Music of the Twilight

Music of the Twilight

Chapter seven: Rising Crescendo.

Cloud brought his blade up to block the Phantom's attack, but was knocked sprawling by the impact. He jumped to his feet, narrowly dodging a thrust that would have pinned him to the ground, and paled visibly as he parried the upswing.

Sephiroth smirked as the boy scrambled to dodge his thrusts and swings, easily parrying the occasional counterattack as he pursued his quarry through the graveyard. He suppressed a sigh of irritation as the boy swung his sword in a wide arc, then turned with his momentum and ran behind a row of cast iron latticework.

Cloud dropped into a crouch the moment he was behind the lattice, which was the only thing that saved him as the Phantom's sword cut clean through the barrier at what would have been chest height had he been standing. In a flash of inspiration, he thrust his sword at the newly detached top half of the wall, tipping it over onto his opponent.

Sephiroth reacted on instinct when the iron grid fell towards him. He reversed his momentum and batted it away to his left, where it landed with a resounding crash. His eyes widened slightly in almost-concealed surprise as the boy leapt over the fence in the wake of his swing, bringing his own blade down with a snarl of triumph.

Cloud's expression of triumph changed to one of fury as his opponent threw himself to the side, then one of pain as the tip of the Phantom's sword tore through his shoulder, and finally to one of fear as he saw his momentary advantage vanish into the falling snow.

Sephiroth landed just as the boy bent back down to free his sword from the frozen ground and sprang forward, delivering a kick that caught his opponent in the ribs and sent him back over the bisected barrier, minus his sword.

Pain. The pain in his arm paled to the burst of agony that accompanied the cracking sound from his ribs and the white-hot flash from his back and head as he landed against something solid. He was dimly aware of his opponent slowly, almost casually approaching him. He tried to get to his feet, but his vision swam and went grey, merciful unconsciousness claiming him as he collapsed.

Sephiroth glared down at his opponent's unconscious form as he raised his sword to deliver a deathblow, and he seemed more disappointed than surprised when Aeris ran to stop him.

"Don't." A pair of green eyes so very like and unlike Aeris' own turned to meet her gaze. "Give me one good reason I shouldn't use his blood to create my next masterpiece." Aeris responded, almost sadly, with three simple words: "You already know."

He hissed in indignation as he turned away from her. "Frailty, thy name is woman! I love you so fucking much, that I do believe the sensation is capable of making my physically ill. You know in your heart every single thing I've done for you, and what exactly has he done to deserve the affection you shower upon him?

Is it because he's rich? Should the desire overtake me, and it would if you but say the word, I could easily amass a fortune to rival that of a King, let alone some petty Viscount. He has been handed all he has by parents, and what did my parents give me? Nothing but this hideous countenance I hide behind my mask, yet I persevered and have come to acquire all I now have by my own merits.

Why, why, why, are you so in love with him, and the answer had best not be his face! If it is, I will take him with me and when next you two meet I will have ruined his face in just the same manner mine was. No… I think I'll disfigure the left side of his face, it's a much more artistically fitting punishment.

That way when next we stand side by side you can behold the unharmed right side of his face leading into my left, and decide which half you prefer better." Aeris shivered in a way that had nothing to do with the cold. "He doesn't kill people." The Phantom threw back his head and laughed. "No of course he doesn't, he doesn't have to. As a rich noble he has slower, more painful ways of bringing someone's life to a ruinous close.

More to the point, he has never been pressed up against a wall, almost crushed by a headless herd of humanity that has not a single care for the content of a man's mind if the shell surrounding it is disfigured. You see Miss Gaste, it's not my face that makes me a monster, it's the way that other people react to it that does.

I'll take my leave now, but bare the following facts in mind. You will undoubtedly be the leading lady in my opera, and when the time comes I will be watching you from much closer than before, as this fool has usurped my normal seat. With an opera of this caliber, starring a lead of your talent, well… even the incompetence of the rest of the cast will do little to diminish its grandeur- I wouldn't miss it for the world.

So, until that pleasant night when we once more gaze into each other's eyes, do be a dear and break a leg, since it would be an unmitigated shame if your refusal to go on and show the people of Midgar just how talented you truly are forced me to snap a spine." Then he calmly walked off into the swirl of snow. His boots made a slight crunching noise with each step they took, yet he somehow left behind no footprints. Aeris sighed and got to work dragging Cloud over towards his mount, hoping that he either came round fairly soon or that she proved better at riding chocobos then she thought she was.

-- / -- \\\\\ -- /

Reno watched the proceedings as the cast of the Midgar Central Opera House practiced their assigned roles in the production that had either been handed down to them from on high, or passed up to them from below. "How uncanny Rude, I know you're sitting next to me up here, but it's like I'm watching an entire stage full of you down there!"

