XIII

It was the day that Vincent Valentine died.

The morning wind was crisp, blustering through Edge with hostility. Above, faceless clouds coalesced together into a gloomy mercury pall that some of the more superstitious of the convoy took to be an ill omen; the Planet's displeasure towards their mockery of death. Vincent, by contrast, had for a long time stolen mortality from the world with his own existence and thought little of it. He travelled there, stowed away in secret, to observe the turn of the tides himself.

To protect their identities and name, and most importantly to be there for Denzel, the other party members had remained with the boy.
Out of sight, out of blame, and out of danger. All except the doomed, proud man who refused to see this finished through another's eyes.

The route was rough and uneven, the truck's worn rubber tracks and aged, convulsing engine giving those in the rear of the vehicle a dose of seasickness. For that reason the journey was silent, and each of the WRO soldiers flanking the condemned stared down between their feet in concentration, repelling the nausea. Except the lack of red knitted into the breast of their tawny-stone jackets, Vincent couldn't truly distinguish the military from nurse Evie's own apparel. However, it wasn't their uniformity that brought disquiet to his thoughts. It was that which sat opposite to him in a bizarre mirror image. There, emulating him in all posture, appearance and even mood, was a living duplicate of himself puppeteered from within by Reeve's very own Cait Sith.

'Failsafes,' Reeve had referred to the dangling, stiff marionettes as. Likenesses of each and every one of the party were hung by hooks, like butchered carrion, inside a secure chamber that both Vincent and Yuffie had been exposed to the previous night. 'For emergency situations, just like this.'

'Disturbed,' Vincent had replied.

Two horns bleated from behind the truck. Once short, followed a long drone, ended by a second brief blare. They were entirely in tandem with each other. The WRO soldier to Vincent's right pressed a hand to the tense gunslinger's shoulder and urged him to remain unseen, leaning up out of their seat to peel back the green tarpaulin. Looking through it, he spied two antiquated cars trailing the vehicle with the sinister meander of a predator's dorsal fin. They were neither leisurely nor belligerent, but their presence sowed disquiet within the soldier, as if they were only there to convey a message: we know.

"Two cars," he reported. Rust had mottled over them like lichen. "They look old - really old. Skeleton cars, y'know?"

The Don, Vincent deduced.

"There's two more," the soldier added uneasily. Pulling out of the alleyways on either side, as their pursuers passed, was a second couple of aged cars proclaiming another three horn-blasts - two quicker, bracketing a single drawn-out note just as before. A dryness lurked within the sounds, hoarse with dust and age and neglect, as solemn as the knells of a church. It piqued Vincent's intrigue, but he contained himself. After not half a minute's pause, what was becoming a chilling indication of Don Santeo's insight into their plans announced itself with the three-stop clamour of a fifth and sixth cars' horns pulling out concurrently into the inauspicious columns behind the five-truck WRO convoy. "That's creepy, man. You think there's someone on the inside?" The soldier was nonplussed, his brow creased; the other, to Vincent's left, was completely silent. There wasn't a word from them, and they radiated nervous tension. The man sniffed.

"It's possible," proposed Vincent. "But we don't have time to suspect everyone. Santeo's in such a position where he can neither object to, nor prevent what we intend to do - regardless of any prior intelligence." There was a metallic click on his left, stirring his ears. A handgun's safety, thumbed off. "Unless..."

Vincent barred his forearm into the muzzle of the weapon beside him, and pushed it off-target. The gun unloaded its fatal shot through the flapping material shroud over the truck's rear, the bullet blunted into the wall of a passing building outside. Vincent's ear was aflame with noise, the ringing cacophonous and persistent. The traitor's face was glossed with sweat, a portrait of anxiety that belied his murderous intent. The gunslinger latched around the barrel of the handgun, which regurgitated smoke, and tugged it free of quivering, perspiration-slicked hands. The would-be assassin was cornered, stammering in almost as much discomfort as Vincent's off-putting copy was now in. Cait Sith quailed with surprise, painting an unflattering look to the doppelgänger.

"...He tried to get there first."

"Wait," the soldier said, stumbling ponderously inside the moving vehicle. He trained his rifle onto the collaborator with a confounded expression, one of betrayal. "Toba's not one of the Don's guys. I've been with him since the beginning; he's got a damn family! Shit. You being blackmailed?"

