Chapter Text
The dark-haired man lifted his face a little out of the top of his crimson wool mantle and took in a deep breath. The back of his throat stung with the crisp mountain air, but he felt refreshed anyway. He was high up in the crystalline, snow-packed mountains, far away from society, away from everything that ever reminded him of that day. That sharp, fateful day that not even time had been able to dull.
Vincent lowered his head then, averted his eyes away from the sky. He didn’t deserve to look at that beautiful, eternally stretching sky, when she would never be able to see it again. Was her spirit somewhere up in that sky? Her body was trapped in a stasis between life and death; did her soul yet cling to her crystallized flesh, or had it found some way to escape? Over and again he had whispered, cried, screamed his prayer to the sky that she had found some peace after all. The sky never answered; it just kept stretching on, as vast and empty as ever.
With overflowing tears – tears he had held too long in check before his friends – Vincent turned away from the bright, cloudless sky and trudged back into the mountaintop cave he was using for a camp. It wasn’t a long walk back, but every step seemed to weigh his heart down further. Snow clung to his boots and made his every step heavier, more awkward. Vincent narrowed his eyes at the ground, as if to accuse the snow of mocking the same heavy feeling he carried inside.
When he entered his cave, he blinked to adjust to the sudden low light. Something in the cave felt amiss. It was cooler than usual, uncomfortably so. Normally, warm air rose up from somewhere deep in the mountain to counterbalance the cold from the cave’s mouth, but Vincent wasn’t feeling that warmth anymore. Had there been a cave-in?
It was a good thing he had thought to bring that woolen greatcoat. His normal red mantle and cloak kept him warm enough during the day, but it wouldn’t be safe to rely on them alone after the sun went down. He decided to throw the greatcoat around his shoulders and investigate the depths of his mountain cave camp.
Lucky for him, his cave system was a single twisting tunnel with no offshoots, or at least none that were big enough to admit a man’s passage. As a result he didn’t have to worry about getting lost or turned around. In some parts the ceiling, which was little more than a sheet of thick ice, thinned out enough to cast an eerie bluish tint over the glittering ice and rock below. The effect was beautiful, if eerie, but it reminded Vincent too much of her crystal prison. He kept his eyes down and kept moving forward.
In the fourth, or perhaps fifth cavern from his camp, the ceiling had thickened again and the light was much dimmer. Here the ice grew in slick stalagmites and stalactites, some of which were so large and thick that they formed complete pillars from top to bottom. There were large ice crystals with wide facets like alien flowers sitting quietly in most of the corners and crannies of the cave.
In the very center, there was the most magnificent crystal of all. It blossomed up from the ground like a jagged blue rose, its edges glinting dangerously even in the poor light. But there was something strange about it; its outer edges were translucent and glowing but its core was dark, far darker than Vincent had expected. And the dark core had a peculiar shape that he couldn’t put his finger on.
He laid his hand on one of the “rose’s” outer petals, then drew back instantly as he realized that the ice crystal was not ice at all, but a literal crystal, and it was warm. It was emanating a heat that must have originated within itself, for there was no other source in the cave. Had all the heat in his cave come from this crystal? That would explain why the stalactites all looked damp. But why did it cool down? Vincent laid his hand on the crystal’s surface again.
As he held his hand there, the crystal began to crack, splitting at the edges of every petal like a suit with every seam torn out at once. The cracking was loud, and it echoed against the icy chamber, to the point that Vincent was sure his ears would bleed and his skull would split. The noise was so great that the snow on the outside of the cavern fell away in an avalanche. The sun shone through the ice ceiling brighter now, and Vincent could see just what was really waiting in the core of the now-shattered crystal.
It was a woman. A beautiful woman with long, slender limbs and strawberry blondish hair. Despite the fact that she was wearing uncomfortable-looking plate mail, she seemed to be sleeping peacefully on a throne inside the giant split crystal. At the sight of her, Vincent averted his eyes. She didn’t look like her, but the situation was too similar for him to take. He had failed her, with disastrous result. Was this woman before him the victim of someone else’s failure? And how long had she been made to suffer for those sins of the past? With eyes still turned away from the collapsing crystal prison, Vincent backed up against one of the ice pillars. He gripped his head with both hands and tried to shut out both the noise and the memories.
