Final Fantasy VII and all related names and characters are property of Square.

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Displacement ~ by Amariƫ

~part six~
"the past invades the kitchen cupboards"

Alice grudgingly allowed Simon to sleep on her couch that night -- not that there was much of a choice, as he had fallen asleep at what she considered the early hour of two in the morning and could not be raised. They had spent the evening and most of the night looking at her photos and talking over their odd memory loss. Despite Alice's hopeful feeling, they had gotten nowhere in the search for further information.

It was with slight irritation that she woke to find him making toast and eggs and reading the paper in her kitchen. Rolling out of bed and padding sleepily over to the table, she complained, "You're really not much of a mysterious stranger."

He raised an eyebrow, but made no comment. Alice ate her toast grumpily and with much loud crunching, got dressed, and emerged from the bathroom looking cleaner and much more alert. Not a moment too soon, either, as she was confronted with the sight of three more people coming in through the door.

"What is this, a fricking open house?" She was, however, in no better a mood. "Before you make yourselves at home, perhaps you can tell me what you're doing here?"

The foremost of the three had just disentangled herself from a long scarf, and now hung it on a convenient umbrella-stand. Taking no notice of the decidedly acerbic tone employed by the hostess, she cheerily extended a hand, saying, "Hi, I'm Yuffie! Nice to meet you!"

Alice realized with a shock that this was the teenaged girl from the photos. She was perhaps a year older, but was very much the same. Slightly bewildered, she took the hand, shook, and muttered something polite in return. "Sorry for bursting in on you like this, but we all met outside your door and we had to talk a bit before we went in. Of course we're all here for the same reason, which is to say that we all wanted to get here so..." Alice was unable to keep up with her breathtaking speed of diction and instead examined the two other visitors.

They were the small girl she had seen in a few of the pictures and a bald man who stubbornly stuck to his sunglasses in spite of the dim lighting in the hall. Alice had barely had time to process these facts before she felt herself being swept along in a tide of new faces into the kitchen.

The first thing she saw was Yuffie going through her cupboards. "I am so so sooo hungry!" she announced to the world, pulling out a packet of cookies. "So hungry I could eat an elephant!" She took a jar of pickles. "Don't you keep any food here?" She finished her raid by appropriating a can of beans, a banana, a leftover slice of pizza, and the only utensil in evidence -- a large spoon. So complete was Alice's confusion that she didn't even protest at the practical emptying of her pantry; instead, she collapsed into a chair and stared up at the rest of the visitors.

"What..." she managed weakly, but the child, obviously the one in control, interrupted with, "We're sorry to disturb you like this, but we have some really important things we've gotta tell you. Don't worry, we can explain what's going on." She consulted a slip of paper pinned to her sleeve. "Oh, an' I have to tell you that..." -- she squinted at the small writing -- "you knew Iris. I don't know what that means."

"Neither do I," said Alice. "But let's just sit down and you all can explain yourselves."

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author's notes: This finishes the chapters I had already written before posting the first one (I wrote the first through sixth chapters over the course of one night) so from now on updates may be a little slower, especially as I'm starting school soon and I seem to be getting new ideas all the time, ideas that just demand to be written down, and they've been taking up a lot of my writing time lately, distracting me from my already-started stories. But fear not, I will continue!