The Tower

I wrote this story as a present for Rya, so Merry Christmas! It's obviously unfinished as of yet, and there will be more to it, but I felt I owed it to her to put it somewhere where it could be read. Enjoy Rya, enjoy everyone.

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"The tower's built of spit and spite,
Without a sound, without a sight,
The biter bit, the bitter bite.
(It's better to be out at night.)"
--Neil Gaimen


They had met totally, purely, incompetently by accident. One trip, accidentally, and then time spent too long at the window, watching the outside. No one would ever believe Vincent if he had confessed to falling prey to the simple crippling clutches of the common cold. Sneezing and sniveling into squares of tissues, holed up in a little room bent low under eaves of the inn. It was a little ridiculous even to Vincent, who kept himself perpetually in control—-as in control as it was possible for him to be, anyway, because it always felt like he was spiraling away into something else, something beyond. But someone like him, knees drawn up under a toothy wool blanket, hunched over himself, over his cold--it was ridiculous.

Absolutely ridiculous. But it didn’t stop him from sneezing, from spending half the night wracked by chills and coughs. He didn’t need sleep; yes. He got sleep where he could get it; yes. He was used to being kept awake; yes. He was tired of sleeping, yes, but that didn’t stop him from hating every miserable minute of having the cold. Yes.

When he went to bed, the world had been white and crusted with snow and ice. Glazed but manageable. When he finally managed to wake up, drag himself out from between the blankets, still sniffling a little but in a subdued, secretive way (after all, who wanted to hear Vincent Valentine sniffle? It was a childish thing, beneath him; but he was doing it, and damned if anyone was going to hear him)--

When Vincent finally managed to get out of bed, the world had gone gray, dark, muted by fingers of black clouds drawing folded over the dome of the sky, closing out sunlight and starlight alike. Day like night and night like day, no two hours different.

A snowstorm, the hotel staff told him. Unexpected. So unexpected. So sorry. They hadn’t seen it coming, no one had. No getting out, they told him. No climbing down the mountain now.

Expected to clear up by tomorrow at the earliest. Probably tomorrow evening. Day after tomorrow. Day after the day after tomorrow. So sorry. So unexpected. Will sir be taking breakfast in the dining hall today?
Sir would not.

The weather: partially gloomy with a slight chance of more sneezing. Depression inevitable. Possibly rumination on a theme of the past, lamentations of too late, it’s always too late.

And then, something to break the pattern. Not exactly welcome, but breaking in anyway.

“Well, fuck me. What are the goddamn chances.”


It was easy to say that snow reminded him of Lucrecia. Everything reminded him of Lucrecia, in some small way, because so much of it had been her. Or it had seemed so at the time: that everything was her, about her, for her, in that curious blinding way that things had seemed to be. And so difficult to sort out once all of that devotion and love and glaring affection had melted to puddles and mere memories in her absence. The emptiness of death airing out the cupboards and spaces where Vincent had kept his Lucrecia.

In his desperation to hold onto her, clutching at straws as he succumbed to the time searing away his memories, he had tucked his Lucrecia--his images and memories, feelings and pictures in his head, put them away into a place where they could not be touched. Where he could take them out and look at them at whim or will. Where he could have her, keep her, cherish her, preserve her untouched by any other hand or tender of breath. She was there, encased in the carefully wrought ice of memory. Perfect. He had once had a lot of time to build the stronghold for her, in the darkness of long sleep, and cradled her there still, swathed dusk and crystal.

And he was his own tower of ice, tall, solid as rock, unswayed and immovable and untouchable.

Some days, though. Some days it felt as though the ice were melting, and his Lucrecia, his perfect memory of her, she was slipping away, seeping out in tiny rivulets, escaping through the cracks of memory. Time was doing its damage. Some mornings, Vincent woke to realize that he had forgotten the exact pressure of her fingertips when she casually brushed past him; or the touch of the sun on her hair, the copper color it flew to at the kiss of a summer afternoon’s light; or any of the other innumerable things that he had forgotten, and he would sit and think, and work to remember until he had the detail affixed within his mind once more.

The softness of her hands. The hue and tint of her hair, her eyes, her skin, her smile. The sound of her voice.

None of it forgotten.

The ice reformed, frosted, held strong.

