The Twelve Days of X-Mas
Chapter One
For Zarazia
SUMMARY: A series of murders hits a little close to home for Cloud Strife, sometime-Private Investigator and former hero of the world.
WARNINGS: Character death, discussion of corpses and murder. Merry *%&^ ing Christmas.
RATING: R for swearing and descriptions of death/violence.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: I had a blast writing this, even if it is rather dark and un-Christmasy. Trying to write something that I thought Zarazia might enjoy was difficult, but fun, and I hope I did a good job. Thanks to Woodster for alpha-reading and VulcanElf for an amazing beta-read.
EDIT: Feel free to head on over to my profile, where you will find a link to download a nicely-formatted PDF e-book of this, in it's entirety, for your perusal offline, thanks to the Fanfiction E-book Project at the Genesis Awards.
I am clearly broken and no one knows what to do
Peaces of the puzzle don't fit, so I pound them into you
Itching is the pulse inside
Creeping up to come alive
It's just doing what it's gonna do
Times are looking grim these days
Holding on to everything
It's hard to draw the line
-Korn featuring Skrillex, "Get Up!"
It was raining, which seemed really cliché to Tifa's ingrained sense of aesthetics.
Still, it was raining when Cloud walked into the bar – wearing a leather duster, of all things, so unlike him – and Tifa inwardly winced at the mess he was making on her nice hardwood floors. Puddles began at the front door of Seventh Heaven, and ended in a very large pool beneath where Cloud was now sitting at the bar.
Thankfully, she'd chosen the vinyl-topped bar stools, rather than opting for the leather ones that had so caught her eye when furnishing the place.
Also unlike him, Cloud immediately ordered a double of scotch whisky. Cloud was more of a rum person, when he could be coerced into drinking in the first place. At this point, Tifa began to get an inkling that something was very wrong in the world of Cloud Strife, her husband and longtime friend.
Really, after eleven years of marriage, she should have known right from the beginning.
She had been surprised when Reeve had called, asking for his expertise (Cloud having been semi-drafted into the police force of Edge, he'd become something of a private eye as he approached middle age), but not unduly worried. Now, a tendril of fear began to weave its way from her gut around her spine, chilling her in a manner that the fire she had just stoked could not help.
She held her hand out for his jacket, which he peeled off with a wrinkle of his nose.
"It's Cid's, sorry," he said, by way of explanation. Tifa didn't reply as she hung the sopping mess up on a hook near the fireplace; it'd drip off quietly there, and the mess would evaporate from the flagstones of the hearth rather than making water-stains across her floor.
She let him drink in silence, locking the door and cleaning up while he sipped. The warmth of the drink pooled in his stomach, calming him and steeling him for what came next: telling Tifa and the others.
Once Tifa had mopped up everything, she came to sit next to him at the bar. Cloud's face was normally quite pale, of course; so was Tifa's. It was a lovely side-effect both of having grown up in the cloudy climate of Nibelheim, and growing up so near a Mako reactor.
Now, however, Cloud looked almost bloodless. As if he were about to faint right off the chair. He'd seen something terrible tonight.
"Was it that bad?" she asked, gently.
"Awful," Cloud replied, his eyes glazing over.
Reeve's voice had shaken badly when he'd called Cloud. It was going to be bad, he knew, but nothing could prepare him for the mess he found. The mess that was a nightmare, horrible to behold, and yet, so very familiar.
Pieces – and that was all it could be called: pieces, a hand here, an arm there – of the victim were strewn about a small cave just outside of Midgar. They might not have known who it was but for some familiar items and the infamous gold gauntlet left out prominently, for the murderer had incinerated the head. It was, perhaps, the only way that he could have been properly killed, considering his amazingly fast recuperation time and healing ability. It had been done with Flare, if Cloud knew his materia, but he'd be calling in Yuffie for a positive identification later.
"Whoever did it must've done a helluva lot of research," Cid had said, scratching his head. He looked a little ragged: his eyes were suspiciously red, the skin around them puffy. Cloud knew that Cid Highwind had done his mourning already. "Everyone knew he was damn-near immortal, and his hearing was just 'bout superhuman. How someone coulda snuck up on him..."
"It must have been someone he knew," Cloud had replied. "No one else could have gotten the better of him otherwise."
Reeve shook his head. "At least his dreams will be peaceful now," he said, mournfully. Then again, Reeve was a mournful sort of person. Cloud was willing to bet he was blaming himself for this death right now.
In the present, Cloud shook himself back to awareness. Tifa was looking at him expectantly. He shivered, flashes of blood, gore, and burnt flesh flashing across his mind's eye once more.
"What I want to know is," he said, "How does one go about killing a man like Vincent Valentine, and survive?"
They weren't going to have a funeral (Yuffie had stomped her protest of the concept: "His whole life was a goddamn funeral," and no one could really object to that), but Shera proved herself to be the pious one of the group, insisting that his soul couldn't rest until they'd laid his physical remains to rest as well. It was a small affair: no press, just AVALANCHE and a few other friends he'd gained throughout the years, held a mere two days after he'd been killed and before the news really had time to percolate throughout Gaea.
The funeral procession wound its way through the snow-covered hills outside Wutai. Yuffie pouted; whether it was because she hadn't wanted a funeral for Vincent, or because she had to wear the ceremonial kimono, Cloud was unsure.
The ninja had nearly gone apoplectic at the thought of burying Vincent in Rocket Town, as Shera had originally suggested. The launch site's proximity to the Nibel mountains and the cursed town within was exactly the wrong spot for Vincent Valentine to be buried at. No one could really argue that point, and so when Yuffie suggested Wutai as a final resting place for the gunslinger, nobody objected.
