Final Fantasy - All Series Fan Fiction ❯ Nowhere ❯ Nowhere ( Chapter 1 )

~ Nowhere ~

By: LunarPlexus

Plot: There really isn’t one :P

Warnings: Some ungraphic slashy male goodness, some violent references, a bit of language…that’s it, I guess.

Disclaimer: and Vincent aren’t mine, and I don’t get paid for doing this to them.

A lot of the things we laugh about aren't funny.
We bust our sides over things that really shouldn't be taken lightly. Things that are just downright horrific...they make us laugh til there are tears streaming down our faces.

The first time Rude actually managed to rip a leg off with his bare hands, we were slapping our knees later on at the pub.
The time Elena cut some punk's nose off, we giggled like mad.
Tseng never laughs, but he smiled when he took that severed nose and fed it to its ex-owner.
Every time I pull my 'tazer-up-the-ass' trick, we piss ourselves over it.

Nobody remembers whether the person who Rude de-legged was male or female. What they were wearing. What they said, how they pleaded as they died. It was just screams to us, sounds that had nothing to do with an actual human being.
Nobody remembers anything about the person who lost his nose to Elena's skilled knife, then to his own digestive system. He was male, that's it. He talked, too. Told us what we wanted to know. We remember the information, but not his voice. Again, just sounds that had nothing to do with a human being.
All I know about the ones I fried from the inside out is that there's nothing to remember, really. They die pretty quick.
The only thing to note is that they stink. No matter if you hit them from the inside or the outside. Burning flesh and all that.

And we reminisce over this, chugging back beers and laughing as if we hadn't a care in the world.

The funny thing about this is that it doesn't really have much to do with whether or not we're bad people. That's got nothing to do with it.
I know for a fact Rude still holds doors open for women.
I know Elena really wants children some day.
I know Tseng donates money to charity.
Me? My good deeds can go unrecorded for all I care. People will only remember the bad ones anyway.

It's not even about whether or not it's actually funny.

The point is, this is about doing what you have to do. After that, it's about doing what you have to do in order to do what you have to do.
I have to get information out of someone, and torture just happens to be the way to go, as it usually is. That's the first thing I have to do. Then, I can either look at the colour of his eyes and wonder if he has kids...or I can concentrate on how he looks like he's dancing every time I zap him one. Then I can go to the pub and have a laugh over it and get a good night's sleep. This is me doing what I gotta do again. If I knew what colour his eyes were, they'd keep me up all night. None of us would be able to do that over and over, no way.

So we go to the pub, laugh, and go home. Start again the next day. I’m not defending myself, because I really love my job. I get a kick out of it, and that’s because I have to.

I never think about life outside of the Turks. I could die any day, and I never think about it. You're a Turk for life, you die in the field, so there's no point thinking about the future. There’s nothing outside this. It's not a job, it's your life.
You could ask the other three, and they'd probably say the same things.

Your beliefs don't come into this, either.
No Turk will tell you that they signed up for this life because they believe in Shinra's work. Sure, we were loyal to Shinra, but not because of his work...and not because he was our buddy. He was an asshole.
His son is the same. He's not our buddy either. Nobody loves Rufus Shinra, and he wouldn't want it anyway. He's never had a real friend in his life.
And hey, you don't have to be someone's buddy to take a bullet for them.

No, we're loyal to him because we might as well be. It's what we're paid to be, so we do it. We get paid to rip off limbs and pull fingernails, get whatever Shinra wants. We do the dirty work so that he doesn't have to tell himself to laugh over a dead man's last words.

* * *

I've never owned a watch that worked.
They all stop pretty much the minute they come into my possession. I usually end up wearing them for months afterwards, though.

It must be somewhere around 3 am.
I can't even see the moon through the trees, they're so thick out here.
I've been walking for about half an hour. This time, I wasn't stupid enough to leave my cigarettes back at Healin. I did that the last time I came out here, and spent all night chewing my nails.
I can smoke and walk at the same time, I'm not stopping.

* * *

I've been making these night time trips for about a year now.
One night, I had a whole load of shit on my mind, and I couldn't get to sleep. I went out for a smoke, and just felt like I needed to get the hell away from Healin. I'm pretty impulsive. I just strolled off into the night and kept going. I ended up in Edge. The bushy bits can be scary at night, but I was never a coward. I just kept walking.

It was a weird thing, how it happened. In such a big space, two people meeting up in the middle of nowhere is pretty bizarre.
He was sitting in front of a fire with his knees drawn up to his chest. I stopped dead for a minute. I wasn’t expecting this.
He kinda glanced at me, and straight back at the fire.

Now, Turks have some pretty good skills, and we can be really stealthy when we need to be. I’d been walking out in heavy bush, so I was moving as stealthily as possible. I didn’t want to encounter anything nasty out here in the dead of night. There was no way this guy should have noticed me yet, and an ordinary person wouldn’t have.

One of the first things I saw, though, was his brass claw.

This wasn’t an ordinary person.

I stared for a moment after he looked at me, wondering if I should run.

He didn’t make any move at all, so I figured I could share his fire for a bit. If I was wrong about that, then I’d be dead long before I realized it, so it didn’t matter anyway.

So I walked over and slumped down on the opposite side of the fire. Still don’t know what was with my head that first night. I would have probably done something different if it had been any other night. I know I was pretty curious, though.

I got to have a good look at Vincent Valentine.

