Tifa had always wondered where he learned the manners.
It wasn't logical, at all. That a man who had once been an assassin could be so smooth about things. He understood etiquette. Any Turk she had ever seen had been no better than a slum kid. All cursewords and harsh banter.
Considering their odd living arrangement, she felt like she had to be in the know.
"Vincent."
He reminded her a bit of Reno sometimes, and that was odd, in a way. Like an inverted version, with dark hair and red eyes. Not that she thought about Turks often. Or much of the life within the walls of Midgar now that she was outside them. She was free. Free enough, that is.
"What is it?"
"Tell me about where you learned to be so polite."
Tifa didn't ask him questions. She'd learned he responded best to almost bossy sounding orders. She figured it was old habit or something like that. Years of working for an organization bent on killing individuality was very likely an impedence on whatever personality he had before.
No, she really couldn't imagine him as some kind of... punk.
"It is complicated."
"Then start at the beginning."
"There is nothing to tell."
Vincent was a stubborn man. That was why they got along. Cid too, but he had enough common sense in the world to pick his battles. But Vincent didn't pick battles. He was always in a war that she suspected he'd never fought.
He would have been too young then, if history served her right. Just missed it. No, there were others he'd known, people with faces just as real as the one she saw in the morning and the ones she saw in her dreams. The kind of people he would be willing to touch.
Not like the woman in the ice. Something in the way he himself became a statue when he talked to her suggested that he'd never even looked her straight in the eye.
"Let us just enjoy the afternoon."
She knew that he was diverting her attention, but she figured that he would slip up sometime. And part of her knew that she might be imagining it, this blank. Maybe that was something of his generation. Maybe they were just classier sorts of people.
---
"Bullshit. You're overcharging me. I know the inflation rate on this sort of thing and even if it is old you're not making me pay that much for it. Fifty. And that's my final offer."
There was a strange older man in the market. Tifa was a messenger; she'd long since turned the bar over to someone else and had taken a more active role in the delivery service. Considering Cloud was trying to get through school and make up for lost time, it was a perfect switch. She couldn't always sit and home and take care of the kids.
And considering Vincent didn't like to go out much anymore, it worked out well. She was no stranger to odd arrangements.
"I won't settle for anything less than sixty."
"TEN GIL. That's the only difference! For a merchant you don't seem to understand math much."
Tifa wasn't nosy normally, but there was something in the tone of this man's voice that made her curious. Commanding, but possibly forgiving. She was like a wine taster when it came to voices; that was why Cloud had interested her at first. Aeris's tone had been one she had always found pleasant, late at night when the others had gone to sleep. Vincent's was interesting because it was ill-used; certain things still strained his vocal cords in interesting ways. Simple words for simple things.
"Sixty."
The interesting man, who was well dressed and mostly grey haired, paused before leaning in to tell the vendor something lowly. The merchant than handed over the item in question, a record player, and accepted the man's fifty gil with a smile.
So he was that kind.
He walked off then, the record player tucked neatly under one arm. His posture was straight, but he didn't hold his head high. She could understand that.
---
"What do you have there?"
The man in the market reminded her of something that she'd seen before in a store. She hadn't been quite sure if he'd like it or not, but she figured that she might as well try it out on him. It was a bit heavier than she anticipated, but she'd managed to get it in the door. His eyebrows were drawn together in a slightly amusing form of confusion. No one could be living in a delusion that made faces like that.
"It's a present."
"You did not have to--"
"It's just a typewriter. Nothing fancy."
There. That flicker. She'd been waiting for that, just that momentary instant. If there was anything she'd learned from Cloud, it was that you had to dig things up. You had to. You couldn't keep corpses in the flowerbed.
She'd had a devil of a time with the stones in her own weed patch, anyway.
"Do you like it? I even made sure to get some ribbon for it. Though I doubt that you'd write..."
Shera was a mechanical genius. His left hand almost looked real until you touched it. But it fit quite well with his other hand, which never scarred. Scratches only lasted a day or so. She'd tried to teach him to play the piano, because that was something girls did when they wanted someone to sit with them. It was easy enough to sleep with him; maybe a little easier than should be comfortable.
"No, I never did like using one."
"But?"
He only ever said half of what he was thinking. He tended to whisper the rest, and it was that whisper which tended to make the hairs raise on the back of her neck and something flutter in her lungs. Breathe. She needn't suffocate.
"Some did."
He was brushing his hand through her hair with the fingers that weren't real, and she knew that he must have been left handed; it was the most immediate one that he used.
