Here I go again starting new stories before I've finished old ones. Ah well, I'm too old to change now.

I'd just like to say a huge thank you to everyone who has read and reviewed my stories. I've been ill, and am very behind on replies, but I really appreciate all feedback.

This is my version of the back story of the "Before Crisis" Turk Katana, who I call Kit. It was supposed to be a one shot, but it grew. At least I can promise this one will progress quickly, as five out of six chapters are already written and I know how it ends.

Most of what is officially known of Katana's past is summarised here:

Katana had something of a reputation in his hometown, Gongaga. When he was younger, a friend of his was kidnapped. To get him back, Katana went to rescue him alone. The story has it that Katana arrived at the place his friend was being held, and single-handedly defeated all the operatives in the area. Katana himself was put into prison. His only way out came from the Turks, who recruited him, telling him that he would be free to leave if he would offer his formidable talent to their service. He did, and has been with the Turks for many years. Compared with most of the other Turks, he is a senior officer. (From Gunshot Romance - a great "Before Crisis" site)

That got me wondering about who the friend was, who kidnapped him and why.

Katana

Chapter One

The Arrival of ShinRa

Their mothers were good friends, they were born four hours apart, and if Kit threw a stone from his loft window he could get Cal's attention by hitting the wooden shutters of his bedroom on the ground floor of the house opposite. People in Gongaga called them the twins, and strangers would have believed it if they'd seen them together tearing through the muddy streets, black hair tousled and blue eyes shining with mischief, both wearing clothes that were either patched or freshly torn. When they were small only Kit's glasses made it easy to tell them apart unless you knew them well.

No matter that Cal's father was the mayor and Kit's widowed mother a poor farmer who also worked as the village midwife; there was little in the way of hierarchy in Gongaga. The mayor's house was only bigger than the others because its ground floor contained the village meeting hall. Apart from the expensive woven silk kilims that decorated the houses and were passed from family to family upon marriage, few Gongagans owned much of financial value. All the village children attended the same school in the mornings, and in the afternoons the boys, along with a handful of interested girls, learned to fight with traditional katana in the small dojo near the weapon shop under the expert tuition of Eli Swift, who also owned the store. By Midgar standards Kit was poor, but, having no comparison, he didn't know that he was poor, and his childhood was happy.

For the first seven years of their lives Kit and Cal's life in Gongaga followed a pattern that had existed in the village largely unchanged since their nomadic ancestors had first settled the area centuries before. Then, on a bright autumn day in 1983, one of the big boys ran into the junior classroom of the little village school yelling excitedly, "Trucks!"

There was a moment of hush before the class burst into a hubbub of thrilled exclamations. Their teacher ordered the excited children to form a line by the door of the classroom. As always, Kit and Cal paired up. "Is it ShinRa?" Kit whispered. Cal grinned. "Yes. Look – Miss Thorn is giving out the flags. I can't wait!"

When each child had been provided with one of the 'welcome to Gongaga' flags they'd had ready for nearly a month now, since no one seemed to know exactly when work on the new mako reactor would begin, Miss Thorn led her short crocodile of children out of the school house. Lining the dirt road to the north of the town, the children waved and cheered as the lorries rumbled past. Kit was a bit frightened of the noise and the sheer size of the huge metal machines, but he didn't let Cal see that he was afraid.

"Pop says there'll be a big festival when the reactor opens," Cal told him when the trucks had vanished into the dust. "Goat stew and everything. And someone important from Midgar will come."

"Goat stew!" Kit smiled. "Yum."

When he got home, Kit told his mother all about it, but she didn't seem to be her usual cheerful self, muttering something about schools spreading ShinRa propaganda.

"What's a propaganda?" asked Kit.

"A well-behaved daddy goose," his mother replied, her smile returning. She gathered him close and kissed him, and he pretended to struggle.

"Cal says we'll have goat stew when they've finished," Kit told her.

"Humph. 'Cal says'! All I hear from you is 'Cal says', and all poor Esther hears is "Kit says'. Joined at the hip you and Caleb Leaman, since the day you were born. And don't you worry about goat stew. We'll have it at harvest, same as always. We'll be waiting years if we wait for the reactor. Nothing like that gets built in a day."

"Years!" Kit exclaimed. "But what about the lelectricity? They said hot water from the tap, and lights and – and televisions." He breathed the last word reverently. Cal's uncle knew someone in Midgar with a television. It was like the travelling cinema that came once a month and set up in the square, but it was in a small box you could put inside your house, and watch all the time!

"We've done all right without so far," his mother said, and her voice wasn't quite back to normal, but almost. "I daresay we can wait a bit longer for the mako miracle to bless us."

x

After the initial excitement died down, Kit's mother was proved right about the length of time it would take to build a reactor. The road east, linking Gongaga to the port at Nymund Bay, was widened and metalled, becoming the first designated highway on the whole continent. ShinRa's builders lived in a town of trailers and tents that swiftly grew up along the road near Gongaga and around the northern edge of the reactor site. Occasionally men would come to the village, but when they discovered that Gongaga boasted only one small inn and that the local girls largely kept themselves to themselves, they tended to say on site where at least they had TV, plenty of alcohol, and a few enterprising whores who had followed them from Midgar to keep them entertained.

