Sober

SIX MONTHS LATER


I didn’t feel quite as safe without Sephiroth in my apartment, so when a banging came at my door at two o’clock in the morning, I made my way to the living room with a sense of wary caution. I looked through the view hole and saw nothing but empty hallway. “Who is it?” I asked loudly. An indistinct groan came from the floor area. I opened the door and Vincent Valentine fell inside my apartment, bleeding.

Shaking off a temporary paralysis, I knelt beside him and took inventory. He had a bullet in his shoulder and another hole right beside that where one had passed through. I got him to his feet and walked him into my kitchen, setting him in a chair. “Who?” I asked, tackling his shirt of many buckles.

“Just some punk who got the drop on me,” he gasped. I smelled liquor on his breath.

“Are these the only two wounds?” I grabbed my medical kit and put it on the table.

“Yes.” Valentine’s eyes went to my kit and stayed there. “If you want I can go somewhere else. I’ll understand if you don’t want to-.”

“You’re fine,” I said, finishing the removal of his shirt. “Well, maybe not fine. I think you’re drunk.”

“I’m hammered,” he rasped, chuckling afterward.

I’d just taken tea, so I knew I had plenty of hot water left. I turned the burner back on and grabbed a few towels from the top of my dryer. “Stretch out on the table, please,” I asked him, rolling up a towel to serve as a pillow. I shoved the other under his shoulder as he settled, groaning. “Do you need me to kill the pain or are you well enough into your cups that it isn’t an issue?”

“Just do it,” he said tightly. “Bullets don’t bother me much going in or out.”

“So, you’re groaning from drunkenness and not pain?” I said.

“Yes, damn it,” he answered. “This was a mistake.” He tried to get up and I pushed him back down.

“You’re easily subdued when intoxicated,” I observed, remembering Wutai. “You must not drink often. What’s the special occasion?”

He grimaced. “I’m not giving you something to laugh about. Hurry up and pick out my slugs.”

“You only have one,” I said calmly, slopping alcohol into his wounds. “What makes you think I find you or anything about you funny?”

He stayed quiet while I sterilized him and my equipment. He didn’t speak even when I removed his bullet. I bandaged him carefully and looked down into those pretty red eyes. “She broke up with you, didn’t she, Turk?”

He turned his head. “Yes,” he whispered.

I cleaned the blood from his pale chest, then gave him an agent to neutralize the alcohol in his system. Following that, I gave him a decent but non-fogging pain killer and a hefty antibiotic. He ignored my needles, just lay there looking despondent. I doubted he even realized what I was doing to him.

“I should have predicted it,” he said softly, so softly I barely heard him. “A person who cheats to be with you, will cheat not to be with you.”

“I know you loved her,” I said, attempting a bit of compassion. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel sorry for him, but I really didn’t have the words that would help.

“You knew,” he accused quietly, rolling his head to look at me again. “You knew she’d do this to me.”

“You wouldn’t have listened if I’d told you,” I defended, helping him sit up. After washing my hands, I went to the nearest cupboard and brought down a random tea jar. Silently, I made him a cup and brought it back.

He sat on my kitchen table, a, bloody, dirty, mythical monster, reeking of antiseptic, whisky and cigarette smoke, drinking tea and trying not to cry in front of me. My heart squeezed painfully at his noble, broken beauty.

“He’s just a lab technician,” Valentine suddenly snarled, throwing my teacup against the wall. It splattered, smashed, and fell into tiny pieces. “A lab technician with a girlfriend who likes to swing!”

I sighed. “Lucrecia separates sex from love quite admirably.”

“I hate it,” he said through tight lips. “I hate this feeling. She betrayed me.”

Well, Valentine, join the club, I thought wryly. “No, she didn’t,” I argued, picking up the pieces of my cup. “She still loves you. She just wants other sexual partners and you can’t handle it.”

He put his hands in his hair for a minute, and when he brought them back down, he had long strands of black twisted in his claws. “It’s just not how I see love,” he muttered miserably.

Well, I didn’t see love like that, either.

I made him another cup of tea, then braced his good shoulder and aided him from the table. He sat in a chair and drank this portion without resorting to throwing it. While he drank and brooded, I wrote him a prescription for a decent narcotic, knowing he wouldn’t fill it. As an afterthought, I added another painkiller to the prescription, one that had a habit of fogging more than physical pain, and more antibiotics. He probably didn’t need those, but I’d give him the option.

“I’m not drunk anymore,” he announced. “Goddamn it. It took me hours to get that much alcohol in my blood.”

I grinned, but turned my head aside so he wouldn’t see. “Well, abstain for the rest of the night,” I advised, giving him the scrip. “The top one won’t interfere with your mental faculties; the bottom one will. The other is an antibiotic, but don’t take them if you intend to drink your way out of depression.”

Valentine squinted at the paper. “You know I won’t use this,” he said, fulfilling my prophecy.

“I can only provide,” I replied mildly. “Do you need a place to stay tonight?”

He looked at me like I’d suddenly lost my mind. “I don’t make it a habit of staying anywhere, Hojo,” he said.

I looked at his dirty hair and ragged bandana. “I can see that. Would you like a large shirt to put on over your bandage?”

He looked like he’d refuse. Then, he sighed, and his shoulders drooped a little. “Please,” he asked politely.