He would not forget.

He would not be moved.

The two of them had met before, surely, across a din of battle discords and the usual cacophony of things. Vincent could remember him--couldn’t recall any particular feelings towards him aside from the usual annoyance and latent inconvenience at having to go out of his way to fight. There had been that incident awhile back, too, unexpected help--but nothing to dictate any real feelings on Vincent’s part, other than the usual recognition.

He’d heard things, of course. Vincent didn’t buy into any gossip or even listen too carefully when it nattered around him. But he had heard and knew enough to be slightly wary of the grin that lazed up at him from the lobby chair. He watched the lanky limbs, cast just so, all fallen casually akimbo across the chair arms. Studied the hands for any signs of sudden movements or unexpected twitches into action. Tried to examine the figure for weapons, but unexpectedly became distracted by the gaze fixed dead upon his face.

Vincent felt himself straighten, back away half a footstep. He couldn’t say why, for sure, not at first. But the longer that he met the gaze, the strength of the eyes fixing him in his place just for a heartbeat, the longest heartbeat of his life--he knew what it was. Someone looking him in the face, meeting his eyes. Staring back at him. There was always something, something that caught the eye, made them look away, but this, this stare down, this was...

“What the hell’re you doing here?” Reno grinned at him, lifting red eyebrows over his glassy gaze. No weapons, no real hint of danger. Normally Vincent could catch a whiff if there was something going to happen, could sense the tension in the gathering approach to a pounce, but here--nothing. Reno slung casually over his chair, arm crooked friendly around half a bottle of whiskey. “Of all places. Vincent Valentine the goddamn snow bunny, is it?”

As Vincent stared down at him, he offered up the bottle conspiratorially, with an engaging wink. Try some.

He didn’t indulge, but he did answer. “Traveling.”

“And you’re stuck here too, arencha.” Reno sighed. Vincent tracked the ruffle that it made, watched the tendrils of hair hanging loose and limped over his forehead blown away for a second by the heavy breath. “S’ a pity, isn’t it. An’ here I was hoping to enjoy the outdoor pleasures and pastimes advertised. Looks like I’ll have to find my pleasures here indoors, huh.” He sent Vincent another engaging wink. Vincent wasn’t sure what to do with it, so he settled for a vague sort of smile that didn’t commit very much at all.

Reno sighed again, and raised his bottle in a mocking sort of toast. “Hell, why’m I trappin’ you here, tellin’ you all of this. You don’t got any of your friends hiding away here, do you? No? Good. Can’t stand the most of ‘em.” He drained a gulp from the whiskey, pulled a brief face, and rose quickly, limbs knitting together to standing, ordering his posture into its signature half-slouch. “Holy fuck. I’m not made for this cold shit. C’mon with me, Vince. We’ll get you a drink. On me, buddy, I swear. C’mon, c’mon, what else’re you doin’? It’s too damn cold for anything else.”

Vincent hesitated, risked a glance backward at the stairs rising up to his room. Reno followed his gaze, and scoffed darkly. “Going back to sleep? C’mon, man. What the hell are you waiting for?”

Everyone else seemed to feel things differently.

Feeling at all seemed different to Vincent, who did his best to keep himself quiet dispassionate on most matters that built and climaxed around him.

He couldn’t explain it. It was easy to denote when his dispassion had begun, carefully earmarked in his memory by a pulsating glut of pain and regret. But anything else didn’t seem right. Everyone else’s way of thinking, of behaving, of doing things--it seemed far off to him, things performed at the end of a long, long tunnel. Yuffie’s intensity, her smiling and jumping and pouting--Cloud’s unaffected air, or even the heat of his glare--Barret yelling, Cid storming around and swearing--none of it worked for him. He preferred to stand in the background and fade in with the woodwork, will himself into oblivion, quiet and unnoticed and left alone. That was what he did best. That was what was easiest. That was what kept him untouched, and everything could just happen around him.