Later that night, she gathered up Cloud, Tifa and Cid and hit the bar in what she announced was a "far more fitting goodbye ceremony," and proceeded to get the group of them shit-faced drunk.
Cloud resented this the next morning, when he had to attend to yet another crime scene, this time with a hangover.
"I figured I'd better call you in before anyone else," the Kalm police chief, a scrawny little man named Charles, told Cloud. Cloud blinked and tried to filter what the man was saying through the pounding in his head.
"I mean, we found him in his office and at first it looked like a suicide," Charles said. "But it was locked from the outside and there was another set of footprints, and we found glove-prints in the dust on the rafter he was hung from. And he wasn't wearing gloves."
Cloud followed him uneasily into the WRO headquarters. Choppers were flying overhead, their beat reverberating through his skull (fwopfwopfwopfwopfwop) in an enormously unpleasant manner. Electric lights flickered on and off gloomily, adding to Cloud's general misery. Charles led him to an elevator and, to Cloud's horror, punched in the top floor - where the WRO Commissioner's office was located.
Up and up they climbed. The ascent took forever, an eternity of agonized waiting. Cloud finally exited the elevator and was relieved to find that he didn't smell the sharp, coppery tang of blood in the air. It would have, he thought, been more than his poor stomach could take at the moment.
Cloud often wondered to himself, in his heart of hearts, if he was getting too detached. He shouldn't be able to look at the body of one of his best friends - a man who helped him save the world - so apathetically. Six years of being an on-call detective for some of the largest police forces in the world had certainly made their mark on him.
Although, perhaps, it was seeing Zack gunned down that had changed him. He supposed he'd never know.
The police forensics people offered to bring Reeve's body down, but Cloud wanted to have a look at the crime scene unaltered, something he'd not been able to really do with Vincent's. The death of two members of AVALANCHE in less than a week had him feeling on-edge.
He'd bet his entire fortune that these two deaths were related. But he had no way to prove it yet.
The Kalm PD cleared out of the room, leaving only Cloud and the police chief, who stood in the corner, pointedly not looking at Reeve's body.
There were greasy prints on Reeve's pants, average adult-sized ones. A close examination of the footprints revealed to him that this was, in fact, the work of two people. They wore the same style of shoe, and the same size, but one of the people – whoever it was who had slipped the rope over Reeve's head rather than the person who hoisted him up there – was wearing the wrong size shoe.
Cloud found himself mentally flipping through the first crime scene in his mind. "Take pictures of everything," he said, turning to the police chief. "Document everything you find on and around him. Take detailed pictures of the footprints. I have to go check on something."
Cloud left the room, his hangover forgotten. He flicked his phone open and dialed Cid's number, knowing the pilot would be just as hungover, if not more so.
"It's Cloud," he said, interrupting Cid's flow of innovative swear words. "Reeve's dead, and I need a ride. I need to go look at the first crime scene. Get Yuffie." He paused briefly. "Don't tell anyone yet, and come get me from WRO headquarters in Kalm."
Cloud had known that Cid would take him seriously. He hadn't thought that Cid would arrive a mere twenty minutes later.
Yuffie was an ashen color that had absolutely nothing to do with her hangover, which appeared to be nonexistent. Cloud found himself unbelievably jealous of her.
"Reeve's dead?" she whispered, and it was at that moment that Cloud realized she'd had feelings for the older man.
"Murdered, just like Vincent," Cloud said. He paused. "Well, not just like Vincent. They hung Reeve in his office, tried to make it look like a suicide. They didn't try hard enough, though."
"They?" Cid said. He too looked unbelievably chipper for someone who'd drunk half a bar's worth of alcohol the night previous.
"They," Cloud affirmed. "I found footprints. They were the same, right down to the style of shoe and size. One pair was wobbly, like the person was slipping around inside of them. One of them was wearing the wrong shoe size."
Yuffie sank into the copilot's chair, legs gone suddenly nerveless. Cloud knew the feeling.
Cid handed him something in a sealed container, and their inebriation-less state made a sudden kind of sense to Cloud. It was Tifa's patented hangover remedy. It tasted like Ifrit's bowels going down, but it worked. Cloud held his nose and chugged it.
"Who'd want to kill Reeve?" Yuffie said. "He's done nothing but good in the last decade, helping get rid of monsters, and build roads, and clean up Shinra's mess."
"I haven't got a clue," Cloud admitted. "But I think they might be the same people who got Vincent."
Cid nodded. "Hang on to something, kids. We're gonna get back to Midgar in ten seconds flat."
The crime scene had been blocked off, but there had been no posted guard, so Cloud was unsurprised to find that it had been wiped clean.
"But look," Cloud said, pointing. "Same two sets of footprints. This was definitely the work of two people, and they definitely killed both Vincent and Reeve."
"What does that mean, though?" Yuffie asked. She was still ashen-looking but doing better, as far as Cloud could tell. He'd see about having her talk with Tifa when they got back to Edge.
"It means," Cloud said, feeling a little melodramatic as he said it, "that we're dealing with a pair of serial killers."
"It gets worse," Cid pointed out, chomping on his cigarette and gesturing at Cloud. He seemed to be figuring they had already come to the same conclusion.
"How could it get worse?" Yuffie demanded, also turning to Cloud.
Cloud hesitated, and then spoke carefully. "It looks like whoever is doing this might be targeting members of AVALANCHE," he said. "Any of us could be next."