A/N: So! Aster has a date with Zack. Interesting. Kinda living for it, not gonna lie. I say that as though I just wrote it on the fly and didn't plan it for months before writing it. But anyway. Kinda love this chapter, too, it was a lot of fun to write and edit and shows a new dynamic between the characters. I actually edited the whole chapter in one sitting on a cross country train journey—I feel so uncharacteristically productive. I certainly hope you're having a lovely week, and please do drop me a line if you feel the need! I'd love to hear your thoughts so far!

29th May '19

Chapter 13: Trailing the Truth

Shopping wasn't Aster's thing. She couldn't think of much worse than traipsing around the Upper Plate in and out of boutiques and department stores in the Shopping District for hours on end because she had no idea what she was looking for. She was a purpose shopper. In and out again with the one thing she went in for, and maybe an impulse buy too if it happened to jump out at her.

She could spend two hours in a food court and loved a good weapons store, but that was a different story.

When Tifa insisted that Aster stop into Wall Market to buy a dress for the SOLDIER inauguration ball, she was initially met with distaste to which Tifa sighed.

"Look, you won't have to worry about wandering around," she'd said with her hands on her hips, "because they'll tailor a dress for you, and it's cheap because it's in the slums. It's a little place run by an old man and his daughter."

So, at her next opportunity—a Wednesday afternoon free thanks to the other cadets partaking in the end of Stage Two SOLDIER aptitude test—Aster headed into the slums to buy a dress. She wandered into Sector Six from the Sector Seven gate where she had been lying in wait in the truck for Tseng mere weeks ago. Standing roughly where she had been sat, where she had been aching and sweating in anticipation and adrenaline, she stared into the park, searching for the tracks of her reckless driving. There were no traces to be seen, although the short fence she had ploughed through had been left in pieces, strewn across the floor. Sadly, it was likely never to be fixed. She pursed her lips and headed into Wall Market.

Clearly, it was named after the wall backdrop, an enormous concrete monolith that led up to the Plate, slathered in graffiti. Art that the painter must have risked life and limb for—there was only a lone wire scaling the wall, and Aster herself didn't fancy climbing it only to then hang on by one hand to paint with the other. 'No Mercy', it read, amongst other things, in luminous green lettering. Extraordinary.

It didn't take her long to find the quaint dress shop that Tifa had recommended. It didn't take her long to have her measurements taken either, but hell, she was shocked by the numbers. She was used to having her clothing tailored—she used to get her skating competition gear tailored all the time, and a lot of the monster-pelt coats that the villagers wore in Icicle Inn had to be customised, too—so she was relatively familiar with her measurements. Evidently, the physical strain of the past month-odd of her life had altered her body in ways that she hadn't realised until she was stood before the tailor's mirror.

Ultimately she had always been relatively slight. Sure, she wasn't always a soldier, but she was always an athlete. Still, she remembered her couple of weeks in the cell, how her hip bones protruded and her ribcage skeletal. Now, in the mirror before her, stood a girl not so fragile. Her abdomen had tightened, her shoulders and collarbones were much more defined, and her arms and thighs were better developed. She wasn't as taut and strong as Tifa, but neither was she dainty, and that was something she could get behind.

The seamstress quizzed Aster to the nature of the event the dress was for, making suggestions based on her rather vague answers. In the end, she was quoted a reasonable price for a dress 'she'd be able to dance in all night' and was told it would be ready later that day if both she and her father worked on it.

Aster thanked the woman before heading back outside. She wandered through the streets, aware of the creepy stick of eyes against her skin from men that crawled out of shifty-looking buildings, before catching the neon of a weapon store sign. Like a magpie, she ducked in immediately, attracted to that which was shiny. Weaponry lined the walls, most of which were clamped behind metal cages. She'd always had a strange fascination with weaponry, particularly blades-she thought it had a connection to her obsession with skating.

She was just about to inquire with the gentleman at the fortress-like cash desk about a leather thigh holster for a pistol or knife-which she was sure would make her look like a total badass-when she was interrupted by a ringing PHS.

