Cid leaves the cabin after an hour or two spent trying to sleep. It's been fairly pointless; between the whole, Mideel thing, and resting his broken ribs from the punt that fucking WEAPON gave before it fled, and the rush of getting Cloud back and then Cait telling them about Junon, he's just – he can't sleep. Giving up, he wriggles into his trousers, doesn't bother doing them up, doesn't bother putting his boots on, doesn't bother with his jacket, just grabs his cigarettes and his lighter and slides the door enough to get through the gap. It's the same as always out here, artificial lighting and engine-warm metal. It's cooler than usual beneath his toes as he pads to the stairs and hauls himself up them, but he doesn't mind too much. It's a little jolt to the system, but it's enough to give him his wits back, and he doesn't mind that, can't mind that. He needs his wits. He's not slept in the better part of forty-eight hours, but all he's got is this. The midnight sky and the hum of the propellers working their way up through the struts.

He minds more about getting air. He's choked inside, the thought of what he did and didn't do, what he should have said at the Fort, what he shouldn't have corrected, it's choking him.

And so he needs air.

It hits him like a brick wall when he opens the hatch, and his eyes sting for a second, two, until he's blinked enough to adjust to it, and then he slips through and closes it behind him, shuts himself off from the others. Out here, it's just him and the air, and he can deal with that. He can probably scream in peace and not be heard.

At least, that's what he'd thought, but when he rounds the corner to get onto the deck, he finds Tifa stood at the railing, elbows on the bar and chin on her hands, one ankle crossed behind the other. She's statuesque, in a way he'd never really thought about. The man he'd been a decade ago, high on his status as a poster boy, he'd have not hesitated for a second in giving her a one-liner or two, all smooth come-ons and offers of cigarettes and drinks and his military wage for the night. He's not ashamed of his past, because who he was at twenty was a very different man to who he is now at thirty-two. He's still an absolute arsehole, and he knows it, but at least he's not a scumbag about it. But that was then, and this is now, and all he can really think is that's she's so fucking young. She's only just twenty, the way that you say your daughter's only just finished school, and he won't insult himself, or her, by saying that he feels protective, paternal. He's not that old, not yet. But he's definitely ready to swing for anyone who looks at her funny, never mind that she's faster than him on any given day, and just as liable to swing.

Then again, he heard about the kind of shit she used to get up to with Aerith, in those initial days where their only concern was the nonsense ShinRa were doing. Chairs, he'd heard, had been involved at one point, and he misses Aerith. He'll admit it when he's ready to go to his grave, but he misses her.

'Hey,' he says, to shake the emptiness off his shoulders, and comes to stand next to her. 'Can't sleep?'

Tifa shakes her head, and gets a handful of hair in her face for her trouble. She sweeps it aside, a long brush of her fingers, and she wrinkles her lips before turning her gaze to her shoes.

'No. There's – too much to think about.'

'It'll be alright,' he says, and cups a hand around his lighter, flicking it into some small measure of life, 'whatever you're thinking about, it'll be alright.'

She hums, and straightens, leaning on the heels of her hands instead of her elbows, and looks out over the horizon, reddened by Meteor, and dark with the shadow of the night. At the furthest Cid's eyes can see, a black mass on the horizon floats aimlessly against the shadow of a cloud. Ultimate Weapon, he reckons, or so Red called it, when it had fled the fight and they were picking their way through the rubble of Mideel.

They'd been searching for Cloud, but Cid, with a clawing desperation he'd not felt in his life before, had been looking for the Doctor and his wife, hoping that they'd survived the destruction. They had, of course they had, because the Planet was not so cruel as to give Shera such sadness at the end of everything.

Deep down, Cid thinks that this is a fair thing to feel, the end of everything. He doesn't see a way to stop it, Meteor. Sephiroth. Any of it. It's an inevitable sort of fate, and he's – he's terrified of it.

He takes a drag of his cigarette, and exhales it hard into the breeze, watching it dissipate in a second, lost in the whisper of the wind as they soar through the night, towards Junon.

'I don't know how you do it,' Tifa murmurs, and he grunts.

'Fuck you on about?'

'Your feelings,' she says, 'for Shera. You have such a good hold on them, and I don't – I don't understand how you do it.'

He nearly inhales his cigarette, and manages to choke out something resembling a laugh.

'Fuck sake, kid,' he snorts, and wipes his face with a hand. 'Warn a guy next time.'

