Dreams would have been nice. Dreams of flying, or Costa del Sol maybe, but the dream he most regretted not having was of a giant target painted on the ground, three individually bagged sonsabitches, and an open hatch at five thousand feet.

What he had was a headache, and no fucking wonder.

"Welcome back," said Yazoo. He was a few feet away, leaning against the bulkhead. "Kadaj wants to know about the turbines."

"Piss on you too," Cid groaned. It felt like he still had his pants on, thank the Planet for small mercies. He probably should have worried about that before getting whacked, but eh. The bit about the ant hills, he was proud of that. He'd have to remember it and use it again.

Sounded like they'd made some progress while he was out—they'd gotten the flywheel spun up, but that still wouldn't mean shit unless they'd figured out the clutch.

"You're smiling," Yazoo noted. "I assume there's something we should know."

"Just being friendly," Cid reassured him, cranking as much bullshit into a smile as he could manage with his head and his nose still hurting so much. "You haven't hit me for a good minute and a half, I figure we're damn near dating now."

Yazoo gave him a look that he knew for sure he didn't like. It wasn't the 'I'm going to hit you again' look, he'd gotten a pretty good handle on that one already and this wasn't it. This one looked like 'that's an interesting idea'. And of course he was doing that smirk thing.

"You think so?"

Shit. He shouldn't have even joked about the potential of a romantic interlude, in his current position. But he could handle it, he was all over it, things were fine. He was going to get out of this jam, live to be an old, old man, and he was going to look his great-grandkids in the eye and tell them that no, his ass had never so much as been touched by some fancy mako truffle.

Maybe he wouldn't actually tell them that. But he wanted to be able to think it, anyway.

He'd been telling himself ever since these three snakes got on his goddamned airship that he'd have a plan any second—maybe it was all the cracks to the head that had finally knocked things into place, but that second was now. All he had to do was get into the cockpit and vent the fuel tanks. She'd be useless. Then he could probably get something non-vital in the back chassis to fail in a distracting way, and hey fucking presto. It wasn't a fancy plan but it ought to save most of the Highwind at least, and he should be able to preserve the structural integrity of his own happy self long enough to get the hell off.

"Look, hey. I tell you what. Lemme up off this thing and I'll get her flying for you."

Yazoo didn't seem to have heard him, he was staring at the cockpit again. The other two weren't talking, up there, but they were doing something to the controls that seemed to be confusing the hell out of the Highwind. Cid couldn't see a damn thing, facing aft the way he was.

"Hey. You hear me? I said I'd fly."

"I heard you. No." Yazoo drifted over and plucked the long-barreled gun from where it rested on Cid's back, close at hand in the likely case that Cid required Yazoo to hit him again.

"You want to get this boat off the ground or not?"

"Hn," said Yazoo, which Cid figured might mean yes. He was awfully absorbed by whatever the hell he was watching up front.

"Great. Then let me get off this fucking pipe."

Cid felt a hand on the back of his neck, tickling the short bristles at his nape. Planet's sweet mercy, he was going to set the bastard on fire before he chucked him out the hatch just for being so touchy all the goddamned time.

"Things seem to be going well with you where you are," Yazoo said, in a way that made Cid want to kick himself again for mentioning that dating thing.

"You won't be thinking that when the vapor shunt blows everything to hell," Cid snapped. The Highwind's prototype had had a manual vapor shunt, but she had an automatic one now—he'd made damn sure of that after he'd forgotten to open the shunt in time and taken out the back wall of the test hangar. Didn't matter. The Sephiroth Variety Hour here didn't even know basic shit like brakes. There was no way in hell they'd be able to call bull on his shunts.

That seemed to get Yazoo's interest, at least enough to make him stop fondling. Good start.

"Yeah," Cid continued. "You got the flywheel going, but I can't hear the shunt venting and after the flywheel starts you got about two minutes before the pressure spikes and the whole goddamn engine just farts itself out the back of the ship. It'll take more time to tell you how to fix than we got. Lemme up."

Well slung, he told himself. Well slung indeed.

It seemed like Yazoo was buying it, mostly because he hadn't hit Cid again. A few seconds passed, fingers drummed once on the back of his neck, and then he was face-to-face with the dainty little shit and god damn it he was going to do something perverted, wasn't he?

A low whirring roar kicked in from both sides of the cabin, and got loud in a hurry. Holy creeping fuck on toast, they figured out the turbines.

Yazoo blinked once, slowly, and ducked down to work on the greasy knots around Cid's wrists first.

Sure enough, the turbine pitch rose as the big gears started to synch up with the flywheel speed. The first one settled into lockstep right away, and the driveshaft gave a shimmy under him. The second didn't take much longer, and everything got a jostle when it caught. The third one, the really big one, took a couple seconds after that just like it should, and why the deep-fried hell couldn't the skinny sonsabitch untie just a little bit faster?