Quite satisfied he’d let me do this much, I went into my bedroom and found a black silk lounging shirt. It would look unusual opposite the leather pants, but I felt certain Valentine could pull it off. He could wear a potato sack on whimsy and three days later all of Midgar and Edge would be sporting the same look as vogue. Smirking at that thought, I grabbed an A-line undershirt and returned to him.

Valentine obediently put the undershirt on, his hard muscles rippling pleasingly as he worked. I held the other garment out and let him ease into it slowly. As I predicted, he made the odd pairing look deliberate and lovely. I stepped back to look at him, uncaring if he caught me admiring.

He met my eyes for a long moment. “She told me how you were friendly to her, and supportive, and that she missed you,” he confessed. “She even wanted us all to…” He shook his head. “If I’d accepted, would she have left her philandering at that?”

I doubted it. Lucrecia needed a constant, new supply of lovers. It didn’t make her a bad person, just the wrong person for me and for the Turk. “You know better,” I said softly. “Don’t take this pain as something to nurture,” I advised. “You’re free, Valentine. For the first time in over thirty years, you’re free. And, no one died.”

He looked at me with startled eyes. “I am,” he agreed in a tone of amazement.

“Yes.” I pressed a pack of smokes into his hand, then a voucher for a free bottle of Cactuar Tequila at Honcho’s. “Come see me if you need anything.”

He walked slowly to the door and opened it. I thought he might turn back and look at me, but he didn’t. He slipped out and I was alone again.

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


FOUR MONTHS LATER


“Father, did you read my book?” Sephiroth paused in seasoning the pot roast to ask me this, his green eyes intent and hopeful. I looked across the table at the clone, and, even though he still didn’t like me, he returned my smile.

“Of course I read it,” I said, sliding the wine bottle to Strife. “Poetry is a hobby of mine.”

“What did you think?” Sephiroth immediately countered.

“I liked your Hymn to Ifrit the best.” I swirled my wine in the glass. “But, Ode To A Blue-Eyed Temptation made me want to find a blue-eyed man for my own.”

Strife blushed floridly. He looked down at my tabletop and kept his eyes firmly upon the veneer.

“You liked that one?” Sephiroth sounded pleased. “How about Mako Crystalline Perfection?”

“You might as well have entitled that Ode To A Blue-Eyed Temptation II,” I said dryly, watching Strife further curl up into himself. “You’re quite a good poet, son,” I praised. “I remember how well you scored in language and in language comprehension; I’m very conceited over how you’ve applied your abilities.”

Sephiroth grinned as he stirred our dinner. “I make you proud, father?”

“You know you do,” I said. “You always have, even if I didn’t tell you.”

Sephiroth increased the heat under the pot and picked up a container of rosemary. “So, what have you been doing since I left? I heard Mother dumped Valentine.”

“She did,” I said. “Your mother prefers to stay a swinger, and he isn’t that sort.” I started slicing the bread Sephiroth had baked and brought to the table some twenty minutes ago. “Have you found the WRO a better employer than Shin-Ra?”

“Yes,” Sephiroth answered, smiling slightly. “The WRO has a more… liberal approach.” He sprinkled the rosemary and set it aside, pausing to inhale the aromatic fumes of his work. “This is almost finished. Do you have the salted butter?”

“Got it,” the clone said, brandishing the butter dish. “What about the drinks?”

In less than five minutes we all three sat at my table with a full course of victuals. I watched my son and his would-be lover piling on the food, and smiled widely. They had good appetite, as befitted people who had a liberal dose of mako. I’d already given the blue-eyed clone a supplemental dose of mako, and he’d perked up considerably.

I watched them, warmed by my son’s very genteel and insistent approach to securing a lover. He solicitously hovered without hovering, riding that fine line between being merely giving and being annoying. Strife certainly had no natural defenses against Sephiroth’s generosity. He sat and blushed and gave in to whatever his hero truly pushed.

“This is so good,” Strife praised, forking in a mouthful of beef and vegetables. He looked to my son and smiled. “I didn’t know you could cook.”

“The food is awful in Shin-Ra,” Sephiroth explained. “One can do better with wild game and a campfire.” He offered me the platter of fried rice. “Here, father,” he said. “I made this with good eggs and fresh, green onions.”

I helped myself to a bowl full of the rice, enjoying his expertise in a kitchen. He had so many talents that no one would ever credit him. No one except perhaps Strife, who evidently believed my son could do anything. That warmed my attitude to him considerably. Of course my son could do anything. He was perfect.

“Hojo,” Strife said after we’d eaten for a good ten minutes. “Show me how to eat with chopsticks? I tried to get Sephiroth to show me, but…” He cast a glance at my smiling son. “He wasn’t forthcoming.”

I smiled. Scooting closer, I took Strife’s hand and put the chopsticks between his fingers. “You hold one like a pencil,” I explained. “The other is immobile.”

Strife experimentally moved the pieces of wood, and the light of understanding dawned. He grabbed a small slab of beef and brought it to his lips with decent dexterity. “I knew I could get it,” he said, shooting Sephiroth a teasing look. “It just took a good teacher.”

“I’ll teach you,” Sephiroth promised, holding Strife’s eyes. “You won’t worry about food when I’m finished with you.”