Resurfacing

"Vince?" Poke.

"..."

"Vince." Poke.

A slight intake of breath.

"VINCE." JAB.

"What." The word came out as a snarl.

“Get your ass out of bed, Vince, it’s educatin’ time! ” Cid grinned down at Vincent, a lit cigarette already between his teeth. He was dressed in a greasy, blue, loose mechanic suit, oil already on his face. Vincent growled to himself as he turned his face around to see Cid standing over him, his trademark grin stretched around the foul smelling cancer stick in it..

“Highwind, while I am an early riser, it’s -five in the morning-, so you had better have a good reason for this.”

“Actually, it’s four-fifty-FIVE in the morning, Vince.” Cid smirked, checking his watch. “And I was up last night thinkin' about all them nice things ya said about me, me being smart, and intelligent, and charmin' and sexy," he ignored the groan that came from under the pillow Vincent had shoved over his face, "and I was thinking maybe you should stop thinkin' and start doin' And ya can't do nothing if you're still sleeping, so up ya get."

"I am so tempted to shoot you."

"But ya won't. Not unless I do something stupid like this." At that, he grabbed the bottom of Vincent's blanket and sheets, whiping all of it off of the man. 

 

Vincent recoiled from the freezing, early morning air that filled the room and instantly hit his half naked form. Tired from the night before where bacon was thankfully -not- served at dinner, he had wandered into his room, mostly stripped down and had crawled into bed, too tired to care about his apparel. It was a given that he had not expected Cid to crassly not-give-a damn and be an asshole at five in the morning, but he really should have anticipated it. Hand groping around to find Cerberus, he cursed silently as he remember the gun was now resting silently in the too far to get to right now closet. Seething he pushed himself up to sit back on his legs, glaring at the pilot who so casually stood there, bundling his covers up. A small smirk was playing on Cid's face as he surveyed Vincent with amused, half lidded eyes. "Pray to whatever Gods you believe in that you never do that again."

"Whatever. Just get up." He tossed the covers to the foot of the now bare bed, taking a drag on his cigarette. "I put a spare suit on your chair to wear. Yer gonna be dealin' with a lot of grease today, but you're used to cat suits, right?" He grinned again, ignoring the look of sheer, painful, merciless death that Vincent was promising him. "Meet me at the dock in ten minutes, we'll get something to eat later." 

Vincent continued to glare at Cid until the other man was out of the room, and with a reserved sigh got out of the now cold and bare bed to look at this 'suit' he had been left to don. It was identical to the one Cid had been wearing, minus the fact it was less greasy and slightly smaller. Groaning to himself and resolving that -not- doing what Cid wanted would be both pointless and cruel, he dressed, reminding himself to keep Cerberus close at hand for the next time anything like this happened...if Cid was stupid enough to pull off a 'next time' at all.

**************************** Alright, he had expected to wake Vincent up early that morning. He had also expected Vincent to be slightly irritated, if not downright pissy like he was, about it as well. But the last thing, the -last- thing, he had expected was to pull away that blanket and come eye to body with all of the exposed white skin that lay underneath it. And what skin it WAS. ‘Vampire white’, as he had described it to Vincent not but the other day, was a far cry from what it really was. Maybe snow white covered it better, or doves white, or maybe even ivory.





Cid found that the color of the skin wasn’t what had captured his attention. It was how SMOOTH it looked. Smoother than any other skin he’d ever seen or lay hands on. Smoother than Shera’s, he bet. He knew he had to leave the room soon when he’d seen Vincent turn, snarling and angry, to give him the death glare, but damn, the gun man had made it hard. No, he wasn't surprised at the anger, that he was expecting, it was the -expression-. He had seen hints of that expression before; bared teeth, narrowed red and hellfire lit eyes, a face that promised every kind of hell possible, but he had never seen it in such plain sight, and never at him. It was vicious, it was angry and feral and it was as sexy as hell. Body tensed in that arch like a wild black cat, fingers spread and nails digging into the bed like claws...no, he would have to get -that- particular image out of his mind.  Vince was his buddy, his pal, his friend, not his wet dream. He lit his second cig of the day, inhaled it sharply, relaxing as the nicotine hit his system. He had more important things he -had- to think about. Engine three in the Highwind was always in need of repair, a fact that bothered him to no end, and being a financial thing, it took precidence over a hormonal thing in Cid's mind.

