No One But Herself Chapter 4
Whenever two or more Turks got together, there was one topic above all others that dominated the conversation.
Sex.
Sex talk in the Gainsborough household had been limited to the following advice: Boys only want one thing, and it's your job to make sure they don't get it. Well, Elmyra hadn't put it quite like that, but Aeris had got the message... and rebelled against it when Zack came along. Making love with him had been a revelation: he gave as much as he received. Yet even with Zack it had been a struggle, at first, to put into words her preferences and desires. That old ingrained modesty kept kicking in.
Clearly the Turks did not suffer from this problem. They all talked frankly, freely, constantly - and often hilariously - about what they got up to both in bed and in a wide variety of other places, describing their escapades in glorious technicolour detail. It didn't take long for Aeris to realise that when it came to sex, she really was the rookie in this department. Merely eavesdropping on their chit-chat was an education in itself.
One-night stands were their principal M.O. Boyfriends and girlfriends never lasted long. They weren't supposed to become "emotionally compromised" with each other - the rule was right there in the company handbook, printed in black and white - but Aeris was pretty sure Reno and Cissnei got up to all kinds of stuff together; they were always touching each other when they thought nobody was looking. Rod was into guys, lots of guys, while little Knives liked girls, big girls; she had developed a massive crush on Pearl Matheson, the first woman in SOLDIER, whose stern face could be seen on almost any street corner staring out of the current recruiting posters. Nunchuks said he wasn't fussy. "Any port in a storm," he cheerfully declared. Rude was the only one who didn't kiss and tell, but then again, he didn't need to say a word: the others knew all about his hopeless, unrequited love for a barmaid down in the slums of Sector Seven, whom Two-Guns had nicknamed "Twin-Turbines", and they teased him mercilessly for it.
Love, in their world, was a weakness.
They didn't deliberately exclude her from these conversations, but they never invited her to join in either. They assumed, correctly, that her sex life was currently non-existent. But a girl could dream, and a girl did dream: while she was sleeping her unconscious mind replayed the Turks' stories with herself as the protagonist - and when she awoke, panting and unsatisfied, she was appalled to remember who the partners in her dreams had been: Sephiroth (! Why? She'd never found him remotely appealing, and also, he was dead); Gary the post-room boy with the freckles and the cute smile; a smarmy actor off the TV; Rod, who didn't even like women; and once, horribly, Reno.
Never Zack or - Never anyone she wanted.
.
Tseng was the great mystery. Aeris wasn't the only one in the department consumed with curiosity about his personal life; nobody knew; it was all speculation. Reno could get nothing on him. Tseng covered his tracks with all the secretiveness one would expect from a Chief Turk, and would not raise to the bait, no matter how persistent the needling.
"It's cause you're not getting any, isn't it, Boss? You ain't telling 'cause there's nothing to tell."
"I'm forever alone," Tseng replied, with the kind of bland smugness that strongly implied he was lying but which might, in itself, be an act.
In the old life, she would have assumed he was lying to cover up the truth: namely, that he was in love with her. What innocent days those had been, in retrospect. He had been right to call her a child, vain and naive in equal measure.
.
The more time she spent with the Turks, the easier it was to forget that these people did terrible things for a living. Of course, Zack had done some terrible things, too. He had killed people, enemies of Shinra. That hadn't stopped her from loving him. Aeris was beginning to suspect she might be a moral relativist; that with her, personal feelings carried more weight than abstract principles. If she liked someone, she could always make excuses for him.
Anyway (she thought), in this cruel and chancy world, blind luck was all that separated the innocent from the guilty. Without Ifalna and Elmyra, and Tseng of course, she too might have been forced to do terrible things, just to survive. She was no better than they were. Just luckier.
.
When the Harvest Festival rolled round, she put on a grey sweater dress and knee boots and a crushed-blueberry velvet jacket and went with the other off-duty Turks to join the festivities in Fountain Square. There was pie eating, apple-bobbing and toffee-pulling; a choir sang; champagne corks popped up on the dais; fireworks filled the sky. President Shinra made a speech. Nunchuks bought her a cup of hot mulled cider from a street vendor and Aeris sipped it gratefully, skin tingling with excitement. Tseng was on bodyguard duty up on the dais. He moved like the President's shadow; Aeris wondered how many people in the crowd actually noticed he was there. As for herself, she was finding it hard to look anywhere else.
