Glimpses of Normalcy
"I am responsible. Although I may not be able to prevent the worst from happening, I am responsible for my attitude toward the inevitable misfortunes that darken life. Bad things do happen; how I respond to them defines my character and the quality of my life. I can choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilized by the gravity of my loss, or I can choose to rise from the pain and treasure the most precious gift I have – life itself."
Walter Anderson
Through his dining room window, Vincent watched Tifa leave her house early that morning; he would've thought that she was sleeping at this hour. The morning was quiet, not at all unusual for Nibelheim in late autumn. Dusty winds roved over the lonely landscape, tingeing the predawn purple skies an almost red. Everything was still dark, dreaming, even the sounds of tourists and shows had long since been extinguished out of the new areas of the town. During this morning when Vincent would usually be ascending his stairs for bed until work that night, he reflected over a glass of brandy.
Who in the end of this mess would be held accountable for Sephiroth, for Tifa, and for Cloud? There were so many things that'd gone astray in the world that he could do nothing to fix lest he work a miracle. Of only one thing was Vincent certain, no longer could he live his life in Lucrecia's memory. Today, he'd do something drastic.
They'd always kept an eye on Cloud during the hunt for Sephiroth. That seemed like years ago to Vincent. It was the sensible course of action. After all Cloud was the damaged one. Voices that none of the others heard frequently incapacitated him, and with that distraction it never even occurred to Vincent to study Tifa as well. He'd always thought that she was the strongest out of all of them, resilient in every way imaginable. She was quick to smile and quicker to laugh even in the bleakest times three years ago.
The red sky hung enormous above their heads as they all stood on the deck of the Highwind. Cloud had just given Sephiroth the black materia, and the Lifestream devoured his body perhaps dissolving it into nothing. Even then, she was defiant after Shinra imprisoned them in Junon. He saw her there at the edge of the deck just after their escape onto the Highwind. Her teeth were gleaming as she laughed into the sky even though Meteor hung over them all ready to fall at any moment. Out of all of them, she refused to be conquered. Perhaps that was the very moment when he should've noticed that she was cracked. It'd been in their faces all along, but with the world ending who really even cared anymore? After all, aren't fatalism and heroism just words mere millimeters apart in meaning?
Back then Vincent couldn't see the strain in her easy smiles or the hollowness behind the sparkle in her eyes. Everyone knew Tifa's story or as she recounted it. They knew of her happy childhood in Nibelheim and that her father tucked away money for her to leave that village to make her way into the world. Did the rest of Avalanche know that story was a lie? And, how much of what she told him last night was true? Tifa was every bit as fractured as Cloud, and he wasn't sure how to mend the situation. He didn't want to mend her; people hadn't been Vincent's forte for so many years. He came back to Nibelheim because it was only place he had left…ironic as that may seem. The Shinra Mansion and all of its secrets hidden behind mold covered walls, beneath rotten beams, and inside dusty drawers. Everything that he knew and remembered stood two paces apart in the mansion's basement, a coffin and that damn library.
Really what did he have after all?
Lucrecia was gone. His family died a long time ago. And friends? What friends did he ever have? Those he hadn't left behind in his ambition to be one of Shinra's best, betrayed him. He never allowed himself to get too close to the others in Avalanche, and when he came back here, he did what only a remnant of a man could do. Remember.
He traced the hollows of the mountain paths, and when the weather was too formidable and bitter which was often in the high peaks that the resort workers left untouched, he roamed the corridors beneath the town in the mansion, reading Hojo's notes and records, praying that he'd find a scrap of anything that once belonged to his beloved Lucrecia, and how dreadfully successful he was.
In the mansion, everything stank of rotten wood and mildew. The library was no different. He didn't know how often he'd come back there to read that fleeting journal entry and the document again and again. Each time he read over her journal, his heart nearly stopped. He let loose the breath he hadn't known he was holding and folded over the pages once more, staring down at the elegant loop of her handwriting with a certain sort of reverence that he hadn't felt in a long time beneath the anger. Their affair birthed the world's greatest monster. All at once, he felt an incalculable pride that Sephiroth had been his son and not Hojo's, but then there was the earth shattering guilt. Everything that'd happened in the last thirteen years, the Wutai War, the Nibelheim Massacre, Midgar, Junon, Meteor…happened because he couldn't control himself or recognize the madness hidden beneath Lucrecia's scientific ambitions.
