Mug
I mentioned that I'd learned some of Vincent's past. I guess I should mention how.
After the deaths of the last of AVALANCHE and the period of wandering, occasionally one or a few or all of us in the cave would take off for a while. It was during one of those times, one when I alone left and the others stayed in the cavern, that I met the Lowara.
The others thought I was checking on the Bloodlines, something we all did from time to time. We even looked after specific Bloodlines- I watched over the Highwinds, Reno the descendants of Elena and Tseng, Cloud the Wallaces, and Vincent Reeve's children's children. In all honesty, I was originally going to check on the nearest branch of Highwinds, when I came across the Gypsy camp.
I may have been gadjo, a non-gypsy, but I had also walked out of the woods in the shape of a wolf and taken that of a woman. The Lowara I had stumbled upon welcomed me. Originally I had planned to steal some food and leave, but well...it is a bad idea to steal from Gypsies. From the Romani.
And after all, I had just landed myself as an honoured guest in a tribe of wanderers who were in the habit of stealing to survive. This was my idea of heaven. They called me Bhen Kesali, the Forest Spirit's Sister, and it was after a decade or so of living with them and listening to their stories that I realised I had learned Vincent's past, quite by accident.
You have to understand, I'd lived with them for years, but I was no Gypsy. You have to be born into the Rom, or you will never be a Rom, no matter what.
Of course, they were good people, for the most part. So when, many years ago, the Ataman found a woman badly injured with a baby son lost on the riverbank, he had taken them in. The woman had died a month later, but they had raised her son. Not as a Gypsy- like I said, you have to be born a Gypsy- but something more than a slave and less than a family member. They found the boy had a talent for fighting and so trained him appropriately. When he reached the age of twenty, he was to become the bodyguard for the Lowara.
The Turks raided the camp before then. They took supplies, animals- this was bad, because the Rom depend on their animals- and, what was considered the worst blow, the boy who had been trained to fight. Kesali. Forest Spirit.
Vincent.
It had to be Vincent. The time span, the Turks, the description of the boy. He was supposed to have had green eyes and black hair, hence the name Forest Spirit, but then I always figured red wasn't Vinnie's original eye colour.
Suddenly the name my Lowara had given me was much more amusing. The Forest Spirit's Sister. If only they knew. Then again, maybe they did. The Rom are funny that way. They know things others would never dream of and accept them as easily as breathing.
I wondered if Vincent remembered them. If he knew that they mourned for him, this many generations later. Even at his young age, he had been looked upon as a protector. Not a Gypsy, and he didn't have a traditional family- but he had been raised by all the Rom, and so he had a much larger family than normal. Not a Gypsy, but they had liked him anyway, much more than they did most gadjo. He might not have known that, though. He might have thought he was just a burden. I never knew Vincent before Hojo changed him, so I don't know what his personality was like, if he had a guilt complex even then.
I stayed with the Rom a long time. Even after a left them, many years later, I checked on them periodically. I took my duty to the Rom as seriously as my duty to the Bloodlines, maybe more so. In a way, this was Vincent's Bloodline. I never told any of the others of them. I have no idea why not.
In the end, I guess the Rom got their bodyguard after all.
GuardianSaiyoko: You have no idea how much research went into this chapter.
