dreaming.” The quiet statement, from nearby behind him, made Cid startle again.

“I’m damn pleased we could get you out of your beauty sleep, then.”

“It was at your suggestion,” Vincent replied. When Cid looked over, the red eyes were hot in an otherwise blank face. He remembered their conversation about the flight, and about the cave. “I did not expect to sleep, but...”

Cid swallowed. More mildly, he spoke again. “Right. Sorry. Glad you were able to get some shuteye.”

Vincent shrugged. “The dreams and nightmares come whether I am awake or not.” He did not elaborate.

“Again with the sparkling conversation.” Cid shook a cigarette from the pack in his pocket. “Whatever the fuck, I’m glad you’re awake, and I’m glad you’re here.”

“Oh?” Vincent gave this statement due consideration. “Do you think you will need… what did you call me, a bat? When we get to your house?”

Cid rolled his eyes. “Who knows what the fuck we’re gonna find when we get to town, Vince? For me, I just know that havin’ one more friendly somebody next to me if we gotta face off against those company fucks means the odds get a little less shitty for us.” He grinned. “If that friendly somebody happens to dress like he sleeps upside down in the rafters, I ain’t gonna judge.”

Vincent was silent enough that Cid wondered if he’d overstepped some conversational boundary again; thinking back, though, he couldn’t tell what boundary that might be. He took a long drag on his cigarette, blew the smoke out with a huff. They continued along the road, Vincent staring morosely ahead and Cid contemplating the grass and dust below his boots.

The divebombing monster caught them both unawares. Vincent fell underneath it, silent as always despite the great claws on the thing’s kicking feet.

“Shit!” Cid yelled, leaping sideways. Vincent was quicker to react. In the time it took Cid to scramble out of the way, Vincent had fought the thing off and regained his feet. Cid heard the hammer on his sidearm click home, and ducked just in time for the whipcrack sound of gunfire to pass harmlessly over his head. The monster - a hulking, purple thing with huge bat wings and a devilish tail - recoiled as the bullet found its mark in its shoulder. It tried, and failed, to take to the sky again.

Whirling, Vincent took aim again. Cid jumped backwards, waited for the next shot. The monster staggered; Vincent had found his mark. A third whipcrack, a shriek of inhuman pain from the creature. Cid jammed his cigarette between his teeth and hefted his spear. While Vincent reloaded, he jumped forward. The creature never stood a chance. The spear’s blade buried itself almost to the crossbar in the thing’s chest. Hot ichor spurted out of the wound and across Cid’s shirt. So much for skippin’ the next laundry day, he thought wildly.

“Hope the son of a bitch didn’t get you too bad,” Cid called. The thing’s lifeless body slid off his spear and onto the ground with a soggy thud. Cid glanced over to find Vincent staring intently behind them, back towards the Highwind. “Uh, Vince? You okay? Not too much worse for wear, yeah?” Vincent didn’t reply, didn’t acknowledge he’d heard Cid at all. Cid’s grip tightened on the spear’s haft. He followed Vincent’s gaze.

Another of the same winged creatures launched itself from the grass nearby. Dark energy gathered around it as it prepared some kind of gravity spell. Shit. Cid crouched for a jumping attack, but whether the day’s walk had taxed him more than he thought, or the hell of the sunken plane continued to plague him, he moved too slowly.

The creature brought its hands up and released the energy in Vincent’s direction. He dodged, but couldn’t escape it. Down he went, in a flurry of red cape and flashing golden boots.

“Vince! Dammit!” Cid leapt forward, slashing at the creature’s shoulders and wings. He felt the spear crunch through bone on his way past before he skidded to a stop in the dirt. One of its wings hung limply as the creature fell to earth. It stayed on its feet, though. He maybe hadn’t succeeded in taking it down, but at least he’d distracted it from Vincent, bought some time for his friend to recover and find his feet. The monster swung one clawed hand at him, though he was well out of reach. His cigarette was down to the filter by now; tossing it to the ground, he hefted his spear again and made to rush forward.

A roar and a burst of fire from behind the creature stopped him in his tracks. Shit, shit, shit, “Shit!” Cid barked. The great, infernal beast that lived in Vincent’s head: one more thing added to the list of things Cid’s day absolutely did not fuckin’ need. Fur, horns, teeth, muscle and sinew, fire; it was a nightmare of a different sort than those that usually haunted Vincent.

He had called it Galian, when everyone gathered for the evening after its first appearance. Vincent had little to say about it and seemed to have no memory of anything he did when he was transformed. Cid had watched the beast tear all manner of monsters and foes apart, from little redcaps and sahagins to the formidable Vlakorados on the northern continent. Galian seemed to make no distinction between the size, or type, or capabilities of its adversaries. Everything was prey. It had always been able to identify its allies, though. Cid tightened his grip on the haft of his spear and hoped that was still the case.

Whatever this winged thing standing here in the grass today was, it was no Vlakorados. Cid eyed the monster, then watched the glowing, predator light in Galian’s eye. Its gaze shifted for a moment from the monster to him. Under the weight of that stare, Cid had the uncomfortable sensation that he was simply a bug awaiting the collector’s pin, or the fanatic’s swung newspaper. But he and his spear did not hold Galian’s attention for long. He hefted his weapon and jumped again - backwards, this time - to watch the remainder of the fight play out.

He did not have to wait long. Galian charged at the weakened monster, swinging one furred arm wide and bringing it down with punishing weight on the creature. The monster collapsed in a heap, tried to crawl away. Cid looked away as Galian continued to pummel it. He’d seen what happened when the beast danced in a melee, had seen what was left afterward. He wished sometimes that he could go back to a time before he’d heard it - especially the ones that dragged out for minutes. This battle, though, was mercifully swift.

When he looked again, the monster - or what was left of it - lay dead in a pool of steaming filth at Galian’s feet. Galian, facing away from Cid, lashed its tail side to side as it heaved deep breaths, working out its adrenaline. Its head swung heavily back and forth. Cid wondered whether it could smell him, whether it would know him if he approached. He decided to wait a little longer. Galian turned, seemed to startle as it noticed him. It didn’t seem quite like itself; there was hesitation behind the fierce stare.

“You in there, Vince?” Cid called, gently. The beast growled, its lips curled up to reveal its fearsome teeth. Before it could do more than threaten him, though, the beast’s form simply… Cid watched, but couldn’t say exactly what happened. One moment, he was facing a ten foot high creature with a bad temper; the next, his quiet friend emerged from a cloud of dark, misty energy.

