"...tendencies."
6: ____cidal.
"The job," said Vincent, to the darkness of his blind world. "The job makes the soul of the man, the life."
He methodically sharpened the long vicious looking knife he held in his hand. Back, forth, grating and grating.
"A job well done," said Vincent to the emptiness of his cave, "rings eternal with its brightness."
Grating and sawing ,serrating edge so fine it could cut paper at the touch. Skin...at the...touch.
" A job gone awry can demolish the nations." He sheathed the blade with a goosebump of a "shhhhhheenk".
"A job completed... closes a chapter," said Vincent to his shadowself.
Vincent stood up and went to close the chapter.
"There is, " said Tifa very calmly and very composedly, hands gripped at her sides. "A dead man lying on top of my bar."
Blood. Cold clammy hands and spilled tequila and ugh. Ugh. Stench and dead man's skin and glossy fish eyeballs popping out of his head. Blue. Blue. The blue of the dead. He looked like he had been drowned, the way he was all purple with his own mortality, but he wasn't. He had been stabbed. Knife through the stomach, ripping through organs like butter, pulling out and slashing across the chest.
Perhaps he had drowned. On his own blood, choked on it, and now floating on it.
Tifa rolled up her sleeves with a sigh and walked over to the table, flipping the corpse over to look into his face. She squinted, brow furrowed for a minute. There was something familiar about the scruffy beard and the blonde wild hair and the blue eyes. She prodded at the beginnings of a pot belly. Eh. She was in the process of moving him when Cloud and Aeris walked in.
"Teef, what is tha- aaaaugh!" excalimed Cloud, reeling backwards. That's...aw man that's sick. Tifa, do you have any idea what that is?"
"A dead body, "she replied with a slight pout. "Don't tell me you haven't seen one before. I know you have. I've been with you while you killed people."
Aeris' eyes flew wide open, startled. "...killed?"
"That's not killing," Cloud snapped back, his sleeve held up to his nose to muffle the smell. "It's self-defense. I make sure neither my loved ones or me get hurt. That's it. That doesn't count as killing. What the hell happened to this poor guy anyways?"
Tifa shrugged. "I dunno. I just ....found him on this table. Found him. I did!" she snapped as Cloud looked at her funny. Her eyes switched over to focus on Aeris. Pink dress, pink bow, flower basket, braided hair. Process. Repeat. Process. Repeat. "What the hell did you do to her?" she cried, aghast. "You...oh my god."
Cloud's expression darkened. "Aeris, go in the back room."
Tifa sneered. "What are you, her mother now?"
He had, after all, given life to her.
Cloud snarled. "You keep out of this Tifa. Aeris is my business, not yours, you got that?"
"Not my business? And what shall we call you and me, then, Cloud? Does you and me exist?"
"Oh, don't even get into that Tifa, don't. Don't try to guilt me into-"
"...excuse me?"
They turned and looked at Aeris, emerald eyes dewy and frightened. "What...what about him? What're we going to do about him?"
Cloud and Tifa looked down and saw between them the dead man, rotten like a dead fish bobbing at the top of a pond. Tifa sat down and covered her face in her hands. "Take him out of here. I got to open up soon. Bring him to the coroner's or something, will you, Cloud? Look for some ID on him?"
Cloud's face remained steely, his body stiffly placed in front of Aeris like a protective immoveable shield.
"Please Cloud?" Her voice was tired and sad.
Cloud relented, his expression softening as he picked up the corpse and walked out of the door silently.
There was a long silence until Tifa looked up at Aeris. Green eyes looked back at amber, looked back at the blood on the floor, looked at the doorway where Cloud had left.
"So," Tifa asked Aeris. "You want something to eat?"
Aeris watched Tifa clean up the dark goopy plasma over her scrambled eggs and steak, the only things, according to Tifa, that the dark-haired woman could cook. "You and Cloud," ventured the flowergirl hesitantly. "You're...together."