He knew insanity when he saw it.
How would he ever be able to face the others again? He wouldn't. He severed all contact with the rest of Avalanche, although Yuffie remained persistent to…how would she phrase it… "bring him out of his shell". She had no idea.
On an unusually fierce winter night, a year after Meteor fell, Vincent looped around the path back to the reactor. The wind and ice blinded him, painting the world a whirling white against the nearly black sky. His fingers remained taut and rigid as he fingered the Death Penalty, and he listened for even the faintest of noises against the blasting wind. Nothing could be prowling at night in this weather, but every now and then a stray wolf would surprise him. If he didn't find shelter soon, he wasn't sure if he'd be in any shape to fight anything at all.
A low moan ghosted over the ridge. Vincent scanned as far as he could see. Even with heightened senses, he saw nothing. Chaos had been unusually tame these last few months. He stopped in snow and strained to hear the noise once more. A dying animal perhaps? It wasn't unusual for him to find a dragon hatchling in the mountains, its glossy green wings frozen to the snow. Nibel dragons had been of a dying breed ever since mercenaries were paid to prowl the mountains. Then the moan echoed across the mountaintop again, stronger this time and definitely much more human. His eyes widened. Was it coming from the reactor? He set out at a frantic pace, jogging atop the snow. The voice could've belonged to anything…anyone. A lost tourist that may be freezing to death or injured…or a mutated experiment finally awakening. Either possibility wasn't good. He hadn't dare enter the old reactor since he arrived back in Nibelheim.
The reactor was just another reminder of his shortcomings. Sephiroth's insanity could've been avoided completely, or so he'd hoped if he'd just…just emerged from his coffin when he sensed a foreign presence in the old manor's basement. He let his thoughts trail away on the icy winds as he trudged through the thick snows to the stairs leading up to the reactor's main entrance. The acrid, corrosive of smell of mako welled up despite the wind, and he almost turned back, but the voice moaned again over the winds. Whoever…or whatever was making that racket sounded near death but mobile. Vincent checked over his materia quickly.
He slunk along the stair, hiding in what little shadows the reactor's mako eaten beams afforded. The emergency lighting was dim in the late night gloom, dimmer than he remembered on his last trip along this particular path in the mountains. A couple of dragon hatchlings had mutated immensely and were more than a little trouble for him and a few hired mercenaries that night. He hoped it wasn't more of the same. Calling on as much of Chaos' power he dare muster without losing control, he focused all of his senses on the thing in the reactor. Past the bridge, in the main room where Hojo had carried out more of his sick human experiments lay…No. It was impossible!
He was dead.
All Vincent knew was red, as he dropped his gun hearing it fall heavily on the bridge nearly into the chasm below. His gauntlet felt stifling, and claws had already burst through his gloved hand, the ghosting promise of wings growing along his spine threatened to rip through his skin. The agony of the transformation pulled him to a halt just before he reached the experimentation chamber and sent him to his knees. He caught himself with his hands and spat blood, as internal organs shrank, reformed, and grew anew.
For the first time that night he spoke, "Chaos," a choked whisper, a plea, a half sob. Animalistic instinct full of bloodlust and rage fought to overtake his rational, human mind. He watched, horrified and transfixed, by the roving muscle tissue bubbling and growing underneath his skin, an alien presence ingrained into his every cell.
Then, a whisper against his ear sent him into a stark mad panic, "We will annihilate him."
A vision of red carnage, limbs, and flesh strewn about the metal chamber pulsed into his mind and reinvented itself a million times over as the demon fought him.
"Chaos!" he screamed the name into the chill, mako rich air which only helped to fuel his bloodlust when he inhaled and retched.
Wait! The rationalist pled for dominance. All of those months living in Tifa's "house" and ghosting into the manor at night reading over both Lucrecia's and Hojo's work gave birth to a strange sort of sympathy. He knew what it meant to be controlled by a beast beyond human understanding, and at some point Vincent thought he understood Jenova's nature too.
"We will question him. He deserves a chance. If he is truly guilty then we will execute him. Please," Vincent pled, pulling out long strands of his own dark hair as his fingers shifted rapidly between doglike claws and raw flesh.