Vincent had time to take a single step. He blinked in confusion at Cid, and then his legs gave out. Cid dropped his spear. Closing the distance between them was no great task for a dragoon, nor was catching Vincent around his shoulders to keep him from falling all the way to the ground. He huddled there, in the grass and the sun, and waited for Vincent to finish waking up.

“Thanks, Chief,” he eventually mumbled. Cid looked down and found sleepy red eyes watching him from under a fall of impossibly dark hair.

“Of course. Can’t have you fallin’ in all that muck.” Cid nodded in the direction of the remains of the monster. Vincent glanced in that direction, though Cid doubted he could see much from his angle.

“...hurt?” Vincent asked. His voice was still little more than a sigh.

“What’s that? I didn’t quite catch it, Vince.” Cid leaned lower, close enough that when Vincent spoke again, his breath was a warm tickle against Cid’s ear that set off an uncomfortable number of butterflies behind his ribs.

“Are you hurt?” Vincent repeated.

“Nah.” Cid sat up again with a soft chuckle. “You took the brunt of both of the little bastards. Probably that one-two hit combo they laid on you is why… well, why you weren’t quite yourself for a few minutes.”

Vincent shifted suddenly, tried to escape Cid’s arms, but when he sat up, he reeled and almost fell backwards into the grass. Cid caught him again, steadied him with an arm behind his back. “Easy, Vince.” The taller man was still glassy-eyed with fatigue and confusion. Cid found a flask in his pocket and offered it. “Have a swig.”

“Seems like a poor time for a drink, Highwind.”

“It’s not liquor, dammit. Just water.” He shoved it in Vincent’s direction and held it there. Vincent finally took it and, with some reluctance, tried a sip. He took another, deeper drink when he realized it was indeed just water.

After a few moments, Vincent handed the flask back. “I am keeping you from your reunion with your neighbors.” He tried again to sit up on his own, with the same result.

“It just gives Shera more time to hold court with everyone over tea,” Cid said. “But you’re right. Probably there’s much nicer places we could sit while you pick yourself back up.”

Vincent shot a glance towards the monster’s remains. “Places that smell better, perhaps?”

Cid barked a laugh. “Abso-fuckin’-lutely. C’mon.” He leaned Vincent forward a little, and scrambled to his feet before offering a hand. The strength in Vincent’s arm, even as weak as he was, surprised Cid. So did the fact that he did not immediately back away when Cid pulled him up. Cid decided not to mention it - any of it. The strong grip, the coiled-steel muscle below the cape and the layers of fabric, the musky warmth as Vincent found his balance by not quite resting against Cid’s shoulder.

Instead, Cid took a step back to gesture towards the rocket on the horizon. “Not too much further now; hell, we’re close enough that if you fall over between here and the house, I probably could carry you the rest of the way.”

Vincent raised an eyebrow and waited long enough to speak that Cid flushed. “I think I can manage, Chief. I’ll follow you.”

Though Vincent swayed a little while Cid fetched his spear from nearby, he managed to stay on his feet the rest of the way to town. Whether Cid needed to keep a supportive arm quite so tightly wrapped around his shoulders did not merit significant thought.

Company cars zipping up and down the town’s handful of streets were a good distraction, anyway. The two men avoided them when they could, ducking behind trash cans or fences here and there until they'd passed. No townsfolk, though. No madcap experimental cars or bicycles or something-in-betweens careening around a corner. No one hollering out of their front door, with rancor or delight, at the captain’s return. Just a heavy, uncomfortable mood laying across the town as palpably as the rocket’s shadow. Cid glanced up at his prize as they walked. Still there. Still canted far from vertical, a visible reminder of all his hubris and failures and lost opportunities. As he’d done with his contemplation of Vincent’s warm, solid presence next to him a few minutes before, Cid tried not to let that train of thought occupy him. He had plenty of other bullshit to keep him busy. At the top of the list was the punk kid with more money than the Gold Saucer who was trying to steal his rocket. His mood darkened.

After what seemed like an eternity plodding along sunny, familiar streets, and with Vincent stoic and silent but beginning to stumble, Cid’s house appeared before them. The buggy was parked out front. It looked the same as always, and could almost be peaceful, if it weren’t for the fuckin’ meteor looming over the end of the street.

Cid sighed and gave Vincent’s shoulder a squeeze. “Here we are, Vince. Home sweet house.”

“Welcome home, Chief,” Vincent murmured. Cid received two more surprises in quick succession as they stood there together. Vincent had sounded tired, which must mean he was all but dead on his feet - Cid made a mental note to shoo him directly into bed when they got inside. But the other surprise was the way Vincent hadn’t frozen into tense discomfort when Cid tightened his arm. If anything - and maybe Cid had imagined it - he had leaned closer against Cid’s shoulder for a moment.

It was a long moment, when neither of them said a word to break whatever spell had taken hold of them and the town at large. But it was still just a single moment, and it ended as Vincent ducked out from under Cid’s arm. “We should go inside,” he said. “Shera and Tifa both will be worried.” He glanced at Cid with the ghost of a smile, there and gone in an instant. “I do not envy your next several minutes.”

“My next several minutes?” Cid stared back and wondered, not for the first time, how wide Vincent’s sarcastic streak might be. “The hell d’you mean, my next several minutes?”

“I will be asleep, of course, after my ordeal. Our friends will understand.” He strode up the front walk slowly, with more purpose than he’d had since his transformation, leaving Cid to scramble in his wake with indignant squawks.

Vincent was right. The door opened - home, Cid thought as the cheerful noise inside spilled out onto the stoop - and Vincent all but melted through the crowd on his way to the futon in the corner of the living room, leaving Cid to take the full force of everyone’s concern.

It might be the end of the world, and who the fuck knew what was gonna happen with his rocket tomorrow, but as Cid looked around his kitchen at the clamor of Shera and his other friends, all he could think about was how good it was to be back.

Chapter 8

From an echoing cavern pulsing with faint, blue light, she called him. Her voice was softer than he’d ever heard it in life, soft with distance and warmth, but clear and piercing, too, carrying easily over the roar of the waterfall behind him. Like a bell chiming across time, or an arrow straight through his heart.

Or a bullet.