Tifa huffs a breath through her nose; it could be a laugh.

'Sorry,' she says, 'but my point stands.'

'What the fuck makes you think I have a handle on it?' he asks her, because he – he – he doesn't see the point in denying it.

She shrugs.

'You look like you've got it under control,' she says, 'you don't – it feels like it – like it's – it's there – and I can't get away from it. It's just. Stuck. At the front of my brain, where I can't turn it off, or turn away from it.'

He wrinkles his nose, looks at her, with her eyes so sad and her lip between her teeth. She's so fucking young.

'Fuck you on about?' he asks again, because he feels lost. 'You saying you're in love with Shera? The fuck you wanna go and do that for? She certainly ain't worth losing sleep over.'

Says he, like he's not here because of precisely that.

At this, she laughs, a really big belly laugh that borders on hysteria. He lets her laugh it out. If he thought she'd take it, he'd offer her the cigarette. Instead, he waits until she's done and is wiping tears out of her eyes.

'No,' she says, 'not Shera. Even if I was – she's – well, she's yours. And I'm not a homewrecker.'

'Ain't nobody able to wreck my home quite like Shera does when she cleans,' Cid replies, like he's a sage dispensing wisdom. 'Then – who are you – oh.'

He feels stupid for having even started to ask the question. There's only one person that it could possibly be, and he knows exactly who it is.

'Listen,' he says, and knows what a jackass he is, but he's going to do it anyway, 'I know I'm fantastic and I got a great arse, but I'm too old for you, kiddo. My poor life choices are going to get me before we have a chance to start anything.'

At this, Tifa tears up a little, behind the smile she gives him, because she's overtired, and she's been working herself to the bone, and Cid lifts an arm obligingly, not protesting when she tucks herself under it, her face in her hands, pressed up against his collar.

'How do you do it?' she asks, sobs.

He stubs the cigarette out on the railing and flicks it into the nothingness of the black sky beneath them, rests his hand on the back of her head.

'I don't,' he admits, soft into her hair. 'I really fuckin' don't. I don't know where you got this idea that I'm handling shit, Tifa, I really fucking don't. 'Cause I ain't handling shit. Listen, I – I – I ain't gonna deny. I love her. I love her so fucking much and I ain't said shit about it to her. I ain't breathed hide nor hair of a word about it, and she don't know, and we might fucking die, and she ain't gonna know. I've been – I've denied it. I spent most of my time knowing her denying it. She's – fuck sake, she's it for me, yanno? And I – haven't told her.'

Tifa lifts her head, looks at him.

'What do you mean, you haven't told her? I thought she knew. Cloud said – He said.'

She can't finish it, but Cid shrugs, and Tifa pulls herself away, close enough to still be touching at the elbow, but enough of a distance that he doesn't have to feel like he's holding her any more.

'He says a lot of shit,' he says, 'and he assumed we were married when we first met, 'cause that's just the way it looks. A man and a woman living in a house? Course they're married, can't just be living in the same house, 'cause she's a pain in his arse and cost him everything.'

Tifa's eyebrows crease, and then she opens her mouth, closes it again.

'I suppose so,' she says, because she was living by herself with a revolving door of men coming in and out of her door. Okay, they were AVALANCHE, but even so.

'And – listen, don't get me wrong. I want to marry her. Fuck sake, I'd have married her by now if I thought for a second I could do it. I'd have done it the day we fucking met. But I – I couldn't. And now, 'cause of the – the rocket, and all the other shit that's gone on. I just – '

'You haven't told her,' Tifa says again, frowning at her fingertips. 'Cid, you need to tell her.'

'And have you told Cloud?' Cid cuts back.

At the shake of her head, because of course she hasn't told him, he snorts, and leans on the railing, fiddles with his lighter, but doesn't light another cigarette.

'You should,' he says, 'kid's gone on you. He's too much of a coward to say anything, but we all seen the way he looks at you.'

Tifa flushes, and then shakes her head. 'I couldn't.'

'Then don't tell me to,' he replies. 'I'll tell Shera that I want to spend the rest of my life with her and would rather die than be away from her like this again, when you tell Cloud you want to jump his bones.'

'I do not!' Tifa protests, but her cheeks are pink, and Cid snorts.

'Whatever you say, kiddo.'

Tifa purses her lips again, and picks at her fingernails.

'Cid,' she starts, and then hesitates.

