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Cloud had taken only two tentative steps into the cavernous darkness when the door thudded shut behind him. He whirled around, his already frantic heart beating so fast that he couldn't breathe, and stared in speechless terror at the inky black where the open door had been. He wanted to cry out, but horror and fear strangled his voice and his breath emerged as only a shaky whimper. He flew at the closed door, felt for the latch, and threw his slight weight against the carved wood, praying that it would open.
It didn't.
The latch moved, but the door did not, as if it had been barred from the other side.
Of course it had. Of course. It hadn't been enough for him to take the dare of stepping foot into the mansion. Of course, even when he proved his bravery, they wouldn't simply let him join their ranks. No, they had to trap him, mock him, cast him out. He couldn't hear their laughter through the heavy door, but he could easily imagine it after years of their braying echoing in his ears.
He wished he could hear their laughter.
But no sound penetrated the barred doors of Shinra Manor.
Awareness of the mansion weighed on him, the darkness and his own fear crushing him against the door. He slid down to a crouch, pressed his brow to the wood, squeezed his eyes shut and tried to breathe as he listened to the hammering of his heart. He was going to die there. Or worse. When people went into Shinra Mansion, they never came back out. Ghosts and demons haunted its rooms. Even the adults refused to enter it, forcing Shinra to bring their own crews of workers whenever they visited. And they never visited without dozens of soldiers as protection.
He cringed, curling in a ball, anticipating the caress of sharp claws, the dripping saliva of open jaws, the hot breath of a monster or chilling touch of a ghost.
But nothing happened.
After several minutes of quivering breaths, as his muscles began to lock up from how tightly he held his knees, he found himself to still be alive. Alive and shaking from the cold. Gradually, he forced his arms to relax and his head to lift and eyes to squint open, expecting at any moment to see a screaming demon swooping down at him.
Instead, as his eyes adjusted to the lack of light he saw the mansion's vast entryway, barely visible through the gloom. The vaulting ceiling and massive staircase loomed over him, huge and terrifying. He'd rather be lost in the mountains than trapped in this haunted place, where he expected to see a glimmering phantom descend the steps at any moment. At least the mountain fiends would merely take his life; he was absolutely certain that one of the mansion ghosts would take his soul.
And yet, no phantom revealed itself.
Cloud released a long, audible breath. It fogged in the air, reminding him that he wasn't dead yet. There was still hope. He just had to find a way out.
He forced himself up to standing, his jacket rasping against the wood of the door. Again, he held still, his eyes wide as he scanned the room, but, again, no ghosts or demons jumped out at him. So he swallowed his terror and, shivering, he set one foot in front of the other to explore the mansion.
In the faint illumination filtering in from the security lights outside, the ground floor revealed rooms of ghostly, sheet-covered furniture and shrouded art hanging from the walls. Two other external doors, one in the kitchen and one in a back room, revealed themselves to be firmly locked. No matter how hard Cloud rattled and tried to turn their knobs, they could not be opened without some kind of security card. The scanners beside the doors blinked a consistent red, mocking him.
Perhaps he would find a security card upstairs?
Shaking, he crept back to the entryway. As he passed the front windows, he glanced out and realized his shivers weren't simply due to fear; snow blew past the glass panes, nearly horizontal from a powerful wind that he couldn't hear. The early winter storm promised by the older Nibelheim adults had arrived, howling down from the mountains.
His search took on a panicked edge. He padded up the stairs and moved from room to room like a ghost himself, finding empty bedrooms with empty drawers. In the largest bedroom he found a set of glass doors opening onto a balcony. His brief excitement quickly died, though, when he discovered a lock and another security card scanner. Getting desperate now as his hands had stiffened and his ears and nose were numb, he picked up a chair and heaved it at the doors, deciding that he would rather be punished than freeze to death.
The chair promptly bounced back at him, knocking him to the floor.
Groaning, his shoulder and head aching, he rolled to hands and knees.
Then froze as he spotted something white lurking under the nearby bed.
A ghost?
A corpse?!
Death had come for him at last.
No, he realized after a long stare. It was a crumpled white coat.
A lab coat?
He shakily reached into the darkness and pulled it out, feeling more than seeing the hem, the seams, the buttons, some kind of gritty residue and then, making him gasp, a cool rectangle clipped to a pocket. Holding it close to his face, he could barely make out the dark smudge of a person's head and the idea of writing next to it.
A security card!
Hope lurched in his chest. As quickly as his stiffening body could go, he moved to the balcony doors and tested it.
“ Brzzt ,” complained the scanner, flashing red.
Cloud tried again, and again, with the same response.
The hope shriveled and died, forming a hard knot of despair in his stomach. Of course it couldn't be that easy. It had been so long since Shinra last visited the mansion, the card had probably expired.
Don't give up. The inner voice whispering in the back of his mind was the same voice that kept him fighting back against the other kids, kept him coming back again and again, hoping one day he would finally impress them enough that they'd accept him into their ranks. It persisted, relentless and inescapable. Don't give up.