The cavern was large. Making his way to the heart of it meant traveling down narrow, twisting passages, with no sense of where he was or where he was going. Often, he’d had similar experiences in the relationships he’d tried to cultivate in his youth. Before her, before… everything. He walked, his boots rapping on the pavement with each step, and focused on her voice rather than his path.

She called his name, over and over, amidst her other murmurs and entreaties. Soon, he would reach her, would face her and her scorn and his own shame. He would have a chance to try - and fail - again to reassure her. To fail her. The sides of the pathway seemed to crowd close, to whisper their own taunts over his shoulder.

He kept walking. The cavern’s damp, musty air took on a distinct chill as he continued deeper under the mountain. For once, he was not too warm in all of his leather and brass and wool.

Just as abruptly as he’d arrived at the cave’s entrance, the walls of his narrow route now dropped away, leaving him standing at the edge of a soaring chamber with her glowing crystal at its heart. He paused to take it all in, to let his eyes adjust to the dazzling blue-white glare. There she was at the center of everything, suspended forever, as burdened by sorrow and untouched by time as he was.

He took a deep breath, held it, and let it out again before he proceeded. Every inevitable step Vincent took across the cavern’s floor weighed heavier and heavier on his shoulders, until he finally staggered to within arm’s reach of her prison.

Her eyes were closed in a face framed by falls of her glorious chestnut hair. Variations in the crystal’s thickness hid most of her skin behind opaque stone, but her hands were visible, raised with the palms turned out. Whether she gestured in blessing or warning he did not know. He suspected the latter.

Vincent, she murmured in his head, though her lips did not shift from their serene smile. When he had first visited the cave, she had shunned him, had forbidden him from approaching so close. His heart raced to be so near to her now, after so long, after so much had happened.

He reached toward her.

Vincent? came her voice again, insistent now. It was as though she couldn’t see him, or sense him. He frowned.

“I’m here,” he whispered. “What is it?”

Vincent! she cried, and then her voice wasn’t just in his head; he could hear it, from outside his head, from elsewhere. “Vincent, can you hear me? Vincent! It’s -”

He sat up swiftly with a slash of his claws, and found himself not in the familiar, hated darkness of the basement to which he’d been condemned so many years ago, but in a bright, cheerful room full of too many people.

Standing too close for comfort, but further than he suspected she had been a moment ago, a familiar woman with long, dark hair watched him take everything in. “Are you awake?” she asked. Her voice was very soft, but it thundered through the silence of everyone’s concern.

Vincent lowered his claws and blinked around the room again.

“...Vincent?” Tifa began again. His dream - her voice - echoed through his head. No. He was awake now, and these were his friends. He looked around again. The clutter of busy minds, careworn paint on the walls, and on the far side of the room, open kitchen shelves filled with teapots and mugs and various canisters, but not too much actual food. Cid’s house. Rocket Town.

Memory slotted back into place - the meteor, the huge materia, a old hangar, the skirmish he and Cid had faced against the local monsters, the… Vincent faltered. The fight, and the beast. Another transformation had happened. He’d lost control, he’d been overpowered by the great beast in his head, he’d maybe put Cid in danger.

Vincent found Cid across the room now. Blue eyes watched him carefully from above the lip of a steaming mug, bright and wary. There were no questions behind them, no expectations or disappointments he wanted to place on Vincent’s shoulders. Just patient concern, though Vincent noted the way the hand holding the mug trembled a bit. If he knew Cid at all, the tremor was a visible indicator of Cid’s impatience, the frayed leash restraining a formidable outburst of emotion.

But the room was too crowded, was too noisy, was too much for him to contemplate that further. A door nearby led outside - Vincent thought he remembered that it went to Cid’s small, indifferently-maintained back yard. The last time they’d visited town, they’d left through that door. The town was crawling with Shinra goons this time, too, but a backyard probably was a safe harbor far from any surveillance. Vincent closed his eyes with a grimace; even reeling from another nightmare, he couldn’t seem to shut off his professional assessments of their situation. Not that Shinra’s modern goons seemed to have any particular aptitude or interest in decent surveillance in the first place.

“Vincent, are you alright?” Tifa’s gentle voice trying again to reach him grated against his ears for reasons he couldn’t explain. Rather than answer her, he sat up and swung his feet to the floor. The others shifted, too: Yuffie, near the kitchen table, adjusted her feet slightly. Cloud, for some reason, moved close behind Tifa and put a hand on her shoulder.

As she turned to ask him what exactly he thought he was doing, Vincent slipped past to make his escape. Barret started to say something, but Vincent was out the door and into the yard before he’d finished opening his mouth.

Outside was mercifully quiet, with the hush of pre-dawn draped across the bustling town like a lover’s coat. Except for the portion of the northern sky hidden by the meteor’s looming shadow, the stars filled the lingering darkness with a surprising amount of twinkling, gentle light. Vincent, taking deep breaths of the crisp air, leaned back against the porch railing to admire it. The grass was chilly and wet with dew against his feet.

He must’ve dozed again, because he didn’t hear Cid join him until the younger man spoke. “Feelin’ better?”

Vincent replied with a noncommittal hum as he glanced over. Cid, standing on the porch just behind Vincent’s shoulder, had lit a cigarette and held it in the hand resting on the railing. He peered down at Vincent as he took a drag; when he exhaled, Cid gestured in Vincent’s direction.

“You want a taste?”

“No.”

Cid shrugged. “Suit yourself.” The silence uncurled like the smoke, gentle and fleeting, for a few minutes.

Vincent closed his eyes. Today would be another day of too many people, of his senses on high alert for hours, watching for danger and traps and everything else that the younger members of the group never seemed to notice. It was a pity that their return to Rocket Town coincided with such dire circumstances. The boards in the porch floor creaked as Cid shifted his weight from one foot to the other, but Vincent paid their protest no mind. He was too focused on the rocket, on contemplating Shinra’s potential plans.

The rocket loomed over everything here, dwarfing the plain little houses and the tidy streets. Vincent turned his head to look at it. Its hulking presence was dark in the pre-dawn gloom, the dark paint along the boosters seeming to swallow the tentative first sunlight creeping across it. It was a constant reminder of the town’s past - for Cid, certainly, but for everyone else who called this place home, too. Vincent wondered how it would feel to live in shouting distance of Lucrecia in her cave, to be unable to escape from the weight of her presence. His dreams were lively enough; the thought of actually walking past her every day made him want to claw off his skin in ribbons, or throw himself into the northern crater and heroics be damned.

