I've got no beef with you.
FN (Firecat Note) This story takes place after another story written by me and posted by my good friend and editor thegr8sephiroth called Twilight Perfection. However if you don't want to read through 200,000 plus words here's all you need to know it: Twilight Perfection is another one of those stories where Sephiroth redeems himself as a hero, falls in mutually in love with Aeris, he protects her life, she protects his sanity, Sephiroth finds out Vincent is his father, and grows a pair of feathery wings (one white one black) while defeating Jenova in North Crater. After which Meteor gets blown up by Holy without doing any damage and the two (Aeris and Sephiroth) get married and move into to the house where she was born in Icicle Village.
This fic is set to Ceann's "I've got No Beef With You", the parts of the fic in italics are song lyrics used to set the tone, and if I get any of them wrong, it is my own fault, but Ceann doesn't post their song lyrics online, at least not to this song. For maximum reading pleasure go to (http / www. last.fm /music /Ceann / I' ve+G ot+No +Beef+ With+You) (remove all the white spaces I added so that wouldn't show it they're weird about links like that) and you can listen to at least the start of the song and get a feel for it.
My girl's got a particular point of view, she's a real nice girl but she's a vegan, too, and I wonder if she's ever going to change.
Aeris had come to the conclusion that trying to live in close quarters with former general Sephiroth Valentine was not an experience for the faint of heart. It was quite disturbing in fact. Her husband no longer screamed in his sleep and unintentionally set things on fire, but still...
He was disturbing because Sephiroth Valentine was a more or less certified all-around genius; his brilliance extended off the battlefield and into every single area he took an interest in. For example, he could flip through a book and memorize every single page. He was the larger-than-life, twice over hero of Midgar; once for winning the Wutain War and once for saving the entire world.
Being a man who valued his privacy Sephiroth had decided to move as far away from Midgar as possible which was why there two were currently living in a small one room house in Icicle Village that had once belonged to her parents. The problem stemmed from the fact that genius was not something that you could just turn off.
Sephiroth could never stop being Sephiroth. Which was why Aeris had to end up on the receiving end of a great many strange looks whenever he dragged (or simply carried) a dead monster back into the village, and the looks only got more intense when they saw what he did next...
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My girlfriend's got a problem with the way I eat, not about how much, but my commitment to meat, and she wonders if I'll always be this way.
"Do you have to do this every day?" Sephiroth casually pulled a large chest out from underneath his and Aeris' bed; he opened it, and smiled. It was more or less filled to the brim with knives. Of course not a single one of those knives had ever drawn blood from a living foe, mainly because Sephiroth didn't need knives for combat; he had could kill people with his bare hands just fine, thank you very much, not to mention he never went anywhere without his trusty Wutain-style longsword Masamune.
The knives were for cooking. He had special ordered most of them, so when viewed all at once they looked less like a cook's collection of utensils, and more a gathering of every single weapon ever wielded by the villain in a slasher film. Sephiroth was aware of this of course, but it was necessary; you needed a special quality and type of knife if you were going to cut a Vlakorados, even after the monster was dead. "I don't do it every day...
Besides it's the right way to live in tune with the Planet. This thing was wandering too close to the village, so I killed it; which now gives me a responsibility to make use of it to the fullest extent possible." Sephiroth made his selection and stood up, calmly examining his reflection and the sharpness of the knife's blade.
"Sephiroth, there is a difference between being self sufficient, and being a crazy survivalist. I'm pretty sure cooking a monster on your front lawn, which also happens to be the town square, falls on the crazy side of that line." Sephiroth averted his gaze so he didn't have to meet Aeris' eyes, instead focusing his attention on the small stove inside the house. "Well what would you have me do with them?
Even if I cut it up first to get it through the door, I'd never bee able to cook it on that thing. Not to mention we don't have much in the way of a chimney to let the smoke out. So I cook the dead monsters outside using a firebreak, which isn't hard to make considering that with the wind chill it's well below degrees below freezing outside." "Where everyone can see you looking like a maniac, using your magic to napalm a monster who has to weigh around five hundred pounds?