'Yeah?'

'How did you know you were in love with Shera?' she asks, and he shrugs.

'Didn't,' he says, 'I mean. I knew. But I never really put a name to it. Just one of those things. She was always there, so I was always in love with her, but I never really bothered to do anything about it. And now – I don't know. Too late, I guess.'

Tifa looks at him, all wide copper eyes and thick, fluttering lashes, and he shrugs.

'It's never too late,' she says, 'they always say, better late than never.'

'You ain't behaved the way I did,' he tells her, 'I've been – wretched.'

'Then apologise,' she says, like it's that easy.

For another man, maybe.

But Cid is not another man, and he cannot just apologise. It's going to take more than an apology to undo the things he said and did.

'You should try and rest,' he says instead, because answering her will open more of a can of worms than he already has, and fighting the Zolom is not on his to-do list. 'We've got a busy day tomorrow.'

'We never stop,' she replies with a sad little quirk of her lips, which could be a smile, if he was inclined to believe it. She rubs her eye, and nods. 'I suppose you're right. Goodnight, Cid.'

And with that, he's alone on the deck, staring at Ultimate Weapon, floating on the horizon like a particularly large bird catching a breeze.

He thinks about what she said, and what he said, and what he should have said and done, and he smokes half a pack. The dawn comes and they arrive at Junon, and then he has to put all of these thoughts aside, because he's got a job to do, and there's no rest for the wicked.

In a move he did not expect, Cloud is claustrophobic. Yuffie, he understands. Cloud, not so much. But the boy is shaking and his eyes are wild, like a trapped animal, and Cid almost feels for him. Yuffie's already thrown up once, which is fair, and he doesn't know why, when they realised that they were going to be going underground and underwater, and in the confined space of a sub, he doesn't know why she insisted on coming. Really, someone with some stable braincells would have been useful. But Tifa had been looking pensive and had gnawed a chunk out of her thumbnail, which mean that Barret had closed rank around her, and the others had just made sort of vague noises. And so it was up to Cid and Yuffie again, pottering along with Cloud to make sure he didn't make a jackass out of himself. It's almost funny.

'Shift,' he says, because Cloud's looking too green to be any use now, 'I'll do it.'

He's already made the commander of the sub scream through his teeth by kicking the main console, so what's the harm in taking over piloting it? It can't be that hard; he managed the train at Corel, and he's yet to encounter a car he can't drive, and he's flown several aircraft, so it's not like it should be hard.

And once he gets his brain around the inverted Y-axis, it's easy enough. He does his best not to make Cloud or Yuffie sick, but it's hard to think about them when he's got a mission in mind.

The commander says that they have about ten minutes before the sub carrying the Huge Materia is out of their range, and Cid takes nearly three of those minutes doing his best to navigate the crooked terrain of the underwater crags and rocks. So then, they have minimal amount of fucking around to do, and maximum amount of getting the fuck on with it.

In some small way, in a way he hadn't expected to be small and yet not entirely inconsequential, it's like being back in the biplane, during the war. He's got readouts instead of visual, but the radar's not changed in ten years, and the tightness between his shoulders as he squeezes the side-sticks tight is familiar. It's been a long time since he last felt that kind of familiarity, that low thump of his brain behind his eyes, the pressure of doing it right, of succeeding, of victory. It's been a long while.

There's no trigger on the back of the side-stick in his right hand, but his finger twitches anyway. No, this time it's a button beneath the side-stick, on the console itself, helpfully painted red. The commader's eyes are boring into the back of his head.

'I know you,' he says, and Cid grunts.

'Been on the news, ain't I?' he dismisses, and banks the sub around a jutting rock, gets a blip to announce that the target is back in range.

'No, from before that. You – I saw you somewhere, during the war.'

'Quite probably. My face was all over the media, and – I doubt you saw me on the ground. I never left my plane, if I could help it.'

He glances over his shoulder, looks at the commander, and tries to make some sense of the man, tries to place his face. But Cid has seen a lot of faces in his lifetime, and they were all wearing helmets, one way or another, and faces are less recognisable than voices. He doesn't know the commander's voice, but that's not to say he's never met the man before.

The commander spends a second considering this, and Cid returns to the readouts. Cloud is doing his best to help, but all he's doing is distracting, so Cid tunes him out.

Cid pushes one of the sticks, speeds them up a little bit, and brings the blip of the other sub closer and closer, until the reticule flashes up to indicate that they're now in range.

