Everglow - Chapter Twenty-Five
"You've been gone a while."
Vincent didn't give any implication that he had even heard the voice other than a slight raise of his chin. He continued his slow, aimless walk through the hallways.
Rufus Shinra caught up to him and walked alongside the gunman, somehow keeping up with his long, elegant strides. "The children have been worried."
Once again, Vincent gave no reply, preferring to look straight ahead. His look was not encouraging the conversation; he looked forlorn, angry and despairing all in one, but Rufus still persisted.
"You could at least tell them you are safe."
Vincent closed his eyes and glided to a stop. "They are in their rooms?"
Rufus shook his head and continued to walk, signaling for Vincent to follow.
If it was possible, Vincent seemed to become more and more withdrawn as he realized where he was being led. The halls were whiter, the lights brighter and harsher, the tile the standard checkered white, gray, and black. The doors were metal, the small window laced with steel wire. The numbers were fading with time, one identical room blending into another, the pattern without interruption.
At the twenty-first door from the last turn they had made, Rufus stopped and gestured forward. "In there." After a tense moment of silence, he fished a key ring from his pocket. "They've been leaving the door unlocked in anticipation of your arrival, but just in case…" He handed the gunman a small brass key. "I don't think they'll mind an intrusion."
Vincent closed his hand around the key but didn't move toward the door. "Why did you lead them here? What purpose would it serve?"
"I did not show them this. They just knew."
Vincent glared at Rufus, his eyes laden with distrust and disbelief.
"Does that surprise you?" Rufus accepted the silence as an answer to the affirmative and nodded curtly. "I never told you what the security team found, did I?"
"At my request, I had some of my men review the security tapes from back when Sephiroth was a general. Aidan had been snooping around and Nadiya was tagging along."
Rufus paused. "They could not possibly have seen the screen, but they knew it was their father that was speaking. They knew his voice. Aidan even called out for him. I have never seen such a despaired child as when he found out that it was only a recording."
Vincent mulled over this for a long time. "You are suggesting that they were drawn to this room?"
"It would make sense, wouldn't it? Nadiya told us that sometimes when she was in Hojo's lab and in the worst of her anguish, she would feel arms around her and voices urging her to hold on. Aidan has dreams. Both of them knew their father like he had raised them. Given all this, would it be too much of a stretch to say that they could identify the room their parents had spent their childhood in?"
Vincent was still skeptical, not sure whether he should believe that there was some supernatural connection. He judged it to be a conversation best dropped. "Have they been well?"
Rufus changed the subject. "They are probably waiting. Go on in."
Vincent took that as a definite no.
Rufus left the gunman standing by the door. Vincent slowly slid the key into the lock and found it already unlocked. He turned the knob and pushed the door open slowly, hinges long ago rusted almost beyond use wailing their protest.
The room, in contrast to the others, was painted. Even though the lights were dimmed, Vincent was assaulted by the contrast. He could tell by the naivety of the style that the walls were painted by Sephiroth and Aralyn's small, inexperienced hands. Streams of paint, not tended to when they had first been applied, sometimes ran past the boundaries of the shapes and intruded into different hues and designs. There was no logical pattern to the designs; there was a vine with small, dainty blossoms and an ocean next to it, pastel and neon colored fish swimming in harmony.
Vincent turned his eyes up. On the ceiling, two sets of handprints, one slightly larger and less feminine than the other, were smeared across the entire breadth of the bland white tile.
He could have sworn he saw a young girl and a silver-haired boy leaping up to the bed, smiling mischievously, before they jumped with all their strength to paste their painted hands onto the ceiling. When the area was so plastered with prints that any more would make the haphazard pattern indistinguishable, the children jumped to the floor. The boy got behind the plain metal headboard and moved the bed to a new, untainted area. The girl went straight to a cluster of shallow, round pans, each with a different color of paint, and dipped her small hands in past her wrists, not having bothered to wash the last color from her hands first. The boy soon joined her, dipping one hand in green and the other in a turquoise, grinning widely. The pair raced to the bed, not caring as their hands dripped splotches of color on the white bedclothes, and they leapt into the air again, laughing and squealing in pure, childish delight.
He could only imagine how fierce Hojo's fury might have been, or the price the pair had paid for these simple moments of rapture. Somehow, he didn't think either of them had minded. That these prints were still here, and even that they had been grudgingly allowed in the first place, was undeniable proof of a victory against their oppressors.
In the bed, pushed against the corner, bedclothes still splashed with color despite being faded through washings, Nadiya and Aidan lay curled up in the same place their father had slept all these years ago.
He had never seen such peace and content on the children's sleeping faces.
He entered cautiously, stepping slowly to muffle his footfalls. He stopped at the children's bedside and observed the still children for a while. He wondered what they were dreaming, and if they perhaps could feel their parents in the room, protecting them.
He couldn't bring himself to wake them. The news that he was back could wait until morning. The sheets were at their ankles from their unconscious shifting, and so he righted the blankets, feeling oddly at peace as Nadiya let out a long, contented sigh and then curled in closer to her brother.
A glint in the vent caught his eye.
Silently he sank to his knees, fingers deftly handling the latch. When the grate fell away with a barely suppressed squeal, he reached in and pulled out can after can of ancient, leftover paint, most of the colors mixed so that it was impossible to tell the original hue. The lids were only half hammered on, and the tops of most were covered with a filmy layer of hardened paint. Brushes and stencils, lovingly but naively cleaned, and heavily worn books, favorite pages dog-eared, completed the set.
Tomorrow, he decided, he would let the children add their prints to their parents'.
A/N: (cough, wheeze, gasp) (points to 'next chapter' button)