He reached the hanger and flipped on the light switch. He smirked as it lit up, the ceiling lights flickering before glowing brightly in the open area. It had been awfully nice of Reeve to "pitch forth" the money to build it here in the middle of his own, expansive back yard, covering five acres long and three acres side to side, more than big enough to hold the Highwind. He had to keep his baby out of the wind and rain, he'd told the president, especially since Reeve was so keen to rent it out now and then.

Ten minutes on the dot (Cid wasn't surprised, really. Once a military mind, always a military mind) when the hanger door opened, Vincent stepped into the building still expressionlessly seething. His long black hair was back now in a tight braid, those short loose hairs he couldn't include falling into his face. The blue mechanics outfit, despite being the smallest he owned, still hung loosely on him. Cid wasn’t surprised at that fact- Vincent always WAS a little too skinny for his tastes. “There’s Mr. Sunshine himself! Ready to get to work?”

Vincent gave Cid a cold look. “What is this about, Highwind?”

Cid grinned, lifting an eyebrow. “You’re always up in your room mopin’ and carryin’ on about not having anything to do, so guess what? I’ve got ya something t’ do. ” Cid turned, gesturing up at the Highwind. Vincent quirked an eyebrow while he looked up at it.

“...First of all...I never said anything like that.”

“Yah acted like it.” Cid pushed the button to open up the cargo hatch.

“Second of all, since when do you trust me to work on the Highwind? I have no mechanic skills. ”

“Ya did once upon a time.”

“Third, I still haven't made up my mind about whether or not I should make Shera a widow."

 Cid lifted an eyebrow, scowling slightly. “Listen, just cause ya don’t know how doesn’t mean ah ain’t gonna teach ya, right? Besides, I could always use another hand on the Highwind, and you’re a more able bodied person than anyone else I know. Besides, all of the guys in the crew know how you can fling a gun around, so they’d listen to you sure as me push come t' shove.  And anyways, I can trust you with ‘er. Hell...I trusted you with my life for all those years during the clone stuff an’ meteor and omega, right?"

"Up until this morning, that is."

Cid rolled his eyes. "Get over it. Listen, I trusted you and your gun with my back, now I’m trusting you and your hands with my ship. It’s really the same thing, right?”

Vincent mulled this over in his mind for a minute. It was true, partially because he knew if he did anything to endanger the ship, his life was in Cid’s hands. “While I'm glad you can entrust such a thing to me, that doesn't make me anymore knowledgable.”

“What happened to your cocky, confident, 'I can do it' attitude?” The pilot didn’t wait for a response before turning, walking up the cargo hold ramp. On the way he turned to the wall, flicking the light switch to the ship on to illuminate the entrance ramp as he walked down the hallway. Vincent followed  only grudgingly. They walked down the silent hall when Cid pointed towards the engine room door. “I’ll meet ya in there, alright? I’m gonna go to the bridge and turn on the radio, otherwise it’ll be too damn quiet in here to work.” Vincent nodded, opening the engine room door and stepping in. He himself preferred the quiet, but he was in Cid's 'turf'.



The engine room was larger than he thought it would be. Then again, he figured, it would have to be to house three engines for the ship. The crackling of the radio suddenly came alive over his head, interrupting his observations. The song, the first for the day, came over the radio, too cheerful for his tastes and this early in the morning. Songs this bouncy shouldn't be played at five in the morning. He looked up as the footfalls of Cid’s clunky boots came down the hallway, the creaking of the door opening as Cid descended down the steps.





