Fearless

Disclaimer: No, sadly this leave of absence hasn't been accompanied by me hunting down a copyright to the world of FFVII...would be nice though, haha!

A/N: I know I can't apologize enough for this and make it sound legit, but it isn't that I've been unmotivated to write; quite frankly I've just been unable to do much of anything thanks to the shitstorm that's decided to take over my life. It's nothing compared with the magnitude of Diana's own issues, but let me tell you it's sucked.
This is where it changes. From now, I'm not taking any more crap or letting things beat me. I'm sick of being unhappy and sick of the hell that my best friend in the world's been through. Life bites you in the ass sometimes, even when it isn't aiming for you. No lessons come without pain, but just because they weren't our lessons to learn and we weren't the ones to blame doesn't mean we can't walk away stronger. This is where it all gets back on track. A better one.

Nice, huh? I'm not looking for sympathy or a scapegoat or anything, but I just kinda wanted to get across that things have been a bit beyond my control. I wanted to write so badly, but I just couldn't get myself to do it. And when that happens you know there's a problem! (Holy crap the aliens stole run4life didn't they? ! - eh, no, not quite, haha.) Just try to understand if you can, I love you all and thanks for sticking with me - er, at least hopefully you have! :) Enjoy all the same.

This one's for you, Ultimate. Let's carry on.

Chapter 51: Points for Creativity

Diana was not going to win this.

She was a wreck already, emotionally more so than physically, and it was severely unnerving fighting someone like him. She didn't know what to expect, and when he wasn't throwing snide comments at her and messing her up more, he was just as fast as she was on a good day.

And it was not exactly a good day.

It really didn't look good.

And he might have won the fight, too, were it not for one very important factor.


Zack panted, finally having knocked his first attacker's head against the wall hard enough to render him temporarily unconscious. Temporary was all they needed right now; was all he needed to get to Di.

Tearing through the doorway and assessing the situation, he didn't have time to think. Ten and Diana were rolling over and over on the floor, practically ripping each other to shreds. Ten had just said something that was clearly causing Diana pain, because she shrieked in rage as she tried to slam his head into the side of the couch they had just smashed into. It looked like the already junk-filled and dilapidated room had been subjected to a tornado simulation.

Tears were streaming from her eyes in grief and anger, and the repeated pain was helping them along. But those eyes were wide open in a desperate attempt to keep her vision clear. And they were glaring and crying and aching and screaming in shades of dark crimson-violet. That in itself was surreal and more than a bit unsettling.

Diana leaped from the floor to grab for a long-forgotten fragment of metal, possibly from an I-beam, that was lying by an overturned table not far away. Zack saw her jump. He marked her trajectory, velocity, and intended target. He tracked Ten rolling up into a kneeling position way too fast. He saw the other man's arm shoot out with concentrated precision. For a moment he almost thought Di's trailing leg would slip through her opponent's grasp—but then part of her was hauled back forcibly and he saw her foot twist unnaturally.

He also saw the dark mass by the window start to shift. And then it exploded into full-throttle motion.

Diana crashed to the debris-littered floor, one leg crumpled under her and an arm outstretched. She heard motion, felt it, and really didn't care, even when there came a scream from someone behind her in the room and the hand gripping her now throbbing foot relinquished its hold on her. Her neck twisted uncomfortably, she stared straight ahead, between the remains of the back of a chair and a shattered picture frame that hadn't seen its glass plate in years.

Come to notice, her hand was bleeding from having landed on some of the fractured metal.

She didn't move, even when one of the three men in the room stumbled and nearly crushed her leg. Her breath was shaky—it whooshed in and out in heavy gasping gusts. Her stressed veins felt like they would pulse straight out of her skin.

And she didn't budge, except for her breathing and the pounding of her heart.

She couldn't.


When the body smashed through the window above her head, her eyes snapped to find the sound only to reflexively squeeze shut to the torrent of falling glass.

Then suddenly she was scooped up off the ground. She hardly reacted; and maybe it was her instinct telling her that she was meant no harm, but she found herself just not even caring anymore regardless.

Someone leapt smoothly through the shattered window, and Diana could feel the man holding her holding his own breath. A moment later the other landed lightly inside the room and spoke one word:

"Dead."