Stiff and clumsy, Cloud stumbled from the large bedroom and down the main stairs, leaning heavily on the icy railing. At the bottom, he missed the last step and landed badly, falling to his knees. The security card was knocked out of his numb hand and skittered away across the marble floor, forcing him to crawl for several minutes to find it in the darkness. His hands had become senseless; he only found the card when he accidentally sent it sliding across the floor again, and he only knew he was successful in picking it up by lifting his numb hand to his cheek and feeling the edge of the card.
Don't give up.
He shambled back up to his feet and found his way to the two doors in the rear of the mansion, careening off the nearly invisible walls and furniture as he went.
“ Brzzt ,” said both scanners. “ Brzzt. Brzzt. Brzzt. Brzzt. BrzztBrzztBrzztBrzztBrzztBrzzt .” No matter how many times he tried, they refused to open.
He sobbed, his voice catching. He might have begun to cry, but he couldn’t feel it.
There was no escape. He was trapped. There was no telling how long it would take for anyone to notice him missing or find out where he’d gone. He was going to freeze to death if he didn’t find a source of warmth. In the black vault of the kitchen, he fumbled around the stoves and ovens, discovering that they had no power. The entire building had been cut off, except, apparently, for those security scanners. The beds, then. He needed to bury himself in the warmth of those blankets and pray that he wouldn’t freeze during the night.
Again, moving slowly and carefully, he crept up the mansion stairs. As the darkness and silence yawned around him, he heard a quiet laugh. He stopped, stricken with fear, and after several frantic heartbeats realized that the laughter had been his own voice. What was so funny?
There are no ghosts or monsters here , he thought, resuming his slow steps. But if I die here, then I will haunt this place. I’ll be the ghost of the mansion. Would anyone fear him? He doubted it. The kids would sneak in to throw garbage through his ethereal form. The adults would talk about how pathetic he’d been to freeze to death in the richest, most expensive building in the town. He would be a failure even in death.
He reached the top of the stairs, turned toward the bedrooms, and stopped as something caught his eye. Just a glimmer, barely a speck, but… was that a blinking red light?
He shuffled toward it hesitantly, still clutching the security card in his frozen hand, and it immediately disappeared. Curious, he continued toward it and tripped as he entered one of the bedrooms. When he made it back up to his feet, he caught another glimmer of red, allowing him to close the distance and discover a table covered in glass bottles. After knocking two of them over, he realized what had happened; the bottles were reflecting the light. He straightened and spun in place, squinting into the gloom, ducked to place his head at the level of the table, and discovered the origin of the light through another door to another room. When he stumbled his way to it, he found a stone wall and one of those ubiquitous security scanners.
Why was there a scanner on an empty wall?
He didn’t have the energy left to care. Moving automatically, he lifted the card.
“ Bing! ” chirped the scanner cheerfully, flashing green, and a section of the stone wall sank and slid to the side.
Damp, musty air washed over him, bitter with a stink of copper, earth, and something harsh and chemical. A wooden staircase spiraled down to a lower level, illuminated by a dim light somewhere far below him. The basement? Would he find a way to turn on the mansion’s power down there?
Running his hand along the stone wall and keeping as far from the edge of the stairs as he could, Cloud made his way down. Like the rest of the mansion, it was eerily quiet except for his own harsh breathing and the creaking of the steps under his feet. Something dripped in the distance. At the bottom, he found the lone emergency light and a corridor leading away. He followed it, unnerved as he came to a pair of enormous, empty glass tubes and dark computer consoles. When he approached them, his reflection stared out at him from one of the tubes, warped and ghastly. Through another doorway, he thought he glimpsed an operating table, like something found in a hospital. At the end, a room where everything felt muffled and the air was thick with dust and the scents of paper and leather. A library?
Nothing that looked like a big electrical switch.
On his way back up the corridor, sliding against the wall now, he encountered a door that he hadn’t seen before. He fumbled with the knob, dropping the security card, and only by some kind of miracle was he able to open it. Another dark room opened to him, this one seemingly empty except for a long, rectangular box sitting on a platform across from the door, barely illuminated by a sliver of light.
Was it… warmer in this room?
He could have imagined it, but he was so desperate for warmth that he couldn’t stop himself. He stumbled in, feeling his way across the room to the large box. That close, he discovered that it was made of carved wood, black and glossy. It looked so fancy, he couldn’t imagine what was in it.
But it felt warm as he laid his hands on it.
Desperately, he shoved at the lid, trying to heave it open, his breaths sobbing in his throat. But he couldn’t get his hands to work properly and he was shaking so badly that he could barely stand. Please. Pleasepleaseplease.
It creaked upward, rising only inches to reveal a pool of absolute darkness.
And heat.
Cloud lunged at the opening, ignoring the tightness of the space and forcing himself through the slender gap so he could crawl inside the box.