"I- I have to be the one to shoot him," Toba stuttered. He was wracked with fear, unlike the rabid detainees of Grimhaven Vincent was familiar with. "I have to... I've gotta kill him, I don't have a choice, Crado! My fiancée," he swallowed, groping feebly for the weapon, "m-my fiancée... Oh Gaia, he's got Lexi, man!"

"That prick," Crado spat. "Look, he's not gonna touch her. You know what she's like," he slapped Toba's shoulder with an unsettled spur of humour, one which was entirely amiss with the panic-stricken man. "C'mon, she's tough. Remember when you first asked her on a date? She slapped you so hard!"

"I don't care," Toba gave back, as if talking to a stranger. "I don't- I don't care about that! I can't take the risk! I can't... I can't let them do that to her, okay? I just can't!" With his second miss of the handgun, which Vincent tilted just out of range, he cried out in both frustration and hysteria. "This guy... this guy's got nobody! No-one even knows his fucking name! Please, man! Please, let me see her home safely, all right? All right? Please!"

When manipulated, love was as perilous as hatred, if not more so. Vincent knew first-hand. The desolation he'd suffered upon the reprehensible acts of that accursed scientist and his former, wayward lover was evidence enough of this. The very fact that he was alive in this generation alone was because he had loved too openly, that he had exposed his candour to the taste of Hojo's bullet and Lucrecia's abandon. His heart would never again reside upon his sleeve, that much he had promised himself, never requiting the tangible and youthful warmth of one in particular he did so lament his wonders of. The cesspit of emotions that he had repressed or shunned altogether was stinging and splitting open at the sight of this enamoured man and the life that Vincent could never have himself.

There was civil war within his own mind.
The stoic, pragmatic ice of the dead man was thawing under the memories of what it was to be alive.

He cast his gaze down upon the babbling Toba, and down towards the handgun he wielded. With one decision, he had the ability to rob this man of all he cherished and adored. With that couple's life in pieces, the WRO could then manoeuvre against this underground empire yet not without blood upon their hands, nor guilt upon his. The pressure of a needle, in certain places of the body, was far more agonising than the press of a razor's edge in another. The truth would be known intimately by him alone. If he turned the firearm upon himself, then he invited the slow, toxic doubt of whether the Don had the capacity to honour his word even if this man did comply. Crado too appeared to be considering the same dangerous line of thoughts, flitting his attention between Vincent and Toba.

A moral roadblock: precisely what the Don wanted.

"This is a problem," Cait Sith sighed with loud resignation. "And just when I was starting to like being you, too!"

"Boss?" Crado gestured towards the peculiar puppet. "What are you talking about?"

"Seems like you lads need a break," the faux Vincent shrugged. How surreal it was for Vincent to view himself in such a cheery disposition. "I'm all due to die today, so don't worry about a thing, all right? Now, listen up - there's a blood packet stashed up here," Cait Sith rapped at his forehead. "This was where I- Reeve, was going to shoot me. Extremely dependable, and just as realistic! All you've got to do is just point, shoot, and carry me to the Don! Nae bother!"

"What if he sees through it?" Toba pointed out.

"Then Lady Luck's bade her fond farewells," Cait Sith declared, with macabre levity. "You haven't really got a choice though, have you?"

"He's not wrong," Crado offered unhelpfully. "You better take this chance."

A heavier horn bellowed out across the road, and Crado peered through the tarpaulin sheet. Behind the six-car tail was a veritable fortress of a vehicle, clad in the scavenged hides of multiple others. Their cadavers were soldered together to form a towering, misshapen mutant of an engine, rumbling forth on colossal crenellated wheels that threatened to annihilate even the military's trucks upon overshadowing them. No doubt this was Don Santeo's luxurious personal craft.

"Wh-what is that?" Toba rose to his feet timidly, but Vincent palmed him back onto the bench.

"We gotta shoot you in the head?" Crado asked the puppet, stress branching out in a vein beside his eye.

"You don't have to," Cait Sith replied. "It'd help, though."

The reins were Crado's own, and through haste he levered his rifle upward and punctured open Cait Sith's skull. The spray of pseudo-blood spattered across the three, stippling them with the deep maroon spume. The entrance wound brooked thick and abundant, pumping free through manufactured flesh. Vincent's double slumped bonelessly against the seat, the expression measured perfectly the subtle human shock that had struck Vincent's own features by Hojo's hand. If anything however it was liberating, and the gunslinger was oddly unfazed by the sight of it; he considered that he had become desensitised to death, having embraced it so personally, but the voice of that waggish young fool from Wutai echoed inside him that he was simply moving on.

