A Sticky Situation – An FFVII Fanfiction

Disclaimer: The FF7 characters do not belong to me. But Tai-Chung and the hybrid monsters are mine. Steal and DDIIIIEEE. X.x

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"Vincent..."

That voice. Why has it come to disturb him again?

"Vincent..."

Go away... go away...

"Vincent..."

Lucrecia...

Vincent screamed as his left shoulder bore him great pain. He gripped it with his flesh hand, trying to calm the beast that raged for release, and opened his eyes with much effort. He found himself waking up in the middle of a field of flowers. The scenery reminded him of Aeris' garden in that ruined church in Midgar, but these flowers were... half-withered...

"Vincent..." Why? Why call his name? Vincent used his flesh arm to assist his limbs with the process of standing up, feeling his knees wobbling everytime he tried to take a step.

"Lucrecia..."

"...Vincent, you are weak." The voice vibrated warmly in his skull. It did not carry the sinister, maniacal undertone it usually did, and this puzzled the gunman.

"I feel like it." He answered, looking around the vast fields in the hopes of sighting of the woman he loved. There was nothing notable on the landscape other than the pitiful, wilting flowers.

"No, you are weak inside."

Vincent's breath caught. "That is... nonsense." He gritted his teeth at the faltering force in his words, knowing that what this.. spirit informed him of was painfully true. So that's what these flowers were... a symbol of his current state of mind.

"You have spent too much time thinking about me." Vincent could feel a cold, invisible hand cupped against his cheek. "I am your past, Vincent. The past is not something to be dwelled on for such a prolonged length of time."

Vincent brought his his flesh hand up to feel the hand pressed against his cheek, but amazingly he felt nothing. Lucrecia, or whoever it was, had moved away. "I alone will dictate what is my past and what is my present, and what will be my future. Only I can convince myself what is what, because it's my life, and I control it!"

"Vincent!" The sudden call silenced him, and he burned alone. "You cannot continue this lonely life you have built after our separation!"

"I can do whatever I choose!"

Then followed a silence so profound, Vincent almost envisioned that he had died.

"...No man is an island..."

---

Cid was awakened by the sudden jerk of his arm. Characteristically, he shouted a surprised expletive, snapping up into sitting position and looking around for his lance, just in case it was one of them damned Formulas trying to bite his ass again. After making sure that he had the weapon gripped tightly in his hand, he managed to work out that it was Vincent who had escaped from his tight embrace.

"Fucker... almost snapped my arm right off..." He tried to move his arm, just in case it really had snapped off. It hadn't. "Phew. I'd be fucked if I lose these babies. I mean, how am I going to smoke if I can't even hold up the cigarette?"

Shivering at the prospect, the pilot thought it best to start searching for his companion. Unusually, the gunman left easy-to-spot tracks leading from the camp into the woods. Cid followed it carefully, occasionally taking a bit of a diversion to whack down some Formula nests tucked into some tree branches and steal the eggs (for breakfast - I mean come on, you gotta think SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST here). The tracks eventually led him to a river and a haggard Vincent, sitting on the banks, panting.

"Hey, hey. Ya got a reason for almost yanking my arm clean off this early in the morning?"

Vincent kept quiet.

"Yo. Mr Brick Pillar." Cid hesitantly poked the gunman with the blunt end of his lance. "Wakie wakie, ya vertical stone column."

Vincent flinched as he was poked again and again, and at last he gave in and sighed. "I did not ask for you to follow me, Cid."

"It figured. I mean, you left them OBVIOUSLY, STUPENDOUSLY, BRIGHTLY visible tracks and all... of course you didn't even TRY to tempt me to follow you." Cid tried to make a vaguely innocent face. Vincent looked at him once and it was enough to cease further arguments.

"...Okay, so maybe we need to talk." Cid plopped down beside the gunman and swung his arm around the other's shoulders. "Spake, and be heard."

Vincent clung tightly to his compaign for silence. Cid caught the drift and shrugged. Unlike Vincent, he was an easy quitter. I mean, if something was too hard, why should he even bother trying again and again to understand it? It'd be a waste of his cigarette-smoking time. "Alright, alright. But I'll... uh..."

Vincent raised an eyebrow.

"I'll... uh..."

The expectant twinkle in Vincent's eye unnnerved Cid. "I'll... uh..."

"Well?"

"I'll be around when you need to talk. Uh. Okay?"

Vincent frowned slightly.

Cid spazzed.

"Fuck! You don't like that? Uh, then I'll... uh... I'llgothrowmyselfintoacageandlockitthenthrowthecageinahouseandlockthedoorandthenI'llaskaspaceshiptoshootmeintospacethenI'llaskaspacemonstertoeatmeupandyou'llneverseemeagain! Uh. Okay?"

