Dual Trigger
-By Chronic Guardian-
Reunione dei Giorni: Valentine, Chapter 1
Sephiroth Valentine, age seven-and-three-quarters, rarely saw either of his parents. Given that both worked for a shadowy counter terrorism organization, some would say that wasn't surprising. His mother, Doctor Lucrecia Crescent Valentine, was at the forefront of experimental medical technology and his father, Vincent Valentine, was a field agent. Frankly, it was a wonder his grandfather, Doctor Grimoire Valentine, a professor at the Third Univeristy of Rome, natural science department, had the time to care for him. Of course, Grandpa Grim didn't do it alone, he also hired the neighbor's boy, Zack from time to time.
Currently hanging a line of tinsel while precariously balancing on one foot on top of a stepping stool, Zack steadied himself with one hand and motioned for Sephiroth to feed him more of the shaggy, shimmering chord. Sephiroth nodded dutifully and obliged, lifting more out of one of the attic boxes they'd brought down that afternoon.
Zack was fun. People often told Sephiroth he was lucky to have such a rich and prestigious heritage, but he more often counted himself lucky to have a friend like the wild, raven haired boy who tried everything from climbing up the side of the house to building indoor furniture obstacle courses. Of course, the early teen was responsible when it came down to it, but to the casual eye, young Sephiroth was more fit to be watching Zack than the other way around.
As if in concurrence with the thought, the old wooden step stool wiggled under the older boy's sock before tipping to the side and depositing him on the living room floor with a thud. Rubbing his side, Zack grunted and got back up. The older boy didn't cry; never when he was hurt, anyway. Some movies could accomplish the deed, but Sephiroth chose to overlook that.
"Guess it wasn't meant to all be in one trip, huh?" Zack wheezed, still getting air back into his lungs as he studied the expanse he'd been trying to span with a single position. In all honesty it was surprising he'd gotten as far as he had. "Well, that's life. Let's get it back up and go again!"
Sephiroth gave him a tilted look before helping to move the step stool and this time holding it steady as Zack continued to insist on putting up the decorations without both feet on the stool. The youngest Valentine shook his head as he studied the deft movements of his sitter's hands. Most people would've called Zack a bad influence and fired him by now.
Thankfully, Grandpa Grim saw the truth of the boy's character. Contrary to the somber connotation of his nickname, Grimoire Valentine was a gentle and warm man, if a bit odd. He often entrusted his grandson into Zack's care and had a strong bond of trust with the youth. A bond strong enough to invite him over for Christmas Eve, when his own son would be coming home.
In a normal case, the most one had to worry about with such an offer were parents politely declining. In this case, it meant Grim trusted Zack around the deepest of the government's secrets. Sephiroth's father wasn't just an ordinary field agent. He was a handler for the Social Welfare Agency. Most people assumed that meant some zookeeper type position dealing with pet animals for the government based charity organization. The side of the SWA that people didn't know, the side that Sephiroth only heard about because it was where his parents worked, did things nobody talked about outside the grounds. The young Valentine boy had only been there a few times. There were other kids there, a bunch of girls; but his parents told him they were different, not quite normal anymore. Until the time he saw one carrying a gun, he'd assumed they just meant the girls were orphans living at the facility. Now he knew what life was like for Aerith, the girl he'd once viewed as a sister.
Aerith Faremis, daughter of Gast and Ifalna Faremis, had been orphaned at the start of the year. In the same incident that took her parents, she'd been severely wounded herself. With the Valentine family being designated her adoptive next-of-kin, Sephiroth's parents eventually decided the only way to save her was to make her like the other girls at the Agency. And that meant Vincent became her 'handler'.
Part of the process was that Aerith's name was to be changed. Sephiroth was still getting used to her new name, which sounded a lot like her old one Inside he really wondered if the change had been necessary in the first place, but he supposed so long as she was still Aerith inside it was alright. He wanted Zack to meet the girl he viewed as his older sister, the one he'd spent half his life with. It seemed to the Valentine boy that the two would get along well.
"Hey, Sephiroth..." Zack asked, securing the last of the length of tinsel and descending the stool. "What're your parents like, anyway?"