In her old life, she had taken it for granted that she was the most important thing in Tseng's world. She hadn't understood about this other life of his - his real life, she supposed she should call it; his bigger life, so much bigger and more complicated than anything she'd imagined down there in her little world. Up here, he was the important one.
She wanted to ask him, "Suppose I was trapped on a rock out at sea, and President Shinra was trapped on another rock, and the tide was rising, and you only had time to save one of us?" In the old life, she wouldn't have thought twice about teasing him with cheeky questions, but it just didn't feel right any more. Nobody else in the department would have dreamed of speaking to him like that, except Reno, of course, and Cissnei, who had known him since they were both children.
Down below he had been hers alone. Up here, he belonged to all of them. Everybody wants a piece of him. She would just have to get in line -
He caught her watching him, and gave her a smile, a quick smile, so quick that if she'd blinked she would have missed it; but such as it was, it was all hers. The anxious thoughts that had been weighing on her heart blew away, and she realised she felt happy, happier than she'd been since... well, in quite a while.
.
This feeling of happiness buoyed her up for the rest of the afternoon, and was probably responsible for the strange thing that happened that evening. The festivities in the Square were winding up, and some of the other Turks had already headed off to the Goblins, when Knives said she needed to go buy a present for someone, and invited Aeris to come with her.
"Who's the lucky giftee?" Aeris asked, as they shoved their way through the milling throngs on Loveless Avenue. Whenever she wore the Turk suit, a path would magically open before her, but when, as now, she was dressed in civvies, she had to elbow her way forward like everyone else.
"SOLDIER Second Class Pearl Matheson."
"She got promoted? Oh!" Aeris exclaimed, "Does this mean - you and she - "
"Sadly, no. I'm afraid I'm just another adoring fan, worshipping from afar. Down here," said Knives, steering her into a quiet, narrow lane of shops below, apartments above. "She's from Banora, so I thought she might like something apple-y. There's a silversmith along here that does beautiful earrings - "
Hearing footsteps running up behind her, Aeris turned to see who it was. This small movement probably saved her life. A knife, intended for her neck, instead plunged deep into her shoulder muscle. Frozen in disbelief, she couldn't make a sound. It was like a bad dream. Her assailant's face was covered by a balaclava. All she could see were his eyes.
"Death to the Shinra," he shouted, pulling the blade out and preparing to strike again.
A shot rang out. Knives had fired her gun. Aeris heard the bullet enter his flesh, saw him stagger and press a hand to his ribs. Twisting round, he delivered a back-handed blow that drove his blade deep into Knives' stomach. She dropped the gun, doubled over, and fell to her knees clutching her belly.
"So die all enemies of Wutai," the man cried.
Somewhere overhead a window was thrown up and a man's voice shouted, "Hey, you - leave those girls alone. We're calling PSM."
With a curse, the man threw his knife at Aeris and turned and ran. The blunt side of the blade struck a glancing blow on her cheekbone before clattering to the pavement. She became conscious of pain: her shoulder felt as if it were on fire. But what did that matter, when Knives lay bleeding out at her feet? The Turk's lips were blue; her breath came in shallow gasps. The pool of blood was spreading with shocking speed. If Aeris didn't do something fast, Knives would die, here, now, in this street.
Because she was off-duty, she had left her staff and materia back in the office. She'd have to manage without. Ignoring her own pain, she knelt down in the blood and took the Turk's icy-cold hands between her own. She didn't know what she was doing. It just seemed like the right thing to do.
Warmth flowed between them. The more warmth she poured into Knives, the hotter she herself became. Sweat trickled between her shoulder blades. It was like pouring water into the soil of her flower-bed back at the church: she felt the Turk's body soaking up the energy, felt the life quicken in her veins. Knives' cheeks grew pink again. Aeris sensed torn flesh knitting itself back together, like a film running backwards - though whichsense she used to do this, she could not have explained. In her shoulder she felt a tightness, a tugging. Her wound was healing itself.
Knives took several deep breaths, and opened her eyes.
"Firaga!"
That deep voice could only belong to Rude. Aeris looked over her shoulder and saw him running towards them. She'd forgotten he was on duty in Sector 8 tonight. "Knives!" he cried, "Are you okay? What happened?"