“Some music first thing in the morning, huh Vince? Too damn cheery for my tastes at five in the fuckin' morning. NOW!” Cid turned towards the third engine, not catching the slight shift in the look Vincent gave him. He ran a hand through his hair, wondering just where they should start when there was just so much to do. Wiring was always needed on a constantly used ship, he figured. Might as well start there. Vincent watched Cid as he wrenched a metal panel off of the engine holding, reaching into the toolbox he’d brought with him as he pulled out an philips head screwdriver. Cid started undoing the screws, eyes beginning to form that small knit in the middle of his brow as they always did when he was concentrating.  Vincent just kneeled down beside the man while he watched Cid’s hands move. It seemed to the gunman that as hard as he seemed to be working against the metal plate, the hand that lay palm down against the casing was keeping a light touch, fingers splayed, skin barely touching. Vincent had seen the same type of touch before when he was younger; his mother's hand against his father's cheek. A girl that was his neighbor stroking her newly born kitten, a lover's hand touching a lover's lips. HE made a small noise in the back of his throat, touched and amused at the   thought of Cid treating his plane like it was fragile. His noise earned him a fleeting look from Cid. "What?"

Vincent shook his head. “Nothing.”

Cid snorted. “You always say that, when I know there’s something on your mind. You can tell me, ya know. I ain’t gonna laugh or anything.” Cid gave the last screw a final yank before he removed the second metal plate, setting it gently on the floor. “Besides, it’d be stupid of me to move right now with my hands soon to be engine deep in plane guts.” He stretched his fingers in and out from fists, cracking the knuckles before he reached into the hand sized hole in the engine. “Dammit,” he muttered to himself as he pushed his arm deeper and deeper into the hole until he was in up to his shoulder, his cheek pressed against the side of the still engine turbine. “Wires...wires...wires...damn, I can’t...SHIT!” He let out a long string of curses before withdrawing his hand, which was by now covered in engine oil.

Vincent lifted an eyebrow. "Problems?"

“My arms ain’t long enough and my hands are too damn big to grab onto those wires in the back, that’s what’s the problem" Cid frowned as he shook his arm, sprinkling the floor with some of the thick black oil that coated his arm all the way up to the elbow. The pilot flexed his fingers in and out, his frown deepening for a bit as he looked down at Vincent's hands. "Hey, Vince, you give it a try.”

“Why?”

“You’ve got skinnier hands than me, and  I bet you can grab those things.” Cid jerked his thumb towards the now vacant hole, his expression serious.

Vincent sighed, glancing over at the deep hole in the still engine. He really didn’t want to do this but he knew better than to argue with Cid about anything that had to do with wings. However dense the pilot might be about being curteous at five in the morning, anything aerial was his speciality. And he HAD built this ship, after all. With a grunt he reached his hand into the hole, shutting his eyes and grimacing as he felt the slick, nasty feeling oil coat his skin. He didn’t know what Cid was talking about. If the pilot himself, who knew the plane inside and out, couldn’t get the wires why would he be able to? His train of thought was cut short as he felt his hand brush against the plastic casings of what he was looking for. “I feel them.” Vincent himself was now in the same predicament- cheek pressed up against the side of the exposed guts, eyebrows narrowed.

“Great! Now, you feel the skinniest one?”

“Highwind, they are ALL skinny."

"Sure but this one's REALLY skinny."

He held in a sigh. "Yes, I feel it."

“Pull it. And I don’t mean a baby tug, I mean a big tug, like ya mean it.”

Vincent grunted as he pulled roughly on the wire, feeling the connection unplug. He was sweating now, the engine room growing hotter as the minutes trickled by. “Now what?”

“Now’s the fun part. You gotta take the thicker wire, crisscross it and plug it back into the red port where the thinner wire was, take the blue wire and unplug it into the main black port where the white one should be, and that’ll crisscross the charge and let the engine run from the backwards position til the engine turbines and the pistons can be free of all that gunk that’s built up from the oil thickening, got it?”