It took her a solid ten seconds to realise it was hers. Tseng 'gifted' it after he had been unable to find her one evening a week or so prior while she had been on a stint with Tifa involving a barrel of a new kind of beer for the bar and an original cocktail recipe that concerned a lot more drinking that it did mixology. She was allowed to use the PHS personally on the condition that she kept in on her person at all times so that Tseng could contact her, although calls outside of Midgar were blocked. It was tracked, but the fact didn't bother her. Even if she ditched the phone and legged it somewhere, if the Turks wanted to find her, she would always be found.

Above the Shinra insignia, the small screen read the name of her mentor. She flipped it open and brought it to her ear. Didn't even get a chance to say hello. "Doe, where are you?"

"Sector Six," she said, tucking the PHS between her ear and shoulder as she put the holster back on the shelf. "Why?"

"Topside?"

"Bottomside."

"Ideal. Meet me in the Sector Six park."

Click.

"Seriously?" she breathed aloud to no one in particular, snapping the phone closed and shoving it in her pocket. The holster of her dreams would have to wait. Her free time was becoming less free by the day.

The park had become something of an infamous rendezvous by this point. Tseng stood in wait beyond a swing set, a beaten-up truck not far behind him. Just how many different cars did the Turks as a force actually have?

She sighed dramatically. "Tseng, if you just wanted someone to play in the park with you—"

"Get in," he said, blatantly ignoring her. "You're driving."

"Hey, you're the boss," she said, clambering into the driver's side.

Once in, he slammed the door. "Head due southwest. We've found a lead on a Wutaian—"

"—From the break-in?" she interrupted, eagerly, flooring the pedal. She was so ready to kick those guerrillas out of the city. She felt unsafe in her own goddamn home—

Wait, home?

"Well, we have reason to believe—"

"Classified," Aster said mockingly, pushing her nose up like a snout with her index finger, then froze. "Wait—you're actually gonna tell me?"

Tseng blew half a laugh through his nose. "Not anymore."

"What, really?" She bounced petulantly in her seat. "Me and my big mouth!"

"Will you get serious," he said grumbling. "You've been spending too much time with that Fair."

Her face flashed a violent shade of pink. "I—! "

"Head for the outskirts," he snapped. "We're looking for a small resistance sect. Wutaian descent. Don't want a repeat of last week."

"Alright," she mumbled. "Who's your support?"

The Turks could operate alone, but typically they worked in at least pairs. Aster didn't count. Tseng made it clear after the fiasco last time that she was merely an extension of him and not an individual of her own.

"Reno," he said, inserting a small radio into her ear—highly distracting while driving. "You're going to be our eyes. Stop the car."

Aster pulled the truck between two shacks on a dirt road. Ahead, a large archway stood in a thick wall. Beyond it, all that could be seen was waste and ruin. Even by slum standards. It looked like a sectioned off village, dark and run down. Lawless.

"Somewhere deep in there, there's a growing faction of Wutaian resistance. We don't have any numbers as we anticipate they have spread themselves in small groups across sectors," Tseng said, not taking his eyes off the open, probably broken gate in the arch. "We are looking for one individual in particular, part of the Crescent Unit."

Genesis, too, mentioned the Crescent Unit. "What's that?"

"The Wutaians' elite force," Tseng said. "Reno is currently in there, watching the target. In approximately fifteen minutes, he will exit the building Reno is marking, and we believe he will head to one of three locations. This is where you come in. All you need to do—and you need to do it well—is follow the target, then find a safe location to deliver this information to Reno."

Aster's fingers pulsed against the steering wheel she was gripping for life. "Understood."

"Should you encounter trouble, I will take over. Ideally, it won't come to that. Once the mark enters the building, Reno will dispatch him. Be prepared to adapt," he gave a dark laugh devoid of humour. "No plan survives first contact."

Something in her chest trembled. "So…" she said, palms slipping with sweat. Her voice pushed through gritted teeth. "These are the criminals responsible for the break-in the other day?"

"If the thought makes it easier for you to digest, they can be anyone you like," said Tseng. "They are the enemy. They will wreak destruction if left unchecked. That much is an undeniable fact."

"That was a non-answer."

"Then don't ask." He got out of the car and slammed the door, confirming his finality on the matter. When Aster followed him, he said, "How are you going to blend? Your clothing is too nice."