You know Icicle Village imports plenty of food so that people don't have to do stuff like this, right?" Sephiroth's arms drooped as he shrugged. "We don't need to, but I can't get rid of the monster's corpse any other way. If I just leave it laying around then all the local animals become dependant on me. In order to keep the local wildlife properly wild I need to dispose of the bodies, so I bring them back, I cook them, and we eat them. Is that so wrong?"
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And I told her I'm a complicated, picky guy, and this has to end, then she asks me, "Why?" But she knows, cause I got no beef with you.
It was a small monster that he could cook inside this time. "Where did you even learn to cook, if you don't mind me asking?" Sephiroth was a great cook, Aeris would be the first admit that and not just because she had wanted to be proud of her husband, since he had plenty of other fine qualities and achievements for her to be proud of. He actually could make wonderful meals out of a few imported spices and whatever monsters he could kill and drag back, that was why she let him do it.
Of course he went about cooking with the same sort of professionalism that he handled warfare. Each slice was precise, effective, and to the point, as if he has spent hours planning it out with complicated diagrams and maps. "I picked up after the Wutain War. You know how I told you that Jenova was driving me insane because I was doing nothing between then and Nibelhiem?"
Aeris nodded along as Sephiroth began to go about mincing the thing, pushing aside a few parts of the monster that he had just cut from its carcass. "Well I took up cooking because it involves sticking sharp metal implements into soft flesh, fire, and blood. That made her happy, so she didn't scream in my mind quite as loud. It was simply a way to get through the day; learning to cook was a survival mechanism."
Sephiroth had more or less been born and bred (not to mention genetically modified while still a fetus inside his mother's womb) to be the ultimate survivor. Aeris had acclimatized to living four hundred miles north of everywhere. Sephiroth on the other hand, she wasn't 100 sure, but by the same token wasn't about to rule out the possibility that he might have actually already started evolving to better handle their new environment.
A flash of recognition made Aeris suddenly much more interested in what her husband would be serving for dinner tonight. "Seph, doesn't that monster use poison attacks?" "Yes." He seemed blithely unconcerned about this fact, but Aeris lacked his confidence. "Don't you think that trying to eat something that is poisonous might be a bad idea?" Sephiroth never took his eyes off the meal he was making as he responded. "It could be if you do it wrong. That's why I'm cutting it and pushing aside all the poison sacs so that I can dispose of them later."
"You're absolutely sure you know where they all are?" Sephiroth nodded as he continued to cut. "Before I'd even think of serving this to you I tasted it extensively." He pointed to one batch of body parts. "Poisoned, poisoned, poisoned, poisoned, poisoned, and poisoned." He pointed to the other group that looked exactly the same. "Tasty bits." It was funny; Sephiroth was usually the more skeptical of the two.
"Umm, are you sure that was safe? You decided to find out where the poison was by taking random bites out of it till you tasted it?" Sephiroth put down his knife and turned to face his wife of two months. "Aeris, I never intended to tell this to you this, but here it is. One night, after an absolutely legendary amount of drinking, Zack and I decided to test just how immortal I was.
So with a scalpel I'd stolen from Hojo's lab I gave my self totally unnecessary surgery to remove my left kidney. I survived that, and inside two weeks I snuck into Hojo's lab again to give myself an X-ray; it showed a man with two healthy kidneys. So, naturally, I went on to make my first small fortune on the black market by selling the following organs, all taken from my own body over the course of a few years: fifty seven kidneys, thirteen lungs, half of my liver half a dozen times over, and one heart.
That last one I only survived because Zack kept me on an artificial respirator after he removed it, though on the plus side he told me that after the transaction took place the surprisingly well preserved mother of a thirteen year old boy who lived because he's got my first heart in him did all-but-literally bang his brains out. I also think it's safe to say serving as my Queen's royal food tester isn't going to kill me either."
That said, he casually slammed a hand against the hilt of the knife he'd put down, causing it to flip up into the air. Sephiroth held out his hand, and spread his fingers. The knife plummeted perfectly through the gap between his middle and index finger. At which point he closed his hands around the knife and adopted a far more textbook grip before he got back to cutting.
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Now she's reading books and she's got these facts and I pretend to listen, but I'm hiding snacks in places I know she never goes.
