A/N: Good morning/afternoon/evening! Thank you so much to everyone who has read this and given it the time of your day to stick with! I was genuinely floored that people actually favourited and followed and reviewed and even read it at all—seriously, thank you so much, you literally made my week. Writing is the only thing keeping me going these days and to think that you guys enjoyed what I'm putting out there means so much to me! Speaking of which, if I get waaaay far ahead in terms of the number of chapters I have written, I might increase upload speeds to like three a fortnight as opposed to one a week, but we'll see! For now, I'll keep updating every Wednesday!

Thank you so much hifivebuddy and in citrus heights for your super nice comments, I hope the following chapters live up to your expectations! The story is a bit of a slow-burn, but it gets big…you'll see!

6th Mar '19

Disclaimer: Just to remind you—not mine (but Aster is).

Chapter 2: The Floating City

The B1-Beta series helicopter lurched through the air, through the snow, and over the Northern Continent's formidable cliff walls that had always protected it from intrusion via sea. Boats couldn't travel to the Knowlespole easily. It had clearly granted its people with an inflated and baseless sense of security; turns out you could be snatched from the sky within a mile of your own home.

By the time Aster came around to the whistle of the rotor and rumbling groan of winds and gusts, the helicopter had long since passed those cliff edges and had banked over the dry and rocky mountainous regions attributed to the East. Alone in the passenger cabin, her capturer presumably in the cockpit with the pilot, she peered through the window to a sight equally breathtaking and horrifying.

Dying earth and dry lands in the distance, a knot and tangle of steel and skyscrapers reached towards Shinra Headquarters, easily the tallest and most important structure on the planet. A statue, a reverie, homage to its overwhelming power.

At landing, she was dragged from the aircraft and met without eye contact or regard. Her open mouth was incapable of forming words, and when it did the words were not heard.

The floor that stretched beneath her feet was over-clean to the point of mirroring. In it she saw her face daring her to go on, begging her to stop, and flash every shade of doubt in between. And maybe it really was the persuasion of her reflection, but more likely it was the clicking and smacking of the feet tailing her, that forced her onward to an elevator.

The doors were of heavy metal, inches thick, and lay veiled under the shadow left by a long red light above. Its gory glare hollowed out Aster's cheeks and sharpened her cheekbones. To look at Tseng, her captor, may have been frightening.

When the angry light soothed into seafoam so, too, did their features soften. Green light swam into his eyes, but the disguise was short-lived. As soon as he stepped into the round, glass elevator, the light lost its hold on his face, and inky black returned as hollow as ever. Aster chose not to look at him. She was vaguely aware of another person entering the elevator behind her, but she kept her gaze on the small control panel, wary of meeting Tseng's face again. She did not turn around until she was startled.

Broad with tanned skin, the man was so tall that had Aster not been stood in a reflective glass elevator, she would not have been able to see all angles of his head to prove his total baldness. Despite being indoors and late in the evening, dark sunglasses masked his eyes—but no one would need to see them to be intimidated. Deep creases between his eyebrows gave away his perpetual scowl, and his rough goatee and eight various piercings only added to what seemed an already unapproachable man.

Worst yet, his suit was identical to Tseng's. Another Turk.

And she knew this to be the Turk that had followed her through the trees of Icicle Inn. She'd recognise his foreboding presence anywhere.

When Aster's body didn't respond to her will to move, Tseng brushed past her and pressed a numbered key and the green button on the control panel screen. The transition between stationary and rising was smooth as the platform was sucked upwards inside the curved sheath of glass. She reached her hand out to it and it ran away with her fingertips. Streams and streams of endless glass cascaded like falling water, sinking away beneath her.

The neighbouring elevator pulled a few suited employees twenty storeys down, plunging as though to crash into the Plate below. Only then did the grandeur and glamour of the city splayed beyond before her hit her firm in the face. Her gasp was utterly choking.

