I own nothing of FF7. Therefore, everything from it belongs to whoever owns it.
Ring!
"Honey, who is it?" called the older woman washing the dishes in the kitchen. Her aged husband looked over his newspaper at the caller ID.
"It's an unknown caller again!" he hollered back. "It's probably one of those solicitors again!"
"Don't answer it then!" advised his wife, rinsing out one small, steel pot. "Let the answering machine handle it!"
"Yes, dear," replied her husband, turning back to his newspaper as the answering machine began blaring its recording.
"Hello, you've reached 877…" the husband grimaced at the farce the bloody machine had made of his voice. He didn't really sound like that, did he? "… Please leave a message after the tone and we'll get back to you as soon as we can!"
The elderly couple was astonished when the muffled tones of their daughter echoed though the house. She had gone off and joined Shin Ra not long ago. She'd said something about an administration agency that was in charge of internal review or something like that…
"Mom? Dad?" her voice gasped raggedly as her father desperately tried to get his frozen limbs to work as his wife waited anxiously in a similar state. "It hurts so much!" wailed their little girl. There was so much pain in her voice that her father unfroze and tripped heavily on his way to the phone. "I didn't think that bullets hurt like this. I don't want to die, mom! I'm afraid…" she sobbed raggedly as her father crawled desperately towards the phone stand. Her mother stood in the kitchen, dishwater dripping from her clenched hands onto the floor. "I'm not ready…" trailed off their daughter's voice in a panicked gurgle and her parents stared at the answering machine, horrified as it stopped recording the silence on the line.
They got a letter from somebody at the company a week later. "Dear Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne, we regret to inform you that your daughter, Ms. Emily Hawthorne, died in a terrible car accident. According to her cell phone records, some impostor made a call to your residence not long after her car accident…" They shredded the letter without reading further and kept the tape from the answering machine even after throwing the bloody thing out.
AN: This struck me yesterday on the bus. I have no idea where it came from, but I'm sure everyone that has caller ID has let the answering machine handle a call like this one. Well, not exactly like this one, but you know...