Tifa looked up sharply. "Yes," she said, blunt and curt, and went back to scrubbing the floor with exponentially growing vigor. After a moment of beating the hell out of the floor, she turned back to Aeris with a sigh, though her eyes did not rise to meet the girl's. "Yes, we're together, and no, I don't know where we're going with this relationship, and yes I am jealous and no I'm not going to let you have my man no matter what kind of a jerk he is."
She returned to scrubbing, and Aeris munched on her eggs, meek and quelled. Munch and scrub, munch and scrub.
"So what are you, anyways," inquired Tifa brusquely, though there was a gentle tone behind her words. "Are you really Aeris? Aeris Aeris? Or some sort of clone? Or her reincarnated?"
"I..." Aeris thought back to the dressing room, thought back to her home beneath the waves. Blades. Waves. Laughter. Drown. "I'm not sure. I don't know. I don't really...remember. I remember...things, but not everything, and I forget everything oh so often. It's like everything's blurry."
Tifa stood up and threw the reddened rag in the seat, rolling her sleeves down and putting her hands on her hips. "I told Cloud this was all wrong. I warned him. I told him he didn't know what he was getting into, and then he ups and creates something unnatural like-" she stopped her words, an apology in her eyes.
"...like me," Aeris finished the sentence for her.
"Like you," Tifa admitted. "In all understanding of your situation, you shouldn't even be alive. You shouldn't be here. But it was Cloud's mistake, not yours. And now..." She shook her head, long lashes fluttering against her cheek tiredly. "I always got to fix that boy's mistakes." She hopped over the bar and tied an apron on, pulling back her long lustrous hair. "Anyways, at least I got someone to talk to now."
Aeris twirled her fork in her slender fingers. "Tifa, I know that you....don't think highly of me right now, but we were friends before, right? And I'd like to be your friend now. Really, I would. So...could we? Be friends?"
Tifa looked back at her absently, smile pasted on her face. "Oh, yeah, sure. Friends. Totally."
Aeris returned the smile cheerfully, then looked back down at her plate, the bleeding eggs, the raw fleshy steak. Tifa's smile had seemed genuine enough. There was heart in that woman, a caring heart, and it extended to Aeris. But there was also this other feeling, this dangerous, frenetic something hiding behind that smile. Aeris looked at Tifa's back and poked at her own food. Suddenly she wasn't so hungry anymore.
"Wait, say that name again?"
"Bart Highwind."
"Highwind?"
"Highwind. Jesus Christ, man, you deaf?" The medical intern pulled on his cold rubber gloves.
Cloud shook his head. "But Highwind? I know a Highwind...looks like this guy. It's too uncanny for my tastes. Too coincidental."
The college-aged intern snorted as he casually examined the gutted insides of the corpse. "Yeah, well I'm dealing with facts here, and his ID places him as Bart Highwind, freight plane driver. He does transport. Has a twin brother and an older sister."
"Would this twin brother by any chance be named Cid?" Cloud asked with frigid spiders crawling up and down his back.
"Yea," said the kid in the lab coat, grabbing a pizza-cutter knife from his tray of tools. "Yeah. Cid. How'd you know that?"
Cloud shook his head. "Lucky guess."
He looked at the body's empty eyes as the jr. coroner pulled back the sheet.
Bart Highwind. Cid's brother. From a blurry distance, one could mistake them for each other.
How the hell did he end up in Tifa's bar, dead?
Vincent saw Cloud through the window, alone. Tifa and Aeris must be in 7th Heaven together by themselves. If he were Cloud, Vincent thought, he wouldn't leave Aeris alone with Tifa. But then, if he were Cloud, he wouldn't leave either of them alone. Not with men like Vincent walking the streets. Not with things like this happening. He peered over Cloud's shoulder through the frosty glass and saw a corpse, realizing that the autopsy would take some time, that Cloud would be staying there.
The job could start.
And will he not come again?
And will he not come again?
Perhaps he will come again. Perhaps he will come again with a knife in his hand and the sun in his eye and the dripping water of the lake from his bloody feet.
And will he not come again?
And will he not come again?
Nay.
Nay.
He is dead, he is dead.
Dead.
Go to thy death-bed.
He will never come again.
TBC.
Yes. Gets /even/ freakier. I am freaky-queen. Here me Roar.
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