A/N: Hello! SO. Last chapter o_o Anyone pick up on Aster's subtle little 'time well spent' line paralleling her concept of time being 'stolen' from her by Tseng?

I remember I was so excited to write this chapter, and I get kinda excited rereading it and editing it, too. I hope it reads as well as it plays in my head. Such a cool scene. Things are beginning to heat up a bit, and everything that appears to make no sense will start to make sense soon—or maybe that's misleading—everything will make sense eventually. Yeah. That's more accurate.

I'd really love to ask for some constructive feedback at this point. I feel like I am slowly improving, but there is so much to learn. I don't regret how huge this story is (at all, I love that it's such a behemoth) but it certainly is a challenge! Really any thoughts would be super helpful, thank you!

As always, I hope you're having a lovely week and I will see you next chapter! - Spirit

19th Jun '19

Chapter 15: Stabscotch

Zack's overstimulated brain wouldn't allow his body to rest. His eyes stung against the will of his racing mind whether he held them open or closed. Open, and he was swallowed by the enormity of a lonely, empty bedroom and a sliver of pale green light drifting in between his curtains from the Sector-governing reactor. Closed, and he just saw eyes, a bright flame captured in ice, threads of silver and cornflower blue.

Suddenly the bed was too big for one.

For Aster, her mind had not exacted the same toll as her body, and so she laid in an uncomfortable state of wake, waiting for her dreams to release her from endless overthinking.

Zack had walked her back to Tifa's. When she'd hugged him before he left, she made the mistake of inhaling too deeply, taking in too much of the subtle scent of his body and the warmth of his embrace. Kissing just his cheek took every ounce of her waning self-discipline and all that training was suddenly worth it. The right time hadn't come; the time it had was interrupted.

So, Aster slept at Tifa's for something less than four hours and strode through the steel doors to her cell at six-fifteen. The cadet barracks, that is. Six-fifteen since it was Sunday, a rest day for the cadets, but not Aster.

She threw her things down onto her bed and rubbed her eyes, ready to get out of the heels she'd had to force her now swollen feet into, and grabbed a fresh uniform from her cabinet. She glanced over at Rex's sleeping form beside her before ambling towards the showers at the back of the room, stifling a yawn while the skirt of her dress drifted lazily around her knees.

"Went to that sodding party, didn't you. Now performing your walk of shame."

She whirled around, much harsher than the night before, seeking the gravelly voice that set her teeth on edge through the low light. Newberry perched on the metal frame of the foot of his bed, hunched over, fingers gripping his knees. Looked like he could have been sat there all night. Maybe even days. He was perfectly rigid with resentment, carved of marble, stone veins standing from his hands. It was in his body language. In his voice. In the air that hung thick around him.

"Maybe," she said through gritted teeth, unwilling to let him talk her down. "If only I had the capacity to feel ashamed, huh."

He balled his fists into knots of twisted steel and launched towards her, the closer he got, the more visibly he trembled with boiling rage. The heat of his blood knocked Aster back a step. "That's exactly the problem with you," he seethed. "You disgust me."

"What? What the hell have I done now?" she asked, addressing him with her arms open. There was no way that even this idiot could get this angry just because she went to a snooty Shinra party and he didn't get to go. She searched for clues in his blotchy, rubbery face, but found nothing but sweat, irritated eyes, hatred, and tears. Her jaw fell. "Are you crying?"

"You have no remorse—I can't even look at you."

Aster stretched her arms towards him placatingly, trying to quell a raging beast, calm the noise, reduce the impact his anger inflicted. "Newberry—"

The cadets surrounding them began to wake with his rising voice that was torn by ragged breaths, disorientation thick in their groggy faces.

"What you did," he screamed, baring his teeth with bulging eyes like a rabid wolf. "What you do."

"Newberry, calm down—I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Which makes every part of you even worse."

He grabbed her shoulders and shoved her with all his strength into the wooden table that sat in the middle of the room, which in turn skidded into a couple of beds behind it. The table slammed to a halt with a screech and threw her body into a crumpled heap, half on the floor, and half on top of some unfortunate cadet. She mumbled blurry apologies to the poor kid, and picked herself up to her feet, the room spinning.

Rex shot upright in bed at the crash and yanked his sheets away to stand, and he wasn't the only one to snap to his feet. Wasn't the first, either.