With his mind occupied by the rocket, and Shinra, by the past and the present and everything else, Vincent’s awareness of the space around him dwindled. A heavy weight on his shoulder snapped his reveries apart. He spun, claws raised and cape and hair flying, to face the threat - and found a wide-eyed Cid Highwind, hand frozen mid-air where it had been on Vincent’s shoulder a moment ago, staring down the barrel of his gun.

If Vincent’s reflexes had been a fraction slower, the morning would have ended before it even started, and he would have had another name for the litany of sins branded across his soul.

He bared his teeth in a snarl. “Chief.”

“Shit!” Cid swallowed hard as his hand slapped back to his side. His eyes did not leave the muzzle’s bore, still pointed at him. “The hell do you think you’re doin’, Vince, pullin’ a gun on me in my own goddam yard?”

Vincent’s heart pounded in his ears, almost loud enough to drown out Cid’s indignance. After what seemed like a lifetime in eight or nine heartbeats, he dropped the gun back into its holster.

“It’s unusual for someone to sneak up on me,” he said.

“You mean for you not to hear ‘em,” Cid replied. His voice was sour.

“Yes.”

Vincent turned his attention away from the other man, back to the rocket and the sky beyond it. Rosy-fingered dawn curled along the hulk, teasing brightness and warmth and life against its inert form. Machinery like this had never held much appeal for him, but as he watched the day arrive around the slow-rotting carcass of Cid’s hopes and dreams, Vincent thought he might understand. A rocket was meant to go to space, to have one shining and brilliant moment of bliss and achievement before falling back to the world, burning away to ash and emptiness.

In a way, that planned trajectory matched what he hoped to achieve for himself alongside his young companions. It would be easy, almost child’s play, to melt into the landscape and disappear forever, haunting the little towns throughout the rolling hills. Shinra had turned him into a parasite, a creature that fed off others and dealt only death and suffering in return. He could finish this charade of heroism and, if they succeeded in stopping the meteor, could fade into an eternity of reliving all his past mistakes over and over. It was what he deserved.

 

A few streets away, the sound of a car engine roared towards the house, then quickly faded in the direction of the launchpad complex. Vincent listened to it. Another Shinra car, perhaps, some company flunkie or other arriving to impede whatever progress Cloud’s plan called for. Civilization was so loud, and so predictable.

“I shoulda said somethin’.” Cid’s quiet voice interrupted his thoughts.

“Yes.”

“All that skulkin’ you do, I figured you’d hear me from miles away.”

“No.”

Boots shifted on the porch floorboards behind him, then on the steps into the yard. And then, tentatively, “Mind if I try again?”

Vincent glanced sideways. Cid was still watching him, though the panic in his eyes had been replaced by rapt curiosity. One hand was raised, tentatively, in Vincent’s direction. It was the softest expression Vincent had seen on Cid’s face while the man was awake. Behind his cowl, he sighed fondly.

Above his cowl, he nodded in reply.

Cid took a careful half-step towards him. Though blue eyes did not dart to the gun at Vincent’s hip, there was a tension, a familiar hesitation in Cid’s expression.

“Chief,” he said again, and then Cid’s hand was on his shoulder again.

This time, Vincent did not spin away, or draw his sidearm. He couldn’t help the way he flinched from the warm weight, though, not after so many years alone. Instincts honed through long, brutal training and missions screamed in his ears that he should move, that he needed to put distance between himself and this other, that this contact could only spell doom for him.

But something in Cid’s face kept him from looking away, from retreating into the shadows that lingered in the still-growing dawn. His eyes were steady, a little disbelieving, and absolutely inescapable.

Vincent had made peace with the doom that dogged his steps ever since he received his company badge. Fate was never far behind a Turk.

He was startled, though, to find that his own fate seemed to have wild blonde hair above a scarred temple, and more than a hint of day-later scruff along its jaw.

Cid took one more half-step towards him, and now they were very close indeed, in the soft light of dawn. Cloying, lingering cigarette smoke clung to Cid’s glove and his jacket, overlaying the more familiar and comforting scent of whatever tea he’d made earlier.

Inside the house, the muffled, distant sounds of the others bustling and arguing, clattering in the kitchen, suggested no one else was paying any attention to the yard. No cars approached on the nearby streets. A bold, early songbird greeted the morning from a tree at the far end of the yard. They were as alone as they could be.

Vincent relaxed his shoulders somewhat. When Cid tried to remove his hand, some impulse he couldn’t understand led Vincent to put his own, gloved hand atop it.

For a miracle, Cid did not speak right away. They both simply watched each other, silent, wondering. A little of the tension crept back into Vincent’s shoulders, until Cid squeezed very gently and spoke over the resulting wave of warmth.

“Guessin’ you had a nightmare.” His voice was quiet and low.

“Mm.”

Cid’s eyes - blue, so blue, wide and bright and he would drown in them if he spent too long looking - searched Vincent’s face for a long moment. Vincent wondered if Cid had noticed the way his heart had sped up in great, lurching thumps.

“I’m sorry to hear,” Cid eventually said. He gave Vincent’s shoulder another squeeze. When Vincent did not release his hand, Cid glanced down at where their fingers were gently laced together. “...You gonna give this back any time soon?”

Vincent tipped his head back far enough that Cid could see the smirk playing on his face. Another impulse, fueled perhaps by that lingering warmth on his shoulder, made him bold enough to say, “That depends. What will I receive in exchange for it?”

Cid chuckled with the ease of a man in full understanding of the effect his eyes and his smiles had on those nearby. “Name your prize, Valentine,” he replied. His voice was lower now, and rougher than normal. Somehow, he’d moved closer without Vincent noticing. They were close enough now that one deeper than usual breath from Vincent would have the buckles on his cowl rubbing against Cid’s chest.

The thought made his heart thump even faster. Under his cape and his heavy hair, the heat centered still on his shoulder and under his hand was almost overwhelming, made him forget how cold his feet were in the wet grass. Vincent schooled his face into a severe, blank expression as words clawed up from his chest, into his throat and mouth, words and feelings tearing themselves from the graveyard where they’d been buried for decades.

“I -” he began.