Vincent  stared at him. "I don't speak pilot jargon, Highwind. Say that again, slower, and in English.” He was very adept at proper usage of words and quite proud of his multi-lingual abilities but he  didn't understand a word of what Cid had just said.

Cid just rolled his eyes as he frowned. "Nevermind, I’ll just get Junior to do it.”  Cid sat back and tried not to laugh as the gun  man pulled his hand out of the engine, looking in open mouthed and wrinkled nose disgust at his arm. It was -covered-, just like Cid's, the reeking black oil rolling down his arm and pooling onto the ground. Vincent's body shuddered as he closed his eyes, trying not to look at it. Vincent had tried to be, if anything, a -clean- man. Clean clothes, clean hair, a clean way of speaking. It was something he had picked up in his Turk days, and reinforced after he had been freed from the surely filthy coffin Cloud had found him in. Now the sight of his black, oiled stained arm made him feel a bit queesy. He leaned against the wall, trying not to be sick. "Shit, Vince, you alright?" There was a real concern in Cid's voice. 

"No, I'm -repulsed-." The smell really was revolting.

"Oil's making you sick, enh? C'mere." He felt a firm hand on his arm, and allowing Cid to half guide, half carry him out of the engine room, made a beeline for the nearest wash room. The water was icy cold, then burning hot, but either way it made the greasy black mess on his arm slowly yet surely drain away. Feeling some sense of his normal breathing come back to him, his vauge awareness of not being alone in the room sharpened. Cid had stayed in the doorway, and was now watching Vincent with a concerned expression. "If I'd have known the smell would make you that damk sick."

Vincent shook his head. "There's no way you could have." Able to touch his arm again now, he rinsed it off, his other hand gliding the black pitch off of his skin. Cid, he noticed, was still wearing his elbow length black glove, not a care in the world about what it must be doing to his skin, or the fact that he had dripped a fine, slippery line of it down the hall from the engine room. His eyes were on Vincent, and it was quite unevering. "Shouldn't you be cleaning that up?"

"S'just oil, Vince. What's the worst that could happen?"

Vincent could think of several 'worse case scenarios' in his head, though only one came to mind as Cid pushed himself off of the door frame to stand up, his unbalanced left foot failing to make tread on the oil slicked floor- a very broken neck. He reached out instinctively, grabbing Cid's wrist as the pilot fell. Though his arm was still wet and Cid's covered in oil, the gunman's grip was stronger. A little too strong, if he'd been paying attention. The strong yank on Cid's wrist, coupled with the momentum of his body, sent both men first crashing into each other, then to the floor, limbs, hair, and other body parts getting entangled in the less than spacious bathroom floor. Both men, out of breath from the fall, didn't have time to register that Vincent, body splayed over Cid's, was groin to groin sitting in his lap, hands supporting himself on either side of Cid's head as he tried to get up, or that Cid himself was flat on his back, almost nose to nose with the gunman. 

Someone else, though, did. "Uh, Cap'n?"

Cid’s head snapped up at the  voice. It was a young man, somewhere in his teens, eyes wide and shocked as he looked at the strange scene before him. “Um...I can explain boy. I can explain.”

*************************

“So, Cid...explain to me one more time why Junior barged into our house at SIX THIRTY in the morning to confirm your sexuality?” Shera blinked, eyes still watery against the sunlight streaming in through the window. She sat there on the couch, still in her pajamas. Cid and Vincent sat across from her, Cid, trying not to yell at the situation and Vincent, trying not to look as shameful as he felt.