She glanced down at herself. It was no compliment; he had a point. Her t-shirt, one she frequently wore in the bar, was clean. Her leggings were freshly washed, relatively new. Compared to her destination, a slum of slums, the dregs of the dregs, she was out of place. She nodded.

"Got a knife?"

Tseng smiled at her, genuinely, for the first time, and handed her a short knife. She pulled at her leggings and shoved the blade through, snagging at the fibres of the fabric until they frayed. She rubbed her hand in the dusty, dirty ground, and smeared them across her legs and face.

Meanwhile, Tseng threw open the trunk and rummaged in a duffel bag for a tattered old shirt several sizes too large for her. Bloodstained, torn. She sucked a deep breath through her nose but didn't protest as she took it from him, then peeled off her clean t-shirt to replace with the beaten. It smelt like rot and sweat.

It was probably one of Tseng's old shirts. She wondered what kind of mission he had been on to end up in this state.

He knew it wasn't pleasant. "The more you look the part, the better your chance of survival. If they don't pass you a second glance—"

"—Then they won't shiv me, either," she finished, handing him back his blade.

"You're willing to go in unarmed?"

She shrugged. The knife hung limply in the space between them. "I mean, you've told me enough times about my safety and armaments."

"Does not apply if you can handle it."

She shook her head and urged him to take it from her. "Well, I haven't had any weaponry training."

"You could die," he said, and Aster never previously believed that someone could say something so loaded so nonchalantly. "I would suggest you keep it on you, but do not pull it out unless it is absolutely necessary. Ultimately, you'd look stranger in this kind of environment if you weren't armed than if you were."

She shook the light blade between her fingers a few times before reluctantly tucking it under the elastic of her leggings, silently remarking how uncomfortable it was, and panicking that it would slip out at an inopportune moment. Or potentially stab herself in the back.

"You have less than fifteen minutes," he said. "Once inside the compound, you will find a dirt road lined on one side with old streetlights. Most of them are still standing. You are to find the building two storeys high, standing behind two streetlights, one of which functions, the other does not. One of the streetlights nearby this building has been notched approximately two foot from the bottom. This is Reno's cue to you. Count on seven more non-felled lamps, and an alleyway to the right winds around to where Reno is stationed. Locate the individual who surfaces from that alleyway, and track the building that he enters."

When she nodded, he swept his arm towards her destination. "Best of luck."

The arch that led into the slum within slums looked like a dysfunctional version of the Sector Seven gate by the park, but this one likely hadn't been working for some time. Aster could hardly breathe for her nerves, and those nerves made her more conspicuous.

What was her story? Her mind raced with possibilities—should've worked this one out before putting one foot in front of the other. She was proving not to be as logical as she had once thought herself to be.

The ground was pale and lifeless, strewn with litter and scrap. The pathway was wide with sheds and lean-tos on either side and took a sharp turn left in the foggy distance. It only took a few minutes of wandering to locate the two-storey building Tseng had mentioned, and it was one of the only structures that resembled anything semi-permanent, made of concrete and steel. Still, it had been gutted by thieves, and the windows had long since been smashed.

The two streetlights in front of it, one working, one not, told her she was in the right place. She ran her fingers along the line of shacks as she slowly made her way through the street. She clutched at her stomach, stumbling, buying for time she had to kill. A voice startled her, coming from the shadows between shacks.

"You sick, too?"

Petrified, but unable to let that fact on, she turned to face the individual. Maybe a few years older than she, he was a man in tattered clothing and dark hair. But she made out no more features for she was looking through him, feigning a lack of focus, and noting that he was stood in an alley that ran to a parallel street. Likely one that this road twisted into.

"Ugh…ahh…" She nodded faintly, and forced a violent retch that brought nothing up, but was so hard pushed that it appeared she'd already emptied the contents of her stomach and now couldn't even bring up bile. She improvised. "The…Mako…"

"Mako poisoning? The bastards," the man muttered, and sank back into the darkness.

Heart in her throat, she stumbled onward, keeping close to the row of houses to her left piled high and almost on top of each other, and far from the ones by the streetlights to her right. She staggered with squinting eyes—keeping them on those streetlights—retching here and there until she actually started to feel very real nausea.