The porch door banged open behind them. Before Cid could turn to look, Vincent’s instincts had kicked in and he’d stepped backwards one, two steps and turned to face the house. The loss of Cid’s hand on his shoulder roared across him like icewater. He shoved his dismay aside to focus on the intrusion.

“Breakfast is ready!” Yuffie called from the doorway. “We couldn’t find any oatmeal or whatever in the kitchen for you old guys, but Tifa made pancakes! And there’s eggs and stuff, too.” She closed the door with another bang. Before either of them could move, a third bang as the door flew open again. “Oh, and Cid, Shera says to tell you the tea’s gonna get cold if you wait out here much longer!” she crowed.

“Take it easy on my goddam house, brat!” Cid yelled.

“Gonna drink all your tea, Cap’n!” she shot back. She disappeared back into the house, and though the door still banged loudly as it shut behind her, she did seem to take just a moment’s care with it.

Vincent turned back to Cid, expecting to find him muttering under his breath about kids and tea and Shera, or perhaps smoking another cigarette before heading back inside.

Instead, he found the pilot looking quietly up at the rocket. The sun was far enough up by now that the yard was bathed in golden orange light. It caught in Cid’s hair and limned his shoulders like fire. His hands were shoved into his pockets. Vincent had never seen him so still, except when he was sleeping. Every inch of his figure seemed to be waiting for something, though Vincent couldn’t say what that something might be.

“Chief,” he said quietly. Cid didn’t turn, or answer, or give any indication at all that he’d heard.

Vincent walked over. “Chief,” he said again, and this time he was close enough to reach out and return Cid’s earlier gesture. His glove rustled against the twill of Cid’s jacket, but the surprised tension under his fingers disappeared almost immediately.

“Shall we go inside?” Vincent asked.

“What are we doin’ here, Vince?” Cid did not turn to look at him. Vincent frowned in thought. The question could mean any number of ‘we’ and ‘here’ and even ‘doing.’ How, then, to answer…? Cid spoke again, though, almost as though Vincent weren’t there.

“The planet’s sick. Big ol’ fuckin’ space rock is comin’ to turn us all into dust.” As was his habit, Cid flipped off the meteor, though he didn’t look north at it. “Some punk-ass kid, with too much money and less sense than that patch of begonias Shera’s got goin’ over there by the fence, keeps trying to stop us from tryin’ to fix things.” He gestured towards the rocket. “And all I’ve got to show for any of it is this lousy fuckin’ thing.” He flipped the rocket off, too. “Greatest machine I ever built,” he continued. “Best goddam design in history. It was gonna take me to space. It shoulda taken me to space. And now…” He shrugged. “Now it’s just gonna kill somebody, the day it eventually falls over.” He barked a bitter laugh. “Maybe the meteor’s for the best. Can’t die from a rocket fallin’ on your house if the goddam planet’s gone.”

Cid turned, then, away from the rocket and towards the house. Vincent’s hand fell off his shoulder. Cid’s face was full of the anger of a trapped, wounded animal. Normally, Vincent would have acted to put such a creature out of its misery, but… he recognized this sort of agony over a past that could not be changed. There was no easy solution for his friend’s troubles. They stood silently for another long moment. Vincent did not know what to say.

Eventually, Cid took a deep breath and released it in a shuddering whoosh. “C’mon,” he muttered. “Only thing worse than Shera naggin’ me about drinking my tea while it’s hot is when she’s goddam right, and it really is too cold out here. And we gotta figure out how to stop whatever the hell Shinra's planning to do with that materia.” He stomped towards the porch.

As he walked past, he reached for and squeezed Vincent’s hand briefly, a quick enough there-and-gone pressure that Vincent, left standing on his own in the grass, wondered whether he’d imagined it.

Chapter 9

Rockets, machinery, adding the sugar correctly to the tea so it didn’t get all sludgy at the bottom of the cup, and of course, flying airplanes: these were all things in which Cid considered himself something of an expert. A connoisseur, he might say, if he were in Midgar and had to use ten-dollar words to impress some fancy suit who might help keep the space program afloat.

Masterminding a strategy for infiltrating a launch complex crawling with company goons was not on the list. ‘Stealth’ was not a word most people associated with Captain Cid Highwind.

Still, there were eight other folks crowded into his living room and kitchen who all seemed to have some kind of opinion about it. As morning fully arrived and he stood at the sink scrubbing breakfast dishes, offering his comments here and there, a plan took shape. He set the last mug on the drying rack and turned to face the others with his arms crossed. They all looked determined - even Shera had come around eventually, once Tifa had explained what they were trying to do.

Shera looked to Cid, who nodded across the room at Cloud. “Spike’s in charge,” he said. “You should take him and the girls in the car with you. The layouts are in my office at the hangar; we’ll aim there. I can get to my own goddam rocket on my own, but the kids’ll need someone to show ‘em the way, swipe ‘em onto the airfield.”

She giggled, sheepish, before making a soothing gesture in the others’ direction. “My car is just outside. I promise I’m a safe driver,” she said. Tifa’s conspiratorial smile in reply, and a wink for Shera, suggested any of the others behind the wheel would be a poor choice.

Cloud didn’t seem to notice the girls’ exchange. “We’ll go, then,” he said, standing. “Barret, you and Red and Cait Sith should stay here.” The big man’s glower deepened. “Glare at me all you want. A talking cat robot, a lion with fire at the end of its tail, and a man with a gun arm are all pretty conspicuous in a town crawling with Shinra goons, and you know it.”

Cid recognized the tension in Barret’s posture. He’d felt that same simmering, bubbling anger in his own shoulders and jaw at plenty of egghead time-waster meetings over the years. He caught Barret’s eye. “Think of Marlene,” Cid said.

One of the big man’s eyebrows climbed slowly towards his hair. The others stopped their preparations to stare at both of them. “It’s early,” Barret said, his voice very quiet, “and we’re guests in your house, so I’m gonna tell myself that maybe I misheard you, Cap’n, and that I’m pretty sure you didn’t just try to tell me about my little girl.” His eyes were flinty and sharp.

Cid stared right back. “Wouldn’t dream of it. But while we head out, you can use the phone here to give her a call, if you want.” He jerked his head towards the wall-mounted receiver near the back door. “Tell her hi from me, if you do.”

For a long moment, Barret’s jaw worked. But he shook his shoulders out. “Elmyra’s probably wonderin’ what we’re up to,” he said. “Been a minute since we talked.” The tension didn’t wholly leave him, but he nodded, once, decisively. Cid nodded in return.