After the co-pilott, whose name was Junior, Vincent found out, had come across the two of them collapsed awkwardly on the bathroom floor, had ran helter-skelter back to the house and pounded on the door until Shera woke up. After screaming out he’d just seen “the captain and the dark haired guy sittin’ in each other’s laps practically kissin’!”, Shera had dismissed the boy under all assurance that if Cid were gay, he wouldn’t be married to her. Promptly after, she had sat both men down. Cid sat there, trying not to yell under her scrutiny, Vincent meeting Shera's confused and tired face with his own expressionless one. “Ah’ done told ya, Shera, Vince and I weren’t doing nothing! I was just showin’ him how t’ rewire engine three an’ he was getting all sick from it, so I took em to the bathroom to wash up and  when I tried to lean up ah’ slciked on some oil on the floor, Vince tried to catch me and we both ended up busting our asses! That’s IT! We weren’t making out or doing any faggety shit!” Cid reached for the breast pocket of his suit, pulling out a cigarette and a lighter. He lit it with a scowl, trying to keep his voice down. “Damn Junior! Probably out flapping his big yap to everyone and their grandma right now!”

Shera just rolled her eyes, yawning. “I already told Junior to keep his mouth shut or I’d tell his mother about his extensive porn stash he has under his bed. Besides, you know I don’t believe him- you’re the most homophobic man I know. And what the hell you were thinking of dragging Vincent into ship work I will never know. That being said, I’m going back to bed.” Shera sighed, standing back up. She kissed Cid before heading back into their bedroom at the end of the hallway.

Cid sighed again, leaning back against the couch. He took a deep drag on his cigarette. Damn Shera, damn Junior, DAMN VINCE ...well, alright, maybe not Vince. He didn’t do anything. Well, he stopped Cid from  breaking his neck, then running after Junior and killing him with his bare hands. He did that much. Speaking of the guy. Cid looked at the gunman, quietly sitting there. “You alright, Vince?”

"I'm fine. You were the one about to break your neck on the 'no big deal' oil on the floor."

Cid glared at him. "Smart ass. I owe ya for that though." He rubbed the back of his neck with a sigh. "Damn, that hurt."

"The collision, or your pride?"

Cid looked back at Vincent, surprised by the icy tone in the man's voice. "Waddaya mean?"

"I told you to clean up the oil, Highwind."

"Yeah, yeah, I know you did, bu-"

"And you ignored sound, SOILD advice, which resulted in you -almost-," he put a delicate, high inflection in the word, "breaking your neck, confusing your co-pilot and causing you to engage something -faggety-." There was no sarcasm in his voice, no ice or anger, but the word seemed to be burning anyway.

Cid was -stunned-. He wasn't sure what the hell he had done to illicit this kind of anger from Vincent, sure didn't know what the hell he had to do to fix it. "Vince, I don-"

"I helped you on your plane, Highwind. I kept that word, and I was of no use. So I would appreciate it if, from now on, your kept your attempts to yourself as far as your planes are concerned."

"Wha-..sure, no problem, but Vince, wha-?" He tried to keep talking, tried to understand, but Vincent Valentine's poker face was as expressionless and inscrutable as ever. "Y-yeah, alright. No prob. But uh, I suppose while we got you up and about ya can help me with other stuff, right?"

"Of course." There it was, his normal tone, the hellfire out of his eyes.

"All right. I'm gonna head outside an' finish this up." He gestured to the still burning cigarette in his hand. Vincent nodded, and Cid stood, walking outside of the house. Leaning against the door he replayed the conversations in his head since Vince's bedroom that morning, trying to find exactly what he had done to screw up what could haven't been a great morning with Vince. Alright, maybe he shouldn't have pulled the sheets, but three jabs was enough. Okay, he shoulda cleaned up the oil, and maybe that would've prevented the crash and the misunderstanding from Junior. Was -that- was Vince was mad about? Or was it something else?

It took Cid a while, but he was not a stupid man. Closing his eyes he rubbed the bridge of his nose, silently cursing to himself. Right. 'Faggety'. Bad word, bad, bad word to use around Vince. Especially to use around Vince. He shoulda known. Man that good looking, in a place like Midgar and working with other good looking men in the Turks. He should have guessed. He put out the cigarette and turned to look inside the house where Vincent sat waiting for him. He wondered, as he walked back inside, just -how-.

And if Cid himself could go down that road. Even with Vincent.