Death in a Clearing
Evening air chilled Vincent's face. Though he narrowly avoided colliding with Red XIII, he could not have hoped to avoid him completely.
"You're leaving."
"Call Cid." Vincent increased his pace.
Before Vincent could clear the gate, Red XIII stretched out in front of him, flicking his tail accusatorily. Vincent cursed himself. He had wanted to avoid this.
"Don't do this Vincent," Red XIII said. "No one likes to wake up Reeve so early in the morning." He tossed his mane uncomfortably.
Talking to Red XIII could be pleasant, Vincent decided. But he generally disagreed with that assessment.
"Don't call Reeve." Though the request came out dead and empty as Northern Crater, Vincent reasoned it would have sounded like begging to anyone who knew him well enough.
"You'll have to give me a good reason not to. I've been willing to tolerate this because you watch her, but we cannot leave her alone."
"Cid will come back," Vincent pushed. Cid did not strike him as a proponent of psychiatric clinics.
"You have to know that she will be better off with professionals. She requires constant surveillance. We have—all of us—other obligations. She's not getting better. I have been in contact with Reeve lately. He has told me that she will be given careful care and respect by people who actually know about what's happening to her: people who have seen this and have fixed this. She'll probably never get completely better. But we can't even begin—"
"And you think caging her will help?" Vincent could not listen to him continue without defending his position, however ineffectually.
Red XIII, of course, saw the flaw in his argument instantly. "We're caging her now. We can't let her out again, not after what happened."
He knew. He knew she probably had more of a chance with professionals, without him. He was selfish, that was all. Maybe Reeve had been correct. Maybe some part of him wanted to fix her himself, to atone for not being there in the first place.
Just like Lucrecia.
His life doomed, stuck on repeat. The same old tired song without a real melody or even more than one guitar riff. Like the sorrow songs of the less than liberated.
So he would do the next best thing to breaking the player. He would go back to the beginning and start over until he found a solution, until he found the notes for a new song with more than one riff. He just needed time.
"I'll make a deal," he whispered. "Give me time: a month at most. If I can find out what happened in Wutai, and I can help her, she stays. If not, I'll take her to Reeve and to Edge myself."
Pause.
"I hate it when a friend suffers and I have nothing to give but patience. You best return soon. The longer I live, the easier it is to see how fleeting patience can be."
Vincent nodded.
"Confines foster madness just as much as torture," Red XIII shuddered, the black tattoo on his hip flashing, even in the dark.
It would not kill Godo to send away the fan-wavers and the dancing girls long enough to let Vincent speak his piece, the gunman thought uncharitably, imagining the old man lying on a massive throw pillow and drinking glittering red wine to the gentle sound of an old Costa del Sol rowing song. He had to remind himself several times that Lord Godo in fact ran a country, and probably did have better things to do than sit through ill-conceived rants proffered by a delirious ex-Turk about his violently insane heir-to-the-throne.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Valentine," the guard repeated for the third time. "But Lord Godo refuses to see anyone right now."
Vincent's fingers twitched dangerously close to his gun. "Did you tell him that it's about his daughter?"
"Yes," the guard wobbled, looking ill. The sour green of his face clashed horrendously with the bright violet of his ninja gi.
"Did you tell him that I refuse to leave until he speaks with me?"
"Yes, well," and the guard looked sideways, unwilling to glance into Vincent's eyes, now free from the sunglasses he knew decreased the intimidation factor. "He told me that no one can stand still forever."
"Try me." The guard skittered backward, clutching tightly to his shuriken. The clanging of gunshot on the dusky Wutainese morning. The emotionless deadpan on the cliffs of Da Chao.
"Well, you can't," the guard insisted. "Technically speaking."
"I spent thirty years in a coffin," Vincent said. "I can out-wait and out-live Lord Godo if he'd prefer, but I'll wager that his people might grow suspicious if he never shows himself."
"Please don't try, Mr. Valentine," the ninja stuttered. "I don't want to call the royal guard to escort you off the premises—"
Vincent raised an incredulous eyebrow.
"That is to say," the guard hastily corrected, "only if you won't leave, and I'm sure you will, but—"
Click. Vincent raised the cocked Cerberus to the guard's temple. He had no real intention of pulling the trigger, but the guard shuffled away anyway, muttering prayers in a hasty language Vincent recognized as Wutainese but could not properly translate.
There was just something so effective about speaking Turk.
Similar guards skittered timidly out of Vincent's way. Each of the guardians of the pagoda gave him a grateful nod, as if they had expected his arrival. He stopped on Gorki to ask a question.