'You were one of the first up,' the commander says, and Cid heaves a breath.

'Can we fucking not?' he asks.

Yuffie throws up somewhere behind him. One of the soldiers, who'd been so desperate to do their finishing move on being imprisoned, cries out and tries to wriggle away. The commander sniffs. Cloud gags, but thankfully doesn't throw up.

'No, no,' the commander says, and Cid can feel the creak of his knuckles around the side-sticks. 'No, you were one of the first up there, and you were – you lot were lethal. More casualties from you lot than there were from the enemy.'

'Shut thefuck up,' Cid snaps, and slams his fist into the red button, because the reticule is demanding he fire, and the rattle of the submarine, and the ripple from the collision with the other sub shuts everyone up for a moment.

Then an automated voice says, 'target destroyed,' and that's the end of that.

Cid finds the controls for the claws, and scoops the Huge Materia out of the rubble, and is about to pull them to the surface when a crackle comes over the radio.

'ShinRa Two, do you copy?'

The three of them look at each other, and then look at the Commander.

'You'd better answer,' is all he says, because he's apparently an absolute asshole.

Cloud is the closest to the radio, and so hits the button.

'This is ShinRa Two,' he says, 'everything is normal.'

'Good,' comes the voice over the radio. 'We've heard word that AVALANCHE have hijacked one of the subs, but we only lost contact with ShinRa One.'

'Is that the one that got destroyed just?' Cloud asks, because he's bold as brass, apparently. 'We didn't see who fired.'

'It was,' comes the voice on the radio. 'We need you to pick up the Huge Materia before AVALANCHE get it, and return to the Airport. We're taking it to Rocket Town as soon as you get to the surface.'

'Rocket Town?' Cid chokes out, and Cloud turns to look at him, half stricken, half with the wide eyes of someone begging for you to shut your fucking mouth.

'Yes, sir,' Cloud says, 'we'll be as soon as we can.'

He hits the button to disable the radio, and then swears. Cid swears along with him. Yuffie groans.

'They're going to use the rocket to launch the Huge Materia,' Cid says, 'that's the only possible reason they can be going there. They're going to use my fucking rocket to blow up Meteor! Fucking idiots, there's no way it'll work.'

'We have three of the Huge Materia,' Cloud says, 'they must know we have two of them by now, and they don't know we have the third. They're going to try and launch it with two.'

'It won't be enough,' Cid sighs, and leans back in the seat. He rubs his eyes. 'Fuck sake, Shera.'

Cloud chews his lip, and then shrugs.

'We'd better get topside,' he says, and rifles in his pockets for his PHS. Looking at it he says, 'if we can get the Highwind close enough, we should be able to avoid Junon entirely, right?'

Cid shrugs, and pulls one of the side-sticks back, and the sub begins to ascend. 'Fuck knows. Worth a shot.'

He can't think, his focus is totally shaken. All he can think about is that he hasn't spoken to Shera for a week, and he should have called her, and he should have told her that he loves her, and fucking ShinRa are in the town, and it's his town, and he was meant to keep them safe, and for fuck sake!

They break the surface, and the commander helpfully opens the hatch to get some air in, and before he's sat back down, because he's very accommodating, as prisoners go, everyone's PHS rings at once.

Cloud gets Tifa, who is trying to help direct the Highwind to their location, but she's been unable to get through on the PHS to know where they are, and that's nice of her. Yuffie gets Cait Sith, who'd been trying Cid's PHS for ten minutes to tell him that ShinRa are in Rocket Town and that they're heading for the Rocket, and Cid gets this information from Yuffie ten seconds before he answers the phone to a fraught Shera, and he tries, he fucking tries to tell her that he loves her. He tries his best, but the line goes dead, and he stares at his PHS for a second.

'The fuck is that shit?' he asks, but the PHS just beeps and the screen goes dark.

Right. Okay.

'We need to move,' Cloud says, because Cloud is helpful like that.

Cid nods, teeth gritted tight, and then he exhales hard, stretches his neck.

'Get on top of the sub,' he says, 'it'll be stable enough.'

He boosts Yuffie out first, and then Cloud, and hauls himself up behind them, ignores the three soldiers still inside, because they'll be able to steer the sub back to the port. They're in the middle of the fucking ocean, and there's nothing they can do for now, nothing except watch the Highwind come in close. Barret, a shadow against the sun, throws the rope ladder over the side for them. Cid holds it steady and makes sure Cloud and Yuffie are most of the way up before he swings himself onto it.