Rude made no comment, so Reno shrugged and resigned himself to watching the rehearsal. The actors and stagehands were performing one and all as if they had been somehow replaced with machines or at least suddenly decided that Rude's taciturn nature was in style and so adopted it with a vengeance. They read their lines without forgetting a single one, they hit the right notes when singing, not even problems with the highly complicated dancing numbers.

Not having the resident tapeworm in the Opera House's digestive track screwing around with the production had been bound to make things go more smoothly, but Reno had never in his wildest dreams imagined something like this. "It does rather appear that our Phantom cast some kind of spell on over them, especially how they seem to be recovering from a daze every time they do finally stop practicing."

Reno clenched his hands together in joy. "Quite frankly I don't care if he's somehow slipping Silkis Greens into their food, look at them Rude, they're all down there and none of them have problems for us up here! Isn't it great? This is exactly what I always told you running an Opera House would be like!"

"Gentlemen, I have a problem that we need to discuss."

Reno hunched over as he slowly turned around seeing exactly what he expected, his patron. "Ms. Gaste feels for certain that the Phantom will somehow try to create a scene on the night that we open our current production to the public." Reno wondered where exactly Viscount Strife got off considering himself a part of the production, but then, people with money could get away with just about anything, especially being tactless.

"Why the hell would he want to do that? This is his play, he produced, he cast, he wrote the score, planned the steps, we're doing everything the way he wants it, why the hell would he want to wreck his own production? It'd be like buying a bottle of beer just for the sensation of smashing it against your head until you get a face full of broken glass."

Cloud evidently felt that the Phantom was just that crazy however. "Still, we must be on our guard as never before. On opening night, I want all the doors to be locked, and for there to be police men with guns amid the audience, several score of them. With any luck now that we actually know when the fiend will strike we can be prepared to properly respond."

"You realize..." "I'll cover all expenses involved." Oh how those five words were music to both Reno and Rude's ears. "All right then Viscount we'll get to work on it straight away!" By which of course Reno meant he'd get to work figuring out just what he could be reasonably sure of getting away with as an expense.

-- / -- / -- /

"Not gonna work." Viscount Cloud turned and glared at Mirri. "What isn't going to work?" Mirri shrugged.

"Don't know, but I'm playing the odds, whatever you're planning isn't going to work. All you're going to succeed at is making yourself look the fool twice over and possibly getting yourself killed." Mirri then began to get to work cleaning her nails, paying more attention to the dirt, grime, and other rubbish beneath her fingernails than to the nobleman before her.

"I suppose your real master sent you with that message?" Mirri didn't look up from her work. "Nope. Personally, I'm sure he'd be all but delighted if you were to slip on a curiously misplaced mop and break your neck in the fall. The 'all but' is of course because a death like that wouldn't teach everyone else in Midgar a lesson about the dangers of crossing him.

So you should just considering yourself glad that I have a surprisingly strong maternal side. I'm serious, he's already working on an overly complicated machine that will drop out the floor beneath anyone sitting in box five and control their fall in such a way that they land headfirst on an anvil, since he felt the reverse had been more or less run into the ground.

I mean, he did thrash your sorry ass back in the graveyard, so why are you even bothering to try and go toe to toe with him again?" Cloud drew himself up to his full height, glaring into her eyes. "Physical strength and skill with weapons isn't the only venue in which two men can compete against one another."

Mirri emitted a sound that was hard to define, but doubtlessly derisive in nature. "So you're going to outthink him then? Believe it or not, Sephiroth has actually figured out a way to put both his pants legs on at the same time. It's complicated, but it involves hanging them nearby his bed on a wire that can support the weight of his pants but not his entire body, so he simply jumps into them from the bed.

As I'm sure you can imagine by now, he has little to fear in a battle of wits with you." Cloud was still not intimidated though, there was still the simple matter of the guards. "I suppose next you will tell me that he is capable of outthinking bullets?" Mirri blew on her right hand as she finished cleaning it and moved onto the other one.

"He usually doesn't have to, since he can simply out maneuver them. That said, he also was just showing me that material he developed after studying the skin of a dead dragon. He tells me that his new version of his outfit is not only just as snappy looking but is also extremely bullet resistant at anything less then point blank range, and if someone was stupid enough to get that close he'd slice them to pieces. So while I'm not sure what scale you're grading on, that sounds to me a lot like being able to outthink bullets."

She blew on her left hand as she finished cleaning that one as well then shook it and sighed. "God damn gloves." "Beg pardon?" Mirri finally met his eyes again. "Gloves, I can't stand what working at this place does to my hands, but at the same time a woman can't wear gloves unless she's going to a formal party.

If society wants us to have clean fingernails, then it should let us wear garments that keep dirt from getting lodged under them. But that's another type of story entirely so allow me instead to close this conversation with a demonstration of why sticking around is a bad idea." Mirri put a hand on Cloud's shoulder in a show of false camaraderie and managed to get him to turn around.