Sephiroth walked into the house and found Aeris glaring from the bed. It was that' look. The look that made Sephiroth want to flee the continent and beg for political asylum, he didn't care who gave it to him, just so long as he could get away from the look she was giving him. There were few things in the world that frightened him, but when Aeris gave him the glare... That frightened him down to his Lifestream essence.
"I decided to inspect our basement today." Sephiroth should have been out the door and striving to build up enough momentum to get airborne, except he was rooted to the spot. "Oh." Aeris crossed her arms and somehow increased the glares intensity. "I was rather surprised to find that we had a basement Sephiroth, especially because this house is built on snow."
Sephiroth rolled his tongue around in his mouth. "Well you know what they say, if you have lemons make lemonade. I was trying to be an optimist." It was the best defense possible, but Aeris wasn't buying it, with good reason of course. "I've heard that one Seph.
But you know what saying I've never heard? If you have a single room house, cut up a section of the floorboard, shovel out the snow beneath it, and then set up a trapdoor leading into a secret underground basement to serve as a meat locker where you can store the corpses of your most recent kills. That one seems to be a little bit less common sense and a little bit more Sephiroth Valentine's guide to how turn your home into a fourth world power."
Sephiroth could do nothing but stand there while his wife flayed him alive with words. "It seemed like a good idea at the time, I mean it's not like it is going to tank the property values of this place." "And you didn't tell me because?" "Well, it must have slipped my mind." Aeris' eyes said what her mouth didn't have to. They both knew that Sephiroth Valentine never forgot anything.
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And every time we eat she always starts to chat, about how Moby said this or Paul McCartney said that... Now I'm hiding pork rinds in my cheerios.
"I don't need to see the plans Seph; you can just go ahead and do it." Sephiroth rolled up the blueprints that he had drawn out to the extent that they probably included notation on where each and every nail would go. "Are you sure? I mean, I don't want this be the basement' all over again." Said basement still existed, after all, for what was essentially just a hole in the ground, it was very effective at keeping his kills from drastically decaying until he was ready to get to work on them.
"Sephiroth I was not angry at you for the basement I was mainly bemused, and upset that you hadn't told me about it before you made it. So seeing that you learned enough to ask me this time around before you decided to renovate our house you've clearly made some progress. Do whatever you want to this place. I, for one, won't mind having indoor plumbing again so I don't have to race across snow to the inn first thing every morning.
However, before you start ordering the wood to be sent by airship since there doubtlessly won't be enough natural building material around for you to work with, do those blueprints include plans for a nursery for when we have children?" For a master of deception on the battlefield, Sephiroth had a very bad poker face where his wife was concerned. "Of course they do. Now then if you'll excuse me I'm going to go triple check the structural integrity of the chimney."
He hustled off with the blueprints, clearly intending to make sure Aeris couldn't come within 20 meters of them until he'd had enough time to redraw them to include a nursery that would probably have a mobile with mastered materias dangling down from it. You couldn't turn off genius, but at the very least you could redirect it.
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And I told her I'm a complicated, picky guy, and this has to end, then she asks me, "Why?" But she knows, cause I got no beef with you.
Sephiroth grabbed a single nail and carefully inspected it. He was wearing his heavy black gloves as always and they did a fine job of making sure that his hands didn't get pricked. "Okay then, just like assembling an army..." He hurled up the nail, kicked a nearby two by four up into the air, grabbed it with his now free hand, and jumped. He hit the peak of his jump before the nail reached the top of is parabolic path. He held out the two by four, and drew a hammer with his other hand flapping his wings to keep him airborne.
Then he proceeded to hammer the nail he'd thrown into the two by four, securing it to the ceiling. "You know Seph, there are these things called ladders' out there, most people use them while they're trying to put a ceiling together.
Sephiroth turned to face Aeris and stopped considering where to put his next nail, two by four, and where to best attach them to the still developing ceiling so as that all together they'd create a ceiling which would also serve as the floor of the second story he was going to be building soon enough.
"I know, but Aeris, what is easy very rarely feels like what is right. Now I haven't lost track of a single nail yet, but I don't want to be the first one I do to end up somewhere in your body. So if you could give me some privacy?" "My husband, he isn't a DIY fan, because why follow someone else's plan when he could make his own?"