A few steps ahead of her, the base support for one of the lamps was missing a small chunk, carved likely by a blade. She counted on seven, skipping two streetlamps that had collapsed into the roofs of the shacks behind them, and spotted another of the many narrow, dark alleyways that seemed to dominate the area. The place was like an ant colony. Only it was completely dead.

She tripped herself onto her knees to stop herself from walking past whenever the guy appeared. It'd be harder to trail someone you can't see. Using the time to dare a glance at her surroundings, she was prepared to wager that she was in a part of town you wouldn't want to be lost in alone. Despite the empty streets she felt watched, but couldn't tell from where. She was glad, above all else, that although it was darker here than in the slums proper, it was still lit somewhat by the lights that shone down from the plate. There's no way she'd want to be found down here in the dead of night.

Hearing movement from beyond the alleyway of question, she stumbled forward. She didn't watch, averse to showing her face, but was aware that there was an individual not too far away. She didn't actually lay an eye on him, or her, or whoever it may be.

The crackle of transmission tickled her eardrum. "That's the one, yo. Take control."

The sweat forming over her brow was probably aiding the persona of being a sick person. When fairly certain the figure had headed onward, she dared a glance, looking not directly at him but rather at one of the buildings near him. It is funny how one can hide in plain sight.

He turned the corner beyond her scope. She cursed to herself silently, knowing she couldn't exactly break into a sprint to catch up and see where he was headed. Grinding her teeth, she slipped into an alley—or less of an alley than it was a small gap between run-down buildings looking ready to fall into one another—that she prayed would lead to the road she assumed he had taken. She ducked beneath jutting corrugated steel and iron girders and made her way through to the other side near a trash can. He was back in her peripheral, heading toward her. She could stay here for a while with eyes up and down the street, blending into the scene and begging him not to pick up on her presence, if only she had a suitably in-character excuse to stay there. So she did the only thing she could think to do to make herself look the part. Like the sick and the hungry of Midgar. She tore into the bag inside the bin, held her breath, and rummaged as convincingly as she could bear.

Her heart pounded in her throat as the man passed her. She didn't look at him. He didn't look at her. Elbow-deep in the trash can, she watched him in the corner of her eye. He didn't turn around and made his way further down the road and into a short hut. Aster slowly pulled her arms from the can and gagged again, genuinely this time but it was all part of a good show, and sat in the shadows. She watched the street for a while, the quiet, dead street. People here only seemed to travel in the shadows.

So why hadn't he?

"Doe, do you have eyes on the target's location?" Tseng said, deep in her ear.

For once, the first time, the sound of Tseng's voice didn't instil anxiety, but rather security.

About to respond, she choked on her voice—just because the mark was far away, didn't mean he didn't have his own surveillance listening. "Ugh…uhhh…?"

Of course, Tseng had been doing this a lot longer than she. He understood without the breath of a word. "Give me an 'ah' if you do."

She gave her best, her weakest 'ah'.

"Understood," he said. "Stand by."

A hand clamped over her mouth and yanked her to her feet. Her eyes widened impossibly, unable to gasp or scream. Her legs kicked against her assailer, but even amidst the panic, she thought better of it and allowed them to flail uselessly. Powerlessly. She was sick, after all. She struggled, shaking her shoulders and upper body as strongly as someone with half her strength might have. She was easily over-powered.

"Trust us, Doe," Tseng said in her ear, firmly. "Leave a trail."

Through blurring eyes of panicked tears, she dragged her heels against the ground desperately to leave a vague groove in the dirt for Tseng or Reno to follow, kicking and trying to scream against the gloved palm of the assailant she couldn't see. He yanked her across into the marked building, and as he let go of one of his holds on her to shove across a blended section of the wall—that was actually little more than a sheath of corrugated steel—to reveal a downward passageway, Aster worked to loosen her bracelet, managing finally to slip it from her wrist. He shoved her into the passage and pulled the metal across once again, murmuring words she couldn't understand.