"We have questions too," the man said quietly, gesturing with a short arm toward the polished red brown stairs in the adjoining corridor.
When he reached the top floor, the gold brown caught him in a whiff of old memories. He remembered watching Yuffie with a mixture of disinterest and exhaustion, unable to weave into the quick jerky movements of her limbs and the awkward slicing of the shuriken into familial skin. That story. That strife? Too old for him.
Grimoire had fixed steaming plastic goggles onto his face, observing the way his boy held the familiar triple barrel with disdain.
"That sort of thing," Vincent's father had whispered. "Kills people's mothers."
"Vincent Valentine?" The image dispelled; Vincent breathed the reedy wood smell of the pagoda and looked to Godo, propped on the flat tan-yellow of the rug. No throw pillows. No dancing ladies. Just a very large map of the world plastered over the rug with stains from soy sauce and white rice. Empty dishes ringed the room with dried grains stuck to the insides of red bowls.
The guard's statement had had some truth to it. Lord Godo had not had any visitors, not even a maid.
"Hn."
"Has something happened to Yuffie?" The man asked, hobbling to his feet, several heads shorter than Vincent.
Vincent wanted to laugh. "Something keeps happening to Yuffie."
"Oh," Lord Godo said dismissively, looking as if he wanted to tumble back to the floor and never stand again. "Did you come all this way and demoralize my sentries to tell me that?"
"I came," Vincent glared at the older man with almost—almost—unwarranted banality. "To say nothing. You're going to do the talking."
"I've already told Mr. Tuetsi everything."
"Then tell me more than everything." Vincent sounded more patient than he felt.
"I have nothing to say to you." The wrinkles around Godo's eyes twitched. He crossed his arms. Vincent noticed the uncanny similarity.
"I think you do."
"All I know is in the article that I presume you've already read."
"If that's the case, what was that about Yuffie's mother?" Vincent seethed at him disdainfully, but Godo refused to shrink back. He had more spine than his own sentries.
"I can't tell you that." Vincent's fingers itched for his Cerberus again, but then Godo reopened his mouth. "But I can point you in the direction of more information on the events. I—don't think poorly of me—I have been too afraid of what I will find."
Godo took to kneeling again and tore the map from the floor, the paper buckling and threatening to tear down the center of Wutai. He fumbled under the flap and pulled out a package of letters and documents, scribbled over and wrinkled.
"A collection of things I saved," he sighed, holding them out as if he thought better of it. "In case I ever changed my mind."
Some had tears, had tears. Some were covered in dirt stains. Some had gone through blood…
"Take them," Godo said. "But don't come back unless you have something to tell me, and even then, only if it's good news." The same as he had said to Reeve.
If Lord Godo had so little time for putting the pieces of Yuffie Kisaragi back together, Vincent had no time for putting the pieces of Lord Godo back together. Vincent considered him with tired red eyes, watching him sag and fall to the floor once more. Something about that man—though younger—looked older. Something about that man looked like he had seen too much of life, but had no excuse to die. Something about the man looked as if he had just had to give up his only key, his only door, and that he wanted to run, to burn his own country if it would bring him back his peace.
A bushy yellow tabby cat pressed against his boot, purring. Distinct human jaw marks ringed the upper right corner of a page. Vincent had a great deal of difficulty suppressing an amused chuckle, for he could not decide precisely what could have possessed Miss Kisaragi to devour her own stunted Midgar prose.
Most of the documents, he noticed, had been written in Wutainese. For, though most of the inhabitants could speak Midgar as a result of the war, their pride confined the contents of their written work to their native language. Valentine realized that he should have considered this possibility before leaving the pagoda and contemplated strolling back up the hill to rouse Godo and drag him back to Yuffie Kisaragi's once home to serve as a personal translator.
Then he had seen the five letters, written on older paper scraps than the rest, stained by tea, spittle, dust, and what looked suspiciously like cat vomit, written in jagged shaky Midgar script by someone who did not write very often.
They were, all of them, addressed to 'V.'
'So you know how I told you about that epic story about the girl and the onion? I totally ripped it off some dead guy from Gongaga. Like for serious, I know. So weird. Why should I need to rip anything off when most of the stuff I come up with is so much awesome anyway? But it just sort of needed to be made better. By me. And it's been kind of bugging me that I lied about that, so I thought I'd…'
Unfinished.
