Pain

Predictably, the first thing she was aware of was pain. Then the sensation of fabric, probably a bed, and tight, stiff bandages bound tightly about her. Non indicative sounds like footsteps and machinery. Her eyes were initially gummed shut, but with a few minutes and some effort she managed to successfully prise them open.

It didn't tell her much. A bed of cold grey Shinra steel, small high window, medical gear. Nothing unexpected, but would she know if there was? Her right hand was heavily bound, but she could see that she still had two missing fingers, although she could still feel both as though they still existed (and were on fire). The gun sword thing that had impaled her was leaning against one wall, it made her wince just to look at it.

Footsteps outside the room. She closed her eyes.

Moment of truth… now I find out if I'm in a medical facility or about to be dissected in some lab… She stilled.

A door opened. "I know you're awake. Relax." Never the most relaxing thing to hear, but she opened her eyes. A doctor or nurse or porter for all she knew poked his head in. Brown hair, gold teeth, moustache.

"How…long?" Pearl croaked.

"Eight days. Could have been quicker, but we figured you wouldn't thank us for waking you. How do you feel?"

"Well…Gagh! I'm not dead." It hurt to breathe, move, and think, but apart from that, she felt reasonably well.

"There is that," he agreed, "It seems to have gone well enough, the main problem was that you kept regenerating in the middle of surgery, but we eventually figured out how to deal with that. I'm afraid we couldn't do anything with your fingers, but there was no other permanent damage. It will be a long difficult healing process, though." As expected. Nothing was going to be easy. "I don't want to overwhelm you, I'll be back, but that'll do for now. Can I do anything for you, before I go?"

"Can you… help me to the window?" She needed to see where she was, to decide if this was a real medical facility or not.

He winced. "I could, but it would hurt and could reopen your wounds. The only reason you're not tied down right now is because we were strongly advised that you might react badly to it. I could open it for you?"

"Please. Advised by who?" She tried to keep her tone neutral, but the pain was challenging even to her cherished poker face.

He shrugged. "Some guy from Midgar. Kept wanting to get you moved to a specialist centre, but your CO was insistent on keeping you in house. Must've made an impression on her." The window was levered open, revealing the distinctive scent of polluted Junon sea air. Could be faked, but why would they bother just for her? She was probably really still in Junon. Her Doctor/Nurse/Porter was still talking. "I don't keep up with the politics, to be honest, he wants to see you to get your opinion when you're fit for it. Are you fit for it?" Permission. There was something he wasn't allowed to say in his voice, but he was giving her the opportunity to try to screen her visitors. She knew better than to think it would work, having a fair idea who her visitor would be.

"I'll see him. Can you get me my phone, please?"

He obliged, and she used her good hand to flick through her messages. 19 missed calls, two each from Anna, Den, and Mbantuwe, a couple from Fitzwilliam, more from her customers and various well wishers (and one death threat). Nothing very important, although one message welcomed her to the 'So you've been impaled' club, a SOLDIER support group. They met in Midgar, so she had no plans to go, but the literature would be helpful in her recovery. She sent her friends replies to let them know she was alive and where to find her, then prepared herself for her visitor.

It was, of course, Paul the PR officer today, resplendent in a purple and green tie and brown suit. He smiled to see her up and alert, and moved close to hear her.

"So, I hear you're dating now?"

Pearl Matheson, swathed in bandages from her recent near disembowelling, stared at her PR officer in dumb amazement, and then burst out laughing. It hurt, but she couldn't help it.

"That is what you're worried about?"

Paul shrugged. "I'm in PR, not medicine. No magic healing powers. Are you going to answer me?"

"Sort of," she said, hedging. "That a problem?"

"For me? No. The days when everything you did had huge political consequences are past now, we have enough female rode models in SOLDIER with varied personalities now that everything doesn't rest on you."

"Is that good for me or bad for me?"

"Means you have less power, but are also in less danger of drawing the wrong attention. You're background now. I feel like we've had this conversation before…"

She stared at him. " Maybe. So…why are you still working with me?"

