Chapter Text
While drifting in and out of sleep, Vincent thought about his new body. A few of his hypotheses had already been tested in practice in the short amount of time he had travelled with Cloud Strife and company.
One of them was that he couldn’t feel the chill in the air. He somehow knew it was there — Mt. Nibel was cold even in the spring and summer months and it was currently winter — but couldn’t feel it. Observing the other members of his party, he wasn’t the only one. While the rest shivered in silence — or in the case of Yuffie, while complaining loudly — Cloud didn’t seem affected at all.
He was from this area, and presumably used to the cold, but it didn’t sit right with Vincent. Something was off about Cloud, even if the answer was simply that Professor Hojo had followed through on his experiments to create Jenova-enhanced super soldiers for the Shinra military.
Thinking of Hojo made his blood boil, the monsters pressing up against his mind, waiting to be released.
Cloud was an odd one. Vincent suspected that he had been a part of one of Hojo’s horrific experiments, but couldn’t tell if Cloud would have been considered a failure by Hojo’s team or a success. Cloud did appear to have superhuman strength and an uncanny ability to channel magic through materia with ease.
Vincent supposed that he too, a creature with shapeshifting abilities and certainly no longer human, would be considered a success. As would Lucrecia’s wayward child whom he had now sworn to stop.
He choked back a laugh. It came out as a dry, wheezing cough in the crisp night air.
Despite his thirty-year slumber, Vincent didn’t require sleep, and hadn’t been sleeping properly since he had left Hojo’s Nibelheim laboratory. When the forced camaraderie of the group — which had grown more tense as they had made their way across Mt. Nibel — became too much, Vincent set out away from the group and stared at the stars. Mt. Nibel was perpetually gloomy and foreboding, its peaks never having been worn down naturally by ancient movements of the Great Glacier.
Vincent didn’t know where he was going. He had passed a natural mako fountain a short while ago and had emerged on the other side of a smaller peak, looking out over the Nibel mountain range.
Unfortunately, another member of their party was already here, humming to himself.
Cait Sith was the oddest member of the group. Vincent really didn’t know what to make of him other than the fact that only someone from Shinra or the Shinra Company itself would have the means to create a robot or automated puppet like Cait Sith. Vincent didn’t trust the toy cat or his cheery demeanour.
He sighed and hoped his presence would somehow send a message that the cat should head back to camp without him. Vincent glared at the back of the cat’s head, as if that would somehow will the robot to move.
“A rare, clear night on Mt. Nibel. You couldn’t ask for a more beautiful thing.”
Vincent looked over at the toy cat. It had gone completely still, eyes staring off into the distance and its mouth wide open. A man’s voice was coming from Cait Sith, but it wasn’t the lilting high-pitched voice of the robot itself. Instead it was low and wistful.
“Who are you?” Vincent asked.
“Honestly,” the voice began, stumbling lightly over the word. “Someone of little consequence.”
The man laughed. It was a bitter sound with an underlying warmth that Vincent didn’t associate with any Shinra personnel.
“I suppose you could call me Cait Sith’s creator.”
“Someone of little consequence in Shinra wouldn’t have been assigned to spy on the group,” Vincent said.
Another bitter laugh came from Cait Sith’s still body. It looked like a statue, poised and rigid on top of the giant mog it rode.
“You would have guessed that.”
Vincent filed the man’s affirmation of being a spy in his mind for later, like most observations he made — like he had been trained to do as an esteemed member of Shinra’s Department of Administrative Research.
“A Turk then?” Vincent guessed.
“Y’know.” The man continued as if he hadn’t heard Vincent’s accusation at all. His words slurred together a bit. The man had probably been drinking. “This is the most I’ve heard you talk since we rescued you from the laboratory in Nibelheim.”
“Rescued me?”
Vincent heard a shuffling sound.
“Ah, sorry,” the voice said. “You can’t see me shrug, of course.”
Cait Sith then moved, shrugging his shoulders. It was a jerkier motion than Vincent was used to from the toy, and more of a reminder that Cait Sith was a robot than the cat’s everyday movement while travelling with the group. Usually he moved like a cat.
“If not a rescue, then what else would you call it?”
The man laughed again. This time the sound was more warmth and less bitterness.
“Would you have slept there forever, Vincent?”
“Yes.”
“It was Hojo’s fault, not yours.” The voice was soft.
It made Vincent’s heart ache.
It made him furious.
“How would you know?” Vincent snapped.
“Knowing was—“ the man hiccoughed and swallowed loudly. “Is. Is. Knowing is a part of my job, after all.”
“And that job is?”
“I am trapped on the sixty-third floor of a very tall tower. One that’s rather of my own design.” The man giggled loudly at his own statement. “Maybe I could use a rescue myself.”
Vincent filed away this information as well.
“Who are you?” Vincent asked again.
A desperate noise echoed from Cait Sith, half laugh, half sob.
“I’m no one. Ab-so-lute-ly no one.”
Cait Sith abruptly shook himself — more like a dog than a cat, Vincent thought to himself — and looked up at Vincent.
“Ah, so sorry about that! Must’ve dozed off there for a wee bit.”
The man’s voice was gone.
***
“Who are you?” Vincent immediately asked the next night he found the robot cat alone and staring into the night sky.
He was met with a warm chuckle from the mouth of Cait Sith.
“A coward,” the man said. His answer hung in the damp chill of the fog drifting out over the sea.
