X. Vincent

When he woke up, the sun was slanting through the blinds of his hospital room, and the wound in his side was throbbing. There was a white-capped nurse in the room with him, transcribing readings from what looked like an advanced vital-signs machine.

He cleared his throat softly. "I'm thirsty," he said. "I would like some water, please."

She jumped, eyes going wide as she glanced to the machine and back. Vincent felt vaguely regretful for scaring her, but there wasn't much he could do about the fact that his vital signs usually stayed the same whether he was asleep or awake. Hojo had done his damage, and there was nothing anyone could do about that now. He opened his mouth to reassure the woman again, but she was already scurrying through the door. A minute later someone returned with a glass of water, but it was a male doctor. Vincent recognized the tall, bearded man - one of the doctors that had been hired on staff at the opening of the Corel hospital almost ten years ago. He didn't know his name.

"Mr. Valentine," the doctor greeted him. "I'm glad to see you're doing better."

"I believe I frightened one of your employees," Vincent said, accepting the water with his good hand and a slight nod. He ran a mental checklist of each body part. Nothing seemed to be hurting with more than a dull throb. His side, he noticed had been swathed and bandaged, as had his wrist and his left knee.

The doctor smiled. "Nurse Vitta is new. Though in your case, that's not much of an excuse, I know."

"Reno and Yuffie," he said. "Rufus Shinra's bodyguard and the lady of Wutai. Are they safe?"

The doctor took the glass of water, now empty, and set it on the desk by the bed. "They were the ones who brought you in. I believe they stayed the night waiting for your surgery results. As for where they are now, I don't know. They left the hospital as soon as I told them you would be all right."

Vincent smiled slightly. "They shouldn't have worried. It takes more than that to kill me."

The doctor frowned. "I won't go as far as asking what the 'that' was that you're referring to. But I strongly advise you against tangling with anymore of whatever it was in the future. It's not good for your health."

"Don't worry," Vincent said. "Hopefully, there was just one, and I have...exterminated it."

The doctor left shortly, taking the water with him and promising some sort of meal soon. Vincent was not particularly hungry, but it was a gesture of goodwill and he accepted it as such. He wished for a moment that Yuffie could be found, but there was no communication device in his room and she most likely needed her rest after the ordeal last night.

He had been surprised at the skill with which she'd handled the plane. Granted, she had not been much more than shakingly amateur, but she had taken off and landed the aircraft admirably, and Cid Highwind had been too worried about Vincent to scold her for skidding one wingtip sideways onto the runway as she had touched down back in Corel. He mulled over the memory of her face, taut with worry and fear, valiantly steering the aircraft down through the clouds back into the safety of the town, and wondered if he had been right to tell her what he had seen and to give her that Materia.

He would tell Yuffie and Rufus, he decided, and no one else. Yuffie he had always felt like he could trust, and he had needed to tell someone last night, had to let the vivid images out from between Chaos' raging voice in his head. Under normal circumstances, he would not have even thought of letting Rufus Shinra know what he had discovered. But it was Rufus to whom the dreams came, Rufus who had first been alerted to Nibelheim's fate, and for some reason, Rufus had been chosen to be part of this new game.

So Vincent would tell him everything. He had no choice, he had decided, if they all wanted to survive.

"Mr. Valentine. And what trouble have you gotten into this time?"

He glanced up, not too surprised to see Rufus Shinra there in the doorway, leaning on that bright, flashy chrome cane with a bemused smile on a face that looked otherwise drawn and tired. "I wasn't expecting you until later," Vincent said.

Rufus limped into the room. "It is later. Almost time for dinner. I'd ask you to join me, but...circumstances prevent that, unfortunately." He cast a critical glance at Vincent's bandaged side.

"I can eat," Vincent told him calmly. "It's not as bad as it looks." He looked out the window and realized the sunlight was the ruddy sunlight of evening. "I forgot the sun sets later in Corel. What time is it?"

"Almost eight o' clock, evening. You were out of surgery at dawn, Yuffie tells me, so you've been asleep for a while. How are you feeling?"

"Speaking literally," Vincent said, "I've obviously been worse. Speaking otherwise-" he raised his arm slightly and glanced at the blackened, blistered flesh that crawled above his bandaged wrist. "You could say I've been better."

Rufus made a slight hissing sound at the sight, and he said, "It's worse than Reno had me believe."

Vincent put down his arm. "It's been getting worse these few days. Strange, because the progression of the disease was quite steady before that."

"You mean," Rufus said, "that you think something is accelerating it since you came to Corel."

Vincent met his gaze steadily. "Yes."

Rufus shuffled slowly to the window, leaning his cane against the wall and carefully opening the blinds. Vincent watched him for a moment, then gazed instead out below at the bustling main street of Corel, the muted sound of rumbling cars and patchy vegetation on the cliffs above.

"Tell me what happened."

If he'd had time to rehearse his story, perhaps Vincent would have had some sort of plan of attack, because relaying an account of a battle unprepared was much like rushing into that battle unprepared. And to do that to Rufus Shinra was not something he was comfortable with. "I must confess that I wasn't expecting you to visit so soon," he said. "I'm not quite sure I have the details correct."

