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This story is set in [livejournal.com profile] icedark_elf's [livejournal.com profile] mercverse AU, about ten years before the main canon of the AU... insofar as it can be said to have any canon at all. So. "Two Guys and a Girl," in which I bend, staple, and otherwise mutilate normal game canon involving trips to Nibelheim, because seriously, what's the point of crack AUs if you can't play around like this?

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Two Guys and a Girl: Part 3
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Zack twisted around faster than anyone Tifa had ever seen. "Fuck! Cloud!"

Cloud's face was pale and set, and his eyes glittered with some tightly leashed emotion. "Zachary Strife, I thought I told you to go to the kitchen."

"We did go to the kitchen. We just didn't stay there," Zack said, letting go of Tifa's hand and waving his arms; his flashlight beam danced wildly over the murdered demons. "Besides, this is serious. Cloud, look at this place! Look at all these people! Why didn't you know what was going on here? Your family hunted people and stuffed them, and Tifa said they had mad scientists breeding monsters here, and--"

"His family?" Tifa asked. "What do you mean, 'his family'?"

Cloud froze. Zack flushed. "Um. Cloud kind of owns this house? And he kind of lent it to his cousins? And they're kind of the royal family?"

"The royal family? You're Shinra?" But they'd seemed so... so nice, if not anywhere near normal. And the Shinra weren't nice. They weren't always evil -- some of them helped people, in an impersonal, grand project sort of way -- but they always, always had to be in absolute power, and they didn't much care who got hurt in the process. And some of them, or their servants, had filled this room of corpses.

Tifa edged away, keeping a wary eye on the Strifes. Then she tripped over an empty display stand hidden by the shadows.

"Crap! Are you okay, Tifa?" Zack's hands were warm against her back, and Tifa realized he'd almost blurred forward and stopped her from falling on her ass. Which was something a friend would do. And not really like any story she'd heard about the Shinra. And not exactly something a human could do.

"Uh, maybe? I mean, yeah, of course I'm fine." She tossed her hair back over her shoulder and tried to look brave. It was hard, in this shadowy room with dozens of magically preserved eyes staring at her. "Um. Can we get out of here?"

"Yes," Cloud said firmly. "We're going back to the kitchen, where I am going to make tea. Then we'll talk."

"I'll cast the fire spells," Zack said hastily. "Your tea won't be very hot, but at least the house won't burn down."

"That might not be such a bad thing," Cloud muttered, as he shut the door behind them

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The kitchen was a haven of disorganized normality after their discoveries; the afternoon sunlight pouring through the windows was a particularly welcome contrast to the dark, closed trophy rooms. Tifa busied herself collecting the used plates and cups and setting them in the sink. She turned the hot water faucet experimentally; the pipes rattled, and then a sputtering pop of air heralded an uneven flow of water. It was cold, and faintly metallic -- well water, then, instead of treated water from the town reservoir.

"Hey, Cloud did fix the pump generator," Zack said, looking over her shoulder. "When we got here last night, even the toilets didn't work, which was totally disgusting, and we had to hand-pump water for breakfast. That generator's weird -- I mean, it burns these huge tanks of gas, which you'd have to fly in from somewhere, and it makes way too much power for just a pump, but we couldn't figure out what else it's supposed to run."

"Probably the electric fence," Tifa said, making a face at the likely state of the toilets. "And maybe the mad scientists' labs -- oh no, what if you turned on a bunch of killer robots and laser canons or something like that?"

Zack shrugged. "Then we'll fight. You're tough, right? And I'm pretty good, and Cloud's awesome. But anyway, don't worry about the dishes," Zack said, grabbing her hand and pulling her over to the table. "There's a whole room full of dead people, and we have to do something about it. Who knows how long they've been there? What if they had families, and people are still looking for them? It's hard to pin anything on the Shinra, but Cloud has pull and whoever did this needs to go down, hard."

Cloud looked up from communing with his tea, and frowned. "Did one of you say something about mad scientists?"

"Yeah, Tifa says the Shinra had a whole bunch of headcases out here breeding monsters, until something got loose and ate one of them -- that's another one of her ghost stories." Zack rummaged through the nearly-empty take-out bag, searching for another sandwich. "Hey, do you think the scientists were the ones who killed the demons?"

Cloud pinched the bridge of his nose; his other hand clutched his teacup like it was a guide rope and he was walking a two-inch wide ledge at the top of a cliff. "No. Now that I think about it, I'm fairly sure I know which pair of my cousins killed those people, and neither of them would have had anything to do with scientists. They certainly wouldn't have let anyone carve up their kills for experiments. But the door beyond that... trophy collection... leads to the basement, and you two are not going anywhere near it. What you've already seen is bad enough. Do I make myself clear?"

Tifa nodded fervently. She could imagine plenty of things worse than a roomful of stuffed corpses, and she had absolutely no desire to see any of them in real life.

"But--" Zack started.

"No." Cloud held up his hand, palm flat and forbidding. "It isn't that I don't trust you. There are simply some things in the world that I'd prefer you not to experience unless you absolutely can't avoid them. You've already had enough bad luck to see you through the next four or five decades; let the scales even a bit before you throw yourself into trouble."