Paul grinned widely. "Well, I guess you could call it… sentiment. I like you."

"I see."

Her good hand flashed out and closed around his throat.

He glanced down at it, utterly impassive. "I hope you have a good reason for that."

She was reluctantly impressed. A grip on your throat was very uncomfortable, it went against every instinct not to pull away.

He had lost his smile, but that told her nothing. No matter how confident they were, only a fool looked smug when under threat, people sometimes died solely because the man with the gun wanted to wipe the smirk off their face. She met his eyes. It hurt to maintain the grip, and she had to work to keep her own face blank. "You wanted me moved to Midgar. Why?"

Paul raised an eyebrow. "I had heard you weren't integrating with the garrison as well as I'd hoped. I wanted to make sure you were safe when you weren't able to defend yourself."

Damn. Plausible. Of course it was. "You expect me to trust your word?" It was very difficult to project calm while attached to a heart monitor, but pain and exertion would account for some of the readings. Then again, she was dealing with someone whose entire livelihood was guessing what other people were thinking.

He was still talking. "Honestly, I'd be kinda disappointed if you did. But as your PR Officer, I would advise against killing me. At least, not this publicly."

"But you're okay with it in private?" She tried to smile but couldn't.

"Well, it would be more likely for you to come out alive. Throat tearing is messy. And I refuse to be murdered by someone too stupid to get away with it!" Now there was slight edge in his voice, very possibly manufactured. She didn't know what to think.

He was correct that she couldn't get away with harming him. She was in no condition to run, fight or hide. He could turn around and destroy her life as soon as he got out of arms reach, but that would still be a step up from the certain death if she killed him now. She'd never have tried something so dramatic if she'd been thinking clearly, but it was too late for that now. She'd just have to protect herself as best she could. Faced with no other option, she growled and opened her hand.

Paul stepped away, pointedly not in a hurry. "Well, you have some sense, at least."

She tried to summon her best glare. "Messing with my medical care just after a near death experience? I don't need to be paranoid to be concerned about that."

With her fingermarks still fading on his neck, the bastard smiled! "Don't worry, I won't have to now. I had to work hard just to get in to see you, you have good friends here, hang onto them."

Threat? Good natured compliment? Deliberately ambiguous? No way to know. She waved him away before her head started hurting as much as the rest of her did. You needed to be at full alertness to deal with PR. He retreated, but only as far as the foot of her bed.

"I don't know why you did that, Ms. Matheson, but given the circumstances I can understand the stress you must be under." She opened her mouth, and he snapped up a hand. "You seem to have won the loyalty of at least some of the garrison, but I would be careful. You are vulnerable right now. If you have people you trust, I would keep them close while you recover. If you have some specific grievance, I would advise being very, very quiet about it until you have a better plan than 'grab the nearest person and tear out their throat'. Do we understand each other?"

Yes. He had just given exactly the advice she would get from both a concerned friend trying to keep her safe and an enemy trying to keep her quiet before later silencing her. It was probably on purpose, too. The bastard.

She managed a nod. Even that hurt. He saw it on her face, and took another step back. "Alright, I can see you're not in good shape, so I won't take up more of your time. Unless there's something else?"

"Have you ever heard of a company called Adamant Holdings?"

"No." he said, evenly, letting her see the lie on his face.

"I see. Shame."She waved in dismissal. He obeyed the gesture, but paused on the threshold. "I'm glad you're okay. Really."

The door closed. She tried to doze, but was in far too much pain and fear for her life to sleep, so was left to worry about whether she had just signed her own death warrant until her next visitor. This time it was her CO, Robin, who read her expression and immediately apologised for letting in a PR staffer in, despite both of them realising how hard it would be to keep one from going where they chose. She checked on her injuries, seeming genuinely pleased that Pearl was no longer dying, always a nice reaction to get from the person that ordered you around. Then she delivered a general update on what had been going on while she was unconscious, which it would be suspicious not to listen to. The attack had eventually been repelled when SOLDIER reinforcements hit, although there were rumours that the enemy had withdrawn in advance instead. Genesis was normally clever enough not to waste his resources on 'random chaos' attacks, but anyone that knew the actual goal was not speaking up, so there was no way to determine whether he'd succeeded or not. It was also rumoured that the attackers had withdrawn as soon as they realised Sephiroth was in town, which was plausible but not certain.