Aeris couldn't speak. Powerful aftershocks were still rippling through her body. Every nerve throbbed. The light seemed brighter; the air smelled sweeter; all the ambient noises sounded louder, sharper. She felt radiant, as if she could have run up a mountain, laughing all the way.
Doors were opening and people were emptying into the street, asking each other what all the commotion was about. Rude bent down and scooped Knives into his arms. "We better go," he said. "Let's hustle."
By the time they got back to the office, Knives seemed fully recovered. She swore up and down that she was perfectly fine, never better - and indeed, not so much as the faintest trace of a scar could be seen on her smooth, flat belly. Nevertheless Rude insisted she check herself into the infirmary overnight. When that was done, he told Aeris she would need to write an incident report. She tried, but could not hold the pen; her fingertips were fizzing with pins and needles, as though they'd received an electric shock. Rude filled the form out for her. When they'd finished, he gave her a tranquilizer and put her to bed.
The next morning, very early, Tseng summoned her to his office. "Tell me what happened," he said. "Leave nothing out." Still groggy from her drugged sleep, her story wasn't very coherent, but Tseng pulled the details from her. She felt he was being rather brusque. Again and again he returned to the matter of the healing. "And you're absolutely sure you had no materia with you?"
"No. Nothing."
"How is that possible?"
"I can't explain it. I didn't know I could that. I just... She was dying, Tseng. I just did it."
"Could you do it again? Could you do it on demand?"
"Why do you keep asking me questions you know I can't answer?"
"Because I'm afraid," he snapped at her, "And I don't know what else to do."
Roughly he pushed his chair back and stood up, crossing in three long strides to the window, where he stood with his back to her - unwilling, it seemed, to let her see his face.
"What are you afraid of?" she asked softly.
He didn't answer. She saw his fists clench.
"Tseng?"
"You seem hellbent on making my job more difficult than it needs to be." He spoke through gritted teeth, which might have accounted for the steely edge to his tone, as though he was fighting to control his anger. It certainly sounded like anger. "Do you have any idea how hard we've worked to build your cover? If someone had seen you - if anyone outside the department ever suspected you can Cure without materia - Your cover would be blown wide open. Is that what you want?"
Aeris could hardly believe her ears. "I thought Knives' life might be of some value to you."
"There's a pharmacy in that lane - people who could have helped. Knives had a phoenix down on her. What you did was not necessary."
"I see." Aeris was having trouble containing her own mounting anger. The effort was making her face numb.
"Do you? By your own account, this is a power you cannot control. I'm beginning to wonder if I can afford to let you go outside, if it means an unacceptable level of risk."
"Let me?" said Aeris, with a dangerous glint in her eye.
Tseng was too wrought up to see it. "Of course Knives is valuable to me. All my Turks are. I don't think you have any idea how hard I work to keep them alive. I wouldn't willingly let any of them run the risk you ran last night, not unless the stakes were life and death. But at the end of the day, everyone in this department is replaceable, including me. Whereas you - you are a different order of being - "
She had heard enough. Too much; her heart was sick of it. Leaping to her feet, she cried, "I'm not a thing you can keep in a box, Tseng. I'm a human being, like you. I have to live. Stop treating me like a holy relic. It's suffocating me! You can't keep me locked up, I won't let you!"
Anger flashed in his eyes. The nails of her own white-knuckled fists were digging into her palms. He strode towards her, hand raised. With a cry of rage, she fled from the room - not because she was afraid he would hit her, but because she didn't want to hit him.
She ran out into the corridor and straight into Reno. "Hey, steady there, Sticky," he said, catching her as she stumbled and setting her upright.
She brushed him off with a snarl. "Eavesdropper."
"The Boss been giving you a hard time?"
"That's none of your business."
"Whoa, tetchy. Let me tell you something, sister; you got off lightly in there. When Tseng really wants to haul you over the coals, man, it's third degree burn time. You just got yourself a little singed, that's all."
"I saved Knives's life and he didn't even say thank you!"
"Yeah, he's a real ingrate. I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but - you're all right, Sticky. You did good last night. Now come on, I'll make you a coffee. And I'll tell you what: fifty gil says he apologises before the day is out. The man can't handle it when you get pissed at him."
.