'Yo. So I've got this plan to get rid of the tourists. I get you to stand in the center of the square and glare at them. Awesome right? So you'll do it? You will! Great. I expect you tomorrow. Wear something spooky. Oh wait. You do that anyway.'
Unsent.
'''Member that one time when you guys saved me from Don Corneo? I never really thanked you. And I won't. But I just thought I'd let you know that I don't plan on it. Didn't want there to be any confusion or anything. Especially for you because, you know, you seem confused a lot.'
Undelivered.
'I've got this ton—and I mean, like bricks ton—of letters that I've written you. And I don't finish 'em or put them in the mail. Or send them. Because I know you won't write back. You probably won't read them either, because you know, it takes a lot of time and all. But I thought you might want to know. Just in case you will send something back. Just in case you want to read them…
'…Who wouldn't, right?'
Unkempt.
'This is so stupid! Why am I writing this? Because you're like my big fat—seriously, lose some weight; it's like you'll just need a new prosthetic and a buzz cut and you'll be Barret-friggin'-Wallace—flippin' diary and I can't organize my epically deep thought processes without your ugly broody face sitting there going "Hn." And not even saying anything useful! And why? Why? Because I'm ridic. Like completely ridic. Ridic with a side of ridic on a stick. But you know what I think about you Vincent Valentine? You know what I think about you and your diary-ness? I'm going to eat your letters now. Just eat them. Like cake, only more papery and less tasteful. See. Look at that. I bit off the corner. I bet you didn't think I would; I bet you didn't think…'
Unread.
How often did they—meaning the cats that inhabited Yuffie Kisaragi's tiny shack—eat? How did they survive without her? Resourceful, like he remembered her.
Yuffie talked—and Vincent lifted another paper in Wutainese with Midgar translation: an immigration document—to old women about their daughters.
The address? Across the street. He hoped Leona Florette took visitors at high noon.
The smell of banana leaf and dried fruit wafted from the adjacent window. The gunman checked the numbers on the house, then the address, then the house again; they matched. Yuffie had even endeavored to copy the flowery script that ensconced the lacquered door frame.
The house looked just like any other house in Wutai. Thick rouge door frame with tan brown inlays. Charcoal walls. Half oval windows papered white so there was no looking in, only a bizarrely invasive sense of someone looking out. But something about the gilded red and the definitively earthen brown on the doors made Vincent hesitate. These were the colors she could not stand.
Vincent attempted to peer through the window, still ajar by just a crack. Having lived so long in the death-dealing profession, Vincent could smell sorrow in the food the family made after his bullet curdled the skull. The pregnant swell of bread parted in the center from over-kneading. Tears mixed with bitter-sweet liquid lemon in the funeral punch bowl so that even the children could taste it.
He heard hard steps—too heavy for a serving maid of Yuffie's—escalate behind the door, signaling Vincent to redirect his attention. When the front of the house slid open, wide but unwelcoming, Vincent could see a thick man inside.
"Yes?" Vincent at least knew that word in Wutainese. The man sounded more timid than he looked. His husky hands gripped the doorframe with a foreboding tightness that Vincent chose not to interpret as threatening.
"I am looking for Ms. Leona Florette."
If he felt put-off by the unabashed use of Midgar, he did not show it. "My wife didn't say that she expected anyone."
Vincent tapped his foot.
"If you have something more to say—"
"Is she in?" Vincent sighed. He tired of the black-balled reception he received wherever he went—not that he could blame anyone, but every once in a while he wondered what it would feel like to be liked immediately.
"What's this about?"
Honesty generally worked the worst in these types of scenarios. He always used it anyway. It took too much work to come up with a convincing alternative. "I'm a care-taker of Lady Yuffie Kisaragi from the main continent. I'm here for information."
"You'll find her at the scene." A certain pleading light emanating from his big black eyes singed Vincent's tongue. "It's about three blocks north and through the woods there. On your left when you come out the other side."
The woods, Vincent decided, reminded him more of Yuffie Kisaragi than anything else in Wutai. He ceased all attempts to interpret the images in his mind in some sensible manner, and merely let them flow through him.
Fall had descended, caramelizing the edges of sage green oak leaves, leaving a sweet earthy scent to drift about the countryside. Winds carried the trickling sound of the stream. Vincent could hear the occasional finch. He could see her here: sitting on the tree branches, her feet kicking fastidiously into the breeze.
'These are the besterest trees ever, Vincent. And you know why?'
He would not answer, but she would for him.
'Because they're in Wutai. I thought that was pretty obvious. Do you need a map or are you happy being a directionally challenged little girl?'