"While you were busy listening to me, you never even noticed what was behind you, so let's just call this the 'noble's rush.'" Mirri pushed firmly on Cloud's black. Normally that would have just caused him to stumble a step or two forward, but not this time. This time he stumbled a step or two forward, and found that someone had apparently waxed the wooden floor behind him to the point that it was completely frictionless.

He flailed his arms, hopelessly trying to gain the footing that would not come. So he just kept right on sliding until tripped over a mop handle that was either very well or very badly placed. He careened about like a chocobo without its head cut off, totally unable to control his own body. This spectacle came to an end as he fell face first into a bucket of soapy water.

As he pulled his head out, tried to rub and blink out the burning sensation in his eyes and eventually noticed the hulking figure that was leaning over him. "Aren't you sort of... dead?" The Janitor shrugged. "I got better." Then the mop came down firmly on his head pushing him back into the bucket of water. By the time he was able to blink his eyes clear a second time, the dead man had vanished.

-- / -- \\\\\ -- /

"Don't think I can't see that you're trying to help him." Mirri didn't bother turning to face the voice; she knew he wouldn't be standing there.

"Help him? I'm chasing him off. You should thank me."

"Stop it. I can't kill him if he runs away, and worse, he may take Aeris with him! I'm too close, everything is playing into my hands, just stick to the plan."

"And when you have her?"

"Do as you please. She's all that matters."

FN: Yeah another short chapter, don't worry the next one, (which should also be the least one) will be a doosy. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll (hopefuly) leave reviews.

OWAN: I know the wait was forever, but school got in the way. Anyway, if you want to see how the firecat does without my help, check out "Ronin Trip", his Suikoden fic. Shouldn't be hard to find, as I'm pretty sure he's the only one with "firecat" in his username. In fact, you guys have been such good sports that I'm going to give you a song. This is an adaptation of a bonfire song of which I'm quite fond, but I made up some of the verses myself.

Surviving cast of Twilight Perfection is gathered on the Valar in a semicircle, with Reno in the middle. Sephiroth steps forward

Sephiroth: You know, we used to travel all over the place, but now, we're simply not welcome on most of the planet. There's a pretty simple reason for this- Mr. Reno here gets around-

Mirri: Though you wouldn't know it to look at him!

Reno: Hey!

Sephiroth: At any rate, there's all sorts of places we used to go. For example… begins singing We used to fly to Kalm, and there we put ashore. We used to fly to Kalm, we did but we don't anymore! A lady asked Reno for flowers…

Aeris(annoyed) We had some of those on board…

Sephiroth: A rose she wanted?

Reno: Pluck 'er I did!

Sephiroth & Aeris: That's why we don't fly there no more!

Alex: We used to fly to Nibel, and there we put ashore. We used to fly to Nibel, we did but we don't anymore! A lady asked Reno for hides…

Reno: We had some of those on board.

Alex: Furs she wanted?

Reno: Shag 'er I did!

Alex: That's why we don't fly there no more!

Vincent: We used to fly to Wutai, and there we put ashore. We used to fly to Wutai, we did but we don't anymore! A lady asked Reno for Saké…

Reno: We had some of hic that on board.

Vincent: Booze she wanted?

Reno: (pelvic thrust) Saké she did!

Vincent: That's why we don't fly there no more!

Niro: We used to fly to Mideel, and there we put ashore. We used to fly to Mideel, we did but we don't anymore! A lady asked Reno for pastries…

Reno: We had some of those on board.

Niro: A cake she wanted?

Reno: Layer I did!

Niro: That's why we don't fly there no more!

Mirri: We used to fly to the Saucer, and there we put ashore. We used to fly to the saucer, we did but we don't anymore! A lady asked Reno for chocobo's…

Reno: We had one of those on board.

Mirri: A racebird she wanted?

Reno: Saddle up, baby!

Mirri: That's why we don't fly there no more!

Melkore: We used to fly to Rocket Town, and there we put ashore. We used to fly to Rocket Town, we did but we don't anymore! A lady asked Reno for a good time…

Reno: We had one of those on board.

Melkore: A good time she wanted?

Reno: (anguished) THEN I FOUND OUT SHE WAS A MAN!

Melkore: That's why we don't fly there no more!

Aeris: We used to fly to Junon, and there we put ashore. We used to fly to Junon, we did but we don't anymore! A lady asked Reno for seafood…

Reno: We had some of that on board.

Aeris: Crabs she wanted?

Reno:(defensive) What have you heard?

Aeris: That's why we don't fly there no more!

All: Now we fly around Midgar, 'tis here we've put ashore. Now we glide around Midgar, like a thousand times before! A lady asked Reno for whiskey…

Reno: (smug) We had some of that on board.

All: Liquor she wanted?

Reno: I poured her a drink.

All: And now she's face down on the floor, down on the floooooor!

Special thanks to Andrew, Dani, Gabby, Kat, Kayla, and anyone else who's contributed to the Skivvy song as I know it. This song is really a lot better sung than read, but I had to try.