Rohrbach inserted himself between Newberry, the table, and Aster, placing a firm grip on the shorter boy's heaving, rattling shoulders. "That's enough."

Even Barnhill of all people, the one who hated Aster most next, was rubbing the back of his neck with a trace of a grimace on his face. He sauntered up behind the seething bull and nodded his agreement with Rohrbach. "Even if it's her."

Newberry shook Rohrbach off him violently with the breadth of his sweeping arm. "You don't understand." He wiped the sweat and tears from his face with his palm. "It's worse—much, much worse."

Rohrbach looked at Aster coolly, as though he were assessing her contorted features. He appeared to regard her dumbfounded expression as genuine. Perhaps he was to say something of that deduction, but he hadn't the chance as Newberry stormed out of the door, past the man standing in it.

And that man, surprisingly, stepped aside without so much as looking at him. It was Tseng, and he silently holstered the baton that was primed for Aster's wake up call.

"Well, then," he said, as the door closed on the moving hurricane's exit, dust settling on the uneasy cadets. He brushed down his suit and addressed his protégé. "Are you ready?"

Aster closed her gaping mouth. Still in her dress, un-showered, and passing glances between equally uncomfortable cadets, she merely nodded.

But she tilted her chin slightly higher, cleared her dry throat, and brushed her dressed down, mirroring exactly as Tseng had done before her. Casually, she pushed the wooden table back into its rightful place as if it hadn't likely just bruised her spine, nodded to Rohrbach courteously and strode for the door.

Rex reached his hand to touch her arm as she passed him, a touch which asked his question without even needing to move his lips: What the hell just happened?

"No idea," she said, with a much smaller voice than she intended.

Jack Newberry didn't return to the barracks. No one knew where he went, and no one knew what caused his violent outburst. No one would dare ask him, either. Rohrbach or Rex could have potentially overpowered him, but with the searing adrenaline of rage on his side, it was unlikely that either of them would actually be able to subdue him if he turned on them.

Regardless, Aster's training took place in a dress that day. Paranoia grew, and stealing glances over her shoulders with every turned corner caused strain in her neck. The dress would really give up the act. The lie—her protection, her defence—would dissolve to foam, and under Zack's repulsed stare she would melt in it. Too deep to back out now.

It was selfish. She couldn't help it.

So, with an aching neck, Aster stabbed her heel into a sandbag, piercing the film and spilling grit upon the diamond plate metal floor in an indoor shooting range developed for the sharpshooters of the infantry. Tight in a two-handed grip, she aimed a weighty pistol for the targets ahead of her. A real weapon. Tseng told her he hadn't the same time to waste on imitation weapons that the infantry did.

But she hadn't really spoken to him. Neither did she look at him. There was nothing but his heavy, empty stare and the popping of gunpowder. Eventually, Tseng broke the conversational silence. "Might I ask why the recruit in the barracks appears to hate you so desperately as he clearly does?"

She lowered her pistol, following her target only with her eyes. It slid left and right behind and in front of blue 'pedestrian' targets that she would be penalised for hitting. She raised her gun and fired, catching the shoulder of a blue mark. Rolling her eyes, she lowered the gun in defeat again, the barrel pointing lazily near her feet.

Tseng barked his disapproval. "Nice. Just shot Reno on the field. And flick your damn safety before you pipe a hole through the sole of your shoe."

A sharp intake of breath puffed out her chest and cheeks as she retook aim. She considered ignoring him but glanced at her heel embedded in the sand before legitimising his question with an answer, anyway. "I don't know. I thought I did."

She narrowed her non-dominant eye and squeezed the trigger a few times. The red target folded in on itself and was automatically replaced by another. She sighed. "He took it personally when I singled out Sparrow as the weakest cadet."

"An opinion you proceeded to stand behind."

"Of course," she said with a curt nod. "Objectively speaking, he is the weakest member of the squad. He hasn't improved by the arbitrary standards set by the leaderboard. I'm not attacking his character." She shrugged and frowned at her target. "It's whatever—I'm sure he's alright as a person. Who cares what I think?"

"You don't have to justify yourself to me."

She ground her teeth together, bitterness rising like bile in her throat. "Not when there's no one else around to watch."

Tseng didn't defend himself. He was above that, of course.