The construction work went on all day and most nights, although the Mayor of Gongaga, Cal's father Samuel Leaman, eventually managed to negotiate one night of guaranteed silence a week. Even with almost continual building the corn was already beginning to ripen in the fields nearly a year after the first trucks had arrived by the time the foundations of the reactor had been laid and the deep mako wells dug out.

One sultry evening in the late summer of 1984 the heat was oppressive enough to make sleep impossible for Kit. His bedroom was a raised platform under the tiled dome of the roof; stifling in this weather. When his mother called up the ladder to tell him that she had to go out he stuck his shaggy head over the edge of the platform and asked, "Who is it? Mary Heath?"

"No - Tabitha Fair. She's a little early. Since you're wide awake, how about a hand with carrying water?"

"All right!" Kit agreed happily, keen to get out of the stuffy loft and looking forward to a midnight adventure. He'd assisted his mother at a few births recently, carrying and heating water, bringing clean cloths and looking after the new medical kit that had come all the way from Midgar, the ShinRa logo bright red and beautifully printed on its white plastic surface. The only thing he wasn't allowed to touch was the mako crystal in its beaded leather pouch, handed down to his mother from her mother, and hers before that. Kit knew that boys couldn't become midwives and he sometimes wondered whether his mother wished he'd been a girl, but whenever he asked her she would smile and kiss him and say, "I want you exactly how you are and not so much as an eyelash different". He knew that she meant it, but he still liked to ask, just to hear it again.

Kit took the water bucket and went out to the well. He drew up the heavy well bucket as quietly as he could. He poured the water into his own bucket and watched for a moment, admiring the way the surface turned liquid silver in the moonlight. A sudden dull boom reverberated through the whole village, shivering the water and shaking the ground. Another followed moments later, and another - pile drivers from the construction site. Kit was glad he was already up and about – if that noise went on all night no one was going to get much sleep anyway.

When he reached the Fairs' house his mother was walking with Tabitha who was pacing restlessly, her hands on her belly, her eyes full of that intense look of internalised concentration Kit had seen before in women about to give birth. Kit's mother looked up as he entered, and another resounding boom shook the house. "What a time to start with all that row!" she said. "Couldn't they have waited until morning?"

Tabitha Fair managed a smile. "Some things – won't wait," she said, breathlessly. "I'm glad you're here, Judith."

Kit poured the water into a large pan on the stove. Jacob Fair, a tall, handsome man with mild blue eyes and an easy manner, nodded his thanks, but Kit could see that he was worried. "It's early," he said to Kit's mother. "It shouldn't be happening yet."

"Not very early," Kit's mother reassured him. "Just an impatient baby. Three weeks is all right. And it's already as big as many that are full term." She looked to check that the water was heating and turned to Kit. "This will take a while," she said. "You get home. I doubt I'll be back much before dawn."

"Perhaps – I should go out for a while –" Jacob began, but Tabitha's glare silenced him. "You are going nowhere, Jacob Fair!" she told him. "You were happy enough to start this – you can – uh – bloody well stay and see it through – ow – holy –"

His mother shot Kit a warning glance and he fled before the cursing got out of hand.

The sounds from the construction site had ceased for the moment. As he passed his best friend's house on the way home, Kit knocked gently on the shutters of Cal's bedroom just in case the heat or the sound of the pile drivers had woken him. There was no response, so he was heading for his own house, when Cal's whisper stopped him. "Kit! What're you doing?" Cal opened the window wide and jumped down into the street, barefoot, but dressed in trousers and an old t-shirt.

"Tabitha Fair's baby," Kit said.

"Gross! Did you see it come out?"

"No – it hasn't come yet."

"Have you ever seen one come out though?"

Knowing that the sight of blood made Kit feel faint, his mother had always made sure that he was well out of the way before the actual delivery took place, but Kit wasn't about to admit that to Cal. "Almost. It's the same as with goats and cows, really."

"Ugh."

"Yeah, but – they're nice, though, after."

"What – cows and goats?"

"Babies."

Cal made a face. "My sister isn't nice. All yelling and poop. Keeps us awake half the night usually, and then tonight with all this noise going on, guess what?"

"What?" Kit asked.

"Miriam – fast asleep and smiling, blowing these little bubbles sometimes…"

Kit smiled, knowing how much Cal doted on baby Miriam in spite of all his claims about what a pain she was.

Another hollow boom made even the heat-heavy air appear to tremble. "Let's go and watch," Cal said, ever the leader in their escapades. Together they ran through the empty streets of the village, through the sparse woodlands beyond and across a short stretch of moonlit heath, before scrambling up the high earth bank built to protect Gongaga from the worst of the noise and dust from the construction site. ShinRa had promised to build the bank – it was in the plans approved by the mayor – but in the end it had been erected by the villagers themselves, aided by one small, rather rusty mechanical digger reluctantly provided by the ShinRa site manager after considerable pressure from Cal's father, backed by a delegation from the village.