"Strong," Sephiroth answered quietly, folding up the stool and walking it back to its resting place in the closet. "And smart, too."
"Okaaay..." The dark haired boy frowned slightly as he followed his young compatriot. "Are they nice? Do they talk to you a lot?"
Sephiroth shrugged. They weren't really around enough for him to form much of an opinion. He loved them, and assumed they loved him back, but that was probably just because they were his parents. Zack didn't spend much time with his folks either, but that was mostly because he chose to spend his time at the Valentine residence. Sephiroth sometimes wondered what it would be like, to have the luxury of choice.
"Well, they can't be that bad," Zack said confidently to himself. "After all, your Gramps seems like a decent guy. I can't really imagine him raising a brat. And he works for that government charity organization, right? The Social Whatnot Agency? What's he do there?"
"He works with my sister who was in the accident." Hiding the facts didn't seem like much of an issue, particularly since Zack would be meeting them in person.
Zack's sock sheathed feet did a quick shuffle on the wood floor before he regained his balance. "You have a sister?!" he blanched.
Sephiroth gave an exasperated sigh and shook his head. He'd told Zack about his connection to Aerith multiple times. Despite this and even a few reminders from Grandpa Grim, it never really seemed to sink in for the boy.
"...Or do you just call her that and you're not actually related?" Zack guessed again after Sephiroth's silence stretched a few seconds. "Gosh... you could just call her your girlfriend or something. It's so confusing when you—"
"She's not my girlfriend," Sephiroth stated sharply. Even overlooking the five years between him and Aerith, not to mention that he was way too young to be even considering that kind of stuff, he didn't think he'd ever see the girl in a romantic light.
Zack threw up his hands in surrender. "Whoa! I'm only joking here. Do ya always gotta be so serious?"
"Runs in the family, I'm afraid," Grandpa Grim called from the kitchen. "Well, from Vincent's mother's side, anyway."
"Huh," the older boy relaxed into a thinking pose as they rounded into the kitchen to join the older Valentine. Grandpa Grim was at the counter with his back turned towards them, stirring something in a bowl. "Figures," Zack went on. "I guess I just thought he'd be more like you, seeing as you're the only family he really sees mosta the time."
"I'm afraid the bonds of family run stronger than the forces of distance, young Zack," Grim smiled over his shoulder. "Even when separated, there's something keeping us all together. And not just nucleotides and double helixes, but commonness of soul."
Zack looked helplessly at Sephiroth, probably hoping the light haired youth had understood Grim's cryptic comments. Sephiroth simply shrugged. All he knew was that his grandfather was talking about what his father called "metaphysics". Or at least, he suspected it. Most things involving "soul" went into that category and were carefully kept out of any textbook Sephiroth could get his hands on.
"And with the blessings of heaven, sometimes these can be enough to bring together the fractured pieces of a broken whole," Grandpa Grim said as he continued to stir, sounding more like a retired priest than a university professor now. "Especially at this time of year, when the warmth of earth wanes and sunlight becomes scarce, the voice of the eternal can be heard over the din of the ephemeral; calling us to reunion with truth and love."
"Umm... sounds good, Mister Valentine," Zack told the older gentleman, looking away uncomfortably.
Sephiroth couldn't really blame him. Despite the widespread immersion of Catholicism in their society, the supernatural was still something that made people uncomfortable, particularly when you pretended to understand it better than they did. Sephiroth couldn't say whether his grandfather was pretending or not, but part of the boy didn't quite believe it. Maybe it was just that he'd seen enough of life to doubt anything he couldn't see firsthand, especially with what happened to Aerith. The other part of him though, basked in the wonder of the statements, and reveled in the thoughts of a true reunion: him, his father, mother, and Aerith, all together again.
}§{
"If anything comes, don't touch it until I get back," Aria told her roommate, carefully aligning the final bits of her luggage in her suitcase. "And wish Terra and Angelica Buon Natale when they come back, alright?"