"That's not to say he hasn't improved at all, though," she said, dropping the gun to her side again. She heard Tseng draw breath to which she lifted the pistol without looking at him and pointed at the engaged safety, rolling her eyes—where he couldn't see, that is. "Not improving on an 'arbitrary scale' doesn't mean he's not improving at all. Just that he's not keeping up with the rest of us."

"As for Newberry?" Tseng pressed.

She shot a hole through another red target. Knuckles white. If she were imagining the pistol as Newberry's throat, he would have been thoroughly choked. "He said I was classless. Bullshit. Doesn't get a lot classier than firing a nine millimetre in a dress, three-inch heels and last night's make-up, now, does it?"

Tseng pinched the bridge of his nose. "As full of panache, as ever."

"I'm only short of champagne." A blue pedestrian suffered two bullets to the face and one to the shoulder. Aster's scowl suggested it wasn't an accident. "Why do you even care?"

"Do you find it so abhorrent that I may look to ensure your safety?"

She bristled. It was a wonder how in the tension of her body her brittle neck didn't snap when she half turned to him like a badly oiled machine. "My safety?" she squeezed through clenched teeth. "You mean my utility."

It seemed they were mostly the same in the eyes of Shinra. And Tseng appeared to have an inclination as to who might have given her that impression.

"What did he tell you?" Tseng snapped as he ripped back her arm to force her to face him. "I needn't threaten you."

She coolly tilted her head to meet his eyes with a scowl that mirrored his. "He didn't tell me anything. Only made me aware of the distinction between Turks candidates and Selectives."

His bony fingers dug into her flesh. "Fair knows nothing."

"Selectives are chosen for specific tasks," she reeled, growing faster and faster until her cheeks were red, "but I'm being trained separately—differently—to regular Turk cadets and for Gaia's sake I wanna know what the hell is going on, Tseng!"

"Be quiet," he hissed, close enough to her face that she could see his lips tense over his teeth. "Your training is tailored to the Turk you need to become. You are hired for a specific task. That is the distinction. Before you complete it, you will have a test."

Obscenities rushed with her breath as she shrugged off his grip. "Better pass then," she muttered.

Tseng didn't respond. He merely stared ahead into the targets.

After being let go at around seventeen-hundred hours, Aster collapsed into a chair opposite Rex in the mess hall with the clatter of her tray, feeling but ignoring the stares that licked her neck and back, sticking like jam.

How many times had they eaten like this? Enough times that Rex immediately swiped her baby carrots in exchange for his mushy peas. Enough times that they both knew without really asking which foods they liked and which they didn't.

Not before shovelling a trowel full of veg and meat in his mouth did he speak. "You didn't have to get all dressed up for me."

She narrowed her eyes with her false smile. "Adorable."

"How you goin'?"

She moved the slop of peas he'd dumped on her tray around with her fork. "No advancements since this morning's antics. You?"

"Same. On which front, the devil in that detail is nowhere to be found."

Aster swept a glance down the table from their usual position right at the very edge. No Newberry. An empty place where he'd normally sit.

"No one's seen him all day," Rex added.

"Whatever," she said, shrugging as if to shake him off her shoulders. If only it were so easy. At the sound of a small chorus of snickers arising from the table behind Rex, she pressed a hand to her face and ignored the look from four strangers' eyes. "You ever feel overdressed?"

Rex snorted loudly, a carrot threatening to clog his windpipe. It was fine. He coughed it up. "Can't relate. Wanna borrow my helmet?"

"Wow, thank you, Big-Brains-Surrexit for that two-hundred IQ suggestion. If I cover my face, no one will notice!"

"You are so welcome," he said, clapping his helmet down over her head. "I'll let you know if I see anyone you might not wanna see you, if ya get me."

"Thanks."

"You do make life needlessly complicated for yourself, just sayin'. Have you thought about how many hours per week they work you on average?"

She pulled Rex's helmet harder against her head and sank into her chair. "I'd rather not."

"About a hundred" —He leaned against the table for effect— "A hundred. You're killing yourself, seriously, and then you still manage to find the time to go frickin' dancing on a Saturday evening?"

An inhuman whine originated from her throat. "Thanks for the math."

He shrugged. "You should rest more."

"No," she said flatly. "Stopping never won anyone any races. You can't take a break at a station, or the train'll leave without you. Pushing through is the best way, the only way. This isn't a vacation. It's the military. Besides, you lot work around eighty hours, anyway."

