"Run away, run away from here. Run away, run away from here. Run away from all you know, run away from fear. Run away from failure, run away from tears. Run away from home, from the wife and kids. From the cats and the doggies, run away to forgive. Running into the light. Run away. Hide away, in the lion's den. Play with matches, ya get burned. Flyin' high, in an aeroplane. In a fast car, on the highway. Run away, run away, run away. Run entranced, by the sunset. No looking back, and no regrets. I'll think of you, if I run again." -Oingo Boingo, Run Away (Escape Song)

She loved the jungle.

She would never tell anyone. No one would ask, at least, no one to whom she cared to confide in. There was one man who met that distinction, and such an observation would have meant nothing to him, though he would have understood it. He understood alot of things about her, it was why they worked together so well.

She loved it for its sounds. Sounds were everything to her, her life, and her domain. Every individual sound was a brushstroke in the fragile painting in her mind, every nuance her cherished possession. She had come to rely on them as she relied on air, on food, on water for nourishment.

The jungle was alive with music. Indeed, alive, for that music was the music of life itself. Of death and birth, and the neverending struggle to perpetuate.

Reiko Nakamura did not remember much about her childhood before the war which had ravaged her home country of Wutai. She remembered not so much her parents as she did an abstract, warm presence, sensed but not seen, felt but not understood. What she remembered most about her parents was her father. More accurately, his weapon. It dominated his life, and he'd pushed it on her almost before she could walk. He had been determined that she would follow in his footsteps, and her disability had been an obstacle to be surmounted, nothing more.

He had been an amazing man, she remembered that much. He had taught her to see without sight, relying on all of her senses equally, a whole much greater than the sum of its parts. In this manner, she exceeded her father's expectations, for the body betrays itself in a thousand minute ways that mere eyesight cannot possibly hope to pick up.

Her tribute to her father was her sword, and though he would not have approved of the cause for which she shed blood, he would have understood her reasons. Her father had been a contradiction, a reserved and quiet front that hid a wellspring of deep and fiery passions... the soul of a poet.

Or perhaps an artist. The sword was his paintbrush, his every movement the palette.

The battlefield, his canvas.

He would have understood the unreserved devotion that sprang from her for the wolf-like killer who had graced her side these past 20 years. Devotion born of a debt he'd never acknowledged had needed paying, devotion which, during the onset of her adolescence, had grown into a childish infatuation that had amused him in its clumsy sincerity, though in all things Jaeger had remained the perfect gentleman, much to her dismay. Infatuation maturing into something deeper that he had chosen not to recognize, perhaps blinded by the image undimmed in his mind's eye of a little girl with a grim, determined face, too big sword almost, but not quite, dragging on the ground, struggling in her small strides to keep up to his brutal pace. He'd told her he would leave her behind if she couldn't keep up, and he'd meant it... he was a wolf, and a wolf has no place in its heart for weakness. She'd never given him a reason to equate that state of being with her, and so at his side she remained.

Her love for him was unrequited, but nonetheless real.

Unrequited perhaps, but Reiko was content. No one else understood Jaeger quite as she did, and certainly there would never be another woman in his life. If she could not have him, she was content in the knowledge that she was closer to him than any other human being.

Still living at least.

"What do you think, schattenblum?" His voice broke into her reverie with sharp suddenness, though she gave no sign of being startled.

He was like that, sometimes, especially during the hunt... a bundle of nervous energy that lashed out at sudden, unpredictable intervals. She could hear a tension in his voice she associated with eagerness, and something else... an excitement that she'd never felt from him before. Words and intonations were all she had to paint the picture of a person's mind for her, and she was very good at sensing the unseen emotions voiced behind the lines. She'd been accused of being a mind reader before, and she'd never disabused the accusers of such an observation; praise or suspicion meant nothing to her.

Jaeger had always simply shook his head in amusement.

She'd never been able to pry out of him the origin of the strange words he sometimes used, the harsh, throaty accent he never bothered to rid himself of. She got the impression that the word he used for her was a source of amusement to him, but it was the closest he'd ever come to an endearment for her, and so she tolerated it, no... truthfully, she cherished it.

Still, he expected an answer, and she wasn't one to keep him waiting.

"I think, Jaeger-sama, that we are on the right trail." She paused, lifting her face for a moment, then cocking her head in concentration.

"Violence has been done near here... I smell death. Old death." She paused. "Fire... it has been drowned out by rain."