But then she would realize that she could not see where she was going, that she was lost in the woods—
Through the woods and to the left.
Vincent broke into a run. When he came out the other side, before he had time to acclimate himself to his surroundings, he heard a woman scream. He followed the scream to a tiny white-papered shack. A streak of old dry death colored the front.
With a forceful shove, Vincent smashed his shoulder into the door. The roof slanted backward in a failed attempt to compensate for a split in the wall. The only room inside looked unfurnished, but the wooden floor had deep gouges. Thin grooves collected on the walls.
Vincent had only enough time to guess that the marks had been made by a metal weapon of some sort before he fired two succinct rounds from the Cerberus into the right leg of a man who, before Vincent's attack, had been pinning an unarmed middle-aged woman against the wall.
The man groaned, clutching at his wound. Irritated, Vincent kicked the man's healthy lower limb just enough to provoke a higher pitched "Ouch."
A whimper by the door barely registered. Vincent, under normal circumstances, would have told her to run, but he reasoned that she was probably Leona Florette. He still wanted to talk to her.
"Who are you?" Vincent asked the man.
"Sven, Tri," he spat.
"And you decided to attack a woman in a deserted cottage because?"
"Her family refuses to stand against the Kisaragis for the injustice."
Vincent's twitching eyebrow betrayed his confusion.
"We're worried they'll stand against us instead, and they're a small enough group that one woman would make a difference in the end."
Vincent paused. Took a moment to register the dried blood staining the white paper-like walls. Then turned back to the man huddled around his own twisted leg in the center of the room.
"So if I were a Kisaragi supporter, it would be best for me to just kill you right now?"
Swiftly, the man dove for the knife that had fallen from his hand only moments before and attempted, rather ineffectually, to leap high enough from his sitting position to drive the object into Vincent's left pectoral.
A twitch of an index finger left the suddenly violent man back on the floor, this time with a round black hole in his forehead.
Almost as quick as his Turk days.
"Oh thank you, Sir!" the woman gushed from the door. "If you hadn't passed by, I would…"
"Your daughter," Vincent began gruffly, his patience catching in all of the wrong places. "She died in this room?"
The eerie sound of silence returned for the first time since Vincent's departure from the forest. He heard it pocketing like dense cotton in the corners of the shack.
"Perhaps we should talk in the clearing outside?"
"No," Vincent answered, his eyes wandering to a blossom-shaped blood stain that spanned nearly half his height from the floor. "If you don't mind the smell, I think it would be best if we stayed."
"Alright." The woman nodded, still standing at the door, still refusing to move her eyes from the gouge in the floor. "My name is Leona Florette. From what Lady Kisaragi has told me of her friends, I am quite certain that you are Vincent Valentine."
After reading Yuffie's letters, this admission did not surprise Vincent at all. "Could you tell me," he asked, "about Yuffie's relationship with your daughter?"
"Lady Kisaragi"—Vincent tried to mitigate the intensity of his gaze, but something about her made the center of his forehead wrinkle. Her frailty? Her tired eyes? The flat nature of her voice?—"used to, at my request, convince my daughter to see the undesirability of certain suitors. Ishwara looked up to Miss Kisaragi and found her very wise."
"The day of your daughter's murder?" Vincent had to check himself. For him, that day had startlingly different significance. Vincent could see himself in this room easily. Teenagers broken at the shoulders and hip sockets. The gouges on the walls replaced by bullet holes.
But not Yuffie. Never Yuffie. Shinra SOLDIERS had always been her monsters, but her own people were different.
Vincent listened as the short Wutainese woman recounted, in detail, the conversation she had had with Yuffie Kisaragi and the foregoing details surrounding her daughter's final day. She spoke rapidly, and Vincent found himself slipping in and out of the conversation.
"Lord Godo," Vincent swallowed after she had finished. "Told me that you don't believe Yuffie was responsible for your daughter's death."
Then her head shot up. "Of course not!" Her eyes rang, her lips tightened eagerly, her crooked teeth clacked together. "I think"—and here Leona squinted—"I think she got revenge."
He waited for the laugh that never came, a wave of images to pool in his head.
There was only blood, only death, and only Leona Florette, eyes blazing flash balms in the cut light of the dead shack.
Revenge. Revenge on whom?
"I'll walk you home," he told Mrs. Florette. He did not feel comfortable inside the small room with her anymore.
The epic onion story is a reference to Fyodor Dostoyevsky's onion story—which he respectively stole from an old peasant woman—in The Brothers Karamazov. Credit where credit is due.
Revised.