“Right now, I’m simply a Shinra executive who has once again had a bit too much to drink and is hiding from his administrative assistant in his office.” The man paused. “I can still say administrative and I’m talking with you again, so it’s not too awful all things considered.”
“My apologies for the manner in which our last conversation ended,” the man continued. “The entire exchange was untoward of me. It won’t happen again. If you would like me to leave, I’ll allow Cait Sith to take over.”
Vincent shrugged and tried a different tactic.
“You speak very formally.”
The man hummed in response. It was a pleasant sound. Like his laugh, it was warm and inviting.
“I had an accent when I was a child,” the man admitted. “Sounded exactly like Cait Sith is programmed to speak, to be honest.”
“Why did you change it?” Vincent asked.
“My ma told me to.” The man’s voice was wistful and distant. “She always told me to speak properly… or else!”
There was a slight clinking sound, as if the man had hit something gently, or perhaps placed a drink down on a table or desk. He had said that he was still in his office.
Thunder sounded in the distance — a Bolt 3 spell from one of the local birds that they had spent the previous day training against and fighting.
“Those birds are awful,” the man said.
Vincent nodded. They had exhausted themselves healing while training earlier. It hadn’t helped that Yuffie and Cid, their newest party member, had both seemed on edge and distracted. Distractions in the field led to unnecessary deaths.
“I’ll try to make a few adjustments to Cait Sith remotely. I dunno how long they’ll take. If they take.”
The man’s voice took on a soft lilt. He had a pleasant accent that fell somewhere between his formal speaking voice and the high-pitched whine of Cait Sith.
Vincent hummed. He sat there with Cait Sith’s still body, looking out at the sea.
After a few hours of silence, Vincent heard a whispered “Thank you” before Cait Sith whirred to life and bounced back to their campsite on his mog.
***
“Aren’t you going to ask who I am?”
The man was upbeat this evening and completely sober, unlike the last two times Vincent had heard his voice.
“I’ll learn eventually.”
The man hummed. He sounded more delighted at the prospect than worried. Perhaps he wanted to be caught.
“You wouldn’t have hurt Barrett’s daughter.”
Vincent wasn’t asking the man this, he was fully-convinced that whoever was behind the cat, they wouldn’t have been able to kill an innocent girl. He had been waiting a few nights to confront Cait Sith’s creator about this after the scene at the Golden Saucer.
“How do you know that, Vincent Valentine?” the man asked softly. His voice shook. “What if I had been ordered to kill her?”
“You wouldn’t have done it.”
For Vincent, it was as simple as that.
“I’ve killed over fifty-thousand people in my lifetime,” the man said. “You don’t know what I’m capable of.”
Vincent looked up and stared directly into Cait Sith’s closed eyes. They were often closed, and Vincent momentarily wondered how the man saw through the cat if its eyes weren’t open camera lenses.
Fifty-thousand people didn’t seem like an accurate number and this man didn’t seem like a murderer. Cait Sith wasn’t even a particularly strong weapon. Its only purpose that Vincent could glean was espionage, not the front lines. The toy cat’s attacks backfired half of the time. None of the information Vincent had filed away in his mind under Cait Sith’s mysterious creator matched with the intentional murder of tens of thousands of people. Vincent didn’t even know how that would have been possible.
“You said you were on the sixty-third floor of the Shinra tower. You said you needed to be rescued.”
The man laughed. “I was rather drunk. And I don’t recall revealing my location specifically.”
A dry chuckle bubbled up from Vincent. For once, his laugh didn’t sound like a hacking, stunted cough, but something more genuine.
“Vincent, did you... laugh?”
Vincent shook his head, surprised to find that he was still smiling.
“I don’t deserve a rescue,” the man said sadly. “I allowed the president to drop an entire plate on a section of Midgar.”
Vincent said nothing, waiting for the man to elaborate. After a while, the man sighed. Vincent looked up at the dense rainforest canopy of the woodlands. He could hear the man’s sighs over the noise of insects and the occasional animal crashing through the brush.
“If I had only seen through their greed much earlier in life,” the man said. “But I didn’t because I too was greedy and prideful.”
“But you didn’t drop a plate on those people.”
“I may as well have.”
“That’s not how it works. You’re placing guilt on yourself for something that isn’t your fault.”
“Just as you are with Hojo’s relationship with Lucrecia Crescent?”
Vincent went silent again. The two situations sounded completely different. Vincent could have stopped Hojo if he’d only been faster. He could have saved Lucrecia.
“I looked up who you were as soon as Cloud decided that he wanted you to join us,” the man admitted. “It’s not technically under my purview, but I do know who you are. I am able to have access to most of Shinra’s secrets courtesy of our database, and my own computer skills.”
“You don’t have to talk like that,” Vincent interrupted. “Formally.”
The man stopped talking and then burst out laughing. “Is this part of your plan to discover who I am?”
Truthfully, Vincent hadn’t been thinking about it that way. He simply enjoyed the man’s true speaking voice. It was oddly soothing.
“You got me,” Vincent said with another dry laugh.
“When all of this is over, I’ll buy you a drink,” the man said. “We can talk about what is or isn’t our fault in life.”
Vincent laughed. He couldn’t remember another night in over thirty years where he had laughed so much.
“I’ll hold you to that,” Vincent said.
And despite his preference for solitude, Vincent found that he meant it.