He found his eyes drifting again, a pair of helpless ghosts, drawn like moths to the sunlight beyond the window's glass.
The grasses were at high tide, overgrown with the delicate blooms of the field, billowing, undulating in the wind, calling him-- As tempting as the beckoning-white hands of an apparition of moonlight.
Even the windows of this place seemed to know of his sloth-like disability, and sang a siren song as their heavy stone frames curved and curled over the glass in an intimately possessive way.
Choked on shadow and fussily tired, Vincent Valentine leaned against the stone, one of his high cheekbones practically touching the pane, the light heat of spring laying against his skin.
Ever since he'd been reassigned to here-- to Nibelheim-- it seemed as if he couldn't find time for anything else but thinking. It wasn't as if there was much else to do; but in Midgar he had always been busy, moving, headed somewhere, returning from somewhere. . .
He hadn't found himself alone with his thoughts in a while. Such a thing should have been welcome. After all, it was a fresh breath of humanity after carrying out orders as a pre-programmed Turkbot at headquarters-- But here--
Here, he was not alone with the thoughts, but rather, locked in a maze with them and a myriad of phantoms that came and went, like passing through walls. These phantoms of science-- Shinra's cogs and gears in tattered lab coats-- They had gutted this mansion, replacing its yellowing volumes of literature with tomes of data tables and its beds with operating tables of unforgiving steel. Yet, they had only built upon the stifling, waiting atmosphere of the place, had strengthened its eerie foundation of shadows and dust.
He sighed, a part of him escaping the gloomy backdrops of his mind and riding on carbon dioxide to the musty sunlight at his fingertips.
Too much time to think.
Next break his grim-intentioned captors gave him, he was going to do a little research of his own, out into the sun and along that half-concealed path he thought he'd glimpsed earlier, tangled in weeds and time.
Maybe it would lead him to a place less closed and locked, and maybe, just maybe, he would catch up on his sleep.