Zack looked disgruntled, but he just slumped and grabbed another sandwich. "Fine, whatever. But you won't be able to order me around too much longer."

"That," said Cloud, "depends entirely on your choice of profession. You may eat those words yet." He sipped his tea and smiled enigmatically. Zack threw a piece of bread crust at him.

"Don't throw food," Tifa said, reaching over to punch him lightly in the shoulder. "And stop complaining -- it's not like Cloud's asking you to do anything stupid or wrong. You're lucky."

A look of mock-panic crossed Zack's face. "Don't say that -- he'll get ideas."

"Jerk."

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While Cloud brooded over his tea and Zack picked at his sandwich, Tifa went in search of the nearest bathroom. The toilet was as nasty as she'd expected, and the rest of the room was coated in dust, but a good flush, combined with some soap, water, and a borrowed dishrag, fixed the worst of the problems.

She tried not to look in the mirror over the sink while she washed her hands. For one thing, the glass was cracked; that was bad luck. For another, she'd heard that sometimes ghosts appeared through mirrors if you thought about them too hard -- they'd hover over your shoulder and touch you with their cold, misty hands, or they'd change your reflection into a monster that lunged forward and strangled you or ripped your heart out.

Maybe some ghosts were harmless -- they just stayed to deliver messages, or to wait for someone -- but any ghosts who haunted this mansion were bound to be angry, and probably not thinking clearly either.

And speaking of angry people who didn't think clearly, she really ought to call her father before dinner, so he wouldn't flip out too badly.

"Can I borrow a PHS?" she asked as she walked back into the kitchen and dumped the filthy dishrag into the sink. "I need to tell my dad where I am." Then another thought struck her. "Um, my dad's the mayor of Nibelheim -- should we tell him about the dead demons? They were murdered, and he's supposed to deal with stuff like that."

Cloud shook his head. "Those people have been dead for at least thirty years. Their killers are dead as well, and they would have been beyond your father's reach in any case. I always told Roland they needed to be watched, but he never did want to hear anything bad about his little angels," he muttered, and sipped some more tea. "I should never have let those two stay here."

Tifa stared blankly at Cloud.

The only Shinra named Roland had been the old king -- the current king's grandfather. He'd had three children. His eldest son had married, had a son, and died young. His daughter and his younger son had been well-liked, for Shinra; they were beautiful, they liked flashy adventures that looked good in tabloids, and they had a habit of settling in small, out-of-the-way places and drawing tourists to pour money into local businesses and crafts. They had spent several years in Nibelheim, off and on, before their deaths in an airship crash.

Rosa and Vert Shinra had killed all those poor demons? And Cloud had known King Roland? That was impossible -- he couldn't be more than twenty-five years old!

Zack noticed her staring. "Um, Cloud? I think you kind of blew your other secret."

Guilt and embarrassment chased each other over Cloud's face. "Shit." Then he flushed, set down his empty teacup, and sighed. "Sorry. I've been off balance ever since I saw what a mess my family made of my house, and those rooms didn't help. I'm older than I look, Tifa. A lot older."

Tifa leaned against the counter, bracing her hands on the edge of the sink. "Are you a demon? You don't look like a demon, but my dad says if you're only a quarter-breed or less, it doesn't always show. Or are you an angel?"

"I really couldn't tell you," Cloud said wryly. "I'm definitely not all human, but I didn't know that myself until I was twenty-one and my particular... gift... became rather dramatically apparent. The nonhuman blood is on my father's side, but I never knew him, and my mother never spoke of him. The memories were too painful, I assume."

He looked over at Zack and smiled. "Now Zack, here -- I don't know which side he gets it from, but there's demon in his blood. Probably a shadow demon; he's a genius at staying hidden when he knows he's screwed up and he doesn't want a lecture."

"Hey!" Zack protested, casting a nervous glance at Tifa. "Just because you blew your secrets--"

"It's okay," Tifa interrupted. "I don't mind if you're part demon. Demons are people, remember? And you said we're going to be best friends -- friends stick by each other, no matter what. So, are we friends?" She straightened and held out her hand, tilting her chin up and giving Zack her best challenging look.

Slowly, Zack reached over and clasped her hand. "Yeah. We're friends."

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End of Part 3

Back to Part 2

Continue to Part 4

original post and comments

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In other news, I've also been working on "Guardian" (chapter 7 is at 1,400 words) and "Secrets" (chapter 11 is at 625 words). Somehow, though, things are not going as fast as I'd prefer. I come home from work, I sit down to write, and the heat just saps my energy so I'm lucky to get half as many words on the page as I have floating through my head when I sit down.

I hate summer.

Of course, if summer disappeared, I'd hate that even more -- I'm the sort of person who loves to hate each season in turn -- but still, I cannot stand the heat and the humidity, especially since I have no air conditioning and I walk everywhere. In Ithaca. Which is built on really steep hills.

*faints from heat exhaustion*

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Elizabeth Culmer

July 2025

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