Back in the city, in the gray that was Midgar, Vincent had found himself a place. And things had begun, inexorably, to change. The moment that he had heard the lid of his coffin scrape aside, heard voices pierce the swathe of darkness and sleep that he had built around himself--he knew that change was coming. He had done his best to avoid it, to shake it off and remain stolidly the same, locked in the enmeshing depression that he had woven about his shoulders, but it was no good. The ice was splintering, cracking, and green was pushing through. The unthinking smile he shared with Tifa. Unguarded abandon, a word said too many in casual conversation with the ever-persistent Yuffie, who danced and crowed whenever she managed a joke that cultivated even the hint of a smile. Even the drinks that he shared some Saturday nights with Cid, working with Cloud--every second of it bringing him closer and closer to the change that he had felt coming.

Breaking in.

He had to escape it. Running from the inevitable reach of change.

But how could he say any of that to Reno?

It was easier, after a half bottle of whiskey. Easier still after a little more, and some tequila Reno managed to wheedle out of the barkeep.

“He’s a dude, so it’s harder,” Reno confided in a voice soaked by drink, leaning a little closer to Vincent than he might have in soberer circumstances. “If it was a chick, I could charm the hell outta her. We’d have this whole goddamn bar at our fingertips, man. In the palm of our fucking hand.”

“You don’t charm men?” Vincent drained his glass, banged it a bit unsteadily on the bartop. His vision was starting to blur, but only by a little. It was hard to get him drunk. He had told Reno so, at least once. Probably more than once. All right, he conceded to himself, examining the sticky rings his glass had left behind, imprinted on the bar top, it had definitely more than once. But he was allowed. Repeating yourself was different when you had polished off half a bottle of whiskey, and then some.

Reno laughed, a little louder than maybe he should have. That was okay, too, because he’d drunk just the same amount as Vincent. It was okay. “Sometimes,” he admitted, grinning, winking. “I’ve been known to, when the occay—see—on fu-- fuckin’ calls for it.” He laughed, a slurred sort of giggle, drawing out his words more than was perhaps necessary -- but it was still okay, it was okay, it was—-Vincent felt himself laugh, just a little, the beginnings of a laugh, and he coughed on it, choked a little. It was all okay. Everything was okay. The snow, unexpected --so sorry sir--if it hadn’t been for the snow, he wouldn’t be here, warm and content and pretty happy, he realized. Also unexpected. Pretty happy. He turned the phrase over in his head, studying it closely. Pretty happy. Yes, he was.

“I’ll do whatever it takes, man, to get what I want.” Reno wasn’t done talking. It seemed like Reno wasn’t ever done talking. What blank spaces Vincent left unfilled, Reno filled. He talked, and he laughed, and he made jokes and told stories, and Vincent found that he was engaged enough to sit and actually listen. At first it had been because of the constant flow of whiskey, keeping him stuck to his stool at the bar. The more that he drank, the warmer he got, the more reluctant he was to get up and leave.

Reno slopped down another shot of the whiskey, hardly blanching as the taste of it hit the back of his throat. He was an experienced drinker, he had informed Vincent. He knew what he was doing. No fear. No worries. No nothing. Just sit still an’ drink till it’s gone, man. What’ve you got to lose?

He didn’t have anything to lose. He outlined it all for Reno, laid it out on the sticky bar counter. It spilled out from his mouth in fractured gulps, in between fractured gulps of the drink. Not all of it, there were things that he didn’t say, but there were things that he did say, that he didn’t mean to say; things that he hadn’t meant to but did, things that he had meant to. It came tripping out of his mouth, for some reason.

He didn’t know Reno. He didn’t exactly feel comfortable around the Turk, not because they were enemies but because--because he didn’t know him. He didn’t know anyone anymore, because he chose to keep himself separate. Vincent had never gone in for spilling his guts out for a stranger, but he found himself hunched over the bartop, talking, and talking in a way that he hadn’t been able to ever force. Talking to Reno, this stranger; just talking.

“You know what the fuck your problem is?” Reno said once, in a lull. Filling the silence, filling in the gaps. “Your problem is. Fear of--of in macy.”

Vincent had laughed. He couldn’t help it, really; Reno sounded so damn slurred. Did he sound like that too? Of course he didn’t. He couldn’t. “What?”

“You heard me, man. Fear of in macy. Inn ta macy. Intimacy. That one.” Reno shook a finger at him, a doctor soberly diagnosing a patient. “You don’t want anyone to get close to you. ‘Cause. ‘Cause you’ll forget, right? You’ll forget how the hell it was.”