When the crystal shards stopped crashing to the ground and the cavern was once again still, Vincent finally looked up at the woman in the chair. Her eyes were closed and her breathing was level; she was still asleep, somehow. Though he probably should have thought better of it, he approached her. Her face looked so familiar. It was as though he had seen her countless times before, but when he wracked his memory he couldn’t pinpoint from where he might have known her. With his unarmored hand, Vincent reached out to her and prodded her gingerly in the arm.
Her eyes flew open. Vincent pulled his hand away and backed off a step.
She looked around for a second and then fixed her big blue eyes on Vincent’s face.
“Where’s Serah?” she demanded.
Vincent of course had no idea who or what Serah was. “I don’t—“ he began.
The woman rose up from her throne with lightning speed and drove Vincent backward with her arm until his back hit the ice pillar. “Where is Serah?” she asked again, her voice deadly. It occurred to Vincent that he had only been pushed back because of her speed and his surprise. After sleeping inside that crystal for however-long, she had very little physical strength at her disposal. Well, at least he’d be able to contain her if she got really violent. Especially if he considered that the bladed weapon that was in her lap had skittered across the floor and was now out of her reach.
“Sorry,” he told her. “I don’t know anything about Serah. It's just you here.”
The woman searched Vincent’s face for signs of deception, but there were none to find. Then a look of surprise and shock swept over her features and she staggered away, holding her head in her hands much like Vincent had only a few minutes before. Her legs buckled and she fell to her knees, leaning against the crystal throne as she cried out in pain.
“Serah,” she called, while a tear ran down either cheek. She kept repeating that name, Serah, over and again. “I’m…I’m sorry, Serah.”
“Er,” Vincent began, gently as he could manage with his voice raspy from disuse and chill air. “Who’s Serah?”
The woman looked back over her shoulder at the man who had woken her from her crystal slumber. Her eyes were red-rimmed and puffy. “My sister,” she finally answered. She sniffled involuntarily and turned her face away. Vincent shifted his weight away from the ice pillar at his back and took a tentative step forward.
“Where is she?” was all he could think to say.
But the woman just shook her head and swallowed hard. “My sister is gone. Because of me. Because I couldn’t protect her.” She beat her balled fist helplessly against the seat of the throne while her tears continued to flow.
Because I couldn’t protect her, the words echoed endlessly in Vincent’s mind. Without thinking, he walked up to the distraught woman, slipped the greatcoat off his shoulders and wrapped it around hers. She lifted her face and stared at him questioningly. As he wiped away one of her tears it seemed to her that his eyes bore the same deep pain and loss as her own.
So, Vincent thought, it was she who had failed someone else. He, Vincent, knew the pain of that sort of failure intimately. He pulled the lapels of the greatcoat a little tighter around her slender frame and then backed off awkwardly.
“Thank you,” she whispered hoarsely as her hand rose up to hold the edges of the coat in place. He made a slight nod in response.
“What’s your name?” he asked her as gently as before. The woman opened her mouth and then balked, like she couldn’t remember what people used to call her. But that sentiment seemed to last for only a moment, and then she answered.
“Lightning.”
The man nodded. “I’m Vincent,” he replied. “Come on, let’s get out of this cavern.” He helped Lightning to her feet and picked up her blade from the other side of the cavern. “I’ve got a camp further up this tunnel,” he told her as he slowly led the way out of the ice caverns.
“How long have I been asleep?” she wondered aloud as they walked through the icy tunnels. “I don’t remember any of this.”
“I couldn’t tell you,” Vincent answered simply. He jumped up to a ledge and leaned back down to pull Lightning up. Her armor was heavy, but still considerably lighter than he had expected. “I’ve never seen armor or a weapon like yours before. I don’t know if you’ve been asleep for a very long time, or if you’re just not from around here…”
Lightning shrugged. “I guess I’ll have to find out more when we get back to civilization.” She paused. “There is a civilization to go back to, right?”
“You could call it that,” Vincent answered slowly while he thought about it. “Every couple of years an experiment goes wrong and someone with silver hair tries to obliterate the Planet, but we have crossword puzzles on our cell phones.”
Lightning stood there for a moment, staring at Vincent like he was insane. Even after he turned away, it took a moment for her to recover her wits and follow him up the tunnel. “Crossword puzzles,” she muttered with sarcastic venom. “Cute.”