The sky was blue and black like bruising flesh, and concrete and steel stretched out beneath it. The city was a forest of buildings, with paths of train tracks and creepers of cable. Sidewalks that she could see from a bird's eye view glowed like golden moats surrounding apartment buildings and stores, lit up and sparkling by the streetlights. She swept her gaze from left to right, the city unbroken save for large barriers that split off their respective sectors, of which she could see only two: Sector Four and Sector Five. And how could an outsider know? Only by the massive reactors that jutted out of the ends of those huge walls like mammoth knots of steel, with thick curtain walls joining each one in the giant fortress that together became Midgar. Painted on the front of the nearest to Aster was '04' signifying the sector it governed.

"Omnipotent capital of the planet. Her reactors create Mako energy to keep her running, and Mako provides her people with electricity, fuel for cars, and warmth for their homes." Tseng spoke monotonously; he must have explained this one thousand times. Or maybe that was his natural tone. He continued, "The Shinra Electric Power Company went on to build many more reactors across the world to provide the people with an easier way to live."

"Reliant on Mako," she added, murmuring as though she spoke something that shouldn't be heard, "but comfortable."

"Indeed," Tseng said. "And this is your home now."

While her expression was unreadable, her nostrils flared as she pulled in a deep breath.

Her eyes drew over the reactors that spit their plumes of Mako up into the air, slender ribbons of green and bursts of watery blue shooting into the sky above. Eight of these enormous machines formed a rampart circle around their castle, the Shinra Headquarters, and together they provided for her and her city. Midgar was alive, she pulsed, and she breathed through reactors.

The platform slowed and bobbed as it locked into place, but the doors remained shut fast until Tseng swiped his keycard in the control panel. After a quiet ding, the doors drifted open like blown by a small breeze, weightless, with a faint mechanical whirr.

Despite having unceremoniously crowned Midgar Aster's new home mere moments ago as though it was some kind of an honour to be a chosen citizen, he snatched from her the opportunity to steal one last glance by dragging her through the doors. Her eyes clung to the Mako spill of one of the reactors, and even after the doors sliced between her and the splay of Midgar beyond the glass, the bright greens and blues still burned behind her eyelids like phosphorescent ghosts.

The corridor stretched left and right, although she couldn't see where either ended since both wound off to who-knows-where, but she still knew where she was. Out of the wall jutted the number sixty-six, black floats emerging from pale water, right next to a set of ceiling-high, gold doors. The diamond indentation of the Shinra logo called out to Aster's urge to touch it, and the only reason she managed to refrain from dragging her fingers along each embossed line and chiselled shape was that Tseng's voice distracted her.

"You will meet with Heidegger, Head of Public Safety."

Some kind of chuckle both rose and died in his throat when Aster tensed.

"Relax," he said darkly. "He won't like you."

Another panel bleeped as Tseng's keycard cut through it. The fault line where both doors met had been indiscernible until they began to pull apart, creaking and groaning like they hadn't been opened for decades. They were built thick like vault doors—in many ways Aster supposed this room was a vault since some of Shinra's most precious jewels would gather here. Not many would ever be granted the chance to see the innards of this chamber.

A sprawl of plush red carpet spilt beyond and a long conference table stretched its old wooden fibres, in a fruitless attempt to touch the back wall where a barrel of a man stood with his back to his new company. Thirteen seats lined the table in all, twelve of grand leather, and one of lavish velvet at the head.

All around, pillars touched from the floor to ceiling, half embedded in the walls. These pillars were the trunks of once great trees, their bark still clinging to their sides, likely treated. They must have been old, judging by their sheer size, and it was almost a shame that they would not be permitted to rot away for the planet to reclaim them and birth them again. Aster would not have blamed a man for wrongly assuming the glowing orange lamps protruding from the trunks were real flames threatening to burn down these great trees, especially for the way they flickered their warmth onto the ivory walls between. The blend of oranges and reds and flames was only broken by the far wall, a sheer pane of glass that carried in the hue of a dying sky.

Gazing through this wall of glass was the man baring his broad back to Aster and her armed chaperones, and she was so focused on the creases between his shoulders in the stiff green fabric of his suit that she almost didn't notice the presence of others in the room. Aside from Tseng at her right and the unnamed Turk to her left, two others sat across from each other at the table. The pressure of the air taught Aster they had interrupted something important.