“...if we’re all settled, then?” Shera asked into the slightly-less-brittle silence. She collected her car keys. “This way, if you’re riding with me.”

Cloud and the girls fell into line behind her, like so many ducks. Yuffie waved at Cid on her way out the door. “I’ll drink the rest of your tea when we get back tonight!” she chortled.

“The hell you will!”

And then the door closed behind them, and the room held a much more comfortable number of people. Nanaki stretched luxuriously in the corner, then looked up at Barret. “Perhaps, when you’ve finished calling Elmyra, we could also call Grandfather.”

“Y’all got phones up there in the Canyon?” Cid asked, thinking about the lack of relay towers and other modern infrastructure along the ridges and buttes around the little settlement.

Nanaki’s ears flattened. “Of course we have phones,” he said. “The people who live in Cosmo Canyon are scholars of the Planet’s energy, not luddites. Though the village is remote, and lays gently on the land, we do have more than a few modern conveniences available.” He lifted his nose up high to peer down his snout at Cid. “Grandfather in particular has a phone so that elders elsewhere can share their findings with him more easily.”

“Okay, okay, sheesh.”

“We’ll give ‘em a call, sure,” Barret said. “Maybe your Gramps has some ideas about what Shinra wants with these big-ass materia, anyway, or what we can do with the ones we’ve got from them so far.” He glanced down at Cait Sith, who was draped across the back of the couch in the manner of his people. “How ‘bout you, cat? You got any ideas for makin’ yourself useful while everyone else goes out for their derrin’-do?”

Unlike his feline brethren, Cait Sith leapt up and, with a little twirl, landed on his feet on the seat of the couch. “Aye,” he said. “I’ll be out front, tuckin’ meself in the mailbox like some wayward wee plush friend. If I leave the mailbox flap open, maybe I can overhear some useful information from the passing company employees.”

Cid wondered if his own expression was as unimpressed as Barret’s.

“What?” Cait Sith said. “You said it yourselves, lads, this is no time for a wee talking cat to be out and about in town. But if they don’t know I’m a talking cat, I can at least listen.”

For another long beat, Cid simply stared. But Barret shrugged, frustrated, with a muttered, “Do your thing, then,” and turned to fuss with something in his bag.

“Last but not least, it’s your spooky ass,” Cid said, turning to his red-cloaked companion. Since they’d come back inside, from breakfast to planning to Cloud and the others’ departure a few minutes ago, Vincent had stood against the wall near the kitchen table, arms crossed and silent. Red eyes watched the room impassively. There was no hint of the warmth he’d shown in the yard.

“I will join you at the launch complex,” he said.

“You’ll what?” Barret barked. “Now, hang on just a damn minute! My ass is too conspicuous, but Mr. Red Cape Clankyboots here can stroll around where he wants, lookin’ like he blew into town off a movie set nearby?”

Vincent blinked mildly. Cid opened his mouth to speak, but Vincent was faster. “You are a fine leader, Barret,” he said, “but stealth and hiding are not your style.” Barret’s mouth moved, but no sound came out. Vincent continued. “I can move in the shadows, when I want to.” His eyes flashed, just once, above his cowl, as though that explained anything at all.

“You’re gonna have to tell me one day how that all works,” Barret replied.

“No.”

Before Barret’s simmering anger erupted and maybe added a few new holes to Cid’s furniture, Cid stepped between the two men. “Standin’ around all morning yakking isn’t gonna do anyone any good,” he snapped. He looked at Vincent, to his left. “If you’re comin’ with me, let’s get a move on.” He turned to Barret. “Keep an eye on the house for me. Help yourselves to whatever Shera might have in the fridge. We’ll be back this evening.”

“Whatever you say, Cap.” Barret rooted through his pockets and produced a fat, battered black leather bifold wallet. “Gotta figure out where I put Elmyra’s number.” He sat on the couch and began rifling through the various cards, receipts, and scraps. Nanaki padded across the room to watch.

Satisfied that his house’s structural integrity was no longer threatened, Cid returned his attention to Vincent. “Shall we?”

The man seemed to… flow, rather than push himself upright from leaning against the wall, an impression which was not spoiled by the way his cape followed suit. He nodded to Cid, collected his boots near the door, and disappeared outside. Cid caught up his spear and a few other things, then hurried after him. When he got outside, he couldn’t help but stare.

It was just like Vincent had said a moment ago: for a man with long hair, long brass-toed boots, and a billowing red cape, he had a knack for simply disappearing when he wanted to. Watching it in the gloomy hell of the crashed Gelnika had been odd enough, but following only a moment behind Vincent and emerging into a chilly, sunny morning to find an empty goddam street was something else entirely.

“How in the hell does he do that?” Cid muttered as he fussed with his gloves.

“I could tell you, Chief,” a voice murmured very close behind him, “but then I’d have to -”

Cid tried, and failed, to hide his surprise behind a glare. He spun towards the voice and found Vincent waiting with complete calm, just to the side of the front stoop. He leaned against the house as though he’d been doing so for years.

“Have to what, jackass?” Cid snapped over the bloom of flustered heat creeping across his face. “Kill me?”

Vincent tilted his head; under his heavy falls of hair, his red eyes glinted in the sunlight. Someone who knew him better would be able to say whether he was laughing to himself. Cid couldn’t tell. Rather than answer, though, Vincent… moved, in a way Cid didn’t entirely understand.

One minute, he was leaning casually against the house. The next, he was on the stoop next to Cid, close to Cid, as close as they’d been in the backyard an hour or two ago, as close as the sky was when all you had around you was your little metal and glass box with its engine and its wings. Just like when he took a new bird into the sky, Cid’s heart was racing. Maybe with the same excitement and adrenaline. Maybe with fear. In his experience, excitement and fear were always pretty close, too.

Vincent leaned forward so that his hair brushed against Cid’s face and cheek, until he could murmur next to Cid’s ear. “I had other things in mind,” he said. The rasp of his voice took hold somewhere behind Cid’s ribs and plucked, just once, like a guitar string, resonating with overwhelming warmth and fluttery nerves like he hadn’t felt since engineering school.

Other things...? Cid thought. He stared across Vincent’s shoulder, not really seeing anything. The moment spun out for an eternity.

