“…and that’s how that redhead chick got bored with us and moved onto writing about goddamn assassins instead, when she clearly hadn’t finished fuckin’ novelising Avalanche’s adventures and shamelessly pairing up people who had no reason to be paired up but made sense in her deluded fangirl mind… I can’t remember th’ name… Hee… Hii…tar? Whatever. No one can fuckin’ pronounce it, not even her…”

“You don’t say,” was Reeve’s uninterested reply on the other end of the phone, stifling a tiny yawn and stretching over his office chair like a sleepy kitty-cat. The pilot had been rambling tipsily for about an hour now about the audacity of this girl’s intimate knowledge of the Turk’s penis sizes. “Cid, are you drunk again? Because you’re rambling about bugger all and breaking the fourth wall without a care in the world.”

Cid ignored him, head stuck in the fridge and looking for another unopened bottle of lager. “…but I was all like ‘hey, what the hell, if you want to write gay erotica with infamous historical figures, that’s your problem, but you can’t go around writin’ about Avalanche orgies, however intriguin’ Reno may find it.’ Then she was all like ‘well, up yours, your penis ain’t copyright, is it?’”

Reeve snorted out coffee through his nose, tried to stifle his laughter while elegantly mopping up the mess with a handkerchief. “Ooh, how dare she,” he chuckled, dabbing at his moustache.

“Pfft, what a bunch of bollocks: aren’t we all copyright by now? I remember signing a contract before filming began, but I swear to Jenova I’ve seen Vince on some school kid’s lunchbox thing…”

Reeve propped the phone on his shoulder, tilting his head and pressing his ear against it to keep it from falling and picked up a mug of coffee, sighing. Nearby, Cait Sith kneaded his cushion with his fairly lethal claws, yawned electronically and curled up on himself, settling himself down like a real cat would.

Reeve felt sorely tempted to join his mechanical pet in slumber but resigned himself to slurping creamy coffee and rolling his brown eyes at Cid’s ranting. “Yes. Uh huh. That’s nice,” the head of the WRO responded automatically, not particularly caring that he wasn’t making any sense.

“I think Cloud’s big ol’ chocobo haircut is copyright, ain’t it? So why not Avalanche’s private parts? They’re called private for a reason, ya little shit of a fangirl! Yuffie likes it, but then again, she probably writes all that for a living! She’s seen us all naked at least once, geez!” Cid paused for a moment to gulp at his lager, before exhaling noisily, putting the bottle down and started up again. “And another thing, why does she make at least one guy cry during sex?”

“I wouldn’t know.” Reeve awkwardly clicked off Fanfiction.net and cleared his throat. “No idea at all,” he said hesitantly. “Absolutely none.” On the other end of the phone line, he heard something that sounded like the pilot swearing and electrical sparks fizzing. “Cid, I know you’re attacking your computer, stop it.”

There was a guilty burst of static and white noise. “No, I ain’t…” was the sheepish, mumbling reply. “It asked for it.”

“Not a good idea to be exposing any wires right now, Cid,” advised Reeve, fingers flying over the keyboard of his laptop. “Weather report says there’s a thunderstorm brewing over Rocket Town.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Cid grunted, as he put the phone on handsfree and moodily stomped at the sparking computer wires and the old mechanics magazines that had somehow caught fire. “Got Vince stayin’ over for th’ night ‘cos he ain’t gonna get to Nibelheim in time before this motherfucker of a natural disaster hits ‘im. Ooh, speakin’ of… say hi to Kitty, Vince.”

There was the muffled noise of the speaker being covered, the sound of the phone exchanging hands and Reeve smiled as he heard the familiar baritone of Vincent Valentine’s voice awkwardly saying “…hello.” The brunette patiently waited out another long burst of white noise from Cid’s end, until the gunman continued with, “I refuse to call you by an animal name like Cid wants me to. I find it demeaning regardless of how adorable Highwind thinks it is.”

“Perfectly understandable,” the WRO head replied calmly, idly scratching the top of Cait’s head and listening to his electronic purring. “Then I won’t call you “Beastie” like Cid wants me to call you for precisely the same reason. Somehow I don’t think your quartet of demonic tenants won’t like that.”

Another lengthy silence, broken only by Reeve’s miserable attempts at stifling his giggles with his hand. Vincent rumbled, “I’ll be right back, Mr Tuesti.”

“Righto, Vincent. Don’t be too hard on Cid.”

“I make no promises.”

Reeve heard the phone on their end drop to the table with a clunk of dull sound, a body being tackled to the floor, some growls, a girly scream from Cid and curiously, the sound of a computer being turned on and clacking keys. There was a shrill shriek of ‘noooooooooooooooooooo’ from the pilot, the sound of a fruitless struggle and presumably a very smug Vincent picked up the phone and gruffly asked, “You still there, Mr Tuesti?”

“Still here, still curious.” Reeve replied, frowning. “What on Gaia did you do to him?”

“If you’ll excuse my bragging, Mr Tuesti,” Vincent began. “But I am a genius. I’ve successfully shut Cid up for… oh, I don’t know… I’d wager a guess of a few weeks. At the moment, he’s screaming like a little girl, and I’ll estimate it’ll take an hour or so for him to be reduced to incoherent gibbering.”

Reeve’s face lit up with a diabolical grin. “Vincent, you dastardly devil, you didn’t do what I think you did… did you?”

“Frankly, I’m surprised at how I can make an adult man cry like a little girl simply by typing ‘Valenwind’ into a search engine, duct taping him to a chair and forcing him to read it,” was the cool reply. “Cid’s masculinity is taking a beating as we speak. I’m making him read one of those stories where he’s the receiver.”

“Huh. I think I wrote that one...”