A rigid man, whose joints seemed awkward and misplaced, pushed his glasses up his nose. Thick blonde hair brushed his shoulders in a similarly inflexible way.

"Twelve months have seen this young woman aptly manage our Military Academy. She has already begun training this quarter's infantry cadets. I have no qualms allowing her to work with my SOLDIER Thirds."

"SOLDIER? Gya haa haa!" The large man barked incredulously, his voice callous in a sandpaper throat. "SOLDIER? She's just a girl!"

There was 'just a girl' sat at the table opposite the blonde man, and judging by the pulse of movement in her jaw, she was the girl in question.

"You think she can keep up with SOLDIER? You think she can train SOLDIER? Deusericus," he drawled, and despite his shaking shoulders, something sinister—perhaps a bitter tang of rivalry—glazed his words with an oily slick, "you are out of your mind."

"In my right mind, Heidegger," the man retorted calmly.

"The infantry I will allow, but she must prove her worth before she teaches SOLDIER to be weak."

Lazard Deusericus leaned back into his chair, casting a glance over the girl facing him. "Very well. This will conclude our meeting."

Aster looked at the girl whose silky walnut hair was so dark it could have been black, but her gaze was not returned. She was staring off towards an air duct in the ceiling, jaw still tight and eyes severe. Aster almost chuckled. Yeah, she felt like bolting too.

Without turning to look at her, Heidegger said, "I'll be keeping a close eye on you, Lockhart."

"As will we all," said Tseng as he stepped forward, sparing her a glance for but a moment. "Apologies to intrude, Heidegger. We brought you the girl."

'We brought you the girl,' he said, like she was some meaty carcass, a prize for the pack leader, being dropped at his feet. She turned her nose up with a frown.

She instantly regretted her pride, though, when the man in green turned to face her squarely. A puckered scar ripped through his flesh from his hairline, over his right eye, down his cheek and beneath his salt and pepper beard in an unbroken, if you could call this tear unbroken, gash; a canyon in his face. Stony eyes glared forth; how his right eye still opened beneath such thick scar tissue was beyond Aster, and beyond any other to ever meet him.

"Ah, the Selective."

A shiver struck her spine.

The girl at the table pulled away from her set gaze and drew her eyes to Aster's face. She was aware of eyes stuck to her body, yet couldn't take her own off Heidegger. Even with the sprawling table between them, she did not feel safe. She feared he would clamber onto it and charge towards her on all fours like a well-dressed but bulging ape, and shred her face with his bare hands to carve her a scar that would rival his.

He did not charge down the tabletop but slithered down the edge of the room with long, slow strides, his shoulders back and buttons of his jacket under strain as his gut bulged against them. Aster did not doubt that those buttons were solid gold and, like the doors, each had the Shinra logo intricately detailed on them.

His eyes crept up her stained body. Beneath his calculated glare she was naked; vulnerable. She knew then that if she were ever to see him after dark, she was going run.

"We have big plans for you, but you are slight and weak." His sharp words descended into a growl, lips curling. "Tseng. War is raging. You better know what you are doing."

The Turk nodded coolly. "I would not fail a mission of this import, sir."

Heidegger's voice plummeted to a gravelly warning. "And if you do, there will be hell to pay."

Tseng did not react.

"I have seen enough." Heidegger's voice bellowed and if those lamps had truly been flames they would have trembled. "Do not waste more of my time!"

He strode for the door and dug his shoulder into Aster's neck when she refused to move out of his way. His beard, wiry and rough as an old scourer, scratched her jaw as he turned his head, driving her to drag her wrist against her irritated skin in disgust. He smelt of metal and rot.

To avoid a mouthful of hair and hide her racing heart, Aster stepped back to meet the scowl that burned like a cigarette being put out in her eyes. He had always liked to gauge the grit of men by how long they could stare into his marred, ugly scar without timidly looking away. Aster did not disappoint.

"Maybe there is hope, after all."

He shoved past her and left the room, leaving her unsteady on her feet, but even still she was content with having held his stare. Her voice came out with a crack as she rubbed her aching throat. "Was that a test?"

Lazard jerked his chair and body towards her, the table gutting him in doing so, eyes severe. "Everything is a test."