"I'll try," Quistis, a blonde girl, answered dryly from her perch on the top bunk. "Assuming I'm back before you, of course. Signore Laguna and I are headed up to a midnight mass in Milan—"
"The Director's letting you go?" Aria asked, slightly bewildered by the sudden leniency. Normally it was understood that the girls were to be kept away from religious convention.
"We're tailing an attending Padania leader," Quistis finished, giving Aria a reproving look for interrupting. "Signore Laguna is a little upset that we have to work on Christmas Eve, but he'll live. How did Signore Vincent get you two time off with all the ruckus going on about those 'Omega' guys?"
"I dunno," Aria shrugged. All her handler had told her was that he'd done all the necessary paperwork for an overnight stay and had a little talk with the director concerning past favors. Really, she was just too overjoyed that she got to spend both Christmas Eve and Christmas day with him to care about the details. Quistis could be so technical sometimes...
"Ah, and Signore Laguna says 'Have a great Christmas! Joy and peace!'" Quistis recited, her voice altering to a more jovial tone in an attempt to imitate her handler.
Aria smiled. The Portuguese man was a bright contrast to many of the other handlers and, much to their chagrin, rather vaguely interpreted the unwritten rule of not interfering with other fratelli. Besides Signore Vincent, Aria probably liked him the best. "Tell him Buon Natale too, for me," she replied, closing her suitcase and heading for the door. "Arrivederci!"
Leaving the small room behind, Aria flipped her mid-length braid over her shoulder and began walking to the parking lot. The tall buildings of the Agency headquarters towered in front of her, stubbornly remaining stark and humorless in spite of the season. Other than the rec room and the front lobby, nothing really got decorated, especially when there was so much else going on.
It didn't matter though, she would be going somewhere special with Signore Vincent. Somewhere close, somewhere happy and warm. He hadn't told her that, but she knew already.
Christmas was something she remembered. Something from before she was a cyborg. It was something magical. Something that made her feel real again.
}§{
"Do you think he'll be glad to see us?" Vincent asked quietly, helping his wife load the car with the essentials they usually kept at the Agency. His question emitted a small puff of visible air into the less-than-hospitable mid-December weather.
"Of course he will, we're his parents," Lucrecia answered, her voice curt and decisive. She brushed back some of her stray brown bangs and examined their current trunk setup. "Where's Aerith going to put her stuff?"
"Aria," Vincent reminded her. Sometimes he wondered if she recognized the difference. "She should be fine. She knows how to pack light."
Lucrecia rolled her eyes and faced him. "She knows how to pack for light for assignments. Vacations are an entirely different occasion, dear. Besides,I was thinking about the return journey; she'll have more with her coming back. Or did you think she wasn't getting any presents on Christmas?"
Vincent paused, looking away as he refused to ponder the question. Gift giving had never been his thing. It required an understanding of people that fell outside of his mode of operation and, frankly, there was always that lingering fear that he'd wasted his money on something they didn't need or want. Even at this stage in life, it was something of an unresolved matter that insistently recurred every year before being put to the back of his mind for another few months.
"...There'll be room," he assured her. If worst came to worst he could always leave half of his luggage with his father. Or they could take two cars. But Lucrecia wanted them to all make the commute together, saying it would be better that way.
Why she'd insist on that and then worry about the carrying capacity of a single trunk was beyond him.
Lucrecia did another shuffle of their luggage, yielding a few more square inches in the tiny trunk, and grimaced again. "You're sure?"
"Assuming she doesn't receive an entire wardrobe, then yes."
"And if she does?"
"Then I'm going to have a very long talk with either you or my father on the lost concept of frugality." He didn't try to hide his growing exasperation, exacerbated by the season's weather. Some times he thought he understood Lucrecia, others made him wonder what he'd gotten himself into when he'd said "I do". She was reasonable in most respects, but if she got the wrong idea in her head then conversation could quickly turn into an unwilling argument. Vincent had enough of those with Jean Croce, his superior; taking the problem home for the holidays wasn't something he'd been planning on.
He looked back over at his wife. Her swirling brown eyes dared him to make another comment. He pursed his lips, looking for the right words to defuse the situation. The sort of words that never seemed to come when he needed them.