"All right," Crado growled to his friend, and hooked him by the nape of his neck like a lion to its cub over to himself. Blood continued to drip and murmur onto the floor, swilling around underfoot with each tremor the streets brought. "Follow him out, now, and run for your fucking life. Gaia help you, Toba - go."

Toba hoisted the corpse up onto his shoulder, ichor ebbing down over his jacket. Despite its size, it was fairly light; he would have to act. He stumbled out of the truck, ankle buckling against the solid tarmac. He fell onto the puppet, careful not to mangle it further, when the fender of a car loomed before him. His eyes welded shut, his brow furrowed with anticipation, and he braced himself on to the end, sheltering the false being as though it were his own son.

The metal bow brushed against Toba's head, as close as a kiss.
He breathed out, long, and ragged and relieved.

Ahead, the WRO convoy had stopped. There was a clangour from either side as both WRO personnel and riders of the chariots of rust disembarked. The six cars fanned out into a fortified half-hexagon in the road, barricading off the southern end of the onlookers. The truck drivers interpreted this as an invitation, and branched out symmetrically. Grimhaven residents caught within the no-man's land were shepherded over and under the stationary vehicles, crawling and clambering their ways to the relative safety of the thronging hordes. Above their excited chatter, mercenaries and soldiers confronted one another, man to man.

Out of the large, vehicular zombie hobbled Don Santeo, sluggish and hooded by a cloth shawl. No longer was he sporting his lurid set of armour, but he was now dressed in a kingly robe composed of enough fabric to tether to a ship's mast. Hidden away within them were steel spokes at his hip, which clanked and rapped against his tortured belt-line; whatever it was jutted out at his waist, removing his human guise altogether. Sporadic cheers elicited from the people, who marvelled upon him even as he hauled along a clubbed foot that had malformed and bloated to obscene ugliness overnight. The extremity was bulbous and folded in places like congealed liquid, its flesh pale with the texture of a marshland. Its toes were scabbed with gangrene and forked out unnaturally like plant roots. He hugged his broken arm close to his body, and still nursed it inside a cast. His gait was cumbersome and awkward, and his lungs struggled beneath the ample weight of his breasts.

"Well," Reeve called out, strolling through the palpable friction. "Seems like you got what you wanted. Are you happy?"

"Generally, yes," the Don grinned, his lips like mucous leeches. "About having to come outside? No, no I'm not," his humour was soured, and he glanced over the puppet's remains with disdain. "But the Red Ripper, soaked in red! The irony. Haw-haw! I'm going to use his head as a dip bowl!"

'Rip off his head,' bawled a man from behind the vehicular bulwark. 'My son's not slept all night because of that freak!'

"I did it, all right? I did it! Look!" Toba spoke up, pushing himself to his feet. "Where's my fiancée? Where's Lexi?! Give her back to me!"

"Lexi," Santeo mumbled to himself. "Lexi, Lexi... I think I remember her, yes - but, mm... where's the proof you killed him?"

"What?" the soldier was dumbfounded, if reeling with fear. "His body's right there! Right in front of your damn eyes, now give her back to me!"

"Gut it," ordered the Don firmly, his ever-winking eye riddled with suspicion. "I heard a lot of whispers when my weeds were at play. Gut him."

It's over, Toba thought in terror, the spotlight enough to quail his spirit. He wasn't a killer, let alone a battle-toughened warrior. He hadn't even the true conviction to squeeze the trigger on Vincent, either, but the collision of the gunslinger's forearm had startled him. Toba had grown up in Kalm, and was every part the town's namesake - humble and traditional, with not an ounce of flair or ambition in him. When he'd volunteered for the WRO, he had spent most of his days aiding in the construction of the Edge highway, or performing maintenance works. Until today he'd wielded a weapon three times: once in training, once as part of the infamous sewer evacuation disaster last March, and the last time because a cementing saw was technically registered as a sidearm in law. When all eyes were upon him to kneel down and drive a knife into the chest cavity of the puppet, he regressed into that helpless, scared boy from Kalm.

It's over - shit, he's going to find out. He's going to make me into a liar.
He's going to hurt Lexi, or worse - he's going to do what he always does to his women.
He's going to kill me. He's going to make me watch, then kill me here. I can't stomach this - I can't do this, I didn't want any of this!

I want to go home - I want to go home with my Lexi, and we can live on together. I want her.
I want to see her, and I want her safe, and in my arms - that's all I want! I don't deserve this!