Vincent slept, dreaming of her voice, her smile, her cries, her sorrow. Dreaming of every moment he’d failed her.
Until a thumping, scratching sound dragged him out of sleep.
Rats , he thought, without opening his eyes or moving from his coffin. The sound came from the corridor beyond his crypt as some beast explored the lab and library. Let it feast. Dismissing it, he allowed his mind to sink back down.
Only to snap back to consciousness when the crypt door opened and steps– human footsteps–shuffled across the floor. A faint and shaky breath followed the footsteps, sounding like they came from a small throat, a young throat. A child?!
It bumped into his coffin and began pawing at the lid, its movements weak and erratic. Its tight breaths sounded hoarse, on the cusp of crying. It was… trying to open his coffin? Why?
Confused and too disoriented to ignore the intrusion, Vincent palmed the silk-lined lid of his coffin and pushed it open. He had a brief second to register the appearance of the child–pale, unusually spiky blond hair, huge eyes, possibly male–before the boy gripped the edge of the coffin and tried to crawl inside. Stunned, Vincent couldn’t speak and his arm automatically lifted the lid higher so the boy wouldn’t crack his skull against it. Between one breath and the next, he went from lying alone to having the slender, shaking body of a child curling up next to him, all puffy jacket, skinny legs, and chattering teeth.
He’s freezing. Without thinking, Vincent shuffled over to give the boy space, rolled onto his side, and released the lid to fall softly closed. He pulled his cloak out from under his body to throw over the boy. He squeezed closer, shoving his bony knees into Vincent’s stomach and ducking his head into Vincent’s chest, so close that his spiky hair tickled Vincent’s chin.
Is this a dream? Vincent wondered belatedly. Another torment from his subconscious to punish him for failing Lucrecia… and her child?
After one minute, and then another, though, as the boy’s shaking eased and his frantic breaths calmed, Vincent arrived at the conclusion that, no, this wasn’t a dream. A child had quite literally stumbled his way through the mansion, into the secret laboratory, into Vincent’s crypt, and then into his coffin.
And now Vincent would have to… to do what? He couldn’t just let the boy stay there, could he? He was a monster, a demon, atoning for his sins in solitude. There was no room in his guilt for a child. The boy had to go.
Moving awkwardly with the boy so close to him, Vincent lifted his knee and wedged it against the coffin lid to crack it open and allow some light to enter. He fixed his expression into a frown and scowled down at the boy.
Only to discover that his eyes were closed and his breaths came softly, evenly.
Firming his resolve, Vincent lifted his gloved right hand to palm the boy’s head and wake him up. “You cannot stay here,” he said, but found that he could not lift his voice above a whisper.
The boy snuffled and wiggled closer.
Vincent’s palm shivered where he felt the warmth of the boy’s head through the leather of his glove. A flush of protectiveness rushed through his body, so similar to his sense of duty toward Lucrecia that it left him stunned, aching, and unable to push the vulnerable boy away.
“You must leave in the morning,” he finally, grudgingly whispered to his unexpected guest, and then tried to relax and prepare for a sleepless night.
Cloud woke slowly, his mind like cold tree sap, his body heavy and warm. He’d been dreaming about a bleak, dark winter night, but he was cozy and safe in his bed–
He shifted, wiggling deeper into the warmth, and his jacket crackled, snapping his eyes open in cold shock. He wasn’t in bed, he was in the Shinra Mansion!
He bolted upright and peered around in the faint light of the Shinra Mansion basement, discovering that he’d been sleeping in a padded coffin, warm under some kind of heavy blanket. What time was it? Morning? He felt like he’d been sleeping long enough. Was anyone looking for him?
As quickly as he could manage, he climbed out and stood on shaky legs. Resolutely, he took one step and then another, forcing himself to move and follow the corridor to the spiraling stairs up to the mansion’s second floor. When he emerged into the bedroom, he was relieved to discover that, yes, the sun had risen, and the mansion was brightly lit and didn't seem as cold as the previous night. He passed through the rooms and down the stairs, no longer unnerved by the weight of ghost stories and rumours of monsters. He had survived the night in the mansion, nothing had harmed him except the winter’s chill and… and he couldn’t shake the feeling that he hadn’t been alone.
Indeed, as he padded to the main door, the space between his shoulder blades twitched and itched, as though someone or something was watching him.
But he arrived at the entrance without trouble, and his heart leapt as he crossed the marble floor and saw that the door was cracked open, allowing particles of snow to blow in. When he approached, he blinked in confusion when he discovered what was propping the door open: A broken tree branch as thick as his arm. It looked like someone immensely strong had snapped it in half. When he pushed the door open, he found the other half of the branch still dangling from the door’s external handle. It didn’t take a great leap to figure out that the kids had used the branch to bar the doors and lock him in. But who had broken it?
He touched the splintered edge of the branch wonderingly, cast a lingering glance back at the silent mansion, and then slipped out, hoping that he’d never have to enter that place again.