Null Set

by demonegg

His life had always been the same. Controlled. So it was pure chance he saved her that first night, fate that he saved her the rest. But the world had changed, and variables were bad, and he just knew they were playing a game neither could win.

1. Alpha

I don't own FFVII or any of its characters.

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Nine times out of ten, he worked in darkness.

It was natural, really. The night lent an air of credibility to his job, shielding it from too heavy of scrutiny.

Bystanders also forgot more quickly under the opacity of night. Oh, it was nothing, they would say to their neighbors one day in passing, Maybe a drunk or some vandal. I can't even remember who used to live there anymore.

He was a simple guard, a foot soldier. In the drudgery of his job, he occupied the lowest of low spots: night patrol in the slums. Deal with the rabble-rousers, Grunt. They give you trouble--shoot 'em. But do it clean. They'll forgive a death or two there. Dem ain't gonna live much past thirty, no how. Might as well make it easier. It's the damn humane thing to do.

His whole life, he never wielded any power. Father left at five; shuffled between one relative after another; when he was fifteen, his mother slit her wrists one morning, standing over the percolator, waiting for the water to heat and make the last of the coffee; a knife from the drawer (an afterthought, like it had slipped her mind to slice his ham and cheese sandwich before waving him off to school); blood on the floor. He couldn't stop the current of crimson from staining her fair hair.

Somebody decided they should move him around some more, force him to go to school (forcing him to drop out). There was no hope in graduating when he didn't know who wrote the this-or-that treatise on government, who won That War--or that there was even a war, why the unemployment rate had increased a tenth of a percent, or what the difference was between a vertical asymptote and a horizontal one, barring the obvious (little did he know it all came down to x/0 versus 0/x. He was familiar with zero, but didn't give a damn about the variable, making it utterly impossible for him to pass ninth-grade algebra.)

He also didn't know it at the time, but this aversion to math intrigued the Powers That Be. It got him enlisted, even as a dangerously underweight, volatile teenager (or a despondent one, depending on the alignment of the stars, or was it the pull of his hormones?). Variables didn't matter. Give him a zero, show him a bottom line, and he knew what to do. The new regime fostered this kind of thinking. The flap of a butterfly's wings won't cause a thunderstorm if you exterminate every insect from Midgar to Wutai. Knock out the x, and you have order. Peace.

Weeks passed, and they strapped a sword to his back and a number to his name, and suddenly civilians trembled before him: or the insignia on his uniform and the glint of his sword. He could kill with that blade--metal always trumped flesh--but kill 'em or put 'em in prison (a death sentence on either count): it didn't matter, as long as he followed orders.

Perhaps that's why, when he saw her there, lying in the alleyway between two overfull garbage cans, he paused, just for a moment.

She was pretty, albeit a little dirty--not that he was going to screw her--he wasn't like those other guards, even if in the past, he had spent his fair share of gil for a night on a decent bed with a back-alley beauty.

Orders were clear, though. She had been in a fight: blood on her shoe, gash across the abdomen, serrated slightly on one edge. Burn marks across the arm in the telltale branding of a ShinRa EMR. She had tangled with one of his older cousins in arms--the Turks. The punishment? A six-month, slow, agonizing death sentence in one of the camps around the Northern Crater--hell frozen over, if there ever was one. Bits and pieces of you alternately failed: some by ice, some by fire; some overtaxed, some chopped clean off (Sayonara, Semper fi). It was cruel, no doubt, to leave her to such a fate, but if she were to be found in his sector on his patrol, his head would roll.

But truth be told, he didn't feel like walking all the way to the booking post, or cleaning the blood off his sword in the morning, so he picked her up (his shift was almost over, anyways) and carried her back to his apartment. She moaned once or twice (was it a name?), when his arm wrapped around her shoulders and her head lolled against his chest. Carefully, he trekked back to his building, dodging lampposts and the busier street corners. Too many eyes roamed for a chance to sell out another for a small lining in their pocket. A soldier rescuing a criminal would not bode well for ShinRa's attempts to achieve order in the slums.

He made it up the stairs in his building, avoiding the lift (too risky with a bloody, unconscious girl in his arms); and fumbling with his keys a few times, he unlatched his door--unseen by any of his neighbors, as far as he could tell.

She groaned again when he set her on the bed, whimpered when he cleaned her wounds with a damp rag, twitched when he wrapped the worst of her cuts with whatever bandages he could find.

But she never awoke.

He was sure she'd open her eyes for some of his ministrations, but maybe she had lost more blood than he anticipated, or perhaps she'd forfeited the will to live and he was just prolonging the inevitable.

Whatever.

It was a damn stupid move to rescue her in the first place, and he knew it, but he figured he'd kick his own lamebrain ass over it in the morning.

He was tired, so he laid a blanket on the floor and fell asleep.

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The first thing he knew when he awoke the next day was that his back ached like hell and that he would probably spend his entire month's pocket change on a nice bed for the next few nights just to get it back in order.

The second was that she was gone, and he couldn't explain the twitch of his fingers when he realized he never caught her name.

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