Only the Best of Intentions
It was a two part plan: burn the records in Nibelheim and then light Jenova up like a Roman candle. She still wasn't convinced changing history was the best idea, but it was the only one she had left. Self-insertxS. At least I'm honest.
So, I've been stationed in Japan. No, seriously. Somebody up there loves me, and sometimes that spiteful motherfucker throws me a bone, so here I am. Don't expect frequent updates, but I'll update when I can.
Anybody read The Lord of the Rings? Yeah, no, one thing I love about that book series? Tolkein is always putting in random little bits of information. Yay.
NOTE: I don't ever pay a damn bit of attention to the Compilation. Angeal's pretty cool, but otherwise...no. You no likey? OH, TASTE THE TEARS, SCOTT. TASTE THE TEARS.
Disclaimer: I think I'll go take a field trip one weekend, track down whoever owns the rights to FFVII, and go have that discussion with them. I'll keep you posted on my quest. Until then, I don't own a goddamn thing.
Liz in no way was free of misgivings with regards to this totally ludicrous design (and she did not fully agree with keeping Sephiroth ignorant), but on the other hand she didn't have the faintest clue what else to do. Explain to Sephiroth who and what he really was? What benefit would that bring? He wouldn't believe her. He was already pissed at her, for lying.
Besides that, she sure as fuck wasn't about to let herself have to live through Meteor and all that, if it was avoidable. But she couldn't do it alone.
For lack of another soul to turn to, she thought it might be beneficial to enlist the help of Vincent Valentine, whom she was fairly sure would have at least a passing interest in Sephiroth, especially if she figured out a way to tie it into atoning for his sins—sins she didn't even believe were his fault, but Liz was all about how to get from point A to point B with as little toil and trouble as possible.
Almost like an automatic reflex, her mind started to work out exactly what she might say to get that sort of cooperation.
Manipulative? Beyond a shadow of a doubt. Was she regretful? She was too absorbed in scheming to bother with that.
This had not been her first choice. Actually, she hadn't even wanted to become involved in the question to begin with; she had tried to stay under the radar. Cosmic conspiracy intervened, and now here she was, the Planet on the fast track to disaster if she couldn't head it off at the pass.
It was scary, sometimes, how quickly things could go from great to fucked.
The day that Wutai fell, Liz didn't learn of it or have time to think about it until well after the fact. She heard the news, understood them, and then set it aside. In fact she might have even forgot it for a while.
Several months earlier...
Liz was fairly average in height but had a heavy frame that was predisposed to putting on weight easily. It required vigilance and dedication to keep it all off, and Liz was really bad at eschewing every opportunity to indulge. The only exception to this was her thin, bony hands and wrists. She kept her nails long and square; they grew that way. It made her hands look even more delicate.
Liz was very good with her hands. If something required nimble fingered precision, she excelled at it.
She had put seven stitches into the man's arm, and as she pulled the eighth closed, she smiled at him. It wasn't very reassuring, but then Liz would never have made a very good nurse. Her bedside manner sucked.
"Almost done," she said, like someone from the southwestern district of Wutai's capital. It would have been offensively out of place in a more educated, high class setting. She tied the suture off. Really, it wasn't that complicated, sutures fell under that funny category of 'looks hard, but isn't.' The real art was in knowing where to place the stitches so they wouldn't rip; and for really deep injuries, you had to know to put stitches inside as well.
The man stared back at her, and his surprise was mild in its outward shape. She had come to learn that the few foreigners in Wutai before the war had come to study the culture, and never, if they even had a working ability with the tongue to speak of, spoke much more than book Wutai, which really had little to do with the language spoken by the people that used it every day.
In a sense that made her exceptional, but all the same it was often a problem. Although Liz couldn't hammer out what a spy who couldn't melt into his surroundings was worth, many treated her like Shinra scum, and often especially disliked her because she spoke their language. From her perspective, learning Wutai had been necessary for survival. Nobody spoke English, or whatever they called it here, whatever it was like in five years, during the game's time.
"Thank you," he said, the words bursting from him like a bubble rising suddenly out of molasses.
"You're welcome. Now let me clean you up. Don't pick at them, it might get infected. Understand?"
He nodded wordlessly, leaning back against a stone head, part of a shattered statue of Leviathan. They, and the other people who had been dragged out of the rubble, lay or sat or stood in the courtyard of a destroyed temple complex; it had been one of the few open areas in the crowded, deeply built into itself labyrinth. Now it was littered with debris.
Liz wished she had had a camera. The southwestern district (which, it was never far from her mind, didn't exist and was never mentioned in the game, so what was it doing here) had been the oldest part, and there had been some places she saw that seemed to have emerged from time out of mind. It had been razed to the ground last night by Shinra.
She sat back on her heels, examining her handiwork and deciding whether or not she was really through.
I wish the bandages were sterilized.
But then she also wished they were in a real hospital. She cleaned off the blood, although it was still bleeding and persisted in coming out, wrapped his arm up, and then stood up. She should find another person, but...
The sky overhead was a very dark gray, and the wind had begun to blow harder. Liz pulled her scarf a little tighter around her neck and looked up. She ached all over, but especially at her forehead where an ugly gash stood out prominently. It was held together with sloppy stitches; she had needed a clear mirror and bright light to sew herself up in, not to mention to be drunk. She had not one of those things at the time, and there were consequences: there would probably have been a scar in any event, she was too old to be very regenerative, but it was definitely going to leave one now.
Unless you suck it up and do it over. But that depends on whether you really want to stick a needle in your face again. That shit hurts like a mother.
