Disclaimer: Winningly not mine.
A/N: This was written by both myself and Inkbender as an interfic (interactive fanfiction). Is it finished? Well, that depends on whether we get more contributors to help us out. At the moment this is all there is, bu the beauty of interfics is that anyone can take part and help write something if they feel so inclined. Just head on over to the Interfics Forum at .com and see what takes your fancy. Maybe the next chapter of this that I post will have something of yours in it too.
Hold On
© Scribbler/Inkbender, 2012.
"Hey, Cloud. Hold on, buddy."
Zack clung desperately to the ledge with one hand. This was bad. This was real bad.
"You need to lose some weight, Cloud. We're talking crash diet time – no carbs, lots of protein, all those fruit and vegetables you couldn't get for love nor money in Midgar. Fuck." He winced as the muscles in his arms screamed – one stretched beyond its limit, hand gripping the rocky outcropping, the other wrapped around Cloud's waist so that he dangled like a rag doll, nothing but a hundred feet of dead air between them and the ground.
Above, Zack could hear the troopers sent to catch them moving around. Fuckers. His side hurt where the first bullet had caught him – too distracted by Clouds murmurs and the scorching hope his friend might finally be waking up. No such luck, of course.
"They're getting closer, buddy. Gonna have to try something desperate. Then again," Zack grinned, "that's what we're good at, right? Now don't call me an idiot, or try to tell me this is stupid, because I'm fully aware of all that. I'm also aware that there's a cave just below us I'm going try and throw you into."
Cloud didn't answer.
Zack pressed the soles of his boots against the rock face, prayed to whoever was listening, and launched out into empty space.
Freefall.
Zack accelerated downwards much faster than he intended to—after all, it wasn't like he practiced jumping off cliffs with a limp body grasped within one fist often. For an agonizing second, he wasn't sure they were going to make it.
The next second and Zack knew they weren't going to make it.
"Well, time for Plan B," he muttered as he grabbed fistfuls of Cloud's uniform with both hands and heaved the lifeless body into the air. The motion caused the muscles in his abdomen to screech in pain as even more warm blood seeped into his black outfit, but the extra height boost sent Cloud's body right into the cave opening.
Unfortunately, Cloud's upward propulsion meant that Zack himself shot downwards. Even the faint glimmer of moonlight was extinguished by the cliff edge overhead as he plummeted into inky darkness.
Yuffie skittered from branch to branch like a squirrel. Years of sneaking out her bedroom window to do cool stuff her father would NOT approve of had given her skills beyond those of which anyone thought her capable. She could sneak up on rabbits grazing in a meadow. She could pluck eggs right out from under mother birds' butts. If she tried, she bet could get from one end of this forest to the other without stirring a single twig –
A giant crash up ahead signalled there were bigger things than squirrels and ninja princesses abroad tonight. She spent a loaded moment listening to the whatever-it-was finish falling through the canopy. The last few seconds were drawn out, as if it had managed to slow itself somehow before finally meeting the ground. She imagined a big cat clawing tree bark on its way down, or maybe a condor that had suffered a heart attack and fallen out of the sky. She once heard a story about that happening, so it wasn't beyond the realms of possibility.
To check it out, or not check it out? she thought, hunkering over the edge of her branch and straining her ears. She waited for a whole five long minutes before heading off. To check it out, of course. Anything screwy happens in MY forest and it answers to ME.
In truth, Shinra reckoned they owned this forest, as well as everything else in Wutai, but until they learned to live off the land the way she could, she considered the place hers. She could take a hunting knife and fade into the trees for weeks at a time if she wanted to. Currently she was ten days into an excursion after an argument with her father and in no hurry to go home and make nicey-nice with him and the Shinra butt-heads turning their country into a cheap, tacky tourist trap.
She wasn't stupid, though she was impatient and perhaps a little too overconfident. She circled the crash site and kept her senses on high alert, eventually pulling out the night vision goggles she had pilfered from a Shinra goon while they made camp by the waterfall last week. She had no idea what military types like them were doing way out here instead of staying at a hotel, but she didn't need to understand Shinra to hate them. Ration packs and nifty equipment were the toll they paid for staying in her forest.
There was a body on the ground.
Ah, crap.