Diana gasped audibly and opened her half-lidded eyes fully, staring into Zack's face.

He looked down at her in careful concern. "It's okay now, Di. He's gone. How are you doing?"

She blinked slowly. "I… Where is he?" she asked dully.

Zack and Five exchanged apprehensive, vaguely confused looks. "Diana?" Five ventured. Her head turned towards him. "He's not coming back." He stood aside and pointed wordlessly out the window, where Ten's body lay on the ground outside.

"Are…you sure?" Diana asked after a heavy pause, during which she stared with rather alarming intensity at the corpse.

"I checked his pulse, his breathing, everything," Five stated pragmatically. "Even our kind can't live through that kind of blood loss, regardless of the other…damage."

"…Oh." She blinked twice more, and finally twisted her cramped neck to look straight into Zack's eyes.

It only took two point three seconds for her to throw her arms around his neck and bury her face in his shoulder. Only one hiccupping sob escaped her, but she didn't spend another tear. And exactly fifty-three point two eight seconds later she raised her eyes to his again. Another second and a half and the sounds of running footsteps reached the six ears in the room.

Zack stared into Diana's eyes, trying desperately to decode what she was feeling, what he could possibly do. There was still a fight to be fought, and if he knew anything at all about psychological warfare, Diana had just died about three theoretical deaths and was in no condition to risk an actual one.

A thin ring of violet bordered by a weathered, bronze-gold frame was slowly being overtaken by a sea of green. Zack's own indigo eyes widened because he certainly knew what that one meant. My gods, I don't believe it...

"So—" Diana rasped, and coughed a few times. Zack set her down carefully and she, incredibly, reached down and dusted herself off. She glared at them both suddenly, and both men drew back mentally and looked vaguely terrified.

"Well? !" she demanded, her voice still scratchy but no less vehement. "Are we gonna raise some hell or what?"

"Hey! Remember the last time we referenced raising hell?" Zack blurted out nervously, his borderline ADHD taking over his vocal chords temporarily.

To his amazement, the brunette threw back her head and laughed. "Forget Summons; that was cake compared to today!"

"Not to be the downer here, but are you actually doing alright? I mean, not to highlight the whole you-just-had-a-fight-to-the-death-in-a-questionable-mental-state thing, but, uh…" Five intervened, finally speaking.

"Am I alright?" Diana barked another laugh. "On one hand, hell no. On the other, though…" She grinned and it was positively evil. "This is where the retribution starts. No way in hell am I passing this up. Vengeance is way too sweet. Oh, and Zack—" she began another thought offhandedly, and suddenly her gaze intensified frighteningly— "duck."

Zack was a smart guy. He flung himself to the floor as Diana and Five each dove to their respective sides, away from the window. And it wasn't a moment too soon, because a somewhat large knife buried itself several inches deep in the wood of the window frame.

"Come to join the party?" Zack exclaimed joyfully, exploding up off the floor and heading straight for the two heavily armed men in the doorway.

Five copied him. "This is your idea of a party?"

The two entering men were so surprised at this evidence that their ex-comrade was in fact exactly that, a traitor to his kind—just as they had been informed over their radios not too long ago by Ten, the leader of this operation—that they didn't even see Diana coming in from the right until she was practically on top of the first of them, yelling, "What, you aren't having fun? !"

"There are more!" Zack hollered unnecessarily, hurling a small table at the doorway once Diana had body-slammed into her target, carrying them both several yards out of the flight path of the unfortunate piece of furniture. One of the now three men who had just entered the room knocked it into splinters with a terrifyingly simple backhand motion.

Zack tossed his head and rolled his eyes, not reacting visibly at all to Five tearing across the room to deliver a kick to the kidney of the man who was trying to smother Diana with an old rug. "Please," he scoffed, regarding the three on the threshold with disdain. "I've been doing that since I was twelve."

Right on cue, Diana whirled and threw her opponent across the room, inches from the other enemies' noses. In the instant it took for their eyes to track their comrade's unexpected movement, Zack was suddenly in their faces, and he was armed with half a chair.