As soon as his feet hit the deck, he's slamming through the door and down into the belly of the ship, jumping off the stairs and across the gangway to get to the cockpit. Tifa, halfway through the door when he crashes into the grille, startles.

'You have to stop jumping like that,' she says, 'it's bad enough when Cloud does it.'

'I don't have time,' he replies, and does his best not to rudely shove past her, catches her shoulder in a hand to steady her.

'Time?' she echoes, but he's already got a cigarette lit and filter chewed into before she's turned to look at him.

'Outta the way,' he tells the pilot, a little ruder than he needs to, because he's not thinking about politeness, not really.

He's doing his best, but he's got other concerns, namely Shera, and her safety, and the safety of everyone else in that fucking shithole town he calls home. ShinRa are there, and he – he – he can't afford to lose the little family he's managed to gather there.

'Captain?' the pilot asks, but Cid yanks on the yoke and turns the ship around on an axis that's far tighter than she's meant to turn on.

'We're going to Junon,' he hollers, 'I need full power, and I need absolutely no fucking around. Either help, or fuck off, those are your choices.'

Vincent, stood in the pit with his arms folded, climbs the steps.

'Cait told us that there was a ShinRa presence at Rocket Town,' he says, and Cid snorts.

'Presence,' he chokes out, and nearly chokes on the smoke of his cigarette when he inhales instead of exhales. 'Fucking overrun is what they've done. Locked my fucking town down, fucking assholes. I'll fucking – I'll – '

Tifa, out of nowhere, lays a hand on his arm. 'It's going to be alright,' she assures him, because she doesn't know what else to do, and the pithy comfort is just that.

But he accepts it, even if he's not listening to it. He's already in Rocket Town, and he's – he's –

'They aren't launching that fucking Rocket,' he says.

'Of course not,' Tifa replies, and politely steps back to let him concentrate.

He hears them, vaguely, over his shoulder, talking about Rocket Town, and coming up with something resembling a strategy, but it's all based on suppositions and possibilities of the events. They don't know what they're going to find when they get there. Cid doesn't care about the town itself, not really. He cares about the people, about their safety. Oh, they're rough enough to take on the base level of ShinRa, most of them were base level ShinRa troops at one point, most of them served in some capacity in the army, for however long they were needed. But he thinks of Shera, of how she can't lift a finger, of how, in those first days of him being gone, she'd been dragged around by her hair. He thinks about the fucking damage these fuckers could do to someone like her, more than they already have, and he –

He's livid.

His gloves creak around the leather of the yoke, and he shoves the lever a little harder, even though there's no power left to give the ship.

'I'm coming,' he says, to himself, to her, to the emptiness of the sky. 'Just a couple hours, hold on.'

It's a wonder the fucking town isn't on fire by the time Cid parks them up on the outskirts and they sprint to the gates. The Highwind promises to stand by, and provide aid only when they're called for. Cid thinks, most likely, they'll be needed for medical assistance; if Shera's managed to start a fight, he can count on Livas and John, and almost certainly Hawke and Grier, to have broken some bones.

Livas will be lucky he doesn't break his neck, the way he carries on.

But yes. There's screaming and hollering and even some hooting going on, and Cid skids to a halt in the square, about to grab the nearest person when he hears it.

'Cid!' Tifa yells, but he's already moving, following the sound of Shera fucking screaming past his house, past the shop, up along the path to the rocket.

Tifa slaps Cloud's arm, and they follow him. The others, wisely, perhaps, remain in the town, and take on the task of assisting the townsfolk, because any excuse to kick the snot out of ShinRa is an excuse Yuffie is happy to take. But that's all by-the-by, because Cid has not spent the last ten years building rockets and living with these assholes throwing spiders and water and snowballs to not know the sound of Shera screaming, and he's – he's – he's blinkered, and he knows he's blinkered, but that's all he's got. The sound of her terrified and he's got to do something.

He skids around the edge of the steps over the cable, nearly topples, but he can already feel the bubble of something beneath his skin, and he pushes onwards. As he hops over the cables, one, two, three, and comes around to where the stairs to the rocket are, he catches up, and Shera's doing her best to kick and scream and writhe, and he thinks good girl. She won't break free, never mind any of their bones, but she's giving it a good fucking go.