But it was just a moment. And when it finished, Vincent straightened and blinked, mild as ever. “We should continue on our way.” He examined Cid’s face before turning on his heel and stepping off the stoop. The cape billowed behind him.

He paused on the front walk, before he got to the street, and turned back to Cid. “My dramatic departure would be much more effective if I knew where I was going, Chief,” he said.

Cid scowled as he gestured towards the rocket, easily visible above the buildings in town, with the hand holding his spear. Vincent’s eyes narrowed, but he did not speak. “Gotta get to Twenty-Six over there. Hang a right at this first corner.” Hefting the spear, Cid sauntered off his stoop to join his companion.

Their trip through town was mostly uneventful. Another time, maybe, Cid would point out the various landmarks, would explain to Vincent how this neighbor specialized in this type of engineering, and that neighbor focused on that part of the design process. But the tension in the streets was palpable, and neither of them felt like lingering. They avoided a few close calls with the company cars and other lackeys out and about so early. Vincent easily melted into shadows and the spaces between houses each time, just as if he were strolling through a city park; despite his best efforts to do the same, Cid found himself scrambling and puffing to keep out of sight.

“Remember that smooth-talk shit you did in Junon, with the guard?” he said, as they left the last of the town’s houses behind. The airfield, and the launch complex, spread out in a vast field ahead of them.

Vincent nodded. “A good idea,” he said. “Guards rarely question a Turk.”

But Cid waved him off. “Nah. I can do ya one better this time around; you had your chance, now it’s my turn to bullshit some poor kid.” As they reached the airfield gate and its guard shack, Cid produced a keycard from one of his jacket pockets. Vincent raised an eyebrow but remained silent as Cid sauntered to the window.

The guard inside was not a poor kid. He was leathery, and grizzled, with a paper-pusher’s haircut and the corresponding boredom. He watched impassively while Cid slapped his badge onto the window’s little counter.

“Captain Highwind,” Cid said with a nod. He wondered if the old man knew what that meant. Just in case, he poked a finger at the badge. “Got a call that y’all turkeys needed some help with somethin’ or other on my bird. So here I am - where’d ya want me to go?”

The guard peered up at him, then down at the badge. “The active operation is currently based at the Shinra Twenty-Six launchpad,” he said. Cid’s eyebrow twitched at the slight emphasis on Shinra. Palmer had mothballed and abandoned the space program; it was only through Rocket Town’s careful devotion, and his own bullheaded stubborn insistence, that the thing was still even vaguely upright at all.

The guard looked past Cid, at Vincent. “Civilians aren’t permitted past this point.” He sneered. “Especially… eccentric ones.”

Before Vincent could flip the spooky-bastard switch, or even the suave-Turk switch, though, Cid spoke up again. “He’s not a civilian.” The guard’s attention returned to Cid, this time with a flat, unimpressed stare.

“No?”

“No. He’s a Turk.” This had worked well for Vincent with the greenhorn in Junon. It should work here in Rocket Town, too. Cid leaned on the window’s counter. “Dunno why the hell the bigwigs thought I needed some kinda… chaperone -” he grimaced and waved his hand in an impatient, fluttery little circle “- but this gloomy bastard is the one they stuck me with. All I know is, he’s supposed to go where I go.”

The guard stared between the two of them. Cid didn’t dare look away to see Vincent’s reaction to the scrutiny. Just as he was about to speak up again, the guard looked down at his desk and began shuffling through some of his papers there. The longer he shuffled, the livelier Cid’s impatience became. He drummed his fingers on the counter.

“Uh, so are we good to head over to the launchpad?”

“A moment, Captain,” the guard said. “Several other members of the Turks are already on site, but I seem to have misplaced the head agent’s phone number amidst all this other material. If I can’t find it, though, it’ll just be a small delay while I dispatch a courier to bring him here in person to confirm the assignment.” He looked up at Cid, then at Vincent, with an empty bureaucratic smile. Cid tried to tamp down the urge to punch him in his perfect, brilliant teeth.

This was not going well.

“We don’t have time for your small delays,” Cid snapped. “My badge is good, and he’s a Turk, and we’re goin’ to my damn launchpad.” He snatched up his keycard and shoved it back into his pocket before turning to a silent Vincent. Red eyes watched him carefully from under that heavy fall of hair. Probably, Vincent was as aware of the precise location of every person and object nearby as Cid was of every canister of tea in the kitchen back at home. He jerked his head towards the rocket and set off in that direction when Vincent nodded. “Report me to whoever the fuck, if you want,” Cid said over his shoulder to the guard.

It wasn’t until they’d passed behind the first low shed along the airfield’s perimeter that Cid paused. “You think he bought it?” he asked.

Vincent’s cape billowed around his knees as he came to a stop nearby. He did not stop scanning their surroundings when he shrugged. “It won’t make a difference in a few minutes.”

“Hey now, that was some prime bullshitting back there! Least you could do is acknowledge that!”

“Your way with words was as charming as ever, Chief,” Vincent answered. He met Cid’s eyes just for a moment and seemed like he wanted to say something else, but he resumed his surveillance instead. He set off in the rocket’s direction. Cid hurried to keep up, and tried and probably failed to emulate the way he constantly watched every which way.

The rocket loomed ahead. It was the same as always, a reminder of his dreams and their failure. Most days, it was just there, and he could almost forget about it. It was a peculiar mountain at the edge of town, a strange overgrown forest of machinery and hubris, something that everyone walked around and past almost without even noticing. Not today, though.

A few rows of parked cars glittered in the morning sun at the foot of the launchpad. Too close to the thing, to tell the truth. Cid wondered where the site foreman was and how the hell so many people had gotten onto the airfield at all, let alone to the rocket. He spotted Shera’s car amidst the others; hopefully, she and Cloud and the girls had made it to the office without any hassle.

Between Vincent’s long legs and Cid’s worry, the distance between the fence and the rocket complex disappeared almost in the blink of an eye. The little sheds and workshops at the foot of the launchpad were abuzz with people and activity, though everyone seemed… listless, somehow. Cid tried not to think about it. Vincent spared Cid a glance, and a nod, before melting into the crowd. Once again, Cid marveled that someone who looked like Vincent could simply disappear. He quickly made his way up to one of the first raised scaffolding catwalks surrounding the shed and the launchpad.

