Final Fantasy - All Series Fan Fiction ❯ Restful Death ❯ Chapter 1

RESTFUL DEATH

DISCLAIMER: I don't own them, they belong to somebody else.

WARNINGS: Mention of past torture, lemons, language. That's it for now. More added if applicable. Oh yeah, and violence.

Tir'd with all this, for restful death I cry:

As to behold desert a beggar born,

And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,

And purest faith unhappily forsworn,

And gilded honour shamefully misplac'd

And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,

And right perfection wrongfully disgrac'd,

And strength by limping sway disabled,

And art made tongue-tied by authority,

And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,

And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,

And captive good attending captain ill-

Tir'd with all these, from these I would be gone,

Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.

~Shakespeare. Sonnet 66

CHAPTER ONE

The first thing he did when he got in the hotel room was take a towel and hang it over the mirror.

He kept his face carefully averted until this was done.

Afterwards, he felt a little more relaxed. Not much, but a little. He sat on the rickety-looking bed, moving cautiously as it creaked and groaned under his sleight weight. Once he was sure it wasn't going to collapse, he set about removing his outer garments.

Red coat, spiked boots, the crimson strips of cloth that kept his hair out of his face.

When he finally stretched out on the bed, sighing, he was wearing only a black dress shirt and loose black leather pants; it was the most comfortable he'd felt since he'd woken from his coffin.

Since long years before he was put into his coffin...

He wondered what the others were doing.

Cloud would be with Tifa, if the girl got her way... Barrett gone back to the tiny girl he called his daughter... Shera had already claimed Cid... Yuffie had vanished and they all assumed she was headed back to Wutai, probably with half their possessions... Red would be back in Cosmo Canyon...

He was the only one with no place to go. With no one waiting for him to come home.

He knew what the others expected of him, now that all the danger seemed to be over. Knew exactly why there had been no offers of a place to stay or something to do - beyond the fact of his strange appearance.

They expected him to go back to sleep.

Probably thought it would be for the best, that he would be content with that. That it was what he wanted.

They had no idea of how his skin crawled at the thought of climbing back into that box...

He wouldn't do it. He *couldn't* do it.

Not yet. He would save it as a last-ditch option, a retreat for when life became unbearable.

He already knew he couldn't commit suicide. He'd tried three times, when he was safely away from the others. Tried slitting his one remaining wrist, watched as the cut dribbled blood and then sealed. Tried swallowing pills, only to go all night without feeling a single effect.

Tried shooting himself through the chest.

He didn't ever want to watch that again - a person should never see their own heart pumping blood even as the hole in it closed and vanished. It had frightened him, when he thought there was nothing left in the world that he would fear.

Damn Hojo, anyway, and his experiments! He wondered if the bastard knew he'd condemned him to an eternity of torment?

Probably. Didn't care, either. Thought it was funny...

Vincent didn't see anything amusing about it.

He'd contemplated shooting himself through the head, but there were faults in that plan. What if his brain healed, like his heart had, but left him without a memory? The idea had seemed a blessing, until he thought of the damage he could do to people if he didn't know how to control his strengths, how to keep Chaos down. He couldn't risk it.

He heaved another sigh. So what was he supposed to do?

He couldn't die, and he didn't know how to live.

The last tenant of the room had left a newspaper on the battered chest of drawers - he picked it up and started reading it. He had nothing else to do, and it would take his mind off of his sorrows for a little while.

A little while was better than nothing.

He read for about ten minutes, skimming past stories of the battles so recently fought, reading about scientists studying the LifeStream, reading predictions about the economy and nearly smiling over the trite problems in the 'agony' column.

When he reached the help-wanted ads he read them, for lack of anything else *left* to read. Halfway down the second column he came across an add that made him lift his eyebrows.

He read it again.

Well... *that* was something he could do...

********(( Rocket Town ))********

Cid Highwind was bored.

Utterly and completely bored.

Saving the planet had been fun. Dangerous, but fun. The time he planned to go into space was fun. Shera had stopped him, of course, and she'd been right about the mechanical problems with his rocket, but it had still been fun. The planning, the building, the dreaming...

Now everything was just dull. Boring.

Shera was boring. Nice girl, really, everyone said so. And she loved him. Told him so every day, even if he never said it back. Offered herself to him with marriage, without marriage, any way he wanted. Some men would have killed for a woman like her.

Cid thought it was... well, boring.

No, wait, not boring, Boring. Capital 'B'.

He didn't want some woman throwing herself at him. He wanted to chase her, to at least have a bit of anticipation about whether she'd say yes or no, to have some mystery to uncover. He'd even seen Shera without her clothes on already. She'd told him her hot water heater was broken, came to his house to shower, and he was fairly certain that forgetting to close the bathroom door had been intentional. Probably expected him to be overwhelmed with passion and take her right there on the floor.

It had been too obviously planned - though he had to admit that Shera nude was quite a pretty sight. But he wasn't born yesterday, and he wasn't going to get suckered into something he didn't want, just for some quick physical relief. He'd deliberately pretended not to see; not to hear the heartfelt sighs.

It was all just so *boring.*

He wondered what the others were doing? Cloud was with Tifa, though a mutinous look in the blond's eyes made him wonder if the boy would stay there. Cloud still had issues over Aeris and Tifa was going to have to deal with that. What she needed to do was let the boy go, let him sort out what was going on under than spiky hair. Cid was fairly sure that Cloud would go back to Tifa after a while, and just as sure that Tifa would never let him go in the first place.