"Signore Vincent!"
Thankfully, his cyborg chose that particular moment to make an entrance. They both dropped the conflict and looked to the girl they'd nigh on given up their lives to save over the past year. Toting with her a suitcase that seemed at least three-quarters of her size, Aria approached the couple from behind, brunette hair bouncing with a light skip. An open mouthed smile, something of a rarity for her, beamed back at Vincent as she joined the couple by their car.
Slowing to a halt, the girl looked from her handler, to Lucrecia, then back at her handler something a little darker than confusion overshadowing her smile. Suddenly all that tension that had dissipated with her arrival was back.
"Why is Doctor Crescent coming with us?"
The question wasn't accusatory. Not outright, at any rate. But it did hold a slight edge that Vincent was certain Lucrecia detected as well. He'd heard stories about some of the cyborgs forming the semblance of a romantic attachment to their handlers. He'd hoped it was just the support staff poking fun, but with how Aria was acting now...
"She's my wife, remember?" he said, fighting a little to keep his voice controlled. He could've sworn he'd told her that. He'd even told the conditioning technicians to keep it in mind when putting together her mix. Apparently they hadn't been paying attention either.
"...Oh," Aria replied quietly. For a moment they all just stood there dumbly before she shuffled up to the back of the car and squeezed her belongings into the mix of boxes and cases.
Vincent sighed and looked over his cyborg's head at his wife. She had a look he couldn't decipher on as she simply held out her hand and uttered, "keys."
He regarded her for a moment. "No. Explanation," he countered calmly. If one of them could get Aria to understand, it sure wasn't going to be him.
"That's your job, 'mister handler'."
"Maybe so." He shrugged as he skirted around to the driver's side of the car. "But it's your skill set."
Lucrecia fumed, but a quick glance behind confirmed she wasn't going to stand there obstinately in the cold until she got her way. Soon enough, the two Valentines and their young charge were all buckled into the car in various states of disgruntlement and headed out of the SWA main campus on the road back to the normal world.
It took until the Agency was far behind them before Lucrecia finally swallowed the blow to her pride and began attempting to explain to Aria the relational web that had gone undetected. As luck would have it, the Valentine residence lay on the far side of Rome, so they were afforded a good chunk of time to sort things out.
Unfortunately, Lucrecia's mood was currently making her partial to long editorials mostly concerning Vincent's carelessness with vital information, so it was only just by the end of the ride that she was finally getting around to the simple point that she and Vincent belonged to each other.
"But... I belong to Signore Vincent too, don't I?" Aria asked, only accepting the previous statements on a grudging nod from her handler.
"Not in the same way," Lucrecia answered firmly. "You're like a younger sister, or a daughter. You're close, but you aren't his one-and-only."
"And you don't have to be," Vincent butted in, graced with the boldness to speak at the prospect of Aria imminently throttling his wife. "You... you're fine, just the way you are."
An uncomfortable silence settled over them as Vincent pulled into his father's driveway and parked outside the already-occupied single car garage. Nobody moved as the hum of the engine died in memory and the cold began to creep in the absence of the heater running. Vincent suspected he'd said something wrong, as usual, but he also suspected himself to be paranoid, so he wasn't going to be getting anywhere fast thinking like that.
What he knew for certain was that even if he had driven here alone and hadn't just been through a potentially lethal conflict of interests, he would still be sitting in the car trying to think of how to set foot in the sanctuary of his father's house after all that had happened throughout the year.
How to approach innocence again after his last set of sins.
Not that he'd been Mr. Perfect in the preceding years. Before his work as a handler, he'd been a field agent for Public Safety Section 1. Investigative work, although far less incriminating than training child assassins, still had it's fair share of grime to add to his morality. Every year it was harder to come back.
Finally, this time it felt like he'd crossed the threshold. He'd only had her kill three people so far, two thugs in the recent warehouse raid and a Padania grunt on some other mission. But three lives were still three stains of blood he'd put on her hands, rather than his own. He understood being accountable for his own actions, for his own sins. Being accountable for hers though...
"Are we going inside?" The question rose tentatively from the back seat.