Reno was bang on the money. That afternoon Tseng summoned her back to his office. He invited her to sit, but she refused, and so he did not sit either. They stood facing each other across his desk, neither of them quite meeting the other's eyes.
"I was wrong to speak to you the way I did," he began with stiff formality. "The concern I feel for your well-being in no way justifies the tone I took with you. If it hadn't been for you, I would have lost a Turk yesterday, and we would all have felt the pain of that. I'm sorry I lost my temper. It's not - well, it's not a side of myself I'm proud of. I hope you can accept my apology."
Aeris had half a mind to make him sweat a bit longer - but when he opened his top drawer, took out a small shagreen jewellery box, and said, "I have a present for you," she forgot she was nursing a grudge against him and cried out, "Oh, what is it?"
" I was going to give it to you for Winterfest. But in light of what happened yesterday, I thought maybe you should have it now. Open it."
The lid bore the name of the most exclusive jeweller in Midgar. Inside, nestled among folds of pale blue silk, were two gold drop earrings. One was set with a white pearl. The other contained - "Mum's materia!" she exclaimed, holding it up to catch the light.
"You always used to wear it in your hair," he said.
"When my hair was long. It's too short now."
"Not too short. I think it suits you. I mean - " he went on hastily - "That materia is important to you; I wanted you to be able to wear it. I suppose it was a bit presumptuous of me; I should have asked your permission - "
"No, no, no," she cried, "It's perfect, it's beautiful, I love it!"
"Maybe you'll be able to discover what it's for, now."
"Oh, it's not for anything. It's just pretty."
"Every materia does something."
"Not this one. It's a memory of my mother, that's all." She was pulling out the silver studs from her ears. "Oh, look how my hands are shaking. Help me put them in."
Holding the earring with the materia in one hand, he took hold of her earlobe with the other, pinching it delicately between his thumb and forefinger to stretch the little hole. At his touch, a delicious sensation, like goosebumps but much, much nicer, shivered through her ear and up across her scalp and down her spine to the soles of her feet; the whole left side of her face was tingling, and all she could think of was how glorious it would feel to have him run his fingers through her hair.
Abruptly he let go. "I can't - "
The earring fell onto the floor. "Damn," he said, crouching down to retrieve it, "Clumsy fingers. I'm no good at this - "
The ringing of his phone caused them both to jump. Tseng stood up too fast, banging his head on the underside of the desk. Aeris winced for him.
The Old Man was on the line. Aeris couldn't hear what he was saying, but he didn't sound pleased. Tseng made noncommittal noises. When he hung up, he told her, "The President wants to see me in his office right away."
"It's nothing bad, I hope?"
"It won't be good. I'm never quite sure when I go up there if I'll be coming down again - That was a joke," he added quickly, seeing her face fall.
She knew it was no joke. Over the last few weeks the levels of tension in the office had been rising exponentially. The Turks had been skating on thin ice ever since Cissnei's abortive mission to recapture Zack at Nibelheim, a failure for which Tseng had publicly disciplined her, but which he had privately approved. Their poorly-disguised reluctance to take part in the subsequent manhunt, combined with the lack of enthusiasm they displayed for the task of finding and executing their previous Commander, was inevitably causing the Old Man to question their usefulness. In fact, Aeris marvelled that they had managed to get away with their insubordination for as long as they had, and had once remarked on this to Cissnei, wondering aloud if perhaps they had some kind of secret hold on the President.
"Oh, don't you worry about us," said Cissnei. "We have leverage. Lots of leverage. Cast iron and gold plated, born with a silver spoon in its mouth and all."
Aeris had wanted to ask her what she meant, but was interrupted by Reno chucking a crunched-up ball of paper at Cissnei's head. The Pits had quickly degenerated into a paper snowball fight, and after that, the chance to ask had never come again.
She remained in Tseng's room for a while after he had gone, gazing out the window at the neon brilliance of the city below, bathed in the twilight glow of the reactors and reflecting on the events of the day. She was beginning to understand why he'd been so angry with her. If the Old Man ever found out she was hiding here, it would be the end. Not only her life, and not only Tseng's, were on the line, but the lives of the entire department, these people she had grown to think of as her friends. What good would it do to save one of them, if she brought about the downfall of them all?
"Oi, Sticky," Reno called to her as he passed the open door, "Don't forget you owe me fifty gil."