'Rude!' he roars, and the Turk turns back, an eyebrow raising behind his sunglasses.

'Oh,' Rude says, 'it's you.'

Shera turns in her skin, prompting one of the soldiers holding her arms to kick the back of her knee, but she barely seems to notice, focused more on getting herself around enough to look over her shoulder.

'Captain!' she shouts, and tries her best to yank herself free, and a crack nearly takes the wind out of him, but it's only the seam of her sweater.

He's close enough that he can see the black eye, purple and swollen and very fucking deliberate, and the bubbling under his skin is suddenly so much fucking worse, his blood boiling. He itches with it, and wants to tear his skin off, but he can't do that, so he's stuck.

'Who the fuck did that?' he demands, but Shera shakes her head, yanks again, only to get another kick to her knee that takes her off her feet.

Cid lurches forward, but she's back on her feet before he can do anything, and she kicks the trooper in the leg. It's nothing, really, but at least she tries.

'This is all very touching,' Rude says, and Tifa skids to a stop one side of Cid, Cloud the other.

They have their weapons ready, and Cid knows the bend of Tifa's knees well enough now to know she's going to spring and boot one of those soldiers in the face.

'Touching?' Cid laughs, and it's more of a bark than a laugh. 'When I find out who lay hands on her, yeah, it fucking will be.'

Rude pushes his glasses up his nose, and his mouth does something that's almost a smile.

'You talk a very loud talk,' Rude says, and comes back down the steps to pull his gloves tight on his fingers. 'But I have yet to see something to really suggest you are more than that.'

Tifa's gloves creak in turn, and Shera nearly breaks her arms trying to yank herself free.

'More than that,' Cid echoes, and Cloud breathes steadily next to him.

'Rude,' Cloud offers, because Cloud is, again, the de facto leader of the bunch of morons that they're shaping up to be, 'just be reasonable. Shera doesn't have anything you need, just let her go.'

Rude shakes his head, and it might be a chuckle that escapes his mouth, it might not be, it's gone too quickly to identify it properly.

'I'm afraid not,' he says. 'She has the launch codes. She changed them, and so we need her.'

Cid snorts. 'Are you fuckin' stupid? You think I don't know the launch codes to my fuckin' rocket? If I got the codes, you don't need her.'

'Give me the codes.'

'No.'

The word comes out of him so fast that he can't stop it, and it does him no good, this level of anger and rage and upset. It does him no good at all, but the boiling in his blood, the ants under his skin, the ripple of snakeskin in the sunlight, he knows that feeling now, can recognise it for what it is.

Rude adjusts his glove again, pulls it tight against his fingers. The leather creaks. 'Then I'll get it out of her.'

'You lay a fuckin' hand on her, and I'll –'

'You'll what, Captain? We have the upper hand here, we have a hostage, and we'll take the necessary steps to ensure your co-operation.'

'What steps?' Cloud asks, and his knuckles are very white around the hilt of his sword. 'You'll do what, Rude?'

Rude offers them a sympathetic look, even with his eyes covered with the sunglasses.

'Cloud, don't insult yourself,' he says, and his head turns, just enough, to betray that he's looking at Tifa. 'Take the engineer aboard,' he says then, 'I'll handle them.'

The soldiers nod, heels clicking, and start dragging Shera towards the stairs. She kicks and screams again, but her knees are clearly sore, and she's not able to get a grip with her heels to get her feet under her, so there's not much she can do. Her eyes lock with Cid's, and he's frozen for a second. Tifa isn't, and launches herself at them, but Rude is there before she can close the distance, and he takes her first punch straight to the chest with little more than a grunt. Then he shoves her, not unkindly, and Cid had not really thought about the Turks in any great detail for any length of time to realise that Rude being able to put Tifa on her ass several feet away without trying was a thing that was not only possible but likely, but there she is, toppling over herself before finding her feet again.

'Captain!' Shera shouts, and she's going to hurt herself if she tries to fight on the stairs, Planet knows she can do enough damage to herself under her own steam on those stairs. Cid's nearly brained himself on those stairs. He remembers the scrapes down the back of her thighs the last time she fell down them, how they'd taken a week to heal properly, and there's still a faint shadow of them now, half a decade later, when she catches the sun just right.

