Lookit, I'm starting another one before I continue with the first one. That's because 'Thin Armour' died in my head. Dang. Maybe this one'll go a little better. It's yaoi, too. Vincent and Cid have some conversations and things eventually start to get 'uncomfortable'.
Don't own nothing. It's probably a good thing.
Cid didn't get it. Right from the beginning. And it should've made me nervous, but I was too busy with demons, fear, grief, and hate to even really notice.
He was too old, like me, for the others, so I could expect him to end up in my corner. He drank, he smoked when the others were just learning how to wake up to the fact that life is mostly disappointment. He talked in brief sentences most of the time, and I knew he had a lot of experience working with people. Gruff, quiet, but with a wilful grin to let them know he wasn't an unfeeling bastard. I didn't expect him not to get it. Especially not after our first conversation.
"So, yer Vincent Valentine."
Camp was well underway without either of our help. It probably would've been better underway if it had also been without Kisaragi's help. Her obliging theft of our materia and at least one important sack of supplies had left our two duelling leaders angry and complaining at each other while the women had worked to salvage what comfort and harmony was left.
I was cleaning my weapons. Without materia (she was a damn quick fingered thing to have gotten into my guns in the night) I knew I was going to need something I could use for long-ranged kills, and there hadn't been much time since I'd pulled myself out of that basement to service all of my artillery.
"And you're Highwind."
He smirked a little, mouth a thin flash of gritty, unshaven humor in the brass light of his cigarette. "Heard of me?"
"No." Thirty years in a coffin effectively shoved you out of earshot of most media events.
"Yeah, well, I ain't heard of you, either."
And that was it. He walked off a few paces to smoke in the dark as I primed my guns and tried to forget the other weapon under my skin that hadn't only scared the shit out of the rest of them. It was unspoken, but unanimously acknowledged: we all had our own agendas, in the beginning.
That changed with time, of course. We established the dynamic necessary between strangers all walking in the same direction, and most of them got closer, some closer than others. There were problems, and moments of insanity that eventually led around to reality; there were imprudent decisions that dropped us into scrapes we sometimes barely stumbled out of; sometimes there were protests over leadership, struggles for control, but for better or worse the seams held.
Eventually, I couldn't ignore his solid presence in my corner, dodging the others, keeping his mouth shut on that cigarette, overlooking the bullshit that went on around us. He knew better than to join a battle he didn't want to win, even if he might've been a well-rounded leader.
And that, I guess, is when he noticed me. When everything went to hell.
Our second conversation happened on his airship, weeks later, somewhere between one place and another. I say conversation loosely; we'd talked before, but those brief encounters had rarely gone beyond a few grunts sprinkled with a word or two, usually during combat. This was a few of sentences -- mostly on his part, but still the longest we'd ever spoken.
I didn't like sleeping. Years of nightmares had taught me insomnia, just like it had taught me how to keep my mouth closed for when the fear, the hatred, the clawing disconnection and self-imposed quarantine made me want to start screaming out of impatience for murder, or madness, it didn't always matter which. Every day, I had to prepare myself for the open spaces. The coffin had been the hell I'd known, and I missed its stiff, musty, confining walls, if only because I'd always known what hell to expect there.
I knew he was coming long before he arrived on deck. His rolling sailor's gait, the assured steps of a man who is doing exactly what he was born to do, and doing it in an environment he practically built himself. This was his home, and would probably one day be his coffin. He knew what hell to expect in his heaven. He was master here.
The largest difference between us was this: he had an assurance that he'd chosen this life, no matter what lay ahead for him. I understood Cloud a lot better than Cid ever would. Not all of us could come to grips, or find peace, with the coffins we'd built.
He cracked his wrist and twitched his cigarette as he glared at the silent crew who barely acknowledged his presence. A good sign. He puffed some smoke into the running air and then stretched like a man who has woken up to the likely comfort of routine. He flicked the cigarette over the side.
I met him in the hallway almost a half hour later, and it surprised me because earlier I'd been listening for signs that anyone else was up. It was nearly dawn.
He was wearing socks and holding a coffee mug. He muttered something as I halted on the catwalk and made as if to back up.
"Go'n. Go."
I hesitated until he made room, and then slipped past him, not expecting further interface with our captain before his first few slugs of coffee.
"Hey, wait-a-sec." He turned around to me, his eyes shut and two fingers pinched together as he pointed at me like he'd forgotten he wasn't holding a cigarette. "You know anything about that shit in the cargo hold, those clothes and stuff?"
The lines of tired irritation were pronounced to me as he spoke, under his eyes and around his mouth. We were all strangers with our half-formed reasons here with him on his ship as he chauffeured us to god-knew-what kind of fate. I didn't care what he was going through, I couldn't care, because Hojo's imminent death was always singing in my thickening blood. It was hardly in me to notice anything they did, most of the time.
But this was his home, and I was sure he didn't say anything to them that wasn't carefully noncommittal. We, both of us, stayed out of the worst of it, caught up in our own private storms. Neither of us had promised anything while the rest of them clamoured for recognition from each other: he, because he was the pilot, the one it was necessary to stay on good terms with; me, because I had no use for them, except on the battlefield.
We were the adults, I knew suddenly. In Cid's mind, we were the two with the clearest heads -- the ones who knew enough to avoid the swirling pit of a common mad goal in the middle of the whirlpool. He thought that we were alike. It was enough to make a dead man want to laugh. I thought he'd understood.
"No," I told him. I didn't know.
He grunted. "Those damn kids," he muttered, turning away. "This isn't a fucking floating motel."
I didn't reply. I headed for the small room I'd claimed, inclined to secure myself again into a familiar, confining space. A part of me did linger for a moment, in truth, on the cargo hold. But, as I said, it was hardly in me to care.