From the top of the bank the view of the site was breathtaking. The entire area was enclosed by high chain-link fencing with razor wire along the top, sharp-looking as the claws on the striped huldercat skin draped over the couch in Eli Swift's weapons shop. Beyond the fence, in the greenish glow of huge floodlights, moved vast machines; diggers with caterpillar treads and toothed scoops like the maws of monsters, and gigantic earthmovers whose wheels were each higher than a grown man – even a tall one like Jacob Fair. Above the floodlights the towers of three pile drivers and the right angle forms of several cranes were silhouetted against the moonlit sky. On every machine the ShinRa logo was boldly painted. Kit knew that in the daytime the logos would be bright red, but in this weird under-water light they appeared almost black. Among the machines men were working, all clad in identical protective suits, hard hats and ear-protectors, goggles obscuring their faces.

"I saw a welding robot out there once," Cal said. "Like fireworks, but so bright you couldn't look at it."

"Cool. Wonder what it's like in Midgar?"

"Pop says when they finish building there it will be a whole city in the sky."

"Yeah," Kit nodded. "Ma, too. She said it wouldn't be much fun for the people underneath, out of the sun."

Cal scoffed. "There won't be people underneath! They're building everything on top – houses and shops and schools – everything. Underneath will just be for – you know – storage, or pipes and things. The plate on top is going to be so big that thousands of people will live there. Thousands! And they need people – for every kind of job. Doctors and teachers and people who look after the money, and security and engineers… I'm going to work there one day. I'll have a house with TV, and I'll go to work on the train, and – and I'll have one of those phones that you can carry around in your pocket! Did I tell you the site manager had one, when Pop went to see him about the digger? He said, "I'll have to call for authorisation" and he made a phone call to Midgar, right there, standing outside in the middle of the site!"

"Yes," said Kit, impressed all over again. "You told me. But – there'll still be farmers here, won't there? And if you leave – and Jude Heart was talking about leaving, and some of the others – who'll look after the village?"

"There are hardly any monsters in the hills, and there hasn't been any trouble with the other villages for years. Anyway, ShinRa has security – like the guards on this site. They won't let anyone or anything attack Gongaga anymore – not when we'll be so close to a mako reactor. That's what Jude wants to be – a ShinRa security guard. Or he said he'd read about a new programme called SOLDIER, where you can train to an even higher level. He's definitely going to Midgar, and I want to as well. You have to come too. You can't just stay here and be a boring farmer. You're good with a katana – I know Eli thinks you're the best, though he doesn't say so. It would be more fun if we went together. Two ShinRa SOLDIERs!"

"Hm. I'd rather be… I don't know… Something like – well, you know that film that came here just after first sowing – The Building of a Dream? About how they designed Midgar? I'd like to be able to do something like that. Be an architect or something. Make things."

"Well, you can draw."

"I guess. I could – " Kit's eyes widened as he noticed the hammer of one of the pile drivers beginning to rise. "Cover your ears!" he cried. The two boys hunched down, hands tight over their ears as another series of thunderous thumps reverberated through the ground, sending trickles of earth skittering down both sides of the mound. When it was over they looked at each other, both laughing.

"If you're an architect, do you get to use those machines?" Cal asked.

"I reckon you might."

"Cool job!" Cal said. "That's what you should do then."

"Maybe," Kit nodded.

They stayed out in the warm night, watching the magnificent, thrilling machines working, until the moon set. When Kit got home he found that his mother still hadn't returned from the Fairs' house, but long labours were common enough with first births and he put himself to bed without undue worry.

In the morning though, his mother was unusually silent as she stirred his breakfast porridge on the stove.

"Is the baby okay?" Kit asked, concerned.

"Yes. He's a boy – doing well. Strong baby. Looks like his father. They've called him Zachary. But poor Tabitha –"

"Did she die?" Kit knew his mother prided herself on never having lost a mother in childbirth yet, unlike most of the midwives in neighbouring villages, who, nonetheless, sneered at her adoption of the latest medical advances from the eastern continent as 'unnatural'.

"No, love. She's alive, and she'll stay that way. But it was a hard birth. I had to use the mako crystal and the ShinRa drugs, and I only stopped the bleeding after a long time. I think – well, I think it's likely that Zachary will be her only child."

"Oh. Like me, then." As an only child Kit was something of an oddity in Gongaga. Cal had three older sisters and baby Miriam, Jude Heart was one of seven; four or five children in a family was the norm.

"Yes, just like you," his mother said with a smile that was only a little too bright. "Although you and Cal might as well be brothers, the amount of time you spend together." She set Kit's porridge on the table and watched him fondly as he wolfed it down. "I don't know where you put it all," she said, as he scraped the bowl clean and asked for seconds. "You must have hollow legs. Either that or you're about to grow again. It's a good thing Jude's mother passed on those trousers, or you'd be running out of clothes. But then, your dad was tall."

Kit looked at his mother quickly, then away. She rarely volunteered information about his father, killed in a farming accident when he was barely three. He could tell that she was already upset about Tabitha Fair, so he only nodded, and added the new knowledge to his small but precious store.