The dragon comes out of nowhere. He'd thought it was a one-off incident, a fever dream brought about by no sleep and too much time alone as he picked his way through the woods to get back to the house after parachuting into the wilderness. She'd come out of nowhere then, too, a coiling, burning serpent, fire in his blood and he's grateful, at least, that she doesn't seem to be fire-based, because she'd have burnt down the forest the way she went after the enemies. She comes out of nowhere now, too, coiling around his shoulders and searching his soul for the split second she needs before she blind-sides Rude, taking him off his feet far further than he'd managed to shove Tifa.

'The hell is that?' Cloud demands, sword still half in the air from where he'd been about to throw himself into battle.

'Fuck knows, dragon, ain't it?' Cid grunts and spins the spear, feels the bubble of heat in his muscles, taking the ache out, the way that it had the first time the dragon had appeared. It's not a lot, but it's enough to give him a second wind. He should call his mother, really, ask her about this. With his father dead and buried, she's the only one with any kind of knowledge of the bloodline left. But this is a thought for another time, when he's not staring a fucking dragon in the eyes.

She curls around him one last time, a familiar, blood-warm embrace, and then she's gone as suddenly as she appeared.

Tifa reappears at his shoulder, wiping blood from her nose.

'So that happened,' she says, and Cid shrugs, pulls a cigarette from under his goggles, sticks it in his mouth, watched Rude struggle to his feet.

'That's generally the way things go, yeah,' he says, and promptly gets smashed in the face by a Grand Spark that Rude throws back at him, because Rude is his own namesake.

He stays on his feet, just about, but skids back a few inches, feels the ache of the blow between his eyes.

'I was talking, motherfucker!' he hollers, and Rude shoves his glasses up. 'Fucking rude!'

Rude spreads his hands, head cocking just enough to suggest an answer, as if to say, well what did you expect, and Cloud scoffs.

'Fuck this,' he says, and off he goes, throwing himself into battle. Tifa snaps her braces and rolls her shoulders, follows his heels.

Cid wipes his own bloody nose, hesitates for half a second, and then twirls his spear, plants his feet.

'Get after Shera!' Tifa hollers, and smoothly ducks under a very overly-telegraphed swing of Rude's fist. He really doesn't like hitting her at all. 'We've got this.'

'We gotta stop the launch!' Cloud yells, and barely blocks a Grand Spark three inches from his face, the ringing of his sword hitting the blow clearly ricocheting around his skull. 'You know what to do!'

Barely, but Cid accepts that they know what they're doing, and hauls his ass up the stairs. His blood's cooled a little now, the dragon having done her duty, as far as she's concerned, and that's fine, he doesn't think she'd be helpful inside the rocket anyway.

It's stifling inside the rocket, and he yanks off his gloves and jacket. There ain't room to swing a cat, either, so he has to leave his spear wedged in the framework, and he scrambles through the air lock to get into the control room. Shera's not going to be in there, but he has to get an idea of what he's dealing with first.

Inside, some of the trainees he'd had in here not six months ago are wringing their hands, looking at each other.

'Captain!' they exclaim as one when they see him, and Cid looks back at them.

They're so fucking young, and his chest aches.

'We're going to launch the rocket!' one of them says, 'it's going to save the Planet!'

'Isn't that cool?' another one asks, eager as anything. 'I think it's really cool, to be part of all this!'

Cid feels the incredulity on his face, even around the cigarette, and the eagerness on their bright-eyed, baby faces makes him want to be sick.

He rubs his eyes, takes a breath.

'Alright,' he says, 'how's the rocket looking?'

The third student, the one fiddling with his fingers still and looking at the console, pipes up.

'It's looking fine,' he says, 'there's just – we'd planned to run it on auto-pilot, so that nobody would get hurt.'

'But?'

'It's not responding. Something is blocking the communication between the auto-pilot and the command station.'

'And we're fixing it?' Cid asks, because he knows damn well who cause the issue in the first place.

The first trainee nods, but doesn't meet Cid's eyes. 'Yes, Captain. Not, uh. Willingly.'

'I don't understand.'

'They dragged, uh, they dragged Shera in here, sir. She was kicking and screaming, sir, but she's down there.'

'Fucking wizards!' he snorts, and makes a very fucking quick decision, based on information he doesn't have, but knows in his gut to be true. 'She's going to take a hundred fuckin' years to fix it!'