"Not an unexpected occurance in a rain forest, eh?"

"Your sarcasm is uncalled for, Jaegar-sama... it was a recent fire, perhaps within a week or two."

He was quiet for a moment, she sensed he was staring deeper into the forest with intense concentration. She knew him better than most, and right now she imagined he was weighing the odds that the couple they sought were lying in ambush for them. Still, the need to know if their information had been correct was a high priority right now, and Jaeger was never very good at waiting once he smelled blood.

There was also the possibility that the violence done here had nothing to do with their quarry. He frowned. "We check it out..." He mused, rolling the thought in his head for a moment beforeshaking his head clear of lingering doubt. "Ja. Schicksal, eh? Perhaps this merry chase ends soon."

"He's good then, Jaeger-sama?" His answer to the Lady Choshu nonwithstanding, Reiko knew this Vincent Valentine character meant something to the gunman, though Jaeger was frustratingly miserly with details about his past, even with her. "The past is past, eh?" Was the answer he gave most often. Still, she'd noted the hint of delighted eagerness when the Lady had mentioned their target. She'd never heard it BEFORE a hunt's conclusion, and it aroused her curiousity.

"Ah. Very... very, good, mein Schattenblum. The best. Maybe better than me. Therein lies the excitement, ja? To finally know if I am better than the one and only Vincent Valentine."

"Better than der Schwarzer Tod..."

He smiled grimly. "He scares me, Reiko. It has been a long time since anyone has done that. Maybe never, eh? I like it."

She cocked her head slightly. "What if he's better than you, Jaeger-sama?"

He grinned. "Than I die before I get any more long in the tooth, ja? Always a bright side, if you look hard enough."

She said nothing in reply, simply following the hidden signs that would lead them to their quarry, but she was thinking about such an eventuality. Was it possible? She had never considered the possiblity that anyone could outpace her companion in his chosen profession, in most cases there was simply no comparison. She knew he was beginning to question if he was still as sharp as he'd always been... Jaeger was not a young man anymore, nor had he been for a long time. Not that this detail mattered to her, of course. Love knows no boundries, save the acknowledgement of two halves for one another, making them whole.

They moved carefully through the jungle, her leading and him following. Jaeger was good, but he wasn't as attuned to his senses as she was. Eventually she stopped, frowning. She detected a scent that she normally only associated with Jaeger, the burnt earth scent of cordite, the smokeless gunpowder which propelled his bullets. She bent down and carefully felt around with her right hand until they closed on a cold, hard object about the size of her pinky finger. She picked it up and turned to show it to Jaeger.

He took it from her and examined it carefully, making considering noises deep in his throat.

".60 caliber long round... a scraped ring around the end... this was fired from a revolver?!" He smelled it, looking up. "Ah... not lead. Rubber. This was a riot shell." He sneered. "Going soft are we, Vincent?"

"I do not think so, Jaeger-sama." Reiko interrupted quietly, having moved ahead about fifteen yards or so.

He looked up, then followed the sound of her voice. His eyes widened when he caught sight of the grisly display before him.

"Mein gott..." he whispered.

Reiko assumed an expression of extreme distaste. There was much death in this clearing, as evidenced by the buzzsaw roar of a thousand flies and other insects busy recycling the detritus of their targets struggle for survival. The sick, gassy scent of putrescence made her slightly queasy.

Another scent caught her attention, the sweet, syrupy sap scent of a damaged tree. She angled her face upward, towards the scent, then rapped her knuckle bracer on the tree in question, listening intently. She sensed Jaeger was walking around the corpses of the great beasts she'd smelled, and his knowledge of such things would give them a better idea of what had happened her. As for herself, there was something up in this tree that interested her... damage where there should have been none. She bent her knees slightly, then arced upward, hands searching for the limb her ears and nose told her had to be there. Finding it, she swung herself upward to change her momentum, then allowed herself to collapse into a crouch on top of it. She crab-walked closer to the source of the sap scent, and ran her fingers down the foot long gash in the woody flesh of the tree.

Jaeger examined the remains of the great lizards and their unfortunate riders, though the jungle had not been kind to them. Despite the bulk of the corpses, huge gaps between ribs and living coats of irridescent insect flesh would soon reduce this scene of carnage to unrecognizable ruin.

Such was the nature of... well, nature.