Vincent smiled.

---

Vincent frowned.

Why the hell should he drag a 80-something-kg 40-something-year-old through a thick wood just because the geezer fainted when he smiled!

He's too old for this. Vincent thought of sending a letter to an authority called Square Enix and suing them for making him too old for his looks. And also for making him do this... menial work. Unfortunately, the gunman had a sneaky feeling that it wasn't Square Enix that planned this whole trip with Cid for him... maybe it was a fangirl.

Anyway.

Vincent hauled Cid's body up to the log and dumped it there, rescuing the Formula eggs from the pilot's pocket before they got squashed under the blond's sheer body mass. He set the twigs in the bonfire burning again, but covered the flames with stones this time, so that the fire would not spoil what he was going to prepare. Cutting off a large leaf from a tree, he broke the eggshells and let the contents pour on to the leaf. Making sure that the stones were properly heated up, the gunman gently placed the leaf on top of the little mound and left it to cook.

The delicious waft of the frying eggs attracted a (dare I say, brave) Formula, who hovered too closely to the eggs for Vincent's liking. Luckily, the gunman was not in his sadistic mood today, therefore the beast met a more fortunate, quick end by a speeding bullet.

Vincent sighed as he looked around the campsite for edible vegetables. How long are they going to be stuck on this island? Their provisions were little - Cid, being the old geezer that he is, forgot to buy enough food to feed both of them - and the surrounding terrains appeared a little bit too rough for human occupance. 'We would be fine here,' thought Vincent as he plucked a mugwort from the base of a tree. 'The stream nearby is clear and unpolluted, so we have our drinking water. The Formulas can provide us with fresh meat and their eggs are nutritious. These edible plants are abundant, perfect for daily consumption. But... beyond this point, we will face harder circumstances. It seems that the stream here leads to a loch which then opens up into the early borders of the ocean, and I don't think we'd have any business there, so following the stream would be a bad idea. Following that thought, we'd die without water, and that idiot left the water container I brought along for the mission in the airship.' Vincent glared hatefully at the 'idiot', who was still in a comatose state. 'Battered old duck.'

There was a rustle in the bushes behind the log against which Cid was resting. Vincent sprang up from his job of cutting up the mugwort with Cid's lance (washed and 100 percent Formula-blood-free, if that's what all you neat freaks want to know), but he could feel his knees faltering as he stood. Geez, egg, cook faster, dammit!

Hungry from lack of nourishment and tired after dragging a grown man through 1 kilometre of dense, thick woods, Vincent knew that his aim would not be as perfect as usual. But he drew his gun anyway with his right hand, while the left carried the lance as some kind of defence, and waited.

At first, it was the colour that surprised him. Such an unnaturally bright yellow, with tints of brown at the edges of the feathers to act as a contrast and soften what would otherwise have been a blinding sight. Then the slender, curvy neck, stretching out to peck curiously at the bits of mugwort stuck to the lance in his hand with a long hooked beak. Thin but sturdy legs supported the whole creature, the branches of its medium-sized, chicken-like feet ending with sharp talons that scratched absent-mindedly at the hardened soil beneath.

Large pink eyes stared hungrily at the pieces of cut-up mugwort left unattended beside the fire, and the creature took advantage of Vincent's brief trip to Lalaland to snap up and munch through the shreds of mugwort. When the beast has decimated the whole stash, it proceeded to peck hesitantly at Cid's goggles. When the pilot didn't react, the creature pecked him over and over again, and when even THAT didn't work, it used its beak to grasp the bridge of the Cid's goggles and pull it away from the messy blond hair.

You can guess what happens next.

Cid woke up in pain. The goggles had thudded against his skull with such a strong force that he had the usual brief bout of amnesia: where was he? Who is he? What is he? What is his purpose in this world? Why does he have five fingers? Why would he want to damage his lungs by smoking too much nicotine?

Why, indeed.

"What the FUCKIN' fuck are you fuckin' doing, you fuckin' son of a kinky bi--oh crap." Cid paused in his string of expletives to fully examine the situation.

There was a bird standing over him.

A bird with a huge beak.

A huge, SHARP beak.

With talons.

At the feet, I mean.

You can't have talons at the mouth, now, can you?

Cid turned extra-nice. "Why hello there, little birdie-bird. Would you like a little grassie-wassie for your belly-tummy?"

The beast innocently clawed the ground near to Cid's head with its talons.

"Oooookay then. Maybe not the little grassie-wassie." Cid looked around desperately, taking care not to make contact with the bringers of his torturous death. "Uh, would you like to eat this log instead? I mean, it's brand-new and all... it's the, uh, shit, man. I mean, bird. I mean, spring chicken--no! I mean, hen. Or, uh, chick. Yeah, let's go with that. Chick."