"Not hiding anything, are you?" the Don mused. "Hurry up!"

"He doesn't have to do that." The Commissioner addressed the both of them, reassuring Toba. "Don't demean the dead. We've delivered what the people want, and whatever sick business between you both is finished here as well." Urgency littered his tone. "Give the man his fiancée back, Santeo."

"Yes he does," the Don wheezed in affront. "Trying to deny me my prize, eh? Open his belly, let's get a good look at him!"

Toba hovered the knife-edge over the simulacrum's torso, but when he pricked the soft faux-skin underneath, he hesitated. The pressure mounted, and his muscles petrified. His body stiffened, an animal caught in the glow of headlights. His breath came slow and hampered, as if the air that flowed from his nostrils were signs of his deception. He readjusted his grip on the hilt, his fingers slick and unable to fasten around it. They're going to kill me, was all that encroached upon him as he took longer and longer, his blade poised, the death of time ticking by. They're going to take my Lexi, and they're going to hurt her...

"Oh," snorted the Don, "what's a little joke between men? Get up, lad, get up! I believe you!"

'The Don's so funny!' hailed a woman from the crowd.

'Yeah, can't you see he was joking?' jeered a man, his four-year old daughter astride his shoulders. 'The Don would never do something like that!'

'Look at all these bastards,' protested another, 'trying to make our Don out to be a monster!'

"You do?" Toba scoped over the mob furtively, afraid and untrusting. "Where is she, then? Give her back to me!"

The Don nodded in acceptance, his sordid mouth pursed. He lumbered back towards his monstrous craft, the atmosphere thick with the soldier's worry. Toba couldn't blink, for fear of missing his fiancée's safe return. The door thumped shut, the reverberations felt in his heart. He flinched from it. The car's suspension hissed and steamed, a great hydraulic hive beneath the chassis, elevating it higher above the little people. From its lofty perch, the vehicle's hood lurched open.

Toba was terrified. "Where-" was all he managed to croak out.

"YOU'RE A LIAR," resonated the scrambled audio of a loudspeaker. "HE'S A LIAR, EVERYONE! HE LIED TO US! THEY ALL DID!"

At that, within the back of the truck, Vincent jarred as if freshly woken.

Hordes of disparagement and abuse volleyed out towards the WRO, the civilians stimulated and riotous. They hung on their Don's every word, transfixed by him into some cultic reverence, and Reeve knew that the temperature of the situation was escalating out of hand. The WRO founder steadily paved his own way back through the soldiers, one arm slung under Toba's in forced rout. The soldier threshed and struggled, screaming out for his fiancée, for his unseen love.

"All parties back to your vehicles," Reeve instructed, as evenly as he could. "Now!"
The enflamed mob hemmed in the convoy on all sides.

"GET THEM!" the Don boomed out over the swelling pandemonium, "THEY'RE PROTECTING THE RED RIPPER! THE LIARS WANT US ALL DEAD! THEY WANT TO SEE HIM PULL YOUR CHILDREN APART, YOUR LOVED ONES, AND WHY? BECAUSE THEY WANT TO RAZE GRIMHAVEN TO THE GROUND, AND BURN IT ALL! THEY WANT EVERYTHING GONE FROM HERE! THEY WANT TO BUILD ANOTHER SHINRA TOWER, RIGHT HERE OVER YOUR GRAVES! YOUR CHILDREN'S GRAVES!"

"Enough!" Reeve yelled out over the chaos, climbing up the scaffolding of the rearmost truck. It was daunting, the platform as high as the stakes. So many hateful eyes pierced up into him. So much incessant, wild emotion. Would reason suffice? "Enough, damn it! Aren't you all tired of this scare-mongering? The Red Ripper is a man who's trying to save you people, just like we are! Just like everyone else but your Don is, but you're too stupid to realise it! Are all of you brainwashed? Or are you all just brain-dead? You know what your Red Ripper was doing, forty-eight hours ago? He was freeing daughters, mothers, sisters... He was freeing your women, women from every corner of the continent, from living in the squalor of human traffic and slavery! That's what your Don is! That's-"

With a harrowing crackle, bullets sang out the dirge of Reeve Tuesti.
In the wake of the truth the crowd hushed, forsaken by their beloved Don.

A/N: Sorry for the late(ish) delivery! I know I'm a little out of sync with my usual upload times, but writer's block has been a nightmare. I had a brutal time with this chapter, for some reason. I hope you enjoy, and thank you for any views/feedback as ever!