Still, the trained eye could pick out any number of interesting details, and Jaeger's eye was better trained than most. For instance, the great corpse lying on its back on top of its unfortunate (and now very flat) riders had been killed by a weapon Jaeger had never seen before, but what ever it was, it has struck with great force, literally blowing a huge gap out the back of the beast's heavily armored skull. Whatever had made this hole had left no powder burns, and no fragments in the wound.

That ruled out his target. Disappointed and somewhat puzzled, he turned to the other corpse.

This one was... much more interesting. His first impression of the beast was that it had been running at great speed, possibly charging, then tripped and snapped its own fool neck in its own haste. Closer examination painted a much more detailed picture.

The beast's body was twisted at an impossible angel in such a way that while its head and upper quarters where oriented as though it had fallen on its belly, its hindquarters were twisted slightly to the left and bunched up. A rider lie slumped forward on its neck, his features indistinquishable for two reasons.

One, the angle of his slump obscured any identification of the body.

Two, he didn't have much of a head left.

Indeed, the straps of a helm of some sort hung loosely in the corpse's lap, along with the better part of his frontal lobe and a small portion of his upper jaw. The lower jaw, along with a days worth of stubble, and the victim's lolling, bloated tongue, hung grotesquely low on the victim's face, and it was as though a great hand had scooped everything higher than that and tossed it away carelessly. Jaeger grabbed the man's shoulder and pushed him back, examining the beast's neck just beneath the corpse.

"HA! There!" Jaeger chortled.

An inch diameter, perfectly rounded hole sat in the beast's neck. Jaeger pulled out his boot knife and dug into the huge lizard's spinal column, finally removing a gory, slightly deformed, silvery bit of metal that felt strangely heavy in his gloved hand.

He turned it over in his hands easily, glancing backward and up, towards a tree some hundred or so yards distant.

"It's him, Reiko. Only he could have pulled off a shot like this." He raised the deformed, mythril jacketed AP round with thumb forefinger. "Rifle round. Long rifle. One shot. Got the rider and the creature in one fell swoop. Ausgezeichnet!"

She jumped down and canted her head towards him from where he stood on the beasts back.

"There was another here. A master of the shuriken. Perhaps the girl the Lady Choshu referred to?"

Jaeger scowled. "I do not recall any information about her being a martial artist. That uppity Weibchen neglected to mention that particular detail, ja?"

Reiko sighed. "It does indeed change things. Perhaps that is why she neglected to mention this little detail."

Jaeger shook his head, his grin returning. "We shall have a little talk with Lady Choshu when next we see her, eh? In the meantime, we are close. Very, very close, I think."

Reiko nodded quietly, somewhat disturbed by the evidence she'd found. The shuriken was a weapon of choice for the Da Chao master, which meant the person they sought was Wutain nobility. She hoped Jaeger was not underestimating their quarry.

Regardless, she would defend him to the death.

Beyond, if need be.

Yuffie was sick to death of this goddamn jungle. She was sick to death of rain, of this oppressive heat, but most of all, most assuredly of all, she was sick of Vincent motherfucking Valentine.

Yuffie was not well known for her stability of moods, and though her sudden, unexpected insight into the Vincent condition had softened her heart somewhat towards the enigmatic gunman, after her cathartic release of sadness and frustration on the quietly disturbed Ex-turk's shoulder, Vincent had clammed up to the point where she wasn't even sure if the man was still breathing, let alone making any attempts towards companionship. Yuffie didn't mind being alone, but she couldn't stand being ignored, and this cold, no, sub-zero treatment seemed like torture.

Not in the least because she was pretty sure it was her fault.

Her internal clock was pretty good, her being a ninja and all, and she figured it had been about three weeks since their unexpected tumble into the ass crack of the world. It had taken the better part of two and a half weeks to extricate themselves from the maze of jungle overgrown stone walls, and once they had, they found themselves deep in the heart of the Gongaga jungle, several hundred miles from the nearest town. Vincent had made it apparent that he intended to backtrack towards Gongaga, presumably to procure transport around the southern penninsula of the continent to Wutai, and Yuffie, heartily sick of slogging through the jungle, agreed.

At least, with the returning to civilization (or what passed for it in these parts) part of the deal. The gears in the Yuffster's head were turning, and she had a plan she was pretty sure would get good ol' Vinnie off her back, at least for a little while. It was sure to work too, because it used his own solitary and creepy nature against him. She had no doubt it would only slow him down, but it might give her some time to put some distance between her and any form of transport headed towards Wutai, and when Vinnie happened to catch up to her again, well... ANYTHING might happen, if she was allowed to get a little distance from him to cool down for a while.