Male, big bones and even bigger muscles, mostly covered in debris and one gigantic branch that completely covered his lower half. It wasn't a weighty one – she could probably move it if she wanted – but he wasn't trying to shift it himself. Facedown and sprawled, he wasn't moving and looked quite dead.
Crap on toast. Where the heck did this bozo come from? Did he fall off the cliffs? He should be a pancake! How the hell could a body stay intact after a fall like that –?
The body moved. Groaned. Fell silent again.
He's ALIVE?! Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap –
Yuffie made her way into the canopy above him, noting the broken branches and the large wound in the side of a monkey puzzle tree where he had grabbed on to try and halt his descent. That was the branch lying across him. It may well have saved his life, if not prevented him from being injured.
What the heck do I do now?
Yuffie froze for another full minute, hidden within shadows and waiting for any more signs of consciousness. The body laid motionless, mostly obscured by the night darkness and - from what she could tell, 'cause the funky Shinra night goggles cast everything into a blurry green light - dark clothing. It was like he was dressed to sneakily blend into the background—the Shinra way, at least. Frankly, Yuffie could wear bright sunshine yellow and still sink into shadow, invisible to all but the trained shinobi eye.
Well, she had the yellow part down. She was still working on that laser-guided and lightning-fast eyesight that her father Godo pulled whenever she attempted to politely remove tourists of their glittery burdens, i.e. gil or—
Ooh, shiny!
She spotted the small green bauble lying on the ground about a foot away from the body's outstretched arm; the one that was bent at a funny angle. Her body moved almost of its own accord, on instinct; she slid out of the canopy, flowing easily from branch to lower branch, until her feet found horizontal ground. Still slinking within the tree's midnight shadow, it wasn't until her fingers were hovering right above the sparkling materia before Yuffie's mind caught up.
Whereupon it tried to screech to a halt, accidentally tripped over its own foot, and fell flat on its face. Yuffie uncharacteristically stopped dead in her tracks, millimetres from another daring instance of shinobi awesomeness, her eyes fixed upon shiny and much, much larger object she'd missed the moment she'd spied the man's materia.
Crap on a trampoline, how does he carry a sword that HUGE?
It wasn't as much of a sword as it was… well, a block of solid steel, almost as long as the man was tall and definitely wider than her waist line. And it was casually attached to his back by a large magnet as if he pulled it out on a regular basis to beat down the recent manifestation of thunderbirds. This man definitely wasn't an unarmed tourist.
Realizing her vulnerable position, Yuffie made a split-second decision. Her fingers closed around the materia and she immediately nestled back up in the heights of the canopy to inspect her most recent treasure.
She realized instantly that this materia hadn't been produced naturally, but rather by Shinra's method of artificial compression. The mako energy within it was muted, feeble ghosts of power moving beneath her fingers, faintly offering her their services. It wasn't at all like the pure crystals discovered in the mountain caves above the Kisaragi clan—caves like the one in the cliff face above them, ones which hid mako fountains within their depths, little leaks of Lifestream which had pushed through the crust and offered timeless knowledge, yadda-yadda-yadda.
Materia was materia, and materia meant magic. Magic meant power, and, if Yuffie's little crimes meant less power for Shinra and more for Wutai, then all was fine in the world.
Which brought Yuffie to her second realization: this man was Shinra. And Shinra sucked.
She almost skedaddled right then and there. She almost ran off with the Shinra soldier's Cure materia, leaving the four other twinkling orbs in their slots in the guy's Big Freaking Sword; as tempting as those treasures were, there was no way in hell she'd try to remove them when the man might just leap up at any moment and easily slice her into two unequally-sized Yuffie sections. Falling off a rocky cliff, crashing through the forest canopy, and splatting onto the ground should have killed any normal man, but you never knew with Shinra. They did some freaking awesome/scary things with their mako-enhanced technology—like the night goggles hanging around her neck, or the fluorescent blue glow in most Shinra soldiers' eyes when they took off their helmets while camping.
But, right as she prepared to take off into the night, a little annoying voice in her head drew her attention to the dark liquid seeping out of the soldier's side.
Aaaand here she was, making off with his only form of healing.
Aw crap.
Yuffie might have been a lowly, dishonourable, despicable thief and a shame to the royal Kisaragi clan (in the ever-wise and honourable words of her desperate caretakers), but she wasn't heartless.