Junon's garrison had performed well above the expected range for ordinary soldiers against Mako enhanced monsters, but there had still been significant casualties. The airport security detail had been wiped out once again, and the airport had essentially shut down as the garrison now refused to occupy it until better security was put into place. Which brought Robin to the real reason for the visit, that she wanted Pearl to endorse applying for a permanent task force of SOLDIER assigned to the docks and airport.

It wasn't a bad idea. There had been four SOLDIERs based in Junon for the attack, including her. Two of those were now dead, she had survived by a hair, and the fourth had been stationed in the reactor, which hadn't been attacked. But they had all performed well under difficult circumstances, some of which had been caught on camera. A dedicated airport and docks defence squad might have been able to blunt the initial attack enough for reinforcements to arrive and grind it down, at least somewhat. And there were also certain advantages for Pearl personally. But she advised Robin, mostly truthfully, that while she supported the idea, it had a better chance of success if Pearl's name wasn't on it. She would certainly feel safer with more SOLDIER in Junon, though.

There was one other piece of news Robin passed on before she left. In light of Pearl's performance against the high grade genesis copy, someone in Midgar had decided to promote her to Second Class. Getting brutally stabbed had impressed somebody, apparently. Checking the handbooks with some effort, she found out her entitlements. A shiny new red uniform, the better to catch the eye of enemy sharpshooters, the ability to order 3rds around, and an expectation to go on more solo missions. The upside to that was that succeeding got you better gear. Downside was the likelihood of injury or death. She wasn't going to be on any missions until she healed, and she'd have to adjust her combat style to deal with the missing fingers, so she had time before that was likely to be an issue.

Several other locations worldwide had also been hit by the attacks, but those were more clearly random distractions. Military analysts had reviewed the attack and there were a few notable points.

Chief among them was that it looked as though Genesis was running out of minions. The bulk of his troops in this attack had seemed to be largely conversions of ordinary Shinra military, raided from isolated garrisons. The gained a power boost from the process, but not enough to challenge true SOLDIER except in numbers. The guys with the gunblades, on the other hand were some of his original high ranked SOLDIER deserters. They'd have high Mako tolerance and strong senses of identity, and as such were harder to make into copies, but also more effective once converted. Science had issued a confidential circular about the nature of the new enemies. They could only hypothesise, but it appeared that those SOLDIERs retained some small fragments of their initial identities, which made them less predictable in combat. There was also a theory that the longer a copy survived, the more it learned to use its new body, and the more effective it would become. Fortunately, with little by way of a self preservation instinct, not many were likely to live that long, but the ones that did would become increasingly dangerous, although they would eventually degrade to the point of death or becoming uncontrollable even by Genesis. Until then, however, Genesis would gradually be surrounded by an increasingly small, increasingly elite group of unquestioning lackeys. They were unlikely to topple Shinra, but would undoubtedly cause a lot of damage before the last of them died.

This meant that they couldn't be wasted on a whim anymore. This attack would have come because Genesis wanted something, something important. A long discussion shed no further light on what that could be, and Pearl eventually managed to steer the conversation towards her personal protection. Robin could detail some people, but wasn't certain if their loyalty would hold given the assassination attempt in the garrison earlier. However, some of the squad Pearl had been leading in combat had volunteered, and it was the best that could be arranged at short notice. Pearl was not particularly happy about this, but had no better suggestion. She did make another few calls to better safeguard her interests into the future, but fainted again from pain and exertion before she got too far into putting her ideas into practice. Once again, she had no idea if she would ever wake up alive, but there was nothing else she could do.

For now.

Please Review, Compliments are not compulsory. This fic is technically three years old today, regards to anyone here from the beginning.