Five went after the last one into the room and helped Zack to hold off the other two while Diana yelled and charged her opponent, who was up again already. Diana's arm was grasped and she was hurled to the floor, but she turned on one knee and head-butted the man in the stomach. When he stumbled backwards and bent over for just a moment, she grabbed a vaguely geometrically shaped object that she spotted out of the corner of her eye and threw it straight at him. By reflex, as he looked up he automatically caught the basket with both hands, and after staring at it for just an instant, he realized what was happening just in time to reach for his gun but lost consciousness as Diana's knee smashed into his temple.

Meanwhile, Five and Zack were enjoying a game of human bowling.

"'Let's dance'?" Five inquired dryly, quoting his new comrade as he ducked a punch and tried to knock one of the men's feet from under him.

"Yeah!" Zack grabbed the wrists of a second opponent and spun around a full five hundred forty degrees to whack him straight into the third man. The two made very pained-sounding choking noises and collapsed in a pile as Five took a hit from a jammed machine gun (which was apparently now being used as a battering ram) and grimaced. One of the two on the floor was making grabs for Zack's ankles, and he danced away, nearly giggling, until one of the larger wayward pieces of smashed furniture got in his way. He only tripped up for an instant, but that was enough for him to be pulled to the floor, and the enemy jumped on him to send them both rolling painfully across the debris-strewn floor amid the flash of knives.

"Hey, guys!" came a shout. Immediately, a dully gleaming candelabrum buried itself with a thud and a faint ringing noise in the wooden floor right next to the head of the enemy that was still down at the moment but unengaged. His eyes widened and, had he been any ordinary man, his expression would have been one of terror as Diana grinned aggressively in his direction. "Extra points for creativity."

With that, she lunged forward into the space that had been hastily vacated by her enemy and wrenched the candelabrum out of the floor just in time to lock it into the barrel of the pistol he pulled out. They fought against each other for control, sweat beads breaking out on their temples and between their fingers, until a shot was finally released into the ceiling. The shell dropped to the floor and the noise was lost as her opponent smashed a steel-toed kick into Diana's shin. She swore loudly in her head as he proceeded to lose some of his balance and compensated by slamming his foot down on top of hers—the one that already probably had a couple fractures—sinking them both down a few inches into the floor. Diana gritted her teeth and yanked down and in towards herself on the arm she was battling against, pulling her opponent off balance again for a second. She swung a leg around and leapt—not very accurately, but effectively—onto his back, squeezing hard with her thighs so that his sides were compressed painfully. Diana would have tried to get a better grip and use a move Tifa had taught her (this involved essentially choking the opponent with one's legs, twisting, and throwing said opponent to the ground) but instead she opted to grapple for the gun in his hand that would certainly cause bigger problems at this range. He yelped and, unfortinately, did the logical thing, turning and throwing himself back-first into the wall. Her breath whooshing out, she held on stubbornly, but when he did it again, she released her hold by reflex and dropped to the floor like a rock. There was a small window of opportunity when he moved away from the wall before turning to her, and she took it to kick at the backs of his knees. He crumpled just as she had and they sprang towards each other, him losing the gun and her still without her breath.

They rolled over a few times in a tangle of limbs, Diana finally stabbing him in the kidney with her heel in a maneuver that was not in any way orthodox. This got her halfway back to an upright position, but then he rose up and spun on one knee to backhand her across the face.

She nearly bit her own tongue off but yelled indignantly, "HEY! You don't slap a girl!"

"In this case I'm willing to make an exception!" he retorted, making another swing at her.


Across the room, Zack was simultaneously driving two people out of their minds.

"I thought SOLDIERs were supposed to be useless without their weapons!" one hissed at his comrade just before the latter suffered a blow to the head by the feet of a third ally, thrown by Five.

"True, my sword is pretty damn awesome," Zack put in conversationally. Then he grinned fiendishly. "But I've got a wicked pile driver!"