The 'chick' seemed pleased. It started to nuzzle Cid's neck affectionately, and if the pilot hadn't moved away just in time, he'd have been flattened under its weight as it came crashing down to snuggle up against him. Cid elbowed Vincent. "What is WRONG with that bird?"

The gunman shook himself out of his reverie. "I think it likes you."

"But it's a bird. I mean, I'd like a bird to like me, but not a real bird. As in, a 'bird' is the slang for a woman, but in this reference I'm actually talking about the actual biological species with distinctive characteristics that separate it from land animals, which is its ability to fly in the air for long periods at a time. But I am in no way referring to flying squirrels, as it is known that these mammals could glide - not fly - between trees like some kind of kamikaze parachute bomber, and are therefore not categorized as birds, though a few dumbasses think that they are."

Vincent blinked.

Cid blinked back.

"...Whoa." Said both simultaneously.

Vincent coughed. "Anyway, it seems that this is our hybrid monster. I have never seen a beast like it before."

"Call Spiky and see what he thinks."

Vincent withdrew the PHS from his pocket and pressed the speed-dial button. Cid went to try and keep the bird around at the campsite so that they could examine it. (this involves a lot of arm-flapping and mimicked squawking, all of which apparently worked to keep the bird interested)

"...Nya, lassie, this 'ere crown, it came frae ma mammy's saide of the family. Legund has it that ma granny banged up a pooch tae get i', she did. And I told ye aboot my tail, dinnae I? Aye, this tail, this tail--"

Vincent pressed a button that kicked the phone line to prioritizing his call over the preceeding one.

"...Cait Sith. May you please pass the PHS over to Cloud please?"

"Eh? Valentine?" For a few seconds, Cait Sith sounded lost. I mean, wouldn't YOU be if one second you're telling your whole family history to a girl, then suddenly this girl turned into a man, then you realized that you had told a MAN about how your first hickey was given to you by an alpaca? "How, what happuned?"

It took Vincent a split-second to discard the 'how' from the sentence and finally have it make sense. "We found the hybrid."

"Ah, right lad. I see." Lowly, Cait Sith whispered, "Jeezo, a man cannae get the chance to pull in t'gurls these days..."

Vincent wondered what species Cait Sith's 'girl' belonged to.

"Well, I'll give ye o'er tae Clood the nou. Ech, lass, get off'er yer boffin--"

"VINNIE!"

The gunman jumped. The exclamation seemed to be carried over loudly to the bird, as it flew into a panic and ran wildly around the campsite, knocking Cid all over the place like a little ball in a pinball table.

"Yuffie, calm down, you'll scare the hybrid away..."

"What! What hybrid! You better not be hiding something from me, Vinnie!"

"I am no--"

"Well, ANYWAY, guess what I got in the mail this morning in Wutai! Some mad fan of ours wrote a story with you and me in it, and it says we are married and my surname was Valentine and we had three kids and they all had your creepy-weepy red eyes and my beautiful hair and we lived in a big house with a thing called a 'garage' where we stash away our 'Merchandize-Bent car' (1) and we had a chicken coop with turkeys in and some stables where there were pretty little tiny animals called 'little ponies' who had weird names like Surfwhore, Tramp and Swan Soup (2) and we had lots and lots of fertile land and we grew grapes and oranges and money and apples and watermelon trees and--"

Cid snatched the PHS from Vincent's abused ear. "Shut UP, you fuckin' radio box! Just give us Cloud, already!"

"Oh, how do you want him, geezer? On a silver platter with apples stuffed in his mouth! Do you want him spit-roasted? Oven-baked? Wrapped in aluminium foil!"

"You...! You ninjapoop!"

"Yeah, way to go - I bet you flunked your English exams in school, sexist JERK!"

"I didn't!"

"Did so!"

"Did not!"

"Did so!"

"Did not!"

"Well, maybe I didn't, but I'm not going to tell a thief like YOU that! You might steal my certificate or something..." Cid sounded almost afraid, as if the incident had already happened once before.

As much as the author would like to continue this petty but highly amusing banter, Cloud is already fighting his way through her brain cells with his long-ass sword (don't be naughty, kids) to get onto the stage, so he has to be given his time.

"...That's enough. Yuffie, give me the PHS."

Cid breathed a deflated sigh at the spiky-haired adult's voice and handed the PHS back to Vincent, resuming his duty of befriending the hybrid.