And then, he knows, deep down, it's going to be too late to get her off the rocket. And if it's auto-piloted, if it's being controlled from the command centre. He's not going to be able to abort it this time. His only chance, really, is to take control of it before the auto-pilot kicks in.

'Listen, I'll take over, so you don't have to worry about the auto-pilot.'

'Sir,' the second trainee says, because they've obviously had their orders, and they haven't learnt the great art of ignoring them yet.

'I said I'll take over! You get your fucking arses off this rocket now, that's an order.'

The trainees look at each other, and then quietly scuttle out, and Cid hears them mutter apologies. The trainees have always been weird, though, so he ignores it, and goes to look at the consoles. Shera's in the rocket, apparently, and he knows she deliberately broke the auto-pilot, because he'd told her to stall, and he doesn't think that was quite what he meant, but it stalled the launch. They wanted the codes, which they don't have, but if they don't have the appropriate launching software…

Then again, he thinks, looking over the readings, then a-fucking-gain. This is ShinRa, they would absolutely waste a few lives making some innocent, ignorant kids pilot it. They were so excited about being a part of it, a part of this history that he knows is fucking nonsense.

The smell of blood and sweat fills the cockpit, and he turns at the sound of panting, fists clenched. It's only Cloud and Tifa, looking battered and bruised, but intact.

'Cid,' Tifa says, 'Rude got a call, they have the codes.'

Cid wrinkles his nose. 'How? Shera's – '

'Rude said something about Palmer. They're just waiting on a repair.'

'The fuck does Palmer - the auto-pilot,' Cid says, and looks at the readings again. There's no sign that they're really repaired, but he wonders if they were ever broken in the first place. All you had to do was move a wire and it would make it all look fucked. 'If you want the Materia, you'd better get it quickly. Through that hatch, we built a housing for it. Figured that we might need the extra power. Never intended for Huge Materia, but I suppose they've pulling the couplings apart to get it in.'

Cloud purses his lips, and looks very concerned for a moment.

'Look,' Cid says, 'this is – this is my dream, right? This is what I wanted for the entirety of my life. To go to space. Take the Huge Materia and get off the rocket.'

'Cid,' Tifa starts, and he knows how stupid he sounds.

But he's saved from replying, because the rocket trembles.

'What the fuck?' he demands of the air around them, and the intercom crackles into life.

'Hey-hey!' Palmer crows, and Cid hates the sound of the fat fuck's voice so much. So very fucking much.

'Palmer!' he yells, 'What the fuck have you done this time?'

Palmer laughs, in the way that you laugh when you're being insulted but don't realise it. 'They've finished the repairs, so I've started the launch!'

Cid looks at the readings again, which haven't changed at all. Shera's still down there, and he still doesn't know what she did to the auto-pilot.

'Goddamnit, Shera!' he snaps, and kicks the console, hitting as many buttons as he can, but nothing responds. 'She lock the console this time or what? Fucking can't trust her!'

He can, and he knows he can, and he told her to stall, and is this what she did? Has she gotten herself confused on which wires to twist and which to unplug?

She really wasn't fucking satisfied with that failure to kill herself the first time, huh?

But this time he can't abort the launch.

Palmer laughs. 'No, no, Captain! You don't have to thank your lovely wife for this! I mean, it's very touching that you made the launch codes her birthday! But it's not completely down to her!'

'She's not my wife!'

Palmer just keeps laughing. 'Ooh, look at that! It's almost lift-off!'

That stops him. He looks at Tifa, looks at Cloud. Tifa goes to the door, but it slams shut and she can't get it open, no matter how hard she spins and shoves at the handwheel.

'Cid!' she exclaims.

'Fucking hell! Palmer, what are you doing? Not even a countdown? Motherfucker, you just wanna ruin my fucking day, eh?'

Palmer just fucking laughs, and if they survive this, Cid's going to fucking kill him. Clearly, the truck didn't do the job, so fuck it. Want a job done properly, do it yourself.

'Oh!' Palmer exclaims, and Cid gestures at the other two to grab hold of something. 'Blast off!'

The rocket shudders, Cid's knees aching with the effort of keeping him upright, and the roaring is immense, even inside the cockpit, sealed as it is. Tifa loses her grip and hits the wall, can't get away from it to get her grip back. Cloud's only just staying upright. Cid has no idea how he manages it, but he watches the world fall away from them in the screen, gaze flickering between that and the monitors on the console.

The world falls, falls, falls.

And then, just like that, they're in space.