"There's a number on the side. I know you saw it. Was it yours? Was it yours that long time ago?"
He mumbled into her temple.
"No, it was not mine."
---
Three weeks. She had almost forgotten about him, but then she was called to do a delivery. A medium sized package that shifted a little on the motorbike that Cloud had given her as a present. A medium sized package that had made her curious, so she peeked in through the seal that was bad because industry was slow.
Records.
He answered the door fully dressed, despite the early hour. She'd wanted to get out this far--and did he live far from the city lights--sooner rather than later. People would be clogging the highways if she let herself sleep in too late.
"Oh. Hello. Package for a Mr. Paladeen?"
"That is me."
She didn't expect to see him around again. People drifted in and out of Edge like mako tides. More out than in, these days. So maybe that's why she said it.
"Do you like music?"
He blinked, but bowed his head a little. "Yes. I trust that most people do."
"I'm, ah, supposed to inspect any packages... old music like this was the kind of thing my mother listened to. Blues, jazz... I just couldn't help but notice."
"You mother had good taste, then."
She handed him a clipboard to sign, and his signature was large, but neat. A far cry from most men's signatures. Like he'd spent a lot of time carefully learning to write. People like that were strange. But an interesting strange.
"Thank you Miss..."
"Lockheart. But call me Tifa, should I ever come out this way again."
"I will look forward to that. Should our paths cross."
She had a strange feeling they would.
---
Sometimes the weather didn't suit Vincent well.
He was a far cry from the half feral thing with a stoic man's voice they'd found in the coffin, but sometimes, sometimes he locked himself in a room and she could hear him talking. Just to himself, maybe to the inventions in his head which he'd made to understand his physical oddities. Always on the light drizzly days in late April that were sometimes cold. Only the world was increasingly colder, something like an age of snow. So it was unusually warm.
He'd come out, after some tapping, and told her in that tired voice that he was going out for a walk. He left the door open to the small room he'd been occupying for the past three days and she saw papers scattered about. She thought she might not go in. She thought.
Conversations.
She knew that they were half finished, in a way only a person that was writing to someone that wasn't there could. She didn't believe he was unbalanced, because he stood with his chin up. Always with his chin up and only certain...
Do you love her? I think I
do. You're being a damn fool, kid. Then I am a
fool.
His idiosyncracies didn't frighten her anymore. She was tired and a little old herself, but they didn't frighten her. If anything, they made her curious. There was a man that existed before her Vincent. She wanted to know who he was. She needed to know who he was.
Just like there was once a Tifa that existed before. Before. A mythology they all clung too. The world wasn't always so cold.
He came back, like he always did, questionably unassuming. Leaning into her shoulder like it was the warmest place on the planet. She would cut his hair one of these days, she decided, listening to him breathing, and cleaning the somewhat red gunk out of it.
She never asked what he did on those walks, but then, when she went out for rides he didn't ask either.
---
He ordered tea.
Mr. Paladeen was in Edge again, and in one of the places she went to when she felt like being alone. She was happy today, really. Her odd arrangement was tenative, and could break with the slightest disturbance, but that was all she could hope for until the bridge came. So for now she was happy. And drinking her spiced warm drink to ward off the unusual June cold.
She approached him.
He wasn't delicate with his tea. He grabbed it like some people would a lifeline and chugged it down like it didn't burn his throat. Considering some people these days, it didn't surprise her.
"They crossed." She smiled as she said it. Tifa was happy today, and she found the man pleasant. Like her father.
"So they have, Tifa. I trust you're not running about on that motored contraption today?"
She liked the way he talked. Accentless. Careful. Warm.
"Oh no, it's my day off."
"So you spend it in this little whole in the wall?"
No, her father was never so... je ne sais pas. He was loving and subtly pushing her. Away? She always wondered. No, this man took in all her features like a painting. If he weren't so greyed and had the most interesting of surgical scars, she would have been worried. But she'd learned the older ones knew their place.
Vincent had said as much, once. Funny how it was when he forgot his place.
"It reminds me of home."
"Ah yes, 'home'."
She sat down, like a dancer would. She used to tell Zangan that she never thought of fighting--so young she was, always being protected--just dancing. He'd laughed in that strange way and shook his head. She might have seen what he'd really meant if she'd looked closely enough. So she wondered instead.
"Yes, home."
---
"You are late."
The way he said it wasn't an accusation. Vincent didn't accuse. Vincent didn't assume. It was what was frightfully annoying about him sometimes; she knew that if one day she didn't come home, he wouldn't assume anything other than she didn't want to come back. It wasn't healthy.