The room was darkly lit. A hovel, not a room. Walls of clay, not brick or steel or wood. Sick to her stomach, Aster could only bring herself to keep up her act, partly because it wasn't an act anymore, and partly because if she didn't, she didn't know what else she'd do.

There wasn't anything unusual in this…hole. There was some kind of low coffee table with scrolls and sheaths of paper littered across it. Large candles lit the room along with the torches on the walls, and a grand chair on a pedestal, more like a throne, in fact, more like a shrine, to Aster's untrained eye.

She turned to look at her aggressor, wearing some pale green uniform and dark armour. Some kind of guard. He pushed her into the ground and the gravel bit into her skin. She didn't resist, but rolled faintly, mumbling incoherently—skills she definitely learned from her encounter with Rohrbach. She'd have to remember to thank him.

The guard barked in a foreign language, and a man sat upon the throne yelled back at him. The man she had been asked to trail. Seemingly in response, the former rolled her face upwards to show him, which she allowed like a rag doll.

The man she had marked, a tall man, was sheathed in dark robes beneath a steel chest plate and helmet of sorts, some hybrid between functional and ceremonial. Across his back was a polearm with a sharp spearhead she didn't want to meet.

The two men towered over her until one crouched into her face and began to scream. Her body shut in on itself, closing down and submitting to terror. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to block out the sounds. Amongst throaty barks and snaps in a language she couldn't speak, Aster distinctly heard the word 'Shinra'. How they knew she would never know.

Then, the distinct sound of corrugated metal bending and blowing out from the tunnel entrance filled the pit. The guard grabbed Aster immediately, pressing a blade to her throat. Terrified, she hardly kept to her feet.

Strolling in from the entrance came a flaming red-headed young Turk. Five-ish years older than her, or maybe he was a baby-faced thirty-year-old, it was hard to say—and irrelevant, but it was helping Aster remain calm all the same.

He strolled in like he owned the damn joint, tapping his stun rod against his shoulder casually. Aster smelt gunpowder. Did he just blow up the doorway?

"Gentleman," he said, taking a step forward, to which the man in the greater armour pointed his halberd. Reno raised his hands. "Whoa. Chill out."

He gave Aster a pointed look. She could have missed it. Good job she didn't, because even though she didn't know what he meant, she knew it was something. That was enough.

Reno snatched the halberd and shoved it upwards, lunging in, activating his stun rod and going in for the blow to the man's neck. The surge of movement and light distracted the guard for just a beat long enough for Aster to push all of her weight into throwing her body into the man holding her at knifepoint and prise the blade-wielding arm away from her. The shock of his previously catatonic prisoner taking him down with strength pulled out of nowhere only blinded him for a moment. She wrestled the power of his wielding arm, temporarily having forgotten his free fist which flung around to connect with the side of her face.

An enormous crash and sound of splintering wood indicated that Reno had the other guy down already, breaking the back of the table, with a foot in his shoulder and his arm yanked back to the point of over-tension in Reno's control. The red-head was barking orders, likely questioning him. The screams of an electrocuted warmonger permeated the air.

Aster rolled to avoid a second blow to the face and desperately grabbed the arm of her attacker, knife inches from her skin. Face turning red from the strain of his strength that began to overpower her, she twisted his wrist with intent to break and kneed him in the gut—one of the only sections of his body not coated in armour—to throw him off her. She scrambled to her feet and kicked his wielding hand as hard as she could muster, sending the blade flying and embedding into the clay wall. The man wailed in pain and snatched her ankle, tearing her down to the ground again.

Her back hit with a hard thud. Head by his feet, she slammed her heel into the lip of his helmet as hard as she could, forcing it off with the crack of one of the joints in his neck. Eyes wide, she shot to her feet, thinking she might have killed him, but when he got up to meet her, she couldn't decide whether to be relieved or terrified. She swallowed her ambivalence like a hard pill and ducked under his impending blows from huge fists, waiting for an opportunity to arise. Can't wait forever. She feigned for his stomach, and when he guarded deftly, she tackled him into the ground where the back of his head smacked into the helmet Aster had kicked off him. Gone. Out like a light. Unconscious. Or dead.

She staggered back as a gasp ripped from her lungs.

Please be breathing.

But she didn't check.