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She's got so many rules, it's hard to choose, between barbecue and raw tofu. And she told me that they make jello is from horse bones, and that eating too much beef will give me gall stones, And if that's true... then I got no beef with you.
It took Sephiroth a month to finish his work. There were not many things in the world that took him a month to do. To use an appropriate scale, it took him two months to help turn a power company that controlled the world into a broken empire that had run up the white flag for fear that after he dealt with Jenova, Sephiroth would give Shinra another thrashing.
By the time he was done, what had started out as nothing more then a one room semi-shack had transformed into a two floor semi-mansion. Of course there were no towers, parapets, or other eccentricities; her husband wasn't that kind of person. It did however have a chimney and a stove that, if you went by appearances, was really more of a blast furnace.
Of course Sephiroth, being Sephiroth, probably wouldn't be fazed by the temperature. The master bedroom was on the first floor, since even he wasn't about to try and maneuver the bed up the stairs that he had built. The kitchen took up most of the second floor with a complicated but effective system for moving dead monsters up from his new basement, which was really the old basement except expanded deeper, since he was aware that if he made it wider it might start to undermine the house. "I can't believe you did that."
Sephiroth casually spun the hammer into its resting place, either intentionally or unintentionally mirroring his father's way of handling his firearms, once he was temporarily finished with them. "I told you I would do it. Did you think that a bunch of metal and wood would stymie me?"
Of course it was a complete fool who thought that there was anything Sephiroth couldn't do when he put his mind to it. "No, I mean its one thing to have someone save your life; the entire build a house thing is somehow more impressive." Sephiroth just shrugged and wrapped an arm around Aeris' shoulder.
"Saving your life was an obligation that I'd have for any soldier serving even if they were foolish enough to get themselves in trouble in the first place. This, on the other hand was a personal commitment." "You're never going to let me forget about how I almost got myself killed are you?" "I'll stop mentioning it about the same time you promise to never again to mention the basement."
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She was none too happy bout my coon skin hat, or my Italian imported leather chaps. But I'm who I am, and I'm a fashion flame. She was none to happy bout my bear skin mat, or my taxidermied Siamese's cats. And she didn't think my ivory bedroom ceiling mirror, trim with snake skin, held by baby seal eyes buttons, was so great. And I told her I'm a complicated picky guy, and this has to end but she asks me "why?" But she knows... Cause I got no beef with you.
"Seph, remember how I told you that's a sliding scale between making use of everything you kill, and being crazy. You're headed into crazy town like they're having a going out of business sale on sword polish." Sephiroth crossed his arms and glared at Aeris, he was suitably proud of his accomplishment. "What's wrong with them?"
Aeris didn't seem to be about to give him the glare, so Sephiroth felt fairly confident he could win this argument. "They say that every man's home is castle but that doesn't mean you need a pair of guard dogs. If I see you digging a moat and designing a drawbridge, then I don't care how much you hate it, we're moving back to Midgar so that you'll have plenty of things to keep you busy beside these personal projects."
It was not a pair of hunting dogs, though they were posed one on either side of the house's door. They were the wild monsters that looked like white skinned versions of the Materia Keeper Aeris had seen in Nibelhiem. They were also dead as doornails. Sephiroth had apparently killed each of them with one decapitating strike each.
He had then proceeded to personally scoop out their insides, and in what he considered (even for him) an impressive display of taxidermy, he had stuffed them and they now stood there giving off the appearance of protecting his house. They were also taller then he was by a fair margin with jaws wide open that looked like they were just the right size to close on either side of a person's neck to pop their head off.
"Sephiroth, there is only one way that I'm going to be willing to let you keep these things. If you agree that regardless of if we have a son or daughter, you teach them how to cook." That was "all in" at the casino of marital debates.
It was a casino in which not just the waitresses, but also the rest of the staff, dealers, bouncers, watchers, and of course the management were all female. And from the Golden Saucer to the smallest crummiest shack in Midgar, there was one universal constant of gambling. The house always, always, won. "Fine. Just out of respect for my shattered ego, kindly do your victory dance in private rather then right in front of my face?"