Theme 02

Trapped

(-No warnings; this one's appropriate for most-)

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Happy Birthday, Vincent Valentine...and a Happy Friday the 13th to the rest of you

Yes, Odin must have been guiding her hand. He must have been lending her strength as well, she realised, for nothing else could have convinced her that she had really brought that mountain of a man down with merely a bust of the late President ShinRa. She dropped the heavy boot-laden leg she was carrying unceremoniously on the hard dirt floor just outside the library, glaring at its owner. Why on earth couldn't she attract a stable man?

She'd be cleaning up broken glass and scattered tomes until early in the morning, when Vincent would no doubt guilt himself. Perhaps the extreme bludgeoning she afforded him would warrant enough of a headache that it would curb some of that guilt. He could consider it his comeuppance, and one she had delivered quite nicely, her lack of dignity pushed aside for the moment as her legs flailed about in the air and she conked him good upside the head with the nearest thing she could find. That would teach him to throw her into a wall.

Tifa stretched her arms up over her head, working the newly acquired kinks out of her back. Heavens, the man was heavy when he was aggravated. Her eyes flicked down to his crude weapon. Better hide that, she figured. After all, the last time she'd had to learn the hard way, and she was lucky enough that she had avoided it during said bludgeoning.

She bent down and gingerly took the chainsaw from his hands, somehow afraid that when she righted herself she would be staring into those empty red irises. She cradled it in her arms, eyes drifting nervously from the weapon in her hands to the man on the floor. First things first; she would hide the machine and then she would drag him back into his chamber and lock him up until dawn. When it was safe to let him out, she would do so.

It was at this point that she noticed a slight twitch in his fingers. Tifa's eyes went wide as she backed up and he began to stir around on the floor. She searched all around the place for somewhere to stash the chainsaw, but they were surrounded on all sides by dirt walls. As she saw his head begin to lull from side to side, she did the only thing she could think of and chucked the power tool far behind him and back into the dusty library with a resounding crash.

He bolted upright at the sound, and she yelped loudly in surprise, half intending to draw his attention away from the discarded weapon and half frightened to death of what might happen if she was unsuccessful. Fortunately for her, his piercing gaze was trained on her, and she backed even further into the hallway as he stood up and lunged at her. She leapt to the side and began running for the stairwell.

She had almost reached her destination when she felt herself pulled back by her shirt, nearly choked by her own collar as she was enveloped by two powerful arms. Her world spun upside down as she was slung roughly over a towering shoulder, gut wrenching at the pain that followed. He turned, heavy weight thudding against the earthen floor as he carried her back into the hallway she had come from.

She pounded on his back and kicked her legs wildly, but neither of these things did much in the way of slowing him down. He turned sharply to the left, knocking the door to his chamber wide open, and before she was able to sort out her jumbled bearings, she landed on velveteen cushions and was sealed away in darkness with an audible 'clunk'.

She immediately began to push against the lid that held her in, but she was instantly met with a jarring slam against the wood that reverberated all around her. She shrank back against the thin cushioning, but began to pound again, her knees bruising up against the flat, hard confines of the coffin. More heavy thuds followed her, and then the lid wouldn't give even an inch where before her pounding had afforded her a recurring crack of dim lighting.

And then, between the shouts and the pounding, she heard his footsteps disappear down the hallway, and she was left all alone.

As her arms and legs tired, Tifa suddenly took notice of how stifling the air inside the chamber was. The small space she was imprisoned within was thick with dust, and she was exhausted and heated from her efforts. Her hair stuck to her face and arms, and she couldn't seem to move in such a way as to escape the heavy veil it had become. Left to her own devices, she would surely run out of oxygen, and she had already used up a great deal in trying to escape. And the silence...oh, the silence was killing her with anticipation.

How she wished she had her exit materia with her! But how was she supposed to know that her boyfriend would attack her in the middle of the night and leave her to rot in his grave?

She couldn't be sure how long she'd been lying there in darkness, her head spinning, dizzy with the blood rushing through her face, when she heard the soft thumping of heavy boots making their way down the hallway. It was at this point that she began her struggle anew, knowing that stillness and quiet wouldn't save her, not caring if she fell faint from the lack of oxygen. At least she wouldn't see it coming.

It was then that she heard him revving up the chainsaw.

She pushed with all her might, stretching to fit the casket, bracing her feet against the end of the bed when all she wanted to do was curl into a tiny ball in some pitiful means of escape. She drew her arms back in the tiny space, her elbows braced against the wood as she pounded quickly with her hands, left and right, left and right, in an attempt to rattle the lid. As she continued on in blind fury, there was another hard thud atop the casket, sharp and in one spot above her. She rattled on and on inside the box, and soon she was rewarded with several more heavy thumps all around her.

Tifa burst through her wooden cage just as Hellmasker made his appearance in the doorway, heavy tomes littering the ground all around his feet. He batted the lid away with the saw as it flew at him, his lover poised and waiting for him, ready to do battle. Angry at being thwarted, he charged her, swinging wildly.

Her heart pounded in her chest as her mind raced, her eyes frantically darting about the room for anything she could use to her advantage. The two seconds it would take him to reach her seemed to pass in undeterred slow-motion, something she could only watch in horror, helpless to stop it as her time wound down to nothing. And with each passing moment, her options became scarce.

So that was how it would end, was it? Their relationship would culminate with her mutilated corpse strewn over the splintered sarcophagus of the man she loved, and by his hands, no less. Well, she wouldn't have that.

Seeing no other alternative, she ducked, kicking the rickety bed across the floor. It slid into his knees as he approached, and he nearly toppled over it, but found his balance to the right of the casket as she ran past him and out into the hallway. He pivoted on his heel, trampling the scattered debris as he rushed after her.

Her biggest mistake of the evening, aside from following him into the basement in the first place, was turning left upon her exit from the chamber. That, however, was nothing a toppled bookcase couldn't remedy, and she was back on track and on her way up the staircase in no time. She could hear the grind of the chain growing faint in the distance as she climbed the steps to freedom.

Once she had emerged from the basement, she set to work dragging every piece of furniture in sight to rest in front of the passageway. The hidden door lifted away from the stone hearth, so it stood to reason that if he could not push it, then he was stuck down there until she chose to let him out. But that didn't stop her from rushing to her room to grab her materia before crouching in hiding behind her closet doors.

When the rustling of clothes had subsided, her ears were filled only with a ringing that pervaded the silence, the anticipation returning to her once again as she could only wait to see whether or not he would make it out of the basement, past her blockade. And then, if he succeeded? Her shaking breath betrayed her fear, and as she failed to calm herself, she felt her confidence shriveling away.

She knew there was still a chance that, come morning, she would have a new appreciation for the phrase, 'body jewelry'. But damned if she didn't love him anyway.

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10/13/2006: In the coming chapters, I plan to get away from the whole chasing element. Thirty chapters of that will grow tiring, I believe, and there's so much fun to be had with this pairing, that I can't waste it away doing cat and mouse scenes. Now if only I could decide which idea to tackle first...