"I guess, although we generally aren't forced into all-nighters just 'cause our boss's a sicko."

Aster burst from her chair and clamped her hand over his mouth to shut him up, shushing all the while. "Rex! Keep it down before you get smacked upside the head by someone."

He pulled her palm away and pushed back his shoulders. "Why? I'm not afraid. I'm only stating facts."

"One day, our mouths, collectively, as a pair," she began, flopping back into her seat, "are gonna get us in some serious trouble."

"Nah, what're they gonna do to us?"

"Hang us. Drag us. Gas us."

"So dramatic," he said, rolling his eyes. Then, he gasped. "Get down!"

She threw herself under the table on his word—much to the confusion of Matt beside her, but Rex must have given him a sign because he didn't question it—frantically scanning the room for whoever he felt she might need to hide from. Sure enough, through a dense wood of calves and table legs, she caught sight of her date of the night before…from under a table in the very same clothes she'd been wearing whilst with him. This was getting ridiculous.

She had to contort, twist her body with her cheek nearly against the floor in order to see him, but comfort was an easy sacrifice to make for the chance. Her smile lit up the underside of the table. He was laughing. By his lax features and way he held himself he wasn't on duty, but neither was he getting food since he had his own place to live. She had to strain to isolate his voice from the mass of the rest, but she could manage it. She could hone in on him. Just about.

He was talking to a man who was probably about his age, maybe twenty-two, twenty-three, in a dark, maroon uniform—SOLDIER Second Class. The guy had his back to her, so she could only see he had a head of brown hair and could barely hear him at all, only able to catch drifting words.

"…last night? Saw you…"

"Yeah." Zack rubbed his upper lip with his knuckle, hiding a smirk. Whatever words he spoke then, Aster couldn't hear. "…was a good night."

"Such a… You always…" the Second Class said to him, shoving Zack in the shoulder and garnering a hearty laugh.

Rex nudged Aster with his shin, interrupting her eavesdropping terribly rudely as far as she was concerned. He tilted his head down and cleared his throat. If anyone were looking, they'd think he was talking to his own crotch.

"Hate to break it to you but the squad's heading back to the barracks. You want a hope in hell of getting out of here without being seen, you're gonna have to hurry and hide in the pack, mate."

Aster whimpered to herself. "Alright…"

She snatched one last glimpse of Zack's smiling face before crawling under the length of the table, away from Zack and the Second, and elbowed her way into the centre of the group as they left the room. She got a few weird looks, but they didn't really ask questions anymore.

The door to the barracks slid open, and the back of the recruit in front of her became a solid wall that virtually flattened her nose when he froze in his footsteps. His name was Alcorn or something like that, and she frowned at his severe reaction until she realised he wasn't the only one to come to a standstill.

She side-stepped around him, wedging her comparatively smaller frame between bodies appearing to be suffering from the effects of Petrification or Stop magic. She, too, froze when her booted toes reached sheets on the floor.

"What the…"

Material carnage, again. A mattress was strewn across the floor ahead of her and bedsheets and uniforms littered the ground. Like a cosmic hand had swept through the room, knocking everything in its path. A pillow and a pair of boots, a leather holster, clothes and bandages hung from the frames of the other beds and across the floor. A t-shirt soaked in crusty, old blood clung to a chair like a rag snagged against splintered wood. A duffel bag, torn leggings.

"Wait—"

An encyclopaedic book laid open on the ground on top of a bloodstained shirt that belonged to Tseng, its pages settled on a grotesque image of some giant, troll-like beast that glared at her.

"All of this is my stuff," she realised aloud, voice growing steadily with each piece that fell into place. "All of it."

She grabbed one of the closest standard recruit t-shirts from near Sparrow's feet, and it almost came to pieces in her fingers. Shredded. Tattered. More net than cloth. She threw Rex's helmet from her head so hard it bounced off his thin mattress and onto the floor, shattering one of the eye-like lamps at its front, to get a better look. Her cabinet was the only one open. Completely gutted. Her bedside table was tipped, the drawer pulled out. Even her tampons were scattered across the floor.

She slammed the cabinet door closed, crunching one of the hinges. 'Monster' was scrawled across the door in the very same lipstick that still stained the edges of her lips. Was it the eerie way the lipstick looked like blood that made her bones turn to ice, or the fact that the word was the very one she was afraid to commit to herself?