Aster shrank in on herself under his intensity, and as though nothing were said, he resumed his almost unnatural aura of composure.

"Tseng. Rude. And," he began, leaning his elbows on the table and resting his chin on his white-gloved, locked fingers. Without Heidegger around, he seemed to own the room. "Who might we have here?"

Aster opened her mouth but Tseng spoke in her place. "Our Turk Selective."

Lazard nodded faintly and regarded him with cool eyes. "I see. And how is that mission coming along, Tse—"

"—Smoothly, Director."

He stood up. Tall, but not broad nor built. Compared to the man Aster now knew as Rude, he was twig-like. Whoever this man was, he was not half as intimidating as anyone she'd met so far—and that included the girl sat at the table. He was not built for combat but was rather like the glasses perched on his nose; fragile, with a spindly frame.

Regardless, when he spoke, he didn't have to bark like Heidegger to assume attention.

"Very well. It appears we are done here. Please escort Miss Lockhart back to the residential courtyard."

Five people were not to fit in one of those elevators, so Rude led Lazard and the mysterious young woman into the rightmost whilst Tseng forced Aster into the left. She stumbled in, sucking her lower lip into a frown at her mistreatment, but it sure beat being pointed at by a gun, so she wouldn't complain. She would hide her fear beneath petulant behaviour.

Before all were in and settled, Aster peered into the other elevator through the glass and studied its occupants. Well, Rude certainly was bald.

But he didn't hold her attention for long—the girl seized it. She was still and composed; her clasped hands behind her back formed a triangle of worked and toned muscles with her shoulders. She was half Rude's size, but he had his eyes—if there were any behind his shades—constantly trained on her, so there was no doubt she was potentially dangerous. Aster wasn't in that elevator to be able to tell for sure, but even from a distance, the girl seemed to be controlling the atmosphere inside. Still air, almost like she made it so.

As though she could feel Aster's eyes, the girl turned to meet her through sheaths of glass as her platform began its slothful descent. For a moment she seemed to deliberate. Then, she smiled.

Midgar's first smile to Aster—all others had been false or with spite. She did have to make a conscious decision to not ponder over why the girl gave her a measuring look before offering her smile, though, because some things just aren't worth thinking about. Judging by the kind of place Midgar appeared to be, smiles were rare, and Aster would take what she was given.

She spent so long trapped in her thoughts that by the time Rude's elevator had fallen out of sight and her own began to rise, she couldn't recall whether she had smiled back. The girl's face was gone, and Aster's own eyes stared back from the glass in her place. Swollen, red. Following the ping of the doors and the tiny growl of the mechanics, the captive led the captor out.

The floor beyond was a spill of grey, polished so thoroughly it appeared glossed. Were all floors of the Shinra Building so clean? Aster wondered who the cleaners were, how hard they must have to work, and who, after they spent their lives slaving over the ground, would clean their dirty, tired knees and dried knuckles.

Floor Sixty-Seven. A corridor wound to the right, white walls lit by glowing bulbs every ten or so feet. She counted each as she passed. One, two, three, four. Anything to distract her racing thoughts.

"W-where are you taking me?" she asked, voice hoarse as he dragged her onward by the wrists.

Taking a left, he didn't speak. The panic. A new, unlit corridor. Then, a right. Shallow breaths. There, she counted six red lights above six steel doors, three on her left and three on her right. Dead end.

Second on the right. Aster's heart pounded, eyes misting over with hysteria. Tseng unlocked the door, grabbed her by the shoulders and threw her inside. A cell.

Horror reached its fever pitch and surged through her every fibre. She scrambled to her feet, ripped the switchblade from beneath her boot and plunged for his chest.

He snatched her wrist and wrenched it behind her back. With a jab of his free elbow and tripping her ankle, he slammed her face-first into the ground, her cheekbone smacking into the ground with the brunt of the fall, pain shooting through her teeth, her nose. He stabbed the blade into the floorboards, ripping it from her fingers, a whisper from her throat.

The wind was sucked from her lungs sharply, but she couldn't cough without feeling the blade. Pinned beneath him, a knee in her back and a knife at her neck, she was helpless. This was end game. It was over.

