Author's note: Alternate Universe. Very. I'm going for both dark and heartwarming here, which will be the main theme of the entire series. Future chapters/stories related to this universe will focus on Vincent, Sephiroth, Cloud and team Avalanche.
Un-beta'd.
The Long Way Home
The lab assistant's name was Geoffrey. He and Vincent hadn't been friends but they had been on amiable terms before… before. Vincent tried to make it quick and clean, hadn't meant for Geoffrey's head to twist as far around as it did. Bones and skin broke gave away with a crunching sound, detaching with ease that simply wasn't possible.
Like most of the lab-assistants, Geoffrey was wearing his security pass on a tie around his neck. Vincent let the head drop from his hands, but kept the security pass. He was confident it would still let him out of the room despite the blood that coated it. He felt a twinge of deja-vu as he swiped the card against the security panel on the door. It buzzed him through, and he wondered when blood spattered security cards became a thing of the norm for him.
She smelled like lilies and antiseptic fluid. On anyone else he would have found the combination repulsive but all he could do was to draw her closer and breathe her in. She clung to him, coming undone under his hands and mouth and cock.
In these moments, he loved everything about her. He loved her fierce mind and deceptively wholesome beauty. He loved how her fingernails dug into his thighs and the way her back arched when she climaxed. He loved the rich, throaty moans she couldn't quite bottle up. He loved her, and in remembering those moments, he could almost forgive her.
"Please be quiet," Vincent murmured.
The frightened family huddled closer together in the corner, as if it could shield them somehow from him, he who invaded their home. The mother cooed wordlessly to her infant, rocking him gently in a futile attempt to convey to the child the urgency of the situation. Her blonde hair was in disarray.
Another helicopter passed overhead. Heading west, Vincent gathered. His (former) colleagues knew him well, but it was a mutual advantage. For a time, Vincent would allow them to exhaust their resources while they looked for a man on the run.
"Quiet," Vincent repeated, softly.
Something precious and fragile shifted within the bundle of blankets next to him. The memory of Geoffrey's flesh giving away under his hands flashed in his mind and caused him to still. Instead he let his (human) hand hover above a silvery head, smiling when the child reached up for him with chubby little hands.
For a moment, the voices in his head were silent.
"Vincent Valentine," he introduced himself to the woman who didn't bother looking up when he entered the laboratory. "I've been assigned to your protection, ma'am."
She looked up from her microscope, eyeing him with sudden interest. "Valentine?" she asked. "You're Grimoire's boy?"
Vincent's mouth twitched for an instant before resuming his practiced poker-face. Much was whispered about him in the company halls these days. The Valentines were once one of the richest families in the continent. Nothing remained of that prestige now except for Vincent, the bastard son of a Valentine man of science and his Wutanese maid.
This woman knew his father personally, though. In fact, she had been there the day of the accident that claimed Grimoire's life. Vincent had read the memo.
"It's good to finally meet you," she said with a small smile, and lied through her teeth. "Your father spoke highly of you."
The cargo ship creaked and shifted with every strong wave. Vincent was confident she didn't have many trips left in her, but he only needed one.
It was good to be out in the open for once. Trying to jump borders while being hunted down by a powerful mega corporation was difficult on its own. Doing it with a baby in his care was ten times more difficult. Somehow, they managed.
He looked down at the child in his arms. The bottle was still a quarter-way full, but the child's eyelids were beginning to drop. Vincent smiled, and shifted the bottle just enough to coax the child to resume his feeding. "Almost there," he murmured. "Sephiroth."
Sephiroth for a boy, Qliphoth for a girl.
She came across the names in an ancient book when she had been only sixteen and fell in love there and then. Vincent didn't remember how the conversation took a turn toward baby names of all things, but he remembered a lazy afternoon in a married woman's bed, drunk with love and Hojo's whiskey. He had laughed at her confession, even when she glared. Her eyes twinkled though, and he thought to himself that he could live with those names, if it meant he could live with her, too.
"Deported?" Vincent asked incredulously. He was eighteen, home for the first time since university happened. He wasn't expected for a whole week yet, but the welcome he received when he burst into the servants' quarters wasn't the one he had been expecting. The new maid told him some of what she knew, and later that night, Vincent's father filled him in on the rest.
Grimoire sighed, rubbing his knuckles against his tired eyes. "Her work permit expired," he explained again, "there was nothing I could have done…"
You could have married her, Vincent hadn't voiced the thought. It was an old, and futile, discussion. Instead, he demanded, "You let my mother be led out of her house in handcuffs?"
"It wasn't her house, Vincent. " Grimoire stressed, "Despite the… circumstances."
Vincent hadn't been to the village in years. The first time he came here, it had taken him weeks just to track it down, and then a few more just to recover from the mosquito bites and the fever he had developed on his journey.
Vincent turned the makeshift sling so Sephiroth could see the village for himself. It was a poor village, smaller than what Vincent had remembered, but the people here were proud and self-sufficient. Most importantly, the house at the top of the hill was still there.
Vincent's enhanced eyesight allowed him a glimpse into the house, and he chuckled when he noticed that his mother's once ebony hair had turned completely silver.