There was a flick, a catch. A flick. A catch.

Her head snapped to meet the sound. Newberry sat on his bed, a foot propped against his knee, quietly opening and closing her switchblade. Flicking, catching. The dark, empty smile that did not reach his small eyes looked as though it could have been hacked by that blade. Aster could imagine too vividly what the teeth of its serrated edge would feel like as they tugged through the gristle and muscle in his neck. A thought that haunted her features.

The room was silent. Her voice resounded. "Give it back."

When he didn't respond, her fists pulsed. She stormed towards him. "I said. Give. It. Back."

"Earn it back," he said, snatching the corner of the table and dragging it between them, wooden legs squealing against the tiled floor.

He kicked a stool to her and sat opposite her. He swiped an arm, all meat and power across the table, scattering the day's newspapers off the surface like leaves in a strong gust of wind. Fitting for the tornado that had torn through her possessions. Aster caught the headlines as they fanned out beside her feet. 'SHINRA THWARTS SECTOR SIX WUTAI INSURGENT PLAN'. 'BOTTOMFEEDERS COST US HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS'. 'FOOD SHORTAGE'.

"Stabscotch. Think you can hold your nerve?" Newberry snarled, snapping her out of her daze. "Flinch and it's mine. Hold yourself together, you can have it back."

Rex burst to the forefront of the gathering crowd. "She doesn't have to play your dumb games, Jack—"

"—You fucking got it."

The clap of Rex's palm against his face was loud but not so as the sound of Aster smacking her hand down into the middle of the wooden table. She didn't take her eyes off Newberry, glaring daggers would be to insult the true blades she sent him. Neither did she sit. She towered over him, for a change, elbow locked tightly.

She inhaled through her nose. This was what she was built for. Tseng. Tifa. They made her ready for this.

The air was thick and still beside the breaths of twenty men and one woman. Silent, besides the sound of a switchblade flicking open once more, and clicking into place. The force of his first stab fell between her thumb and forefinger.

Slow. Between her forefinger and middle. She ignored her slightly bruised knuckles, the sickly yellow-green smattering of old bruises and formation of small callouses that would no doubt one day dominate her hands from all her training.

Between her middle and ring finger. Ignored how her fingernails were not as well-kept as they once were since they broke under repeated impact.

The thud entered her ears rhythmically, every now and then one would come off-beat to throw her. She didn't flinch. Just stared deep into his pig-like face with her mouth in a line and her eyes severe. Her body was hard as stone and just as brittle. If Rex—or worse, Zack—had come to lay a hand to settle her, the result would have been a crumble. She was stronger on her own. Oh, wouldn't Tseng have been pleased.

Newberry jabbed the knife faster and faster, precise in his etching into the wood. Aster carved her name into a school desk with a blade once, but this was a very different brand of possession. These were not carvings between lovebirds like 'JS + EA'. These were like claw marks.

She didn't flinch.

With a guttural roar, he rose to his feet and slammed the blade into the table, slicing into the flesh of two of her fingers. Sickened gasps choked out of cadets who thought he wouldn't dare.

The pain was white hot. Aster could feel the blood drain away from her head, and the rush was blinding. The blade stuck out of the wood and the skin of her inner index and middle fingers.

He beat the table with his palms and yelled, "Fine, you fucking win."

With her breath held in her throat, she wrapped her free hand around the handle of the blade with a firm grip and yanked it from its sheath of wood and skin, much to the disgust of anyone who had the guts to watch.

"Don't wanna play anymore, Newberry?" Her lips barely moved with her words as she switched the knife into her bloodied, torn hand—her wielding hand—hot blood trickling over pale fingers and down the spine of the blade. "How about double or nothing? You don't flinch, you can keep my switchblade. I'll even let you have the dress off my back. Pair of my underwear too if you're goddamned sick enough, which I'm quite sure you are."

She leaned over the table with a hunched back to meet him face to face. "But if you flinch, I'll take all my shit back, and you won't dare fucking speak to me until pass out. Deal?"

The nostrils of his flat nose flared like a wild animal preparing a charge. He slammed his hand beside the small pooling of her blood. "Deal."

"Better keep your word." She wrapped her fingers around the handle but found herself unable to use her index finger. Stifling the wince