"You had them correct for Yuffie," Rufus said abruptly.

There was something strange in the other man's voice when he mentioned Yuffie's name, but Vincent couldn't quite catch the exact tone. He had never been much of a reader of emotions, though he knew that Rufus and Yuffie had grown close in the past ten years in a friendship that he didn't quite understand. But it wasn't his place to say, so he had kept an eye on Yuffie and been silent, listening to her talk when she wanted to talk. Yuffie was like that.

"I told Yuffie because I had to. I would have told Reno if he had been in the airplane with me on the way back. I did not choose her specifically."

"I don't quite believe you," Rufus said, and Vincent smiled slightly.

"Believe what you want, then."

"Vincent-"

"I'm not hiding anything from you," Vincent said sharply, and Rufus' eyes flew to his face at that, narrowing. "I will admit that I still don't quite trust you after all these years, as most of the old members of AVALANCHE don't trust you. But even I will admit that times are changing, and with the circumstances of this last week and how you have been a key player in them, I would be a fool to withhold information from you. It's not a case of you versus Yuffie, or Yuffie versus Reno, or you versus anyone else. That's child's play, and I like to think we're well beyond that."

Rufus turned away again, and after a moment, he said, "Yuffie left."

It took a moment for that to process. "Gone back to Wutai?"

The blond man nodded, one sharp motion up and down. "I tried to convince her to stay - I told her that especially after what happened to you...but she wouldn't hear of it. She left half an hour ago."

There was that strange quality in Rufus' voice again - not anger, not frustration, but something else, a slight longing, maybe, or even something more subtle than that. "Don't take it too hard," he said at last. "Yuffie was always impulsive."

Rufus laughed, but the sound was hard. "I have very few friends in this world, Vincent. I would have liked it if she had stayed."

"Cloud Strife," Vincent said, deciding that a change of subject would be a good thing. "How well did you know him?"

Rufus frowned at him. "Not well enough. I asked him to join Green Earth several times. He refused, as I thought he would. Yuffie wrote of him sometimes, passing mentions of visits. I admired him. Why are you asking?"

"Did Yuffie mention anything about the Materia I gave her?"

"In passing. Nothing about what it was. She told me that it wasn't her story to tell, and to ask you. Which is why I'm here now."

Vincent did some rapid calculating. Yuffie, Rufus said, had left half an hour ago. Logical reasoning would then mean that Rufus had seen her off, then come immediately to the hospital from the airport. He wondered if there was a way to put this delicately, decided that there wasn't. "If you try anything...unbecoming...towards Yuffie," he said quietly, "you do realize you have all the rest of the members of AVALANCHE to deal with. I would be careful, if I were you."

Rufus' hand twitched slightly. "I am a busy man, Mr. Valentine. I assure you that romance isn't a priority at the moment. And as I said, Yuffie Kisaragi and I are merely old friends."

Vincent shrugged and flexed his metal hand once or twice. "I asked about Cloud Strife because there is a link between him and that Materia that Yuffie has now safely tucked away in her Conformer." Before Rufus could say anything, Vincent plowed on. "More precisely, that Materia is Cloud's Materia."

Rufus sucked in a sharp breath. "You mean that Cloud is alive?"

"No," Vincent said. "I mean that the Materia that I gave Yuffie contains all that is left of Cloud Strife."

Silence. Below, cars rumbled past the intersection, horns honking. The sun hung low and red in the sky, and he suddenly thought of Meteor, hanging red and ominous in the sky so long ago. Memories were funny things.

Rufus' cane fell to the floor with a metallic clang. The silence shattered.

"I don't understand," Rufus said.

Vincent leaned back against the flimsy headboard of the bed, and thought of that long, cold night that he had passed slumped against the ground outside the ruins of Nibelheim, hoping that someone, anyone, would be able to help him because he had lost too much blood and could not help himself. It had been almost funny, he had mused as he lay there drowsing through the pain, that the immortal one would be the first to die.

No, not the first. The second.

"I went to Nibelheim because I wanted to see for myself what Rude had described to me. He didn't tell me much more than he told you or Reno, and that worried me. For some reason, I can't remember much of the actual town, other than the fact that it is not there. There are some remnants of civilization - I remember seeing some crumbling walls, a fence or two before the sun set. The roads are gone."

"Yes," Rufus said. His voice was strained, flat. "I heard from Rude."

Vincent smiled grimly. "Rude might have exaggerated. Or perhaps he didn't want to give you the whole truth. Turks never do, you know. We have our own secrets."

Rufus did not smile. "Go on."

"There were bodies. Most of them were just bones - the flesh was long gone, but not long ago enough. There's a look to old bones that these didn't have. These were fresh. I'd say in the last two years or so, long enough for the bodies themselves to decompose, long enough for vegetation to have overgrown what was left of the town. What's strange is that if the town had been destroyed two years ago, certainly someone would have reported it."

"Rude said it had not been burned down."

"It wasn't," Vincent said. He paused, wondering how to word it appropriately. "I remember when Weapon attacked Junon, and I had wondered, back then, what would have happened if the cannon had missed and Junon had been hit. I think perhaps it would have looked something like Nibelheim."

