A/N: This was a request from Circle of Phoenix. Always happy to oblige!
Disclaimer: Statement A: I own Final Fantasy. Statement B: Square owns me in court. Statement B overrules Statement A.
There's really no other way of saying it. Vincent Valentine is utterly befuddled by white goods. And as he paces the aisles of his local electrical shop, surrounded by looming plastic boxes and haunted by instruction manuals as thick as his arm, he would prefer to be almost anywhere else in the world. Except the laundrette.
It's a problem that arose from his Turk days, really. Back then, Turks were highly privileged. They could afford to get their suits laundered by lower ranking employees- a perk with the unexpected side effect of making most Turks incapable of using any form of washing machine. It may have been one more attempt to tie the Turks to Shinra indefinitely (they could hardly quit if they couldn't even wash their own clothes), but that kind of underhanded possessiveness was more the style of Rufus Shinra, as opposed to his Old Man.
And, of course, he'd used the perk. More often than not, there was blood on the suit, and he had no desire to clean it. There was always blood on the suit, in fact, whether it was causing deep red stains in the double breast, or whether it was deeper, stained into the very fibres of the poor fool who wore the suit. Once you were a Turk, you always had blood on your hands, no matter how hard you scrubbed, and there was always blood on your suit. It went with the job.
He left off his musing of the past to examine one of the washing machines he was supposedly shopping for. Spin cycles, energy requirements, optimal settings for each and every material under the sun, safety protocols in case of leaks, barrel dimensions...The details leapt out at him, trying to squish themselves into his brain, but merely lying on the surface like raindrops on an umbrella. Such was the way of modern advertising, he felt. Why couldn't things be more simple?
Eventually, he gave up. It wasn't a great surprise. Using a machine at the laundrette was all very well and good, but they were different beasts when you had to live with and maintain them. And with Vincent being Vincent, he simply couldn't bear the thought of asking an employee for help.
Independently of him, the part of his mind that was still Turk began an analysis of the consequences. He'd mortgaged his a portion of his life to sitting in a building in his underwear, watching his clothes whiz around in boiling water. It would cost him a small fortune in the long term. And worst of all, he would be doing this activity with Yuffie Kisaragi, meaning that he now shared something with her: the inability to use a washing machine.
He briefly considered going back in and asking that employee. But thought better of it. As he trudged back to his house, his Turk mind started wondering how being with an unclothed Yuffie Kisaragi was a bad thing.
A/N: Once a Turk, always a Turk, I guess. Even Vince's inner Turk is not immune to the allure of nearly-naked women.
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