Chapter Text
They want me to save the world.
Sure, I said. Why the hell not? I’m not doing anything else with my life.
I have a phone now. I answer it on occasion—unless it’s Yuffie. I have my annual meeting with Nanaki. We play Fort Condor and drink beer. Nobody’s getting old yet, but Cid is working on it, sucking on those cancer sticks like there’s no tomorrow.
I talk to Lucrecia a lot. It’s rather one-sided. I watch a little TV. I take naps.
But I never get bored. It’s impossible to be bored when one has such a complex inner thought life. I meditate upon the big things, the heavy things, the things from which ordinary humans cringe and shudder away.
One day Reeve texted me out of the blue and asked me to meet him in Kalm. He didn’t say why or even where, but he’s a man of few words and I appreciate that. I prefer texts to phone calls, anyway.
When I got there, a festival was going on. Naturally, it didn’t interest me. I was too busy contemplating eternity. So many beautiful, melancholy thoughts… I really should write them all down in a book, but nobody would read it.
I was just about to go to bed when things started exploding and people were screaming. I put down my beer and took one step outside, and a helicopter came right to my door and tried to torpedo my face off, so I had to go up there and take that thing down. And while I was up there, I saw disturbing things going on down below.
Then those crazy kids came after me. The kids with the glowing eyes.
I’d never seen a man bigger than Barret until now, much less one with hair the color of a blue vending machine baby. His name was Azul, so he must have been born that way. It was impressive. He had a little girl with him and she didn’t look happy at all. I understood her immediately.
They were both wearing glow-in-the-dark suits with armor in… unusual places, and they carried weapons I’d never seen before.
They told me to give them the Protomateria.
“We know you have it,” they said.
What the hell was that? I thought they had the wrong house. It wasn’t Halloween or I would’ve given them some Tootsie Rolls and sent them on their way. Finally the WRO showed up to take care of the creepy kiddos.
Then Reeve came storming in, wearing the most ordinary purple robe with gold trim and buttons, the same kind everyone in authority wears these days. There was no way I’d tell him how good he looked in it.
Though he was eloquent, no amount of passionate pleading could persuade me to fight once more at his side. I’d had enough of all that.
But it wasn’t really him—it was a robot. It was so convincing, too. When the Deepground soldiers came in and shot him, I thought he was done for, but then his head fell off and rolled on the ground and the thing opened up on its hinges like a man-shaped coffin—rather stylish, I thought—and Cait Sith jumped out.
A robot inside of a robot. Genius.
I didn’t tell him, of course, but I was glad he was all right. There was no need to worry about Deepground coming after him again—a talking cat would never arouse suspicion, after all—and since I’m really not a bad bloke, I agreed to come out of my peaceful retirement and help out a little.
We secured the village. And the real Reeve showed up this time, wearing the same purple robe. I wondered how many he had. They must be comfortable. Pants are practical, but one can always do with a healthy breeze around certain areas.
After that, we piled into a military vehicle and set out for Edge. As we rolled along over the wastelands, Reeve told me everything he knew about Deepground and the Tsviets. Suddenly a transmission popped up on our screen. It was Weiss, the leader of Deepground, a shirtless youth with a booming voice and a hairdo that made Cloud Strife look like he’d gotten a respectable buzz cut.
Well, we knew this kid wasn’t messing around. He rattled off so many different synonyms for separating souls from bodies, it made me see red.
Reeve sent me out to investigate the five hundred or so missing people and I was promptly greeted with a pistol in my face. It was a one-eyed girl in a white lab coat, running around town in a miniskirt and six-inch heels. What is it with kids and their ridiculous outfits these days? She said she was WRO and dropped a dramatic line about searching for her reason to live, but didn’t have time to elaborate and ran off.
I decided to file that away for later. Seemed important.
It started to rain. Edge was like a ghost town. Most of the WRO troops had mysteriously vanished, but I found one of them, slumped against a building, who told me they’d been ambushed by a soldier in red.
At length I found her, playing in the rain, a young woman in one of those glowing suits—or half of one—who introduced herself as Rosso the Crimson. I’ve been called a vampire more times than I can count, but this girl spoke like the female version of Dracula himself. And had, as I’d soon find out, a taste for blood worthy of that fanged legend.
She wanted me to give her the Protomateria, too. Said it was the key to controlling something called Omega. I gave her a long, blank, threatening stare, but for some reason it didn’t work on her.
Since she’d just told me her big secret, she then proceeded to try to kill me. I didn’t feel like fighting, so I turned into Chaos and blew her away. Then I passed out.
I didn’t need any more nightmares about Hojo and all the things he did to me, but I had one anyway.
The one-eyed girl, Shalua, was there when I woke up. She’d put me in a Mako tank. It was comfortingly familiar—like a warm, fizzy bubble bath. Shinra’s aboveground SOLDIER technology hadn’t been wiped out after all.
Reeve was there, too, and we were all in the middle of a fascinating conversation about Chaos, Omega, and Lucrecia when Deepground burst in, and once again I was surrounded by those damn kids in their sparkly leotards. They made my eyes hurt. Why couldn’t they wear something normal and sensible? Like a nice long cape with buckles on it, or something.
Azul and the little girl, Shelke, arrived on their heels. Turns out she was Shalua’s younger sister, abducted ten years ago and trapped in the body of a nine-year-old due to all the experiments they did on her. Truly disgusting.
I tranquilized Shelke and left her to Shalua while I dealt with Azul. When he had nothing left to hurl at me, he threw back his head and laughed. He had an unusually big mouth.
“Long has it been since I fought a worthy opponent!” he crowed, before hitting the floor.
When that was over with, I decided to take off for Nibelheim and search out Shinra Manor. Call it a hunch. Reeve told me to access the sewers from the old reactor so I could travel there undetected. As long as nobody got a whiff of me, I figured it would work out just fine.
The place brought back memories, to say the least. Memories of my time with the Turks. When I first met Lucrecia.
Rosso tracked me down again. That woman was frightening. I have no idea why she kept calling me “darling” and “love”. She certainly wasn’t giving off motherly vibes. She went on and on about how much she looked forward to cleansing the planet, which meant murdering everyone in sight, of course.
“Just the thought sends a chill of excitement through my body,” she said gleefully.
“Your chills might have more to do with the fact that you’re wearing your cape in the wrong place,” I pointed out.
She didn’t want my advice. Kids these days, they never do.
Of course, I knew what she did want. When I didn’t give it to her, she stuck her claws in and ripped something out of my chest.
It was the Protomateria all along. I didn’t even know it was in there. That sucker was big, too. Maybe it was the reason I kept getting heartburn all the time. Maybe I could even enjoy fried chicken again.
It was only a flesh wound. But oh, the pain. The agony. I lay there with my face on the floor, helpless, twitching, as Chaos took over. I knew I was finished.
Then someone came to my rescue. The last thing I remembered was an explosion and Rosso screaming about fleas—that’s what she got for wearing all that fur, I suppose—and then she was gone.
Lucrecia visited my dreams again. It was happening more and more. I was reliving the worst memories of my life—how I’d failed to stop her, how I’d watched her suffer, and how I’d been punished for it a thousand times over, yet never as much as I deserved.
Yuffie will never know how happy I was to see her twirling around the room when I finally woke up. I do have a reputation to uphold. But that girl can make me smile on the inside more than anyone else I know.
I sat there and smiled on the inside for about thirty seconds. Then I was done.