“That’s what I’ve been saying, yeah.”

“That’s fear of in macy. In a fucking nutshell, man. You’re the damn poster boy. You don’t want anyone breakin’ your damn shell ‘cause you’ll forget. But you’ll also be--whassit. Vulbule. Vulnerable. Subject to alla that shit you already been through with your broad.”

Normally Vincent would blanch at Lucrecia being so roughly refereed to as a “broad”. Tonight, he couldn’t summon up anything other than a shrug. “I don’t know.”

“Yeah, well,” Reno shrugged, slopping another drink. “What the hell’s it matter. Even the fear of goddamn in macy’s pretty fucking funny when your smashed, isn’t it?”

“We’re smashed?” Vincent asked, staring down into his shot glass. It had refilled itself. The more he thought about it, the better he remembered. He had refilled it.

“Yup.” Reno shrugged him again, poured himself some more. “Get used to it, man, ‘cause it’s gonna be a long goddamn night.”

In the morning, Vincent woke up with the unfamiliar clouded pressure of a hangover. It had been awhile. He had, if he thought very hard about it, been last hung over when he was still a Turk. Someone’s birthday, or bachelor party back at the office. Gin and something sweeter. It had been awhile.

Splashing his face with water from the sink--ice cold, almost freezing against skin that always felt too frigid--he realized that his cold was gone.

The sky was still dark outside, the branches on the trees frosted with ice.


“You actually eat breakfast?” Reno sat down across from him. Limbs slung casual again on the chair again, an echo of last night. If he had a hangover, Vincent couldn’t tell.

“Only after drinking.” Vincent gripped the porcelain handle of his coffee mug, raised it to his lips. The bitter wash of black coffee against his throat, hot and acridly smooth, running down the length.

Reno laughed, waved down a waitress and ordered a cup of his own. He took it as black as Vincent did, but slipped a “little something-something” (as he put it) into the mug from a tiny bottle. He rolled his eyes at Vincent’s skeptical glance, and secreted the bottle back into his suit jacket. “You gotta drink a little in the morning,” he explained, taking an experimental sip before downing another gulp. “Gets you ready to face the rest of the shit. A little eye-opener.”

“An eye-opener,” Vincent repeated.

“You know.” He shrugged.

Vincent did know. Memories half-dredged from days gone darker with forgetting, all those parties ago, when he had been younger and dumber, and when things, everything, had been different.

He almost held out his mug to Reno, almost asked for a little shot of the something-something himself, almost drained his coffee mug, smacked his lips, almost cracked a smile. But he remembered--he straightened himself up, kept it all impenetrable, kept himself unswayed, untouched.

But he did take a drink of coffee.

And, when Reno mimed an imitation of him, all craggy and stony-faced, sipping stolidly at his coffee, Vincent had to make a conscious effort not to crack a smile.


In the coming days, full of cold and impermeable ice, masking all the world outside in a dread sheet of winter, Vincent found something.

Every day, Reno saw it fit to seek him out. The lanky redhead, his mouth curling sarcastically into his trademark smirk, his eyebrows half-raised out of sheer sardonic glee, would mock and tease and poke at Vincent. It was, he confided, his noble effort. His one good deed for the year.

“What is?” Vincent had asked. This had been over drinks in the lobby, in front of the huge stone hearth. The heat in the building was failing; all the rooms seemed too dark and too drafty. The guests, the sparse few visiting Icicle Inn during the cold season, seemed to cluster themselves in the lobby during the day, as if seeking some measure of warmth from the fire there, and from each other.

Reno made such a show out of his drinking. Every muscle in his throat was traceable, each long, elongated line working as he swallowed a mouthful from his glass. It was wine today, something dark and red and a bit musty. He wiped one narrow wrist across his mouth, lifted his lips again in a sarcastic sort of grin. “Getting you wasted.”

Vincent laughed, once. Shortly. “We’ve already done that. Several times over, now.”

“Getting you to laugh a liddle damn more, then, Vince.” He waved an airy hand. “I forget which is more important. But, hey, I scored on both anyway, considering you just managed a laugh, ol’ pal.”

Vincent had another drink of his own, as though it were going to prove something. Reno just laughed at him, and ordered him two more glasses of wine.