It was getting on to nighttime. It was, wasn't it? She hadn't had time to think about that all day, but now it was forced on her because she couldn't hardly see to sew sutures. In a few minutes the light really would be too far gone to see very well at all; within an hour it would be pitch black. People were already trying to start fires.
I should start a fire, too.
It occurred to her that she had no idea how to start a fire from scratch. In Liz's world—meaning aside from her familiar social surroundings, not the technical sense—fire sprang from matches and lighters. Survival classes were a luxury in middle class America that Liz had never indulged or had any interest in.
She scowled, and pushed the thought aside. There were a lot of things she wished she knew how to do, that had only occurred to her as a direct result of needing to know how to do them here and finding herself at a deficit. About the only thing she was really good at was sounding over educated.
They were starting a really big fire in the middle of the old temple annex; it had taken a bomb square in the belly and was now a stony crater; into that they were dragging bits of timber that had been parts of structures. Liz gravitated towards that. It was easier to melt into a larger and less personal crowd.
She hung back a bit furtively, until the cold compelled her to come forward. She got a few glances, but for once they weren't the accusatory stares that followed her through the winding streets; they were exhausted. So was she.
Liz hugged herself as she sat down in front of the fire.
I'm shaking.
She looked at her hand, which was indeed trembling violently, and all of a sudden was very conscious of how hard her heart was beating, and the racing of her mind. She knew this feeling although she had never experienced such a strong degree of it; adrenaline drain, and shock.
Now that she was sitting still it seemed like she barely would have had the energy to stand up, even if she wanted to.
God, I'm so tired I'm nauseous. Should that even be possible?
She stared into the fire, lost in its flickering light. Her mind started to wander down pathways, dragging her inexorably through the gauntlet of the last twenty-four hours, and then before that—
With a start, she realized someone was talking to her. Liz tilted her head back and looked up at an elderly man, and the three standing behind him.
"Did you hear what I was saying?" he snapped as she blinked up at him stupidly.
"No, I'm didn't," she retorted, because it was the truth and she was too tired to be snippy or crack a bad joke.
The man lifted his eyebrows at her incredulously.
"Well, get up. We've got to talk with you."
Liz stayed put. She was not well liked by the Wutai population, who saw a foreigner and assumed they were with Shinra, and it was a matter of personal safety that kept her sitting firmly on the ground. Not to mention she just wasn't sure she could get up.
The man scowled.
"Please?" he spat out, sounding very demanding.
"What for?" she said, her inflection turning the words petulant and angry.
"You're foreign," the man said with a shrug.
Well, wasn't that every reason why she shouldn't go with several fully grown men someplace potentially dark and isolated.
"Could you be more specific?" she asked tiredly.
A slight hesitation showed on the man's face, and he tossed a glance at the other people around the bonfire.
"A lot of people are going to die here if they don't get real medical treatment," the man said, his eyebrows lifted in an expression that by itself said don't you dare ask for anything more than that right now.
He shouldn't have worried. Liz was already frowning and trying to figure out what he could want; he was stating the obvious but what did that have to do with her, and how come it mattered that she was foreign. Where did it fit together.
She had the feeling she would feel very stupid when she figured it out, that this should be obvious, and would be to anyone else. But somehow it just wasn't coming to her. Now that her brain had had a little break, it was down for the count.
Liz got to her feet, mindful of how bone deep weary her legs were, and followed the four men, frustrated but curious. She wasn't important, nor did she know anyone important. But she was foreign. Okay. Somehow that must make her useful?
They stopped at the edge of the temple grounds, where the charred grass gave way to the flattened stone and brick jungle that stretched on for a mile, and there they turned to look at her.
"We want you to go with the people who are going to ask Shinra for help with the wounded," the elderly man said bluntly. "You're a foreigner. They might be more willing to listen to you."
Liz stared at him. Needless to say she was all in from the moment she could establish this was to help injured people get proper treatment, but for the life of her she didn't see how she would really be useful. So she was foreign. She wasn't sure that would mean anything to Shinra. Wutai was isolated and had preserved some sort of us-them dichotomy (although it would seem it disappeared by the time of the game, as well as this entire district...seriously, sometimes she got headaches thinking about these things, so usually she didn't bother), but Shinra was not the same way, at least from what she remembered.
They stared at her hard.
"Will you do it?" the man asked.
"Yes—okay, sure," Liz said, nodding.
Their expressions all softened at once.
"Thank you," the elderly man said. "And thank you for helping us today."
Liz felt embarrassed; she didn't see what she'd done as something deserving thanks. She hadn't really thought, come to think of it, she had just been a part of helping the ones who hadn't managed to make it through the bombing quite so lucky. It was not something for which she did expected gratitude or recognition.
In fact she'd prefer to pass entirely on the recognition.
You dumbass, you shouldn't go near Shinra. If they ask too many questions, you're fucked.
She flinched at the thought, and managed a small shrug for the elderly man.
"When, when are we going?"
"As soon as we can get everyone together," he said.
The silent black and white film reels of Dresden or London or Hiroshima could not reveal the color, sounds, and smells. Even the oversaturated color images with sounds were at a deficit. No film technology could really capture the clear, keening wails arcing over the dull boom of explosions, or the sudden silence, or the thick, acrid, choking smoke that carried death and fire, or convey the bone-deep tremble of the earth when a bomb hit, or the sum total smell.
Liz spent most of that night praying to a God she didn't otherwise believe in, huddled with other people just as scared as she was in the basement of some building. When morning came and everything receded to an uneasy truce, the sound of destruction melted into stunned silence.