She focused on the little green sphere, pulling energy from its mako depths and channelling it through her own body. The materia lit up as it activated, and life surged through the air in front of her. It moved through the air in a soft emerald light, sinking into the man's body and focusing on the blood-soaked side of the man's sweater; dark crimson liquid splattered out of a torn hole, finally ejecting a little piece of metal which tinkled on the ground and rolled away. The green light then travelled to other parts of his body, illuminating his spiky black hair and that one arm bent in a wrong angle—
Crap on a pogo stick.
If she didn't move him, the guy's arm would heal in the wrong position. She'd seen Wutaian soldiers whose broken bones hadn't been set properly before healing magic sealed them back up, all stuck in that wrong position. The healers had to break their bones all over again just to align them correctly and heal them.
She'd already dug herself into a pretty deep hole; might as well dig a bit further. She might even find hidden treasure at the bottom! Or maybe she'd hit a gas pocket instead and suffocate or get blasted into bits.
Wiping her mind free of weird analogies, Yuffie scampered towards the prone body yet again, this time not bothering with stealth. The Cure magic was slowly creeping down his arm and if she didn't straighten his arm in time—
She grabbed his gloved hand right in time and yanked it straight back. He was a LOT heavier than she'd expected and she was pretty sure she heard his arm snapping and crackling and making all sorts of gross noises, but she held his arm straight until the green light died away from his arm and the warmth of the materia in her pocket faded.
"Whew," she sighed as she dropped his limp hand. That was the last time she'd listen to her stupid moral conscience, telling her to do stupid stuff like heal a stupid Shinra soldier just because she was stealing his—
A strong hand roughly grabbed the front of her green vest with its sunshine yellow trim and dragged her to the ground. She might have screamed just a little—in surprise, not fear, mind you—as she impacted the ground gracelessly, but all of this was wiped from her mind the moment she stared into the Shinra soldier's blazing mako blue eyes.
Shit.
"Uh, hi."
The SOLDIER stared at her for what seemed like a very long moment. She wondered if she could get some throwing stars out of her pocket faster than he could mash her to a pulp. The irony of thinking about how to hurt the guy she had just saved did not escape her.
"You might not have noticed, but I just kind of saved your life and you're wrinkling my clothes, which is a really crappy way to say thank you."
He blinked at her.
"I'm not kidding. Me saviour. You saved. Me go now."
He opened his mouth. "Thanks, kid." He sounded like ten miles of really, really, really bad road. Then again, he had just fallen off the cliff with a near-fatal bullet wound and landed on unforgiving hard-packed dirt.
"Don't mention it. Now, uh, my shirt?"
"Why?"
"Excuse me?"
"Why'd you save me?"
"Because."
"Huh?"
"Just because."
"That's not a real answer."
"Is so!"
"You're Wutaian."
"Well fancy that, since you're in Wutai and all. Now please let go of my boobs."
"What?"
"You're totally copping a feel." He wasn't, but it was an underhand way of making him reflexively let go.
Slowly he unclenched his fingers, as if he knew he wasn't actually holding flesh. She scrambled to her feet and up a tree before he could say 'boo'. Once hidden in the highest branches, she peered down at where he was still just lying there. No, wait, he was rolling over. He stared up with an intensity that made her think he could see her, but that was just nuts. If she didn't want to be seen, nobody saw her. Simple as that. He was probably just looking at the mess he had made during his fall and marvelling at how awesome she was for rescuing him after something like that.
"Damn it," he said at last. Hardly words of wisdom, but whatever. He got to his feet, looked for his big-ass sword and picked it up. He didn't bother inspecting it for damage. Maybe he knew it was too tough for a little fall like that to scratch it. He held it like it was made of polystyrene.
Yuffie totally didn't shrink back into the crux of two tree branches.
He patted his side, as if looking for a pouch or bag, of which there was none. "Damn it." He spent a few moments looking through the debris, but gave up when he found something tiny where he had fallen. Yuffie couldn't see properly, but she bet her sweet, sweet ass he was examining the crushed bullet the Cure had ejected from his body. He pocketed it and looked up again, head cocked a little to one side like he was listening for something. Yuffie held incredibly still.
Eventually he moved off, heading towards the base of the cliff. Yuffie watched before following, not really sure why. Shinra was bad news, but something about the guy made her want to see what he did next. Plus, he totally owed her for saving him.
Yeah.