The camp was too bright for both of them after the darkness of the caverns. But even the pain in her eyes couldn’t stop Lightning from running across the cave floor to the exit. Shielding her eyes with her arm she stared out in wonder at the snow-capped peaks around them. Questions floated about in her mind. Why had she been inside the mountain? How did she get there? But the question she wanted to ask most required her to turn back to face Vincent.
“How did you find me up here?”
He drew level with her and looked out over the mountaintops. “I come here sometimes. When I need to get away from, anything really. It was by chance that I chose for my camp the cave with your crystal.” Was it really chance? Or had fate drawn him to this spot? Vincent shook his head rather than give voice to something as foolish as fate. They stood in silence, each lost in their own thoughts.
“How long will it take to reach the nearest town?” Lightning’s quiet voice broke the silence.
Vincent considered. “Probably three days, if we make good time.” He checked the shadows. “It’s too late to start today. We’ll leave first thing in the morning.” Vincent turned and walked back deeper into the cave.
“We?” she called back to him, the surprise as clear in her voice as it was on her face. Vincent knelt beside his half-empty rucksack and prepared to re-pack his camping supplies.
“It’s about time I returned,” he said with a resigned sigh as he pulled out a spare pair of gloves and packed a flashlight in their place. “I’m sure there’s a summon tearing Midgar apart as it is.”
A summon tearing Midgar apart? The woman took a moment to think about this. Midgar sounded like a place, and if there was something large and powerful and summoned enough to tear it apart, it would have to be an eidolon. So they were simply called 'summons' in this new time and place?
“Silver-haired men trying to destroy the Planet, summons destroying cities. Sounds like this world is all but in love with crisis,” Lightning wondered aloud. Vincent gave her a wry smile.
“Perhaps. But you look like you can handle a little crisis.”
She turned and walked back into the cave. “Yeah, I handled it really well last time,” she muttered, barely audible to Vincent’s ears.
Vincent alternated between packing supplies and staring blankly out into the emptiness of the space outside the cave exit. By the time he finished his simple task, the sunset had come and gone. The mountains had gone from blinding white to fiery orange to rosy pink to muted lavender. All these colors and more had filtered into the camp, dulled by their reflection off the grey rocks,but their silent march calmed his spirit, even as his physical body remained tense as he considered how to proceed.
He would deliver Lightning safely to Edge, that much he knew for certain. But where to from there? Where could he take her where she would be safe? Did she even need his protection? She looked capable enough. He stole a glance her way; she looked like a valkyrie from one of his old books. An angel of battle and death, a fierce warrior who could hold her own against any horde of men or beasts. In a test of battle, Vincent had no doubt she would emerge victorious.
Even so, it wouldn’t do to simply bring her to highway outside of Edge and leave her.
He’d take her to 7th Heaven, he decided. Tifa had a good sensible head on her shoulders; she’d know what to do. After that he was sure he couldn’t remain involved, but he’d see his charge to safety. He put his mostly-packed rucksack aside and looked up.
Lightning was leaning up against one of the cave walls. She seemed completely lost in her own thoughts. Vincent fished a couple of protein bars out of the rucksack and held them out to her. She started when he approached and then a perplexed expression colored her familiar features as she regarded the bars.
“Sorry I don’t have real food up here,” he told her as she took them at last. “But these will help you keep your strength up for now.”
“Thank you,” she nodded and she began to peel the wrapper from the first bar. She took a tentative bite and slowly began chewing. She continued chewing as she watched Vincent return to the other side of the cave and sit down with his back against a boulder. “Why were you up here anyway?” she asked after her first swallow.
“I told you; to get away.”
Lightning didn’t say anything, but she stared pointedly. Vincent looked away and silently refused to offer any more information. She took another bite of the protein bar before venturing to speak again.
“What were you running from?” she finally asked.
Without meeting her gaze, “You’re not the only one who’s lost someone they couldn’t protect.” Lightning’s eyes grew wide.
“I’m sorry, I—“
“Don’t worry about it,” he said stiffly. Silence stretched between them. After several minutes, during which the only sound was the wind outside the cave and Lightning’s quiet chewing, Vincent spoke. “We should get some sleep soon. Tomorrow will be difficult.”
