Then everything went straight to hell.
The reports kept pouring in and they got crazier by the hour. Tseng had lost contact, and Avalanche was hunting some ancient mystical weapon. Tseng was dead (oh god) and Sephiroth had some kind of doomsday materia. Tseng was alive but critical, and Avalanche had vanished somewhere up north. Sephiroth knew how to find the Promised Land, and the President was planning a power grab for Heaven. Sephiroth was an alien. Sephiroth was an Ancient. Strife was working for Sephiroth all along. Strife was crazy. Strife was dead, Meteor was falling, Sephiroth was locked in an ice fortress, and Avalanche was on death row. The Planet was alive. The Planet was doomed. The Planet was angry.
That was when Reno, sifting through the rising tide of paperwork at Tseng's desk, trying to sort out the conflicting intel, found the file of a former Turk, active thirty years ago, with a note in Tseng's writing – "confer w/ Reeve re: ID of sniper." (It was definitely Tseng's; only Tseng used words like "confer" in post-its to himself.) "Confer with Reeve" it was, and for a timid, ADD stuffed shirt who lived half his life through his robots, Reeve handled it pretty well when Reno kicked in his door.
X
"So you found his file?" Reeve kept one eye on the monitors, watching through Cait Sith's camera eyes a scene Reno couldn't see.
"What do you know about it?"
"Tseng showed me before he left for the Temple, so I could compare the photo against Cait Sith's scans of the guy's profile. Strife following him was all part of Tseng's plan, by the way – we spent days planting the clues to lead them to the Keystone while you guys were in Wutai. He's the one who pulled Tseng out of the Temple, you know."
"Strife did?" Reno was having trouble keeping up with Reeve's rapid-fire changes of topic.
"No, Valentine. He used to be a Turk. He pulled Tseng out when the walls started to crumble, right as I went in to find Strife's group. Tseng had Valentine's identity pegged from day one, don't ask me how; maybe because he was always the contact for that Nibelheim facility. He's a cold one, you know."
"Tseng?"
"Valentine. He barely speaks, and when he does, it's …cold. Apathetic. Morbid, usually. But he spent three decades in a coffin, so what can you expect."
"Decades?" Reno echoed. That at least matched the gap in Valentine's timeline, though it made for more questions than answers.
"So he says. That's all I can get out of him, generally – that, and he's out to get Hojo. Some bad blood there, I think it was about a woman. You'd think thirty years underground would cool him off, but Valentine just doesn't let stuff go. He's obsessed. They won't tell me what they found in that basement under the old Shinra mansion – other than Valentine, obviously – but he got more and more withdrawn after that."
"Valentine?"
"Strife. Half of what he says is about Sephiroth, and the other half doesn't mean anything at all. It's more than personal with him; it's some kind of holy war. He's obsessed," Reeve repeated. "So's Valentine."
X
Reno came within a moment's hesitation, the next time he was summoned to Junon, of going down to the detention cells where Valentine was held. He only turned back when he realized he had no idea what he would say.