She giggled inwardly at this thought, mentally rubbing her hands together in glee.

Unbenownst to her, Vincent eyed her warily. The speed with which she'd agreed to head back to Gongaga worried him, he knew she had no intention of returning to Wutai. Everything else about her might confuse him, but he understood that. To be perfectly honest, Vincent had no idea what was going on through that cute little head of hers, and the unpredictability of his erstwhile charge set his nerves on edge.

Chaos certainly wasn't helping. He was beginning to wonder which of them was worse... because neither of them would shut up. Yuffie inadvertantly tag teaming the damnable creature with disturbing regularity. Vincent had taken to remaining sullenly silent in an attempt to wash out the noise between his ears.

It wasn't working very well.

"I spy, with my little eye, something that begins with the letter S." Yuffie sang behind him, her hands laced behind her head as she walked, apparently without a care in the world.

Vincent restrained the morbid impulse to glare at her in frustration, but only just barely.

"No guesses, Vinnie?" She sang at him after a short pause.

He sighed.

"Nope, that's wrong, Vinnie. That's 526 to 0, zip, zilch, and nada."

She shook her head. "You aren't very good at this are you, Vinnie?"

-I wasn't aware I agreed to play- Vincent thought irritably.

"Ok, here's another one, Vinnie. I spy, with my little eye, something that begins with the letter T."

"Town." Vincent muttered.

"Nope, that's not it." She blinked at him, momentarily thrown off of her game. She was, after all, just doing this to annoy him. He was ignoring her, and thus had started it, of course.

"No, I meant there's the town. Gongaga." He pointed.

"Oh thank you GOD!" She screamed, rushing past him.

-Amen to that, sister.- Vinnie, er, Vincent thought. Of course, he'd never voice such a statement to the world.

It wouldn't have been very Vincenty of him.

Gongaga had never been a very big city, but the events of Meteor had started to change that. After the shutdown of all the Mako reactors, any town within easy reach of the sea immediately became hot property, as ships were about the only thing capable of traveling long distances with anything approaching comfort of regularity. Add to this the inevitable influx of refugees from various traumatized corners of the world, and you have a city that was just beginning to get a little too big for its britches.

This showed in the haphazard way new streets formed and reformed seemingly overnight, a morass of temporary and semi-permenant housing and businesses springing up like a mass of toadstools around the base of a particularly unpleasant looking tree. Crime was, of course, at a new time high, bringing with it the inevitable bounty hunter population, and with so many hotheaded assholes with far too much firepower and lack of sense, it was not uncommon for blood to run in the streets.

Of course, scavengers, both human and otherwise, were quick to capitalize on any ill-gotten windfalls that might grace their path, and so the streets were at least kept clear of refuse.

This being said, neither Vincent nor his smaller companion stuck out too badly, as this was pretty much the ass end of the world. Even in their decidedly the worse for wear state, they both had an air of competence about them that forstalled most confrontations, and any hardheaded bravo who whistled at Yuffie's ragtag state of dress (or nearly undress, if you take into account what her normal attire looked like) was soon discouraged by the death glare from the young Ninja in question, not to mention the impossibly huge revolver that graced her steely eyed companion.

Coming to a slightly less ramshackle than most building with the ubiquitous title, "The Greasy Monkey", Vincent eyed it dubiously. It would be nice to stay in a real, honest to god building for once, but the comfort potential of a public house named after a hygiene deficient primate gave him serious pause.

The matter was decided once and for all when Yuffie barged past him and entered the building, dragging him along behind her like a recalcitrant child.

"Vincent, it won't kill us to stop here for a day to rest. My whole body, not to mention smell, is killing me."

Vincent shook free of her gently and followed, his eyes adjusting slowly to the dim, smoky interior of the inn. The inside wasn't too bad, in fact, compared to the outside it was downright immaculate. Several hard eyed patrons sat at various tables, drinking their poison of choice and discouraging any prying into their business with shifty glares and unpleasant, hard expressions. One corner held six or seven individuals in some sort of uniform, the uniforms in question in various states of undress.