"I stopped for some tea. I brought some back with me if you want any."
She held out the small box of dark leaves and he looked at it oddly. Just a flicker. She held her breath for that flicker.
"That is thoughtful of you. But I do not drink tea anymore."
"Oh, well, thanks for telling me. More for me I guess!"
Crumpled notes to no one and half turned glances at things and now this. Things that he'd given up for reasons she'd never know. Unlike Lucrecia. Because she knew about that. He talked about that. The woman he'd never ever had. The woman who only saw his father in his eyes.
The kind of woman she would have really disliked to have been around. Her own weaknesses walking around.
She liked him because he didn't remind her of anyone. She could never do that sort of replacement with someone that only reminded her vaguely of another Turk. Someone that she'd only casually met once or twice. Sometimes she had to wonder if she'd only met Vincent once or twice.
"Vincent..."
"It is nothing that you did. Just a preference."
---
"You have any family?"
"Not so much anymore. My daughter's all grown up. She's not too much older than you, actually."
"Ah. All grown up and having her own family?"
"You could say that."
This was what she missed about having a bar. Regulars. People with stories and lives and reminders that other people were still living. She had missed adult company other than Barrett's fumbling and Vincent's stumbling. Oh and Cloud. Yes, she still saw him, sometimes. He was doing well.
This was an old man who had his own history to hide, but that didn't affect how he spoke. How he interacted. He must have been quite the charmer back then, with his not all the way there smile and his distant look. Women always wanted that sort of thing. Like in the movies. Tifa knew better, oh she always knew better there. Which was why she accepted his almost warm company on Tuesdays. A break from reality into something else.
Besides, she had long since noticed that he didn't look at her like most men did. The female form was an art form to men like him. Not a tangible thing. She could only imagine what his wife--and she presumed there--must have felt.
"So you have a boyfriend, Tifa?"
It caught her offguard, because it didn't seem polite. Polite was what his generation insisted on. Thrived off of.
"Kind of."
"You either do or you don't. I know that times have changed, but they haven't changed that much. I can see with your big almost sad eyes that you're just like anyone else."
"I guess I do, then."
"Take him dancing. It's not just the ladies that like that. There's a place down past the canal that you two could go to."
She could never quite pin down how he knew certain things. She supposed it was age, experience, but then she'd seen how he talked to the vendor. Mr. Paladeen, no matter how much she wanted him to be, wasn't simply a kind old man.
Everyone wanted something. Always.
---
He was a terrible dancer. She had to guide him along and he kept tripping over his feet despite the fact that she'd thrown out those hideous pointy boots. Once she'd gotten over the fact that she'd somehow expected he'd know how to do something as simple as dance, she noticed that he was actually enjoying himself.
Vincent liked dancing.
After a while, he caught onto her lead and it was sort fun how they weren't discussing anything or poking at anything or really being the somber adult things that they sometimes were. It would have been a perfect evening, really.
"Wherever did you get this idea?" he asked lightly, teasingly.
"I..." She laughed to give herself time to explain. How had Mr. Paladeen known? It was almost eerie if she thought about it carefully enough.
"Are a very clever woman. That is the explanation." He didn't let her finish because he looked younger than she'd come to see him and she brushed aside however the old man had known. Another generation. Yes, that was it. Just another generation.
---
"I had a sister once."
They were still up, and dawn had happened nearly an hour ago. They sat on porch drinking coffee because they couldn't think of anything else. She had propped her feet on his lap, and he slouched.
"I wish I had siblings." He smirked a little to himself as she said that.
"Helen was a pain. I cannot dance because I did not want to learn from her."
She tried to imagine it. Some tall, slender, female version of him with a teasing expression stepping on his toes on purpose. But then, she would have to imagine him as a child.
"You don't much seem like the learning type. Though you have learned some things."
He frowned and she didn't mean it to come out that way.
"Oh, I didn't mean--"
"No, you are correct. It is just... well. I was talking about Helen, was I not?"
He talked in that way he sometimes did until the mug was empty and they being lazy never bothered to fill it again. He talked about people he'd gone to school with and such safe things to reminisce about. Once he mentioned a friend from the Turks, but that was more in passing and she could tell that there was a lot he didn't want to talk about there.
"I guess there are some things we're not going to be able to talk about, isn't there?"