Instead, she threw her gaze to Reno, avoiding the bodies altogether, who stood with one hand shoved deep into his pocket and the other lazily tapping his shoulder with his stun rod exactly as before, as though he hadn't just used it to burn the flesh of the man on the ground before them. Dead.

Reno raised his eyebrows and grinned. "Hey, not bad. Where'd you learn that one?"

"Was an accident," she lied. Couldn't face the truth of her own brutality.

"Didn't look like an accident to me," he said, throwing his hands behind his head and studying her. "But if your accidents keep you alive like that, I want you around when you're fully trained."

Tseng barked down their earpieces. "Could you two have made any more noise? Out of there, now, before any more alert is raised."

Aster filed out after Reno, ignoring her quaking knees. "The explosives were pretty extra, Reno."

"Yo, you wanted to stay in here? The metal was protected. Magic materia. Wouldn't budge."

"Didn't realise," she meant to say, although it hardly left her lips as they snuck out of the building towards the truck that Tseng drove in masterfully. She threw herself into the back, Reno right behind, and Tseng stepped on it, tearing from the vicinity in a cloud of dust, raising as little alarm as was possible given the circumstances.

"Nicely done," Tseng said. "You two prevented a disaster."

Reno rested his head back on his arms behind him. "Hey…what'd you expect?"

"With you two?" Tseng wiped his face with a hand. "The creation of a disaster."

"So, it was a success?" Aster asked, leaning forward eagerly, keen to forget the events and rule them under as complete and over. Like they'd never happened at all.

"Good as it could have been," Tseng said, eyeing her in the rearview mirror. Her eye caught something dangling from it. Her bracelet. He smirked faintly when their eyes met, slipped it off the mirror and threw it back to her. "Nice touch."

She smiled faintly, but it faded quickly as she put the bracelet back on in its rightful place. "No plan survives first contact, huh…"

Instead of returning to Headquarters as expected, Tseng drove the truck back to the Sector Six park and told her to run along.

"What, really? All that work and I don't even get a lift back?"

"Nope," said Reno, popping on the 'p' sound.

"What about a debrief? Hello. Nearly died here."

Tseng scoffed outright. "That does not count as nearly dying. Tell me how you feel when you've lost more blood than there are pints of milk in your fridge."

Affronted, she sniffed indignantly. "Point still stands."

Tseng looked at Reno, then back at Aster, regarding them both indirectly through the rearview mirror. "The mission was a success. I will be reporting to Heidegger as soon as we return to HQ. The mark was eliminated without more than one additional casualty, and no unnecessary attention was yearned."

"Question."

Tseng funnelled every ounce of his self-control not to roll his eyes. Instead, he used that intensity to bore them into her.

"What were they doing there?"

"Insurgence groups from the war. There's a lot of them."

"Why take out him specifically?"

"He was the leader of the group. Obviously."

"Right, got it."

"Any more questions?"

"Not any that aren't—" she pushed her nose up with her finger again. "—Classified."

Tseng did roll his eyes this time. "Get out."

She grinned and jumped out of the truck. "Sir. Reno."

"Oh," she said, pausing before closing the door on them. She handed Tseng back his small dagger. "Thanks. Didn't need it after all."

With which, she shut the door and headed back into Wall Market. First thing she did was storm straight up to that weapons store and buy the badass thigh holster. She also allowed herself the luxury of buying an extra few supplies, healing materials, bandages and the like, before bursting back into the dress store with a little more vigour than absolutely necessary. Call it the remnants of adrenaline.

She had forgotten herself. Covered in dry blood from Tseng's old shirt, her leggings tattered and covered in filth, hair and face a mess, a new swelling from a punched face, and a holster built for firearms and blades poking out of a suspiciously full-to-the-brim paper bag of bandages and other somewhat dangerous looking paraphernalia.

She smiled politely at the lady behind the counter. "I'm here to pick up my dress."

The woman behind the counter's jaw dropped. The girl had been gone for less than half a day—what the heck had happened to her? With little more than a faint nod, she passed over a pretty little gift bag containing the aforementioned garment.

Dumbstruck, the woman merely said, "Looks like you're gonna be busy this weekend…"