There was a reverberating, painful-sounding crash from Zack's end of the room as Diana nearly bent her wrist back the wrong way with an overestimated block. "Great, well if they weren't aware of this little situation before, they sure as hell are now!" she yelled, ducking a swing and whipping her leg up to hopefully break her opponent's jaw. But that was wishful thinking, since all it did was fling him into the wall ten feet away, spinning once in midair and making a splintered crater in said wall. When he came at her again, she ducked and flipped him over her back, slamming him to the floor as she jumped onto his stomach and tried to clap her cupped hands over his ears to rupture his eardrums. Instead he saw her arms coming and grabbed her wrists, arching his back to flip them both over so that Diana was robbed of her breath for the second time in the past three minutes. Pinned under him with a knee in her stomach, this time she really couldn't breathe and her brain began to panic slightly.

"HEY YOU!" someone hollered. It was Zack, quelle surprise. "THAT'S MY GIRL!"

Diana's hair actually whipped around her face in the slipstream from Zack's kick that swept up and under her opponent, following through way higher than the average male could and/or was willing to do.

The man broke through to the floor of the room above.

"More company!" Diana yelled as she shoved Zack out of the way so she could shove her left foot into the stomach of the guy that had just blown into the room. Unfortunately, he caught her foot.

Diana vividly remembered how she used to get out of this predicament when she and Devon would play fight with the other kids in town.

She jumped and landed on her right hand (she used to have to use both) picking her right foot up and bending her leg to get around the side and back of his legs, and then she snapped a kick straight into the backs of his knees, sending him crashing to the floor like a rug had just been pulled from beneath him.

Not a fraction of a second later he was up again and appeared to be going to a straight-on tackle maneuver. Diana was going to headbutt him in the stomach, but just then Five bellowed, "DUCK!"

And in this kind of situation, when someone says "duck," you aren't just kind of bending over to avoid, say, a pillow thrown across the room.

No, you freaking duck like your life depends on it. Which, in context, well…

Diana did just that to get out of reach of her attacker and flung herself to the ground in the same movement. She wasn't a moment too soon, because someone must have had explosives on them, considering the fact that the ceiling fan had just exploded and all the parts been flung in all directions, including a significant amount of broken imitation glass.

Looking around, Diana realized that her opponent hadn't gotten the memo fast enough and had been bowled over through one of two doorways to a second room by one of the blades of the fan. There was an open section above what looked to be a countertop in between the two doors, and before he could get back on his feet properly, Diana launched herself neatly through said opening. At first she was about to shout triumphantly, but then felt the need to swear violently as she realized he'd actually caught the damn thing and was cocking back to swing and use her as a baseball.

So, naturally, she grabbed the first shiny object that she saw on the countertop that was crammed with Gaia-only-knew-what. And shiny was a relative term, seeing as how everything in these houses seemed to carry a layer of dust and grime three millimeters thick, minimum. She swung too, one-handed, and was pleasantly surprised when the top half of the fiberglass fan blade came splintering right off.

A second later she realized that she was brandishing a frying pan. She shrugged mentally. Go with the flow.

"How many more of them are there gonna be?" Zack yelled in Five's general direction as he broke a table lamp over the head of one enemy and performed a one-handed handspring backwards to slam his feet into the kidneys of another.

"Well, accounting for all eleven of them," Five wheezed after a few seconds, having taken a hard blow to the midsection, probably the most abused part of him after his encounter with Ten. He had at least six broken ribs and was lucky that the probable internal bleeding hadn't penetrated his lungs. "Diana got Eight and two others, then there's Ten—hah!" he shouted in satisfaction as he rebounded off the wall and got several well-placed jabs in— "There are five in here, pardon the pun—that makes, uh, nine—so I figure two—are still patrolling and haven't gotten the message yeeeeeet!" He yelped and ducked as a projectile came flying from a side room that he hadn't paid much attention to.

"TAKE THAT YOU MOTHER-EFFING SONOFABEHEMOTH—"

Based on the noise, its origin was Diana.

She nearly snapped her spine slamming backwards into a counter, and used her momentum to do a backwards kick-over with her arms bent back and her hands on the solid surface. However, she may or may not have temporarily forgotten the restrictions implicated by a standard eight-foot ceiling. The counter was three and a half feet high, and with her arms extended Diana took up more or less seven feet in length.

When totaled, that is much more than eight.