There were things she wouldn't say either. Boys with too serious faces and protective eyes. Teachers that stared. Fathers that wouldn't let her stop playing the piano even when Mom died. But he never asked.
His nose was pointy, she'd always noticed that, but when it was poking into the hollow of her neck it was almost annoyingly pointy. She hoped she would remember that poke for years. And how he always mumbled meaningful things into her collarbone.
"We will just have to make things that we can."
---
Tifa never had the same sense that Aeris had for things that had not yet happened. The girl was uncannily good at sensing trouble, and for walking straight into it. Tifa's problem was that she walked into trouble without knowing it. This was why she fought with such intensity. That was how she had to survive without any foreknowledge.
She heard the voices, but she didn't register who they belonged to. It had been such a nice day, and she was thinking about going dancing the next night. Mr. Paladeen was pleased to hear that it had worked, and had commented on the improvement in her attitude.
"I think she's lovely. You might actually have done well for yourself this time."
"Am I supposed to care what you think?"
"That's right, twenty years of self punishment made you forget that I was right all along. Or did it remind you?"
And she walked right into it.
"Vincent I was wondering--"
There were very few times in her life when things became so vividly and suddenly clear. Like jumping straight into cold water; the same sort of feeling coursed through her veins and sizzled in her capillaries. She could never imagine Vincent as some young punk before, but that was because she had never seen him with that expression nor saw him glaring at this man before.
"Who is this?" She would have thought by now that she could sense a liar. Maybe the liars these days weren't trained as well as the old liars.
Glances were exchanged. "His name is Veld."
"Oh. Alright." She turned. "Veld? Get out of my house."
She should have seen it in the way that he moved and the way that he brushed aside his greying hair. That stinging familiarity in the back of her mind that she chose to ignore because somehow she'd hoped that one or the other would confess something to her, to satisfy her curiousity into what they were and maybe, just maybe, she would know what it meant about their generation.
They that had made the world so cold.
Veld did as he was told and she watched with narrowed eyes as he closed the door. Vincent had stopped glaring but he hadn't moved much either. Just shifted his weight when she gave him the same look.
"You too."
"But Tifa... why?"
"I won't have men airing their unfinished business in my home. I won't live like that."
He nodded slowly before turning to the door himself.
"Oh and one more thing."
"Yes?"
"If you would rather live in yesterday, don't come back."
---
He didn't come back for a while. She was strangely comfortable with this, and when she wished he was around, she remembered that she'd been the one to put her foot down. She didn't let him wallow or fall into whatever destructive cycle that people were bound to.
Tifa didn't want to enable this.
It was raining today, a light and icy drizzle. Warmest day it had been in a while, and she was starting to wonder if it would always be snowing in Edge. She was used to cold, she was from the mountains, and it was always just a little cold there. It was the first thing she noticed about Midgar, how warm it was. Like someone's hand.
Well, a normal person's hand.
"He's been keeping an eye on you. Never left the city, actually."
Mr. Paladeen—no Veld—leaned against the outside of a building. He was quiet. But he was one of them once. How else would he know Vincent so well? Yes, from that time, that world. She had to wonder which woman they fought over. Because they had to be rivals. They had to be.
"Why are you here?"
He pushed off from the wall lightly, and she could see a bit of the old man that made her think of her father. No, he wasn't the problem. Maybe they'd never meant to make the world so frigid.
"If you mean this city, I was just looking to see what was left. If you mean, why am I not with Valentine, well, no one really ever is with him."
He pulled out an umbrella and handed it to her.
"If by why I'm here talking to you... you'll catch a cold in this kind of weather without a little protection."
And she smiled despite history.
"Thank you."
He bowed like a Wutain would, and left again. It was odd really, how he did that. There were a lot of stories there, and she likely wouldn't hear them. She could almost see the other that walked beside him, this little shimmer of a prescence. A thing she'd been able to see in some people after her mother died.
It was a good way to say goodbye, she determined.
---
Vincent was sitting in the living room when she got home. Asleep, like he'd not done so in days and days. She poked him lightly and he started. Always a light sleeper.
"You have a lot of explaining to do, Mr. Valentine."
He smirked.
"I was hoping you would say that."
Maybe he was insane. There were all these mixed up bits inside him that poked out at strange angles and she didn't know enough geometry to solve them. But she also knew that you couldn't solve anyone. You were there. Just... there.
Vincent was half in that other time and half in this time. If she tugged just a little bit, he'd pick a side. Maybe some day she'd tell her stories too. They had time.
But not yet.
"Where did you get the umbrella?"
"From a friend."