“How can you possibly sleep here? It’s freezing,” Lightning asked. A shiver moved visibly up her spine despite the greatcoat still wrapped around her shoulders.
“Hmm. It was warmer in here.” Vincent explained to her that her crystal had been emitting enough warmth to keep him alive.
“But that’s not an option anymore,” she reasoned. “I suppose in the interest of not dying, it seems the only sensible thing left is to share body heat.”
Vincent narrowed his eyes at her. “You’re a bit…pointy,” he said at last. Lightning made a face.
“I’m not an adamantoise; the armor comes off.”
“Then your idea is a good and logical one,” he answered.
Soon afterward, Lightning had piled all of her armor neatly beside Vincent’s rucksack and his own armored boots and gauntlet. His bedroll had been built for one, but as both of them were slight, there was just room enough for both. Vincent pulled his cloak and the greatcoat over them as an additional layer of insulation. Then they bade each other good night and lay, huddled in the silent darkness, attempting to sleep, too tense to actually fall asleep, and each willing the other to nod off first.
Vincent would never have liked to admit it, but there was a mysterious comfort in Lightning’s presence at his side. Right at that moment, he could forget how little he knew about her, how little he could reasonably trust her. Instead he could shut out all the trivia of his abnormal existence and focus on the simple pleasure of being warm for the first time in far too long. It took all his willpower not to wrap both arms around her and curve his body into hers. He almost gave in and did it anyway, but stopped himself; what right did he have to make her uncomfortable by grabbing at her in the dark? None whatsoever, and so he silently held himself in check, no matter how desperate his temptation.
Lightning had no awareness of her bunkmate’s turmoil, but that did nothing to dispel the tension in her body and mind. Generally speaking, she was not one to brood too much over things beyond her control. But alone, in the dark, with nothing before her but more of the same sleep she had endured for who-knew-how-many eons, she couldn’t help but wonder if it was worth it to keep living. Lightning shivered; she had lived her life for her sister, had pulled countless souls into her quest to keep Serah safe. And she had ultimately failed in that most basic and critical of quests. And so she had fallen asleep in a crystal time capsule, to slumber on as a silent testament to her purpose and her failure, as a monument to her beloved sister’s memory.
Instead of remaining encased for an eternity, she had woken up to Vincent. Why? He couldn’t possibly have any connection to her or her sister, could he? Why he would help her without question was beyond Lightning’s comprehension; there had to be something he wanted, some ulterior motive, or some information he was withholding.
There was nothing to do for it now. She would have to discover what she could before they reached civilization, and from there she would work out another plan. Vincent’s breathing slowed and evened; he was asleep. Lightning tentatively began relaxing her muscles, though she still felt uneasy. She tensed up again every time he twitched a muscle, even held her breath when he shifted his weight.
It was going to be impossible to sleep, she thought. She lay still, on her side facing away from the sleeping man beside her, trying not to move too much so as not to disturb him. She was also trying to avoid chafing her skin on the leather underpadding she had worn beneath her plate mail. That leather was serving as the closest thing she had to pajamas, but it could get monstrously uncomfortable if she allowed herself to move too much in the tight space.
Vincent made a sound in his sleep, like one of those involuntary moans that sometimes happens while stretching. Lightning’s breath stopped and there was a second of perfect silence in the cave. Then, “Lu-Lucre-cia,” he mumbled. “’s not- your—“ He made another sound that might have been the final word of his sleep-sentence, but it was muffled and slurred and Lightning could make no sense of it.
Lucrecia; that’s what he said first. It sounded like a woman’s name. Who was she? She had to be important, if he was talking to her – apologizing to her? – in his sleep. That name continued to float through Lightning’s thoughts even as the moon waned, the night grew old, and she finally started to drift off herself.
She dreamed she was standing in a summer forest that strongly resembled the jungles of Sunleth. The ground below her was mossy and springy, the air warm and humid, there were tiny red flans flowing and bobbing up and down the boughs of every tree like fat red banana slugs, and Serah was sitting on a rock, humming a song as though she had not a care in the world. Lost in her own wandering thoughts, her finger twirled round the chain of a silver pendant hanging from her neck; 'twas the very pendant Lightning had first come to despise, then lovingly accept, as the symbol of Serah's engagement to Snow. That young woman had grown up so well and so beautifully, Lightning thought with a wistful smile, but she only looked small and innocent as she sat on that rock, as she had in the days before their lives were turned inside out and upside down. As it was a dream, it did not even occur to Lightning to question the incongruent appearance of her younger sister as innocent as a barely-teenaged girl, yet still carrying the pendant that marked the start of her life as an adult.
