Getting one step forward with Vincent will get you lost, Cid should have realized that with everything else he did right then wrong. True, Cid turned the tide on Vincent’s misery long and powerful enough to make him want to join Aeris in the lifestream.
If it was not something Vincent was afraid of that Cid hadn’t realized yet, it was something new—like Aeris’s love or even death—that seemed to appear out of nowhere to take Vincent away.
This one had been a complete accident. This one was too unpredictable. This one would have more repercussions than anyone could imagine.
Thankfully, Vincent wasn’t there this time. The anonymity of all these events, all these people he cared about, must be getting to him, Cid thought. Then again, might this time be too much for him? There was no way to keep Vincent in the dark about this one.
Cloud tried to give Vincent the strange potion without telling him where it came from, but Vincent trusted it less than Cid did until Cloud told him where he got it.
Cid, who remembered the exact sound of the hum form the many computers on board the rocket he so briefly had been on, could hear something similar come from Vincent’s metal arm. The ephemeral sound should not have been there, on something that was no more than a replacement for flesh. Then it disappeared, swallowed up by anxious curiosity of the effects of the potion and Vincent’s safety.
Cid still didn’t trust it. He had no idea what it would do. Vincent seemed to know, and Cid wondered how, but never asked and kept himself from looking like he wanted to. He was already treading on thin ice with his own relationship with Vincent; there was nothing to even remotely hold him above the icy waters with anyone else’s.
Then again, he had no idea what it would do. He had never seen Vincent in the heat of battle, injured to the point of calling up something metaphysical, his body merging with his ratty clothes and his whole form changing shape into something Cid only thought came from a twisted imagination, and he began to wonder exactly whose.
Cloud had come to the realization on his own that Vincent was probably feeling left out, not having met or seen these people or events that changed his life. Cloud took him along, as well as Cid, who began to wonder who and what he had fallen in love with so long ago.
He began to wonder what exactly Vincent was. He began to wonder about the ethics of wanting to sleep with someone who could become hideously bestial. He wondered about his safety. He wondered how the transformation was done. He wondered why. He wondered why she had given him one of them. He began to wonder why it was called Chaos, the thing with hard, tough, yet smooth blue skin, gigantic—and as Cid had found out from testing them—sensitive wings, long claws the thing seemed to admire, and a more than just sentient glare in it’s large black eyes. He began to wonder whose mind—Vincent’s or someone else’s—gave them that glare. He began to wonder, as Vincent gained strength in the forms and found it easier to blend form one shape to another and become more and more disoriented after each change, if Vincent’s mind were changing.
Were these things wholly different creatures and thoughts that came with the body? Were they some sort of drug that effected the brain? Were there permanent repercussions? Did Vincent know of them? Was he aware he was so disoriented and schiziod he laughed at the most morbid things and forgot where he was entirely for almost half an hour? Was he aware that that it was the shapeshifting that was responsible for him to ask to go to the northern cave when he was already there?
Mostly, he began to wonder: what kind of a person was this Lurcrecia woman?