And no way would she take any advice from *him.* She'd laugh her pretty head off.

Barrett - ah, he didn't care what Barrett was doing. Babysitting, probably. Cute kid, Marlene, but Cid had no interest in being referred to as an 'uncle', the way the tiny girl had begun to refer to Cloud.

And no way was he going to look for Yuffie. Good riddance! Klepto ninja...

Vincent...

A sudden picture filled his mind, all long black hair and swirling red cloak, the beautiful face more hidden than revealed. He could count on one hand the times he'd seen *all* of Vincent's face for longer than a split second.

Cloud and the others had whispered that Vincent would go back to his coffin. Cid wasn't entirely sure about that, but he had made no protests when Shera had come to take him back to Rocket Town. If that was what Vincent wanted, then he deserved to be allowed to sleep. He'd fought just as hard - harder, maybe - as the rest of them. And before that had suffered through a nightmare Cid knew he couldn't imagine.

He just hoped the man's sleep was peaceful.

Shame, really that something like Vincent would be wasted, spending eternity moldering in that coffin. There weren't enough beautiful things left on the Planet for one to go unseen.

Cid sat up a little straighter in his chair. Could he talk Vincent out of sleeping for the next millennia? Or would the Death Penalty blast him into oblivion if he even suggested it? From what Tifa had told them, the man was hell-bent on sleeping past the end of the world.

He wondered why Vincent had told Tifa that? He would never have expected the man to confide in that girl - she had starting giving the gunman the cold shoulder as the final battle approached.

She'd probably noticed the way Cloud had been watching him.

So what? Everyone watched Vincent - it wasn't like you could ignore him. He was freaking beautiful, from raven hair to the slim body hidden by that cloak, to the exotic gleam of gold on his clawed hand. Cid himself had spent several pleasant hours watching him - hell, *Tifa* had spend a good amount of time watching him.

And it wasn't like Cloud had been panting after the man. He'd admired something lovely like the rest of them, but he'd still been stunned by Aeris loss and it would take the boy time to get past the death of the flower girl.

But thinking this over had started Cid wondering. Was Tifa really telling the truth when she told them Vincent had said he was going back to his coffin? At the time, no one had questioned her.

No one had asked Vincent, either, not wanting to add to the burden of sadness the mad seemed to carry.

Cid sometimes wanted to smack him out of that constant state of depression. So he'd loved and woman and she died. She'd belonged to someone else in the first place, hadn't she? Though, he had to cut Vince some slack - the man had gone through hell after Lucretia had died - it was no wonder he'd become fixated on her. Having an angel to remember could get you through some really hard times. Cid used his own memories of his mother to make it through a less-than-stellar childhood. Though that didn't compare to Vince's suffering, he felt he could understand the man a bit better than the others. It made him feel closer to the quiet ex-Turk.

And the more he thought about it, the less he liked the idea of Vincent Valentine sleeping his life away in a musty old coffin.

A coffin he should never have been in, in the first place.

'Maybe,' he thought, scrambling to his feet, 'maybe I should do something about it.'

It would certainly keep him from being bored...

*

"Where are you going?"

Cid winced as he heard Shera's soft voice behind him, but he didn't turn around. He was busily loading up the 'Highwind', making sure he had plenty of supplies, checking that the 'Tiny Bronco' was secure.

"Gotta find a friend of mine," he muttered, trying to ignore her as she moved closer. Why couldn't the woman take 'no' for an answer?

Why couldn't she just leave him alone?

"Are you... going to look for the little girl from Wutai?"

Someone else might have missed the way she emphasized 'little girl', but not Cid.

He scowled at her not-so-subtle innuendo that Yuffie was too young for him, at the fact that she was questioning him, and the idea that he'd be going *anywhere* after Klepto-Ninja.

"No, I ain't goin' after Yuffie. Think I'm crazy?! Kid'd steal the fillings outta yer teeth!"

"Then... where are you going? Are you... is there a problem with Cloud and Tifa? Is something wrong?"

"Naw, they're fine. Outta the plane, Shera. I'm ready to take off."

"But, Cid, where are you going?" She nearly wailed the words and he cringed.

Damn woman...

Wish she'd stop acting like his wife when he'd never so much as smiled at her.

"Toldja. Gotta find a friend. Get outta the plane, dammit!"

Realizing she wasn't going to get any more information out of him that way, Shera started backing toward the hatch. "When will you be back?" she asked, hoping to learn a little more with a different question.

Cid shrugged. "Few days. Few weeks. Depends on how quick I find him."

Oh.

'Him.'

'Well,' Shera thought, 'that's a relief. I thought he was going after Tifa or that little Ninja girl. So this really is about a friend...' "Good-bye, then, Cid. Be careful." She finally left.

"Yeah, yeah." Cid muttered, forgetting her as soon as she was out of sight, and sent the 'Highwind' zooming down the runway and into the air. He didn't look back, and wouldn't have cared if he *had* seen Shera waving goodbye on the tarmac.

"Goodbye, Cid!" she shouted the words even though she knew he couldn't hear them, then turned to walk to her lonely house. She smiled as she went. Cid had been so bored lately, she'd despaired of keeping him close. Finding one of his buddies should cheer him up no end; she hoped he'd bring him here to keep him busy. Men needed other men to chat with, after all.

She had nothing to worry about.