"A few inches to the side and a good angle and I'd have severed your spinal cord. More pressure here," he said, leaning against her twisted arm and eliciting a scream deep in her gut, "and I would have dislocated your shoulder. At the least."

Breath rasped from her throat, sweat slipped across her brow and tears pricked at the corners of her eyes but she blinked them back. Struggling was futile. She quickly realised that that was the point.

If the struggle was pointless, it meant the struggle was over. Some relief came from accepting her fate. Panting, she attempted a nod. "Under…stood. But…if you wanted me dead…clearly, you'd have killed me already…"

He nodded for his own benefit and released her, standing up and offering a hand in aid. Her shaky shoulders pried her body from the floorboards, and when she managed to bat his hand away obstinately, she could have sworn that for just a moment he had smiled. But her head was still fuzzy and the room spinning, so naught was gospel.

Lazard's words hung in the air: Everything is a test.

She stood, but stumbled.

"Cast away your conceit now; you are disposable. And bear in mind that sometimes," he said, as he ran his finger along the blunt of the switchblade—his respect for the weapon could have been mistaken with caution, "it is safer to be unarmed than armed."

She squeezed her fists at her sides, trembling. "But not for you."

"Only one of us is out of their depth here, Doe."

"Doe—wait, how did you kn—?" Her eyes shot wide and blood ran cold. Her jaw recoiled from a blow delivered by shock, face washing over even paler than before. "That's impossible!"

This time he definitely smirked. He twirled the survival knife between his fingers as deftly as he ignored her probes.

"A gift," he said suddenly. Casually. "Purchased from Icicle Inn's weapon store, in the same plaza as the inn your town is named for. Bought for your eighteenth birthday."

Aster's voice faltered. Her stutter betrayed the faultless façade she was working so hard to maintain in front of this truly deadly man. She shook her head aggressively, and it pounded for it. "But—"

"—You don't think we'd find it interesting when a potential SOLDIER candidate purchases a weapon?"

"SOLDIER candidate…?"

"The gift," he pressed, as though she should surely understand what was most obvious. "It was bought by your brother. Let us think. Daniel Upchurch. Sixteen years of age. Five foot nine inches tall if you failed to measure him recently. That's two inches taller than last you scribbled his height on the doorframe to your kitchen."

The beating drum of her heart hammered against her chest, her temples and her throat. The walls of the room closed in on her, air became harder to breathe. The notion of having been the target of such detailed surveillance dawned on her like the sky falling down.

"Yes…one thousand eight hundred Gil, it cost. That's quite a substantial sum of money for a sixteen-year-old to afford, don't you think? There again, the family you were raised by was rather affluent, was it not? Have you ever wondered how that family gained such good stead?"

When met with no response he put the blade in a holster sitting just beneath his suit jacket.

"Regardless, while it is true he had our attention for a while, so have you."

She shifted her posture to mask her wavering bravery. Back came her petulant veneer with a sour pucker of her lips. "Of what kind?"

"Probing for information but not willing to give any in return, I see. That's fine. Your mother died when you were young. Goddess only knows who your father is. Orphaned at one. Adopted before two—oh, I'm sorry. I do hope you already know this, I didn't bring tissues."

Her jaw hitched and Tseng would not have missed it. She snapped, "Of course I already know. Your point?"

"Don't pretend you didn't know someone was watching you all those years."

It was startlingly clear that this spy was not always one step ahead of Aster, but two or three.

"You work alongside an ex-Shinra employee. He is an unremarkable man with an unremarkable career, but that is how you acquired some small sums of skill. Such is why you are here now. Mostly."

"Mostly—?" But she was cut off.

"Maybe you have what it takes," he said, "to progress."

Her fists finally loosened, deep red grooves left in her palms from her fingernails.

"You may prove valuable," he said. Carefully. He eyed her. "We are in need of someone who doesn't exist. Someone you could potentially become. That is all."

"For SOLDIER?"

"Not SOLDIER. The Turks."

"For the—!"

"—Shut up before I change my mind."

Snatched away were all her questions and breath.