Rufus' hands twitched slightly, as if he wanted to curl them into fists and was resisting the compulsion. "Go on," he said again.

"I went towards the edge of the town, where the old building used to be that was commonly named the Shinra Mansion." He cast a significant look at Rufus. "You would know that place."

"Yes," Rufus said, not elaborating.

"It was no longer there, as expected. Instead, there was a cave. As Rude had done, I went inside, fully expecting whatever it was that attacked him to attack me."

Rufus waited, and then when Vincent didn't continue, he prompted. "And it didn't."

Vincent gazed thoughtfully at the ceiling. "No. I had...called my...demons, had them at the ready. Perhaps whatever it was sensed this and kept its distance. I continued into the cave hoping to find some sort of clue, and then I realized that the tunnel was sloping downward. At a certain point the rock ended in rubble, and then abruptly became a set of old stairs."

Rufus drew a breath. "The stairs to the basement."

"Correct. I decided to tempt fate and continue down to the basement to see if any of the books had survived. I was just at the foot of the stairs when I was attacked. Unfortunately I don't remember much of the events past that, because at that point Chaos took over my body and my memories, and Chaos has a... consciousness all his own." Vincent paused again. "When I returned to myself-"

Rufus leaned forward, those bright blue eyes intense like burning stars. "You chased the monster up through the tunnels," he said, "where you ended up at the cave mouth and managed to cripple it."

Vincent frowned. He hadn't told that to Yuffie, only what happened after the battle. "Yes. How do you know this?"

"I've dreamed it," Rufus told him grimly. "I've dreamed it every night for the past four months. Two monsters locked in combat, both dark, both winged, except that one-" he cast a significant look at Vincent, "-has bright red eyes, and the other...its eyes are bright green-silver."

"Mako eyes," Vincent said.

Rufus took a deep, shuddering breath, and Vincent watched the elegant face spasm, then regain control forcefully, smoothing out into the facade of authority that Rufus Shinra worked so hard to keep and which even this recurring living nightmare couldn't shatter. "Yes," Rufus said. "Mako eyes."

They were both silent for a long while, or at least to Vincent it seemed a long while. There were no clocks in the room. He usually needed none; the passage of time was irrelevant to him. The sun rose and the sun set, and days moved into weeks and into months, then years, and nothing changed. In a way, he was almost perversely glad for this new strain of Geostigma that had chosen him as host, to jolt him into remembering how fleeting life really was.

"When did you know it was Cloud Strife?"

Vincent did not stir at the sound of Rufus' voice breaking the brittle silence; instead, he looked down at his metal hand laying limply on the bedspread, like the shriveled copper exoskeleton of some insect. "I have no factual evidence," he said simply. "But I knew, I think, before Rude told me what he had seen, before I borrowed that aircraft from Cid Highwind, before I set foot in that cave." He lifted the sleeve over his infected arm again, then let it drop with a soft sigh. "You're not the only one who has been dreaming, Rufus."

Another brittle silence. "How long have you had these dreams?" Rufus demanded.

"A week, perhaps," Vincent said. "They started just before I talked to Tseng and then rescued Rude and Reno from Costa del Sol. It was enough that I knew what had to be done, after Tseng gave me the basics. I used the morph command out of a last resort, actually. I had crippled the creature, but I didn't want to kill it, and I think that in itself was a sentiment strong enough for Chaos to hold back on slaying it outright. I had no idea that it would morph into a Materia."

Rufus had clasped his hands behind his back, standing as ramrod straight as if he were made out of iron, a hard light gleaming in his eyes. "Two things," he said, his tone clipped and quietly dangerous. "One, Yuffie Kisaragi comes back to Corel with that Materia. No exceptions."

"Agreed," Vincent said.

"Second thing," Rufus said, plowing on over Vincent like a ruthless storm. "I never told Tseng any of this." He fixed Vincent in his withering stare. "So how in high heaven and earth did he know?"

The Planet's rotation seemed to hiccup for a moment. "You didn't?" Vincent asked, amazed, and then at Rufus' cold stare, a faint feeling of dread crept over him. "You didn't," he said flatly. "I see. How interesting."

"We must now add a third thing to our agenda," Rufus said, and reached into his pocket to pull out a small phone. He flipped it open, pushed one button, jammed the thing to his ear. "Shinra here," he said after a moment. "I need to see Tseng right away. Immediately. This instant. Tell him to report to my office and remain there until I speak with him. Tell him that is a direct order."

"There's no point in that now," came a familiar, halting voice from the doorway, and Rufus whirled around, fingers twitching at his belt for the gun hidden under his long coat. Vincent did not turn, and after that brief second he saw Rufus' hand drop away. He could guess at what had happened and why Rude was here. He lay back down against his pillow and moved his gaze to the door, where Rude was leaning heavily, his face ghastly pale.

"You're supposed to be resting," Rufus began, and Rude shook his head weakly.

"We've got a situation on our hands, sir. Our bank accounts have all been emptied. Tseng's gone."