A/N: This prompt comes from...Well, it isn't really a prompt, and it's from yours truly. A continuation of the chapter 'Bad Luck'.
Disclaimer: My greatest fear is that one day, people will realise that all I do in this collection is make jokes, write fluff and poke fun at copyright laws.
Midgar stands proud on the horizon, but there's something comical about the plate that sits above the city. It's wider than the city itself, he realises, and that's where the punchline is: the moral corruption above is larger than the corruption below, despite the poisonous air and the thuggish barflies. He notes it cynically; Shinra Inc. is corrupted. It goes in the same drawer in his mind that every other fact goes into, ready to be used and abused when the time is right. There's no real emotional reaction. He's a Turk, after all.
Huffing, he moves away from the car's back window. He's got a long journey ahead of him. Nibelheim, seems a world away- across the mountains, across the sea, across the desert and the canyons and the forests. It's a path paved with obstacles, and he doesn't like it. In Midgar, the only obstacles were people- easily removed. But a desert will never bleed, no matter how much you shoot it.
He blinks. The driver asks him whether he's okay. He throws him a half-hearted nod, and the driver, civil duty attended to, resumes the job for which he's being paid. Vincent's skin prickles.
He's heard of it before, from accounts of old, retired Turks who got pensions and shuffled paper and couldn't lift a gun. It starts in chest, the feeling of being invincible, like you can't die. (Although, that's the feeling all Turks have. It comes with the territory.) Then comes the fear. The shaking, echoing fear, the fear that strikes when there's nothing around. It's the fear of the self, the monster that lives inside the man, the one no-one can kill, the one that can barely be controlled.
The last step is the realisation: the knowledge that the monster is the Turk, not you. And it becomes a war between you and the Turk, and the Turk always wins. They say that's the moment when the person 'cracks', and their mind starts marching to the tune of machine-gun fire, ever-closer to the inevitable destination: insanity.
He wonders, silently, if this is what it's like to go crazy. They say that wondering if you're crazy proves you aren't, but you'd have to be insane to know that in the first place, so he doesn't trust it.
The moment passes, and he regains control. He'll deal with his personal demons later, in the cold mountain air of Nibelheim. For now, he must rest for the journey.
He's torn, between worrying about the reality of life in Nibelheim, or the mission he has to achieve within it. He settles for the former. He wonders, briefly, if it's anything like his home town, although it's not like he could tell if it was. He can't remember his home town anymore. The deadly, rushing monotony of the city life has worn him down. Still, he can amuse himself with fantasies of how his home might have been.
He doesn't (cannot) know the future. He cannot know that, in about thirty years' time, he will awaken again in Nibelheim, carrying greater demons than he can yet imagine. He cannot know that his childhood foible of blaming himself will be fashioned by time into his own personal torture. And he cannot know that, waiting for him in that quiet mountain town, is a woman who he will love, a man who he will hate, and a bullet that will pierce his heart.
For him, the future is uncertain. But with uncertainty comes hope; a hope that the future he will embrace is better than the city he has left behind.
Only history knows the truth.
A/N: Well, there we go. Bad Luck, part II, and I've caught up with my schedule. There's actually room for a Part III here, to show Vincent's meeting with Lucrecia, but that's for later.
In other news, I promised a celebratory chapter once we reached 25 (planned) chapters, and 25 chapters we have reached; the celebration will be put up with the next chapter. Thanks to everyone who's read this far!