"Aster Doe, you will be spending your nineteenth birthday with Shinra in just under two months, will you not?" With no response, he pressed, "Will you not?"

"Sounds like it."

He whipped his hand across her face without a moment's warning. Vibrations of pain buzzed between skin and skin, and a blush of shared red stung her cheek and his palm.

"Watch your mouth."

She stared at the ground. Tears brimmed blue eyes but she would not wipe them away. "Yes, sir."

He smoothed the skin of his angry palm along the other like wiping a weapon clean of blood. Dark eyes spared her a glance, watching her internalise her anger. Each spring of muscle in her body turned and coiled, increasing the pressure in every limb and every word and every breath. He wondered how much more she could have left to give; a swift jolt and she may simply lose it.

"And by your twentieth birthday, Doe, we'll have you with us. Should you succeed."

Her head snapped up with one of those coils. "And if I don't? What then?"

"Then you may not see your twentieth birthday at all."

Frustration crowned and burst through her veins. It erupted into outstretched palms that smacked the wall like paddles with a crack louder than her cheek had screamed upon Tseng's abuse.

"What if I don't want to be in the Turks, huh?" She screamed, then strode up to Tseng's face. "What if I don't want to work for Shinra?"

He didn't react, merely looked down into her face coldly. "But we know you do. We have an alternative course of action, though, should you refuse to cooperate. Or fail. It is true he would make a better member of SOLDIER than a Turk, but needs must."

Tseng's tongue passed over his lip. It was somewhat shocking to see how normal it was. She was expecting some sort of slithering, forked ribbon of obsidian muscle to protrude from the darkness of his throat.

"So, go ahead. Walk out the door if you like," he said, stepping aside. "We'll just return to the Northern Continent and pick up your little brother."

The needle of fear that spiked through Aster's chest to meet her spine and send a jolt through her entire body must have glowed golden sunlight. Surely, because something made Tseng's eyes glimmer in satisfaction, and it could only have been that.

"So." The taste of his smirk poisoned his voice. "You will work with us?"

Tongue swelled by speechlessness in the palm of the Turk, she nodded meekly. A battle against this man would not be won. Not now, maybe not ever.

She preferred not to think like that.

She turned on her heel. "So, this is Shinra."

"This is Shinra." He nodded. "And you'll remain in this cell until training begins."

Except her training had already begun.

"Is this a punishment for assaulting you?" she said, turning back to assess his body language. Stiff.

He gave a short laugh, more frightening than if he had yelled or punched her or slammed her face into the floor again.

"No. Your punishment is the bruising on your cheek that you will wear with shame for a week. But I suppose you won't have to be ashamed because no one will see it as you will be in here."

Her posture sagged, clothing hanging off her frame like on a wire rack, eyes unfocused. Concussion? Exhaustion? She dragged her wrist over her cheek, stifling a wince. Her voice came out much smaller than she intended. "Then why…?"

"You have nowhere else to go."

And with that he stepped back, the heavy door slid closed, and the light above the door turned red once more. Her tired eyes burned, tears of acid spilling over her waterlines. She swallowed each of his words like a dry pill of lead that sat heavy in her stomach and dragged her to her knees. Though the bed was pressed to the wall beside her, her spine craved the rigidity of the floor to teach it to be strong again.

So she rolled her back into the cold, hard wood beneath her, and let her bones crack and settle into place. She stared into the ceiling, the throbbing of her swelling face timed neatly with the ticking of a clock she could barely hear over the rush of her own blood, and she wondered who had been in this room before her.

Maybe a young civilian with glasses and a white lab coat who deceived staff into allowing her to pass into the libraries full of Shinra's most private information, believing she was indeed a Shinra scientist.

A renegade SOLDIER, privy to enough secrets that he gained a taste for more, who threatened the head of the Science Department, hoping he would divulge his knowledge of the secret behind SOLDIER, and why no other scientist across the planet could crack the code.

Or perhaps a terrorist, maybe Wutaian descent in an act of the ongoing war, who threatened the lives of countless innocent people, or even took those lives in cold blood.

All of these hopeless wonderings to distract herself from one heavy, heavy fact.

You have nowhere else to go.