Her knees met the ceiling and she went crashing down the wrong way, all the way to the floor. She could have broken her attacker's neck just by landing on him if he hadn't had superhuman reflexes, but, you gain some, you lose some. She rolled and scooped up a handful of nasty-looking dust and dirt as a knife struck the floor where her throat had been, tossing it into her opponent's face.

Was it a dirty trick? Puns aside, yes, absolutely. Was it necessary and proper? Well…maybe not so proper, but it was necessary, anyway.

She grabbed the frying pan from where it had landed and rained blows down on him but he finally cut under her attack, snapping her head back with his elbow. The next thing she knew, she was about to launch a kick but suddenly found herself airborne.

Five ducked for the third time in the past few minutes. Splinters of wood were flying everywhere, and Diana was lying on the floor of the main room beneath a Diana-sized hole in the strip of wall between one of the doorways to the side room and the window-like opening in the middle. Ooh. That doesn't look like it felt good. What remained of the structure shuddered and collapsed, and a cabinet fell noisily to the floor, its contents smashing instantly.

Diana's opponent flew through the significantly widened space just in time for Diana to stab the frying pan into his stomach and lever him over her from her position on the floor. Her ribs felt like they were going to come out of her front and she vaguely wondered if she could stab someone with one if it decided to come off. Then she twisted and followed him down, grabbing his collar, planting her feet on his midsection, and slamming him against the floor, hopefully breaking something important. She released her hold quickly and kept moving through the air, hoping he wouldn't be mobile enough to grab her trailing leg. However, she was fairly sure he'd managed to cut her side with a knife or something similar as she had grabbed him.

As it turned out, he wasn't going to make another move to attack, because when Diana turned to briefly look at him, he was out cold but still breathing.

"WATCH IT—" someone shouted.

"Wha—?" Diana began to ask stupidly before a fist filled her vision and her head snapped back. As she stumbled and fell, she went with it and rolled into a backward somersault, springing up with the intention of hitting the offender where it hurt. "SONOFABITCH!"

She slammed an uppercut straight under his jaw, sending him up into the ceiling and back down to earth, where he kicked a pile of dirt and grime into Diana's face. She spluttered, and when he came at her again, brandishing a gun, she spat it right back in his face, mixed in with a nice amount of the blood that was now flowing freely from her broken nose.

"That's why ya don't spit into the wind, man!" Zack supplied from across the room as he danced around the enemy that appeared to be trying to get him into a headlock and shoot him at the same time. The gunshots were distracting Diana and she had to constantly check to make sure she wasn't being fired at as well, even if inadvertently.

Okay, now her opponent was shooting blindly in her general direction. Not okay. She swore as she swerved wildly out of the way, because she felt a bullet carve out a trail of flesh at the back of her ribcage all the same. She absently hoped it didn't lodge, but she was more focused on the sentiment that she hated guns being fired at close range. It was like cheating, and it was reckless and either an easy way out or an easy way to hit something, or someone, that you really didn't want to. It wasn't likely that these guys cared either way.

Now, Diana had a rule regarding males and the place where it hurts to be hit. A personal rule that she'd formulated years ago. After seeing her brother get hit there by accident too many times, she had decided not to go for a blow that low (literally) unless the motivation was tantamount to her being attacked in a dark alleyway.

So she figured this was pretty close and therefore justified.

She kicked up between his legs, which launched him clear across the room and straight into Five's arms, where he was promptly struck on the temple with the butt end of a pair of iron fire tongs and knocked unconscious.

"This is ridiculous!" Zack yelled as he swung with an umbrella that was falling to pieces to propel another opponent towards Diana.

She hooked her arms around one of his as soon as he was within range and flipped him clear over her. Her left shoulder joint had popped oddly as she moved; one of the side effects of being able to execute actions so fast was that one could quite literally overdo it. The maneuver was harder to pull off than it looked: she had to step to the left since his leading arm was his left; her right arm went over his forearm and her left behind his upper arm; and she had to shove up, out, and in the direction of his momentum to flip his body all the way over hers. It made a wicked wrestling move most of the time, but while Diana was successful, her shoulder didn't just shift and click back into its proper place like it should when the joint popped.