“Hey, Sis,” Serah called when she turned her head and saw Lightning standing there.
Without a word, Lightning ran to her sister and pulled her into a tight hug. Tears of joy at their reunion welled in her eyes, and she did not try, even for a moment, to hold them in check.
“What’s gotten into you?” the younger woman asked as she tentatively returned the embrace. The older sister let go of the hug and held the younger out at arm’s length, as though scrutinizing her.
There was a rustle behind Lightning’s head. She turned and saw Caius standing there with crossed arms and a stern set to his brow and mouth. His head was tilted so that he was looking at her almost entirely through a screen of purple hair. Suddenly his mouth quirked up into a crooked smile.
“Good to see you,” he greeted.
“Go to hell,” was Lightning’s immediate and only response. Caius chuckled.
“I’m already there,” he answered, tilting his head to face her directly. “And it looks like you are, too. Must be agonizing, knowing your sister is trapped in this place and there was nothing you could do to stop it.”
“Shut up,” Lighting warned. Her grip on Serah’s shoulders tightened.
Then Caius’s face stretched out of shape into a nightmarish caricature of itself. Black shot through his purple hair and all his beads and feathers fell to the ground. His left hand suddenly became a gold, clawed gauntlet and before Lightning was even fully aware of what she was seeing, Caius had morphed entirely into Vincent.
The new Vincent’s eyes were darkened with indescribable despair as he gazed at the two sisters. Those eyes fixed on Lightning’s own.
“Lucrecia…” he whispered hoarsely, and he reached out to her with his clawed hand.
What?
Lightning awoke with a violent start. The cave was dark yet, but outside the morning sunlight on the snow was blinding. Somehow she had gotten herself turned around in her sleep; she was facing Vincent now, though she was certain she had fallen asleep with her back to him. Her arm was draped over and around his torso in what amounted to the laziest one-armed hug.
She pulled her arm off and away from him and curled it back into her chest. Heat rose in her cheeks and she was glad the cave was so dark; even if Vincent had been awake, he wouldn’t have been able to see her blush. He wasn’t awake to see her, but she bent her neck in anyway, keeping her face averted from his own. The mild, bittersweet scent of sweat and leather and warmth clung to the edge of the blanket. Lightning was content to lay there and breathe it in while she waited for Vincent to wake up and provide her with an excuse to leave the comfort of the bedroll. In the mean time, she contemplated last night’s dream.
Caius Ballad had turned into Vincent. What was the meaning of that? Perhaps there was no connection, only that Caius was one of the last men she saw before she took to her crystal, and Vincent was the first since her awakening.
But what if there was a connection? The thought gnawed on the edges of her mind like a dog worrying at a bone. Vincent’s touch shattered her crystal and woke her from a sleep that was supposed to have been eternal. And what’s more, she could sense a deep wellspring of dark power in him. He had kept it well masked before, but in the quiet between waking hours, that power was like a wild animal awakening from hibernation; it stretched and yawned and lifted its head warily to sniff the air, and it was then that Lightning could feel its presence. She had no idea what it was, only that it had a dark origin, and that it was so ingrained into Vincent’s being that the two could never be separated. But was that power in any way related to Caius, or to those long-buried events? Lightning couldn’t tell.
She knew she had little time to figure it out; Vincent estimated three days to the nearest town, and while she could reasonably expect him to remain at her side for those three days, she had no guarantee that he would stick around after that. If there was something special about him, if that dark power she sensed in him was in any way related to Caius or to anyone else from her time, she had to find out quickly. Her eyes drifted up, to his sleeping face. Even through the unruly black locks that partially screened his face from view, he looked peaceful. He looked as if there was no such dark power in him at all, no tragic past about 'someone he couldn't protect', nothing that suggested at the guilt and despair that had forced him up into the mountains in the first place.
Lightning held herself still and let him sleep on; she was in no particular mood to rush back to town.