The third gear caught, and the entire cabin hummed. Most especially it hummed right through the driveshaft, the casing of which Cid was deeply dismayed to still have his legs around. He decided he'd rather be dead. He'd rather be in hell. He'd rather be in a goddamn budget meeting. Anything had to be better than being molested by his own ship while Precious Snowflake #2 was right there. Right there, waiting for any excuse to do things to him. He could tell.

Things were already getting kinda…fidgetty down there. Oh, this wasn't good.

Deep breath, now. There was nothing freaky about this, it was a simple case of mechanical resonance and bad luck. Anybody with a functioning set would be having the same problem. Nothing he could do about it, and most importantly it wasn't his goddamn fault that it was rapidly getting uncomfortable to be lying on his front. It was time to focus on the really important shit now, like not letting anyone touch his junk. Plan B: same as Plan A, but faster and hunched over. No sweat.

Snowflake was taking his damn time with the knots. "Clock's tickin'," Cid reminded him. He didn't sound distracted, 'course he didn't. His was not the voice of a man with his girl's metaphorical hand down his pants. All business. Oh yes.

"One of the knots was almost loose," Yazoo said, sitting back on his heels. "That's fixed."

"I told you, we probably got about half a minute now!"

"Mm-hm. Two minutes after the flywheel starts, the ship dies. Is that what you said?"

"Close e-fucking-nough! Get me off this thing!"

"Two minutes?"

"More like twenty seconds now, but yeah!" Cid found it was all too easy to get the proper tone of growing desperation into his voice. It was much, much harder not to squirm around.

Yazoo stood, rested a hand lightly on Cid's shoulder, and waited. Cid counted off the seconds in his head, but simple counting wasn't enough distraction to keep blood from going where it wasn't goddamn needed.

…twenty seconds. The engine didn't blow, of course. The cabin tilted, then flattened out again, and Cid knew the Highwind was hovering shakily a few feet above the ground.

"Shit," he said, with feeling. The turbines were still running, the driveshaft still doing exactly what it was supposed to do, and it was getting very difficult to think properly.

"You look worried," Yazoo murmured. "You shouldn't. Kadaj released the brake before I hit you. After I hit you, do you know what happened?"

"Nng."

"You laid there and bled. Slowly. For almost ten minutes."

Cid managed another 'nng', really eloquent, and did not let his legs twitch. He knew his face was red and he could feel a thin sweat starting on his forehead, but if he was lucky, Snowflake would just figure he was scared. Coming off as a wuss was much, much better than the sonofabitch guessing how close he was to achieving the unholy union of man and machine here.

Think of ugly women think of ugly women ugly women in showers very cold showers full of very ugly women…

The hand on Cid's shoulder lifted, and Cid heard Yazoo wander to the fore a few steps. He felt something brush lightly against the back of his leg, but not his ass—thank the Planet, nobody was touching his ass. And then something drummed on the casing.

"Hm." he heard, and then the bastard drifted back into sight. He crouched down so Cid could see him, and if that nasty smile had been on his face just a minute earlier, Cid thought it might have done some good to discourage his junk. No luck now.

"I imagine that's very distracting," said Yazoo, tucking a pair of fingers under Cid's chin. "Are you enjoying it?"

Cid squinted his eyes shut. "Fuck. You." Under the casing, his knuckles crackled as he clenched his fists. Beating Snowflake's face to pulp, that would be a sexually gratifying experience he'd be happy to share.

Something metal went twang.

The ship yawed sharply, the cabin floor abruptly jerking up to damn near fifty degrees of pitch and shit flying all over the place, his screwdriver nearly took his eye out as it sailed past and Snowflake went ass over teakettle straight into the port wall before bouncing off it like a jai'alai ball straight into the cockpit and holy sweet Planet it was enough just not to have the sonofabitch standing there watching him it was all right now…

He barely heard the crunch of the Highwind's sloppy landing, first on her side and then slapping down onto her belly. More metal busted, somewhere, and the kid in the cockpit was throwing a fit and he didn't actually give a shit somehow.

The turbines ticked to a stop. He was sprawled on his side, half-under the casing, with a rapidly cooling mess between his legs and his nose had started up bleeding again. The knots were still tight, but some digging should have them loose again, just like last time. And now there was nobody to hit him, hey! Life was good.

…or not. All three of the bastards were coming out of the cockpit. The kid was in front looking like he wanted to chew the head right off something, and the other two were just lurking back there behind him, kinda being…glowy.

Kadaj just looked at the port hatch, which was well and truly mangled, and the big one came up and just peeled it off like the top off a can. He stepped out first, then Yazoo followed him—and the goddamn slugfucking sonsagoat bastard SMIRKED at Cid as he left, there was no mistaking it. That left the kid.

"Nice flying," Cid told him. Hey, he couldn't not.

"We'll be back in six months," Kadaj told him, disappearing out the hatch. "Build one that works."

Note: Thus the tawdry saga concludes! There will be one last chapter, an epilogue if you will, but don't stay up waiting for "Six Months Later"--there was this thing that happened with Cloud, and Rufus, and Jenova's head, and Sephiroth was there...anyway, suffice to say the airship thing kinda fell by the wayside. Thanks for reading:)