The ceiling was a minor obstacle for his feet and most of the rest of his lower body, but he still managed to fling a knife her way and leave her with a formidable scratch down her arm. "You're telling me!" she yelled, going after the enemy to make sure he stayed down, keeping her left arm out of things.


Two minutes later, when the last of the enemies fell from the ceiling to the floor, unconscious, Five collapsed.

"Hey!" Diana yelped, running unevenly over to him, heedless of her throbbing foot. "Nope. Nooooo no no don't you dare pass out. You're too fat for me to carry," she attempted to joke as she coughed a couple times, feeling his pulse and helping him to stay sitting upright.

"You've both been under way too much stress. Let's just get as far away from here as we can," Zack declared, sweeping some broken glass out of Five's way. "What part of you feels the worst?"

"Head, I guess," slurred Five. The battle with Ten had taken its toll on him and he most likely had a grade three concussion.

"Um, it's kinda between foot and ribs right now." Diana would have shrugged, but, well, there was that pesky shoulder to think about, too. "You?"

"Stomach, kidneys—whatever's in there. Come on, let's go." Zack hoisted Five up off the floor and gave him to Diana on her right side. He strode toward the now considerably enlarged window, trying to make as clear a path through as he could.

"Er, Zack?" Diana jabbed a thumb over her shoulder. "Door?"

"I, uh…may or may not have collapsed it." Zack rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly.

"Why am I not surprised?" Diana sighed. "Okay, Five, now use my arm, don't jostle your skull around…"


"Gah! I'm not getting any signal," Zack ground out in frustration, frantically punching out various codes into his PHS. "C'mon, there's gotta be a tower somewhere around here… See, this is the kind of thing I've got to get Seph to bring up with the President—"

Diana imitated the decidedly unlikeable aging man: "Well, whaddaya need consistent PHS service for down there? You think those slum dogs have the means to communicate? No, ha ha, we don't need that—"

"Not unless there's some actual goddamn emergency!" Zack fumed. But the buildings were beginning to look more inhabitated, if still shabby. "Jeez, finally; marks of some civilization. Maybe we can…"

But he trailed off when he saw a figure keeled over, slumped against the side of a doorway. The person was male, disheveled and clothed in lots of grime-covered black with a hood that partially obscured his face.

Diana readjusted her grip on the semiconscious Five. She walked over to the limp body cautiously, giving him a tap on the shoulder before checking for a pulse. "He's gone. No blood or anything that says it was an external cause, but he's awfully skinny… Man. Poor guy."

Zack hesitated slightly, though he didn't know why. Then he shook himself. "Yeah. Homeless, probably. That's the slums for you, though, I guess. It's too bad. Come on, it can't be far from here." He knocked briefly but hard on the door of the building the man was motionlessly propped up against, hoping that the residents had a way to contact someone about the body, and the trio continued onwards.


When the three battered and bloody mako-eyed people had passed up the street and almost out of view, one of the inhabitants of that very building opened the door slowly, gasped, and called for someone inside the house. In a matter of seconds the pair had determined that the pale, emaciated man was recently deceased. One went to call the police on the landline.

They didn't take any notice of the dog tags around his neck: one with a numerical and alphabetical series carved into it…and the other inscribed with the number four.

A/N: Yeah, so, have a fight scene! It was so entertaining to plot out and write, I gotta say :P The song "Derezzed" by Daft Punk from the Tron soundtrack is pretty awesome, I had it playing on repeat the majority of the time haha! Poor Five, though...8( You have to remember that while they're all walking around and helping each other and stuff, they've all got broken bones and everything else, and would be in debilitating amounts of pain were they not running on adrenaline and survival instincts. And yes, Ten really is very much dead. Their boss ain't gonna be happy xD Take that, you sucker. (I'm not spoiling anything, but trust me on this one, he/she isn't exactly a bucket of warm and fuzzy feelings.)

And this mysterious dead man... anyone catch onto that? And if you did, then what does that mean large-scale for our three friends? Reviews/guesses are wicked awesome! :D All will be revealed... Next time: they all hurt a lot, Zack and Tifa yell a lot, Genesis and Aerith panic a lot, Cloud gets headaches a lot, Max and Shane unintentionally help a lot, and Diana links a lot together. And the update shall not be far off! 'Til then. :)