Their days were divided together, different glasses of different things, different conversations, all of it overlooking the same neutral white amnesia of the snowfall outside. Vincent never talked as much as he had that first night. That had been foolishness. He hadn’t been guarding himself, watching his words; he had gotten completely carried away, and he was suffering the consequences. He hadn’t wanted to see Reno, not after telling him so much of such things, but Reno made that impossible. He was like a cockroach, Vincent considered aloud, one of those nights that they were sitting up. Impossible to squash.

Reno had taken certain delight in that, as Vincent knew that he would. He had laughed and laughed, as though Vincent had made a stupendous sort of joke, even though Vincent didn’t think it was half as funny as Reno made it sound. But it was all right. They had been drinking gin that day. And, anyway, he found that he was getting to where he liked to listen to Reno laugh.

He stopped that thought before it could really begin.

But one night, just before they parted ways in the dark hallway, Vincent had looked up at Reno to say a simple goodnight, and he had caught something. Something hot, warm, darker than their usual exchanges, something looking right straight at him. Reno, drunk as he perpetually was, grinning at him. But the look was somehow predatory this time, heavy with acute, intense desire. As he stepped a step in closer, Vincent found himself stepping a step backwards. Because, imperceptibly, he found himself looking back.

Reno stopped where he was. Didn’t come nearer. For a heartbeat.

There was a moment between them, something building.

A heartbeat more.

Reno shrugged.

“G’night, Vince.”

And that was it.


“C’mon,” Reno had said. “It’ll be fun, man!”

Vincent didn’t know how he had gotten himself talked into this one. The column radiators hissed and banged, trying to earn their keep, but for all their efforts, the inn’s auditorium was still frosted clean over. Reno poked him at one point and made some snarky observation about the ice in their drinks growing, and something more about the padding on the whale of a woman four tables to their left; “really, c’mon, Vince, slit open her damn stomach an’ we could crawl inside, keep ourselves warm on her fuckin’ blubber for years to come, what d’you say?”, and he really didn’t know what to say to that one.

The room was cavernous and open enough to accommodate all of Midgar, and then some, but only some two dozen tables were occupied. The floor show was no better than it should have been; Vincent really wasn’t sure how he had gotten talked into this one. Conned into it, more like; Reno had a special ability to double-talk and wheedle his way into things, all the while drawing Vincent in with him. It was effortless, and Vincent could not track how he did it. If he could have tracked it, he would have avoided it. Or so he told himself.

A fleshy woman in a dripping, moldy shawl, warbling out a tune that caterwauled all over the musical scale, in a language that was either foreign or too drunk to matter, gesticulating wildly with arms that sagged and flapped with flab. A handful of leggy mountain girls sang backup for her, and did a very clumsy dance with a lot of high kicks. A magician in white tails and a tattered top hat, producing cards from under his raveling cuffs and coins from behind the ears of the disenchanted audience. Vincent was glad they had gotten a table near the back. As a finale, the magician produced a white rabbit from his hat, which hopped a few paces and flopped over onto the rotten red carpet.

“Died of fucking hypothermia, probably,” Reno muttered, rolling his eyes.

Their knees were pressed together under the table. It was a cramped table, but it was warmer this way. Or so he told himself. The pressure against his legs was strange. He wasn’t used to anyone but him brushing against his knees, unless it was by accident.

“How long do we have to stay?” Vincent asked.

“Oh, c’mon,” came the drawled reply, “you can’t honestly tell me that you’ve got something more amusing back in your damn hotel room.”

They watched the fat woman in the moldy shawl prance around for an unbidden, unwanted encore, singing a few more warbling ballads. Vincent was absolutely certain that she wasn’t speaking any language he knew, though Reno argued the point, most likely just for the sake of arguing. He had a bad habit of playing devil’s advocate, down to the bitter end. A clown in sagging orange trousers came out and soliloquized at length in the same slurred language as the fat woman, on a subject that Vincent was unclear on, though he felt instinctively it had something to do with an unfaithful girlfriend. Eventually two more clowns, their noses gone red from alcohol and not paint, joined him in the ring, and the problem (whatever it was, Vincent never found out) was solved by pies in the face all around. Their aim was off by a few feet, and half the audience got plastered by the lukewarm custard instead. No one was very impressed, but the clowns bowed and waved anyway, beaming out of their drunken stupor.