"I assume that this is a status report, Vincent?" Cloud asked, his voice sounding much healthier than last time - though none the merrier. "Since the last update, the mayor has been putting everyone under house arrest under reasons so vague, they could be a result of his chronic paranoia. I hope you have some news that would halt this nonsense."

"Does that mean that you would not be able to assist us if there are any difficulties?" Vincent waved off Cid's cries of distress when the pilot found himself squished under the huge bird-hybrid again. "It has been eeriely peaceful recently, and I feel uneasy wading in this thick, anxious atmosphere. What's more..." The gunman took out his pack of gun ammo. "...I'm running out of bullets."

Cloud was silent for a minute. "...Cid has a lance that will surely last both of you, if he utilizes it properly."

"But still, it would be dangerous for one of us to go unarmed. For one, it makes hunting, scouting or nightly shifts of guarding the camp in turns almost impossible."

"I--"

"VINNIE, DARLING, YOU CAN ALWAYS USE A ROCK TO BASH THEM JACKASSES DOWN!"

Vincent deafened his ears to Yuffie's outburst. "I apologize, but I didn't quite catch you, Cloud."

Cloud cleared his throat. "I said, I cannot do anything about our current situation here. You will just have to find a way to go around the problem. Or you can try being economical with your leftover ammo. Now, about the hybrid...?"

Sighing, Vincent gave Cloud his report. He hated to have to depend on someone like Cid for protection, but it looked like he has no choice. "Very well. At around 10 o'clock this morning, a strange bird-like creature stumbled into our base camp whilst foraging for food. It has appearances similar to that of a chocobo's, but with a longer neck and more sturdy-looking legs, and a brown tint to the edges of each feather on its body. The eyes are pink, and the beak is a darker shade of brown. It does not appear that the creature could fly, but this theory has never been tested. I do not want to take the risk of taming the beast - its talons look particularly murderous."

"Do you think that the hybrid and the mysterious toffee are connected?"

"Highly unlikely, Cloud... from where would such a creature excrete the substance?"

...Yup, you guessed it - silence.

"On the other hand, answering that question would not be a good display of morals."

"Ahem. Agreed." Cloud said after a while, and his uneasiness radiated from the PHS like the stink from fresh dog excretions.

"I will try and find out more about the hybrid. I will call again soon."

"Alright. Be careful."

And the call ended. Vincent was just about to drop it into his pocket but something snatched it away from his hands.

"Vincent! Look out!" Cid threw himself against the gunman and forced him to the ground, as something glided swiftly above their heads, making a long, straight cut in the back of Cid's shirt with its claws. The monster resembled a large raven, but it had intricate silver markings on its body, making it luminous. The PHS was gripped tightly in its left feet. Before Cid could reach for his lance, the monster shrieked twice, then lunged for Cid's goggles and grabbed the keys to Highwind. It shrieked again, glancing down on the pilot and his companion with a look of arrogance, before making off with his loot in the general direction of the plains.

Cid got up and off of Vincent, tearing off his ruined shirt. "Fuckin' badass... this was my favourite shirt, godfuckin'dammit! Oh, and it took the keys to Highwind." Cid paused. Then: "FUCKER!"

Vincent, the ever the calm, composed one, brushed all the dirt from his hair and clothes before sitting up and turning, looking in the direction the creature dissapeared in. "What was that?"

Cid shrugged. "I don't know. What a little bastard, though." Agitated, the pilot drew a bent cigarette from his half-shattered goggles and lit it. "Dammit... now we can't get back on Highwind... I'd really like to give that miserable pansy bird a kick in the nuts--"

"I don't think that's anatomically possible."

Cid shrugged. "Yeah, well, you gotta make do with whatcha got."

"So..." Vincent dropped back down to lie on his back again. "Does this mean that we're marrooned?"

Cid took a long drag of his cigarette. "...Yeah. I guess so."

The hybrid bird hiccupped.

---

(1) Um. (cough)Mercedes-Benz(cough).

(2) My Little Pony, My Little Pony, we'll never be apart! My Little Pony, will always be in my heart... Oh yes. Polar opposites here, therefore: Surfdancer becomes Surfwhore, Majesty becomes Tramp, and Duck Soup becomes Swan... Soup. Those people at Hasbro sure are creative with the names, huh?

No, no, you don't have to count with your fingers how long it has been since I last updated. xD

I mean, seriously man... this chapter is craaap. I need to think of a plot soon. D:

And excuse the caps lock throughout, I've got a new computer and I haven't got the MSWord program on it (!), therefore I have to use boring old Notepad. Oh, and by the way, blame any spelling mistakes on Notepad, too. ;)

Until the next (procrastinated) update:D

My Little Pony (c) Hasbro. Hasbro (c) Hasbro. Mercedes-Benz (c) whomever.