Someone in coveralls noticed his arrival. “The Captain’s here!” they cried. Word spread quickly. “The Captain!” “Captain Highwind!” “Hey, cap!” Cid ducked his head and grinned and waved them off.

“Back to work, jackasses!” he called, laughing, not stopping. “Gotta make a good impression for the brass!”

“Must be serious if they hauled you in, too, Cap!” someone called.

He paused long enough to look back over his shoulder in their direction. “The most serious you can think of,” he called back. He grinned, wicked and sharp. “Eggheads seem to think this old bird’s grounded!” Despite the nagging worry in the back of his mind - hurry, hurry, it seemed to say - he turned and rested his hands on the steel safety railing. Several of the workers had gathered now, all watching him. Shit. But it was too late to stop. “How about y’all? Think she’ll get airborne again?” he called.

A few folks clapped, halfheartedly, as though they didn’t want to let him down. A tall engineer with a ponytail gave a little cheer that floated above the hum and the din of the ongoing background work before dying out.

Maybe they’re right, said that little worried voice. What the hell are you thinking, showing up here, expecting this hunk of junk to achieve liftoff, let alone to make it into orbit? Cid stared at his hands and smacked his fist on the railing. The thought of the others seeing his indecision and his hesitation rankled. Who was Rocket Town without their fearless, tireless, boundless leader? He gritted his teeth: would they still follow him if they knew how tired he was, how worried he was about everything?

There was a quiet sound behind him, then, a sort of huff that Cid would never have caught over the other noise around the launchpad, except it was accompanied by the familiar clank of a metal boot on the scaffold walkway. “Chief,” was all Vincent said, low, warning or reassurance or both or neither who could say?

Cid lifted his eyes and looked out at his team: the technicians, the engineers, the guys in oil-spattered coveralls and the ladies with their hard hats and toolbelts festooned with wrenches and screwdrivers. More of them had gathered now, and everyone was looking up at him expectantly. None of them seemed to notice, or care, about the meteor looming on the northern horizon.

He took a deep breath. “The hell kinda answer was that?” he yelled. “Some bullshit scattered applause, a little hoorah from one guy - I saw you, Steve, don’t think I don’t know it was you!” The engineer in question laughed and twisted away from a good-natured shoulder-punch from his colleague. Cid took in the crowd again.

“Our Twenty-Six has stood here for years now,” he said. “Shinra’s name’s the one painted on her side, but I know, and you all know, she’s not theirs.” He fixed each of them with a glare as best he could from so far away. “She’s yours, and yours, and yours.” One arm swept wide. “Might be my name on the paperwork Shinra’s got locked up in their goddam office halfway around the world, but she’s just as much a part of all of you as she is of me.” He craned his neck to look up at her nose, off-kilter, a little rusty, hundreds of feet overhead. “Eggheads and pencil-pushers in those offices will call her a junk heap, a useless relic.”

A murmur rippled through the crowd. “She’s no relic,” he continued. Another cheer - not from Steve, this time. “Maybe she didn’t age as gracefully as she should’ve, and yeah, maybe she’s a little cattywampus now. But y’know what else she is? She’s beautiful, and she’s ours, and I say, Shinra stunt or not, we’re the ones who get to decide whether our bird’s taken her last spin through the sky!”

The cheering was louder now. Hardworking folks he’d known for years - the kids fresh out of their engineering degrees, the gnarled old lineworkers from the workshop across town, the mechanics and the welders and everyone else - smiled and hooted with approval.

“Whaddaya say we show these Shinra eggheads what Rocket Town’s all about?”

More cheers and yelling.

He lifted his hands to ask for quiet. “I gotta go talk to some company turkeys about what exactly they think is gonna happen when we fire her up - so get back to work, shitbirds, and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!” He offered a lazy salute.

“Give ‘em hell, Captain!” someone called. “Get ‘em!” “Don’t mess with Rocket Town!” “Let’s kick some Shinra ass!” Everyone drifted away again slowly, in groups of two or three, chattering with excitement. Cid beamed down at them.

“You lead them well.” Vincent’s voice was just as quiet as before. Cid glanced over his shoulder and found those red eyes watching him thoughtfully. “I suspect they’d follow you anywhere.”

Cid shifted his shoulders to ease some of the tension between them. “Don’t need ‘em to follow me anyplace,” he grumbled. “They oughta follow someone who knows where he’s goin’, not someone who’s gonna feed ‘em a bunch of sounds-good claptrap and just disappoint ‘em all again.” He grimaced.

A gloved hand reached out. Fingertips brushed against the twill of Cid’s jacket before falling back to Vincent’s side. “You plan to disappoint them?” Vincent’s head tilted behind his cowl. “I thought your lucky jacket was going to take you to space. Have your plans changed, after so long?”

Cid’s eyes widened, and his mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out.

Vincent glanced away. “You were delirious, in the Gelnika, I think,” he said softly. “But you seemed very convinced of your jacket’s spaceworthiness.”

Silence unspooled between them for a long moment, despite the din of the launchpad. Cid couldn’t stop the gentle crease in his forehead as he drew his brows down in thought. Had he really said that? It seemed like the kind of bullshit he’d spout, but then, a little more tender, more personal, than normal, too. He cleared his throat. “Nobody’s goin’ to space today if we don’t figure out what President Pipsqueak is up to,” he finally said. Vincent met his eyes again. “We oughta get a move on before your buddies in suits start wonderin’ what the hell everyone’s doing.”

He pointed towards a ladder at one end of the scaffolding; it led to another level of walkways, and another, and another. Just visible beyond the highest tier was the access hatch into the rocket’s interior. “C’mon, Vince. I’ve never been good at ‘inconspicuous,’ and probably even the dullest company goon knows we’re here now.” He pointedly ignored the quiet hn of agreement. “Still, I gotta keep up appearances, which means I gotta teach my company-assigned Turk how the fuck a rocket launch works, and I;ve got about eighty hours less than I need to do it.”

“I look forward to your illuminating commentary,” Vincent replied. “How much do you think you can convey about thermodynamics and aerospace, as we avoid my former coworkers and make our way inside?” He set off, clanking his way down the catwalk, more slowly than before.

Cid’s customary confidence radiated from his smile as he walked alongside Vincent. “If you pay real close attention, and don’t ask too many questions, I can probably teach you to spell it.” There was a lot of activity, and noise, and other hubbub surrounding them, but Cid could have sworn he saw a smile ghost across Vincent’s face.