Vincent figured them for the local police and relaxed slightly. If this was the watering hole of the local authorities than there wouldn't be too much of a criminal presence. He looked down at Yuffie and caught her staring at them as well, before her gaze became disinterested and turned to the stairs leading up to the rooms.

Vincent didn't know it, but phase one of "ditch Vinnie" had begun.

Vincent stepped up to the bar and Yuffie followed, behaving for once. Vincent cleared his throat and the large man behind the counter put down his glass and eyed Vincent blandly before acknowledging him.

"What can I do for ya, stranger?" He eyed Yuffie for a moment, catching a strange vibe from the young girl. He wondered what such a sweet young thing was doing attached to such a grim, creepy looking character like the dark man in front of him.

Of course, it was none of his business.

"I'm looking for for passage to Wutai. A ship, as soon as possible."

The man shrugged, grunted noncomittally, then scratched his chin. "Hell, boats come up through here all the time. Matter a' fact, we had a ship come in from Wutai not too long ago. Might still be in port, come ta think of it. Why the hell would ya wanna go to THAT place anyway?"

Vincent shrugged. "Business." Something in the man's tone made him pause. "What's wrong with Wutai?"

"Eh, don't rightly know, stranger. Rumor has it that there's some sorta trouble out there, an' there have been a helluva lot of refugees comin' in from Wutai. We don't normally get immigrants from that place... they all tend ta head to Costa Del Sol or Midgar, if they're feelin' particularly adventurous." The man paused for a moment, picking at a particularly stubborn fleck of dried matter on the glass he held.

"So many's been leavin' that place that Costa Del Sol had ta close thier ports, an' Midgar is considerably farther down the line than here, so I imagine things must be pretty bad for all those people to come all this way."

Vincent eyed his charge but she hadn't been paying much attention. She turned back from her study of the surroundings to look up at Vincent.

"Vinnie, does this place have a bath?" She asked hopefully, her eyes flicking to the innkeeper then back to Vincent.

The innkeeper frowned and spoke up. "Yeah... but yer gonna have ta run the water yerself. This ain't no full service station."

Vincent sighed and nodded to her. "Don't go anywhere, and try not to attract any attention." He said sternly.

She beamed at him and gave him an innocent look. The sort of look that said, "who, me?".

Vincent wasn't buying it.

The innkeeper slid her a brass key across the counter and she grabbed it and dashed up the stairs, narrowly avoiding knocking an old man down the steps in her haste.

Vincent turned back to the innkeeper, his face revealing nothing.

The innkeeper raised an eyebrow. "What's-"

Vincent gave him an intimidating look. "None of your business."

The innkeeper raised his hands, looking sideways. "Hey, no sweat, partner. Get you somethin'?"

Vincent calmly ordered a tea and seated himself, Death Penalty within easy reach. He was right, his business with Yuffie was none of the innkeepers concern. Unfortunately, fate, and a certain crafty ninja girl, was conspiring against the gunman. Unbenownst to the man in question, Yuffie had been making several interesting faces at the partly inebriated troupe of gaurds not five feet from the bar. Without saying anything, Yuffie had managed to arouse their suspicions (as well as several other things, she was after all, a very attractive young woman) and they'd been listening to the dark gunman's conversation.

They hadn't much liked his attitude, or his tone. The scared, please-help-me looks the young woman had been giving them certainly hadn't helped.

Phase two of operation "ditch Vinnie" had begun. Life was about to get... very interesting for a certain Ex-turk.

Interesting like a solid kick to the nuts.

A/N: My apologies for the long wait. Doom 3 and Morrowind have eaten my brain, and it has taken me quite some time to even get this little bitty chapter out. That being said, this chapter is mainly just a build up for the roller coaster of events that are going to take place in the next chapter. I had considered simply waiting and releasing a huge update that would encompass both chapters, but that would have taken me lord knows how long to finish, and I figured you diehard Why Me? Fanatics might not survive the wait, and so, here you go. Hopefully Chapter 8 will follow before too long, but considering what I want to do in it, it might be anywhere from a week to three weeks. Gomen Nasai, folks.

That being said, I enjoyed writing this chapter, because it allowed me to give a bit more insight into the lives of our two villains. I'm of the school of fantasy writing who believes that there is no more important element to a story than a good, convincing villain or three, and so expect to see more developement of those two as time goes by.

My apologies to those whom this royally annoys, but it's my story so Nyah nyah and all that.

Later all, and thanks for reading. As always, reviews are appreciated.

Chris, DT