"Are you sure that's a good idea?" Tomas asked.
"Of course it is! It's my duty to take care of the planet." Mira said.
"I'll stay home and take care of the kids then." Tomas knew that trying to explain that they really weren't that much different than Shinra wouldn't do any good, Mira had to find out things for herself. And an AVALANCHE meeting was one of the last places he wanted to be, especially since he and Mira had stopped dyeing their hair.
As she left to go to the meeting after dinner, she put her hand on the outside of the window of the house they were staying in, and he put his on the inside. When she got back a couple hours later, Tomas was in bed, and he could instantly tell she was mad.
"Did you know what materia and mako really is?" Mira asked him and Tomas nodded.
"It's gonna kill the planet!" she ranted as she changed into her nightgown and joined him in bed. "I won't let Shinra hurt my children!"
"All four of them?" Tomas asked, putting his hand on her stomach.
"You know? I wasn't going to tell you until we left here." Mira's anger faded as she thought about the new baby growing inside her.
"I thought you seemed to be getting a little fat." he teased her. "We're going to have to get Henry a companion if this keeps up, just to carry all the baby clothes and diapers."
"There are rumours that she's been sighted at AVALANCHE meetings in Kalm." Rude reported.
A grotesque smile appeared on Tseng's face. That was the only kind of smile he could muster now. The boar wolves had nearly killed him, and it left him horribly scarred on his throat and left side of his face, and he wore an eye patch over that eye.
"Then let's spread some rumours of our own, that a Shinra spy has infiltrated AVALANCHE." Tseng said.
With serious misgivings, Tomas agreed to return to Midgar when Mira signed up for an AVALANCHE mission there. He only agreed because she had said the leader of the Kalm branch was a man named Veld. When a man came to visit them to give Mira details for who to contact in Midgar to complete her mission, he kept staring long and hard at Tomas.
They found a place for Tomas to stay at with the kids while Mira went on her mission. She found the warehouse where she was supposed to meet her contact, but no one was there. Suddenly she heard a noise and saw the man who had visited them in Kalm and told her where to go here in Midgar. Only he wasn't alone, he was shoving Tomas towards her, pointing a gun at the both of them.
"What are you doing?" she asked both of them, suddenly scared. Tomas held her and quietly told her that the children were safe.
"I guess the rumours were right about a traitor in our midst. I wasn't sure I recognized him til I saw him following you. I only saw the famed Reno of the Turks once, but that was enough." the man said.
"My name is Tomas. I've never been to any village called Turks." Tomas said.
"Save it for the other side. You know what the price for treason is?" the man tried to point his gun at Mira, but Tomas was standing in the way.
Suddenly Tomas dropped to the ground. "He knows what the price is now." a voice from the doorway said.
The man and Mira turned to see a horribly disfigured Tseng standing there, holding a still smoking silencer gun. A handful of armed guards stood behind him.
Mira dropped down the ground as well, shaking Tomas' body. "Come on, get up. We've got to get out of here. Please get up!" She put her hand on his cheek, feeling something inside she never had before, as she saw the red mark on his forehead and his eyes refused to see her.
Tseng walked over to her as the guards shackled the AVALANCHE operative. "Reno was always lucky, but even luck runs out on you, doesn't it?" he asked her.
As she remembered what Tseng had done to her in the lab, Reno's body grew cold under her hands. Aerith suddenly screamed, and the ground started to shake. The more she screamed, the worse it got. The walls of the building collapsed around them, and cracks appeared in the ground, widening into small chasms. Storm clouds swirled overhead and strong winds whipped through the area.
The AVALANCHE operative and the guards fell into one chasm, screaming. Tseng was losing his footing and tried to grab onto Aerith when a bolt of lightning shot out of the clouds and speared him, dropping him where he stood. A silver haired man appeared, and a hole appeared beneath him, and the lifestream pierced his body and dragged it into the hole, which closed up again, leaving his long sword clattering on the ground as the only evidence he was there. Aerith kept screaming until she heard a voice.
Aerith, STOP!
Aerith looked up and saw her mother standing over her.
This is not what we do. Ifalna gestured to the destruction all around them. She kneeled down and put one of her hands next to Aerith's cheek, and with the other hand she touched Reno's body, which seemed to shimmer for a moment before disappearing.
"What'd you do to him?" Aerith demanded to know.
I returned him to the planet, as I had to do for your father when Hojo killed him.
"Dr. Hojo killed my father?" Aerith was shocked anew.
Yes, so he could take us back to his laboratory.
Hojo muttered as he waited for the generators to kick on. The earthquake must have disrupted the electricity, because the lights kept flickering. Suddenly they went black.
"What the hell is going on here?" Hojo was about to start yelling for an electrician when the lights suddenly came back on.
He turned to resume his latest experiment and stopped dead in his tracks when he saw Aerith before him.
"Well this is a surprise. Why have you come back after all this time?" he asked her.
"I'm going to give you what you always wanted." Aerith said sweetly. "I'm going to show you exactly what I'm capable of."
Hojo ran, trying to escape Aerith's fury. She pointed her finger and lightning came in from the broken windows and blasted the monitors behind him. She finally had him cornered, and started to point her finger at him when she caught sight of the containment cage that she had lived in for so long.
Memories flashed through Aerith's head…the first time she saw Reno there, their unspoken hand greeting, him delivering Jonah in the cave behind the waterfall, their whole life together. It gave her pause just long enough for Hojo to pull out his gun and aim it at her. A gale force wind appeared and blew Hojo into the huge ventilation fan for the laboratory. He didn't even have a chance to scream before he was ripped to shreds. Aerith turned to look from where the wind had come from, and her mother stood there with her finger pointed towards the fan.
I may not have been able to save your father, but at least I was able to save you. Ifalna turned to Aerith and smiled. Go to your children. She touched Aerith's cheek and disappeared.
Aerith stayed in Kalm with Jonah and the girls only until she gave birth to a brown haired son she named Tomas. Then she loaded up Henry and his new companion, another pack mule named Peter, and they headed out, reaching their destination in three months.
"What is this place, Mom?" Jonah asked as they approached the cabin.
Aerith slowly approached the trapper's cabin, opening the door and walking in, stunned by how untouched it look since she had last seen it. She saw the stick that Reno had used as a cane while his ankle healed from their escape, and she nearly broke down again as she picked it up. He had tried to warn her about AVALANCHE and returning to Midgar, but she hadn't understood, just like she hadn't understood when they lived in this cabin why he tried to resist having sex with her. Then the result had been life when she had conceived Jonah, but when she was pregnant with Tomas, her misunderstanding had resulted in Reno's death. She took a deep breath and swallowed hard on the guilt she felt for how she ended up repaying his kindness.
"Mom, what is this place?" Jonah asked again.
She forced a smile and turned around to face their children. "This is where we're going to live from now on."
Aerith never left the clearing surrounding the cabin. As her children grew up and moved on to their own lives, they kept trying to get her to live with them, but she refused. She lived in that cabin until the day she died, when a sinkhole appeared and returned the whole cabin to the planet.