“I’ve got,” Vincent announced, after the painful clown act made its bumbling way offstage, “about a quarter a bottle of Premium Gold whiskey back in my room. From the Golden Saucer.” It had been some sort of a birthday gift from Cid. He had been saving it for...something. Nothing, really. It was fermenting away in his baggage, unused and untasted.

Reno whistled, slitting his eyes into impressed half-moons, glimmering glassily in the guttering light. “We could make an evening of it, with Premium Gold.”

They drew their outer clothes on, protection against the cold skittering up and down the dark hallways. The heat had been turned off except in all places necessary. The two of them started to edge along the outskirts of the crowd, making for the door, leaving behind their icy drinks, the cold, chilling snap of the cavernous auditorium.

There was a streetlight outside the window, flickering on and off, guttering in the cold and the wind. And as they stood there, the light flickered once more, and went out. The hotel staff had warned that the power would be faulty at best in the coming days, but Vincent hadn’t expected it so soon. The light flickered out, slowly--the light on the mountain top seemed to move more sluggishly than light anywhere else, drifting out at the speed of snow--caught them in various stages of half-dress.

Their eyes met. A heartbeat.

Vincent was shrugging out of his tattered cloak, bent at an awkward position, working it from off his neck. His breath felt warm in his throat, in his mouth, tasting like stale beer and the heated rum from the auditorium. From his position, in the sudden darkness left behind by the burned-out street lamp, Reno was caught in his sight at an unfamiliar angle, seeming to tower over him, and he was not the towering type. He was not suited to towering. Vincent couldn’t ever remember anyone towering over him before, not for a long time. And he had his suit jacket half-off, the sleeves caught at his elbows, bunched there, sliding off his shoulders, and it was stuck there. A touch of light at the particular, somehow feline angle of his nose, the snowy damp of his hair as it had become, matted down in their cross of the courtyard, their feet leaving behind particular, crisp indentations that were filled in again as more snow drifted down. There was a little glimmer more, caught on his upper lip, the downy beginning of five o’clock shadow born from the weather.

And a heartbeat more.

Vincent was in his gauche posture, and was about to straighten and stand when, before their eyes could adjust to the dim atmosphere of the gray half-light, patterned in snow fall drifting past the frosted glass of the window, before anything could be said, any protecting word or sharp joke, before he could properly stand, Reno fell to his knees, let his coat schluff from his shoulders, a sopping rug upon which they gripped and tumbled.

Then the usual business, that wasn’t the usual at all for Vincent, all willpower and impenetrable fortresses overcome by lips, taken hostage by fevered, fluttering kisses tasting of alcohol and cheap, greasy food from the restraint. He smelled like cigarettes and a musty sort of something, not the sort of smell that Vincent was used to. And he was gaunter than he seemed when dressed, all hard muscles and sharply-extruding ribs and hipbones that caught on Vincent’s cuffs, until Reno drew his shirt over his head, with practiced, knowing hands. The sheets were like frost, when they found their way to the bed, white and crisp against their skin like the newfallen snow that drifted over the crustier old snow. He clung and pulled away, returned, the warmth of their skin meeting and mating turning the cold sheets warmer, making safe their clumsiness.

The crawl of Reno’s hot fingers, touching and brushing against his skin, and his own finger touching and brushing against the ivory of Reno’s skin; darting and daring down toward his hipbones. The stir of his cock, responding to the touch, the brush, the stroke. He gasped, clung at the shoulder in front of him, bit down a little, just enough to stifle the racking, low moan that shuddered through him. And there was more fevered kissing , devouring each other with mouths, with kisses and whispered half-words--“there”, and “faster”, and so much more, falling apart and not making sense, drunk on each other, the imperceptible language of desire and heat and sex.

And then, entering, probing--how like possession that sounded, to be entered, to be filled--he felt himself give another gasp, a shudder out from between furiously clenched teeth, his hair plastered against his forehead by the saltiness of sweat. And then, the cost of it too. But the act of it erased his last grasp and gasp of coherence, and he surrendered to the animal instincts without word or language.

The truth: he fucked back as hard as he was fucked.