The demon at the back of his mind let out a bark of cruel, mocking laughter, "Pathetic. So much potential and yet so weak," and as its voice faded becoming fainter and fainter until it was less than a murmur at the back of Vincent's mind, it whispered dreamily, "One day, Valentine, you will submit."
Panting and free of the other's ephemeral invasion, he vomited blood as the rest of his organs shifted back into place. Vincent shuddered violently, pushing himself to his knees to look across the room. Shivering, frail, and nude, Sephiroth lay in a viscous pool of mako on the cold metal floor. If Vincent were a more poetic man, he would've pondered for a moment longer how much like a newborn Sephiroth seemed on that floor, but instead he swallowed and shuddered in disgust too tempted to empty the contents of his stomach.
"You are my son," Vincent murmured for the first time, daring to speak the truth aloud.
The other man moaned weakly. His hands and fingertips were stained red and streaked with deep cuts as if he'd climbed a very, very long way, and he had; Vincent's eyes followed the long trail of condensed mako from the deep green chasm back in the bridge room.
It was impossible, unthinkable…that Sephiroth had crawled who knew how long from the lifestream to the planet's surface and to here of all places! Yet hadn't they all seen the man return from the dead before? Why was now any more surprising than before? Vincent approached the man shakily, still weakened from his battle with Chaos, and grabbed a fistful of Sephiroth's long locks, pulling the man's face none too gently towards his.
Sephiroth moaned again, coughed, and sputtered as if trying to speak. A searing pool of mako dribbled out of the corner of his mouth and burned its way down his chin, but it was the look in his eyes- that all too pitiful, human look of a man defeated which struck Vincent silent. This was not the man he fought in the Northern Crater last year. There would be a time for answers, but right now all he could do was to towel off the green liquid doing its damndest to eat away his former enemy's skin and clean his wounds, which were many.
Drinking brandy did nothing to dull his senses or calm his nerves. It'd been years since he could really feel the effects of alcohol, and that was another lifetime ago. It'd been underneath Vincent's nose the entire time since Tifa arrived back in Nibelheim, looking as thin and shaken and frail as Sephiroth had two years ago in the reactor. Was it really that unthinkable that a SOLDIER deployed on a mission would have a tryst with a local girl? Of course not, he chuckled wryly, but this was Sephiroth and Tifa. Everything he'd gathered from his companions, from what people said and had written about Sephiroth, and he'd even learned of the man himself during the three years since Meteor, Sephiroth like he was an often incalculably cold man and professional to a fault, but hadn't he had an affair with Lucrecia?
But Tifa? He had no idea what she was like a teenager, and he certainly couldn't confess to know her well at all even now. Outwardly, he always found her charming in her own way, quietly strong, the glue that held Avalanche together. While they may have always openly acknowledged Cloud as their leader, when it boiled down to the nitty-gritty, everyone turned to Tifa for guidance and support. He downed the rest of his brandy in one gulp, savoring the fleeting burn at the back of his throat. Was he up for it or wasn't he? Tifa had just left her house thirty minutes ago, and if he was going to break in…now would be the time. Of course he'd known about her highly publicized divorce, her overdose, and through seedier sources her weeklong confinement to the hospital's psychiatric ward in Costa del Sol.
Old Turk habits die hard.
Vincent slunk from shadow to shadow in the early morning gloom of the homes in Old Town. Hers sat near the path, straggly weeds fighting their way through the still mostly dead soil in her barren yard. The back window was open as usual, and through it, he crept inside into the kitchen. Everything was bare of personal effects, save a partially reupholstered sofa, odd for a woman but as he'd expected from Tifa. He searched around the first floor and finding nothing decided upon searching what must've been her room on the second floor. A neatly made bed, an old wall mirror, and a file cabinet were the only things in her room. He swallowed his guilt and opened the first drawer. Perhaps what these files contained would be the only true remedy to rebuilding Tifa Lockheart. Vincent often felt in the recent weeks, that like Sephiroth, she'd been sent to him for him to care for, and the responsibility he felt for her superseded whatever guilt he felt for violating her privacy, the one possession she held onto like no other.
A/N: I felt it was time for a break in Tifa's narrative to explore some of the unexplored areas of the story from Vincent's perspective. As Tifa is an "unreliable narrator", I really wanted Vincent to explore some of Tifa's contradictions so far. The story will be wrapping up in about four or five more chapters, and I hope this has been an interesting read. Reviews are appreciated.