I remembered him being part of Strife’s crew years back, but I should have recognized him anyway. He was one of the early Turks, before my time, but we’re all well-versed when it comes to him. To this day, some of us don’t really know whether or not he’s totally human. He was deadly. Nobody who came up against Vincent Valentine was going to survive if he didn’t want them to.

One thought that occurred to me while I watched him was that nothing I knew about his deeds indicated any cruelty or brutality in him. There was nothing recorded about him ripping off limbs, or cutting off noses.

Or dropping a plate on anything.

Mind you, the Turks changed over the years. Shinra got worse and worse, and so did the Turks. Things got nastier, and bloodier until Meteor. Things calmed down after that, but we still have to do nasty things sometimes. I suppose it was a necessity thing. In Valentine’s day, those measures weren’t necessary. In mine, they are.

He still hadn’t moved or anything, and I’ll cut to the chase here: he didn’t move all night.

At one point he did ask what I was staring at, but that was it.

I left just before dawn. It was an hour or so back to Healin, but I didn’t feel like I’d been awake all night. My head actually felt clearer. I could sort of figure out why.

Valentine didn’t know me, he didn’t know the things I do. He probably assumed, being an ex-Turk, but he couldn’t know for sure. It was good.

So I went back.

The thing with Valentine is that he’s never in the same place twice. He’s got stealth and secrecy rooted so far in his brain; I’m amazed he doesn’t sleep with one eye open. I don’t have any proof that he doesn’t, though. I don’t even have any evidence that he sleeps, come to think of it. Remember what I said about him not being all that human? I’m still not that sure.

Anyway, the next sleepless night I had was about a month down the line. We’d been at Nibelheim for the past few days, sorting shit out. I’d only gotten back that night, and I wasn’t feeling that great. That fucking place freaks me out, I don’t know why. I didn’t feel right being at Healin when I still felt like I did. Like I had a million bugs crawling over me.

I needed to get out under a clean night sky.

I needed to be with a clean person.

So I headed out.

I wasn’t fucking happy when I hit the same place as last time and found nothing. Nothing even to track him by. Nothing can compare to that man’s nimbleness.

I came up blank that time.

* * *

I figured him out over time. I had a few more disappointments before I figured it out. A couple of times I stumbled upon him by pure luck, maybe a bit of intuition. After a while, my intuition must have gotten better or something, because I’d find him on the first try.

He was never a talker, that Vincent. He did talk more every visit, but he was never going to dominate the conversation.

For a change, I didn’t either.

We spent more time quiet, actually. It’s what I went out there for, really. A break from the noise.
There was something really innocent about everything.

A place where nobody can find us, and nobody knows about me.

A person who doesn’t know and doesn’t care.

It was all clean and pure, because it had no relation to anything that ever featured in my life. Personally, anyway. By the morning, I’d feel flushed out, detoxed.

Vincent never seemed to care. I actually asked him one time if my visits annoyed him.

He only shook his head.

I asked if I could keep tracking him down. I still remember what he said.

If it makes you feel like someone else.

That freaked me out a bit. Like he hit the nail on the head or something.

I guess maybe these visits did something similar for him too. He’d never allow it, otherwise.

Why the fuck should Vincent Valentine care about me?

I asked him questions sometimes, and he answered every now and then.

What do you want most in the whole world?

He usually never answered personal questions, and to a man like Valentine, most were too personal.

He answered this one after a long pause.

To forget.

He said it as he got up from the ground.
That was the first time he left before I did.

I didn’t see him for a while after that, but the next time I did we didn’t talk for a long time.

I only said one thing.

Me too.

He was smart, he knew what I meant.

* * *

About six months after it all started, I fucked him.

I say fucked for a reason.

We didn’t get close to each other and find our soul mates, and fall in love or any of that crap.

I was pissed off.

I was tired.

I needed something.

I needed to stop thinking.

He didn’t do anything. I walked into the light from his newest fire, grabbed him, and just did it.

He didn’t try to stop me, which was weird. In retrospect, it woulda made more sense if he’d shot me in the crotch.

He didn’t do anything that said he wanted to, either. He just sort of went along with it.

There was no kissing or anything like that, and I don’t think he would have appreciated it, anyway. He didn’t look at me, he just stared up at the sky. He didn’t even move for the most part. I don’t even remember how I got his clothes off. He sure as hell didn’t help.

He only reacted at one point.

For a minute, I felt guilty that he was just taking it. I figured maybe I should do something.

You know.

The minute I grabbed him, I ended up looking down three barrels. He spoke for the first and last time that night.

Don’t.

I let go pretty quickly, I can tell you. He just settled back again, and I wondered if I ever saw the gun in the first place.

He was really just helping me out there. I suppose he knew it was something I needed.

He didn’t really have any reason to want to do me a favour, though, so maybe he needed it too.

We laid next to each other afterwards, not touching or anything. Just laying on the foliage and looking at the sky. I was calm, my head was empty.

Vincent grabbed his cape within a minute and covered himself up, but he stayed on the floor. It was chilly, but I didn’t bother with anything like that. I just lit a cigarette.

I fell asleep with it in my hand.

* * *

When I woke up, he was gone.

He’d grabbed my jacket and laid it over me before he left, it seemed.

I got dressed and trekked back to Healin.

I tried finding him a few times after that. I never did find him again. I guess he didn’t want me to.

I went back to the noses, and the knives, and the tazer trick.

I was okay, though.

I just learned to laugh harder.

~ * ~

End

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