Vincent fingered the release for his seatbelt but let go before enough pressure had been exerted to activate the mechanism.
"Aria." A gruff tinge snuck into his tone as he addressed his cyborg. Her magitek enhancements made her slightly less impressionable than some of his peers, but he still had to choose his words carefully around her. "There's a boy in this house who knows you. His name is Sephiroth."
He paused. Aria stared back in complete attention, her only vital sign being an occasional blink. Suppressing a grimace, he pushed forward.
"He... might call you Aerith."
"Like the girl from my dream?"
An involuntarily sharp intake of air passed through his lungs. "Yes. Like the girl from your dream. I want you to be kind to him. And whatever you do, you must remember not to talk about missions or guns or death or pain. Don't do anything violent, do not use force on anyone. Here is a safe place where all that isn't allowed. You understand?"
"..."
"Aria, do you understand?"
"Yes, Signore Vincent."
"Good. Now let's—"
He was interrupted by a sharp rap on the window and his door opening from the outside.
"Vincent!" He was caught in an awkward standing-to-sitting embrace before being dragged out of the car by his ear.
His father's hand drifted from his ear to his shoulder as the older man led him steadily towards the house. "How long do you intend to make little Sephiroth wait? Come in!"
Throwing a glance over his shoulder, Vincent saw Aria outside of the car and almost at his side before his gaze corralled her pace and she looked away. Lucrecia too had exited and was following with a weary smile as they passed out of the cold and into his father's dwelling.
~Author's Notes:~
12/24/13: The rest of this story should be soon to follow, but if it is not know that more is indeed to come. Thanks for reading!
-CG
On translations (from Italian):
Buon Natale: Merry Christmas
Arrivederci: See you later
Signore: An Italian honorific similar to Mister(Mr.). Used here by the cyborgs to show deference to their handlers.
Reunione dei Giorni: Reunion of days
On the setting:
Gunslinger Girl (GsG) by Yu Aida takes place in Italy. Dual Trigger is a fan made adaption that integrates altered characters from Final Fantasy into the tale. This story is set in late 2004, the year the GsG anime began airing.
This particular interpretation of Vincent/Lucrecia is heavily influenced by FullMentalPanic's "Valentines", a detailed and wonderfully written fic that is recommended to any curious readers wishing to know more on the subject.
On in universe terminology and relations:
1: The Social Welfare Agency(SWA). This is the "front" name of the Italian Government's Public Safety Bureau, Section 2. On the outside, they're a charity organization meant for aiding those in critical medical need, particularly children. On the inside, they're a counter terrorism branch that utilizes formerly terminal young girls remade as cyborgs to hunt down their targets in situations where the law is an obstruction. Their main target has been the Padania "Five Republics Faction" movement, but they'll tangle with other threats when the need arises.
2: Fratelli(Singular: Fratello). Each of the cyborgs at the SWA is assigned an adult who watches after and trains them. These men are known as handlers. Together, cyborg and handler are known as a fratello (siblings, in Italian). The fratelli are the main strong arm of the SWA, and often take the brunt of the workload so far as field jobs are concerned. Since handlers are granted virtual free reign with the training and discipline of their cyborg, there is a broad range of dynamics between the various fratelli. Vincent and Aria, the featured fratello for this story, is unique in that Vincent has a surviving family outside the agency that he is in regular contact with, dividing his attention to his cyborg.
3: The Padania Movement. One of the main enemies of the SWA, this organization seeks to secede Northern Italy from the rest of the nation. They are willing to resort to terrorism to achieve this goal. However, not all of its members are violent, irrational radicals. At its heart, they all simply share a discontent with the Italian government and wish to start anew. Sadly though, these idealistic words are often overshadowed by their grim deeds; leaving reason an early casualty of the conflict.
4: The Omega Faction. This group seems to be making a clandestine bid for the SWA's attention, starting with the abduction and subsequent murder of an SWA doctor named Gast Faremis, Aerith's father. Little is known about their activities, and as they press closer to the SWA more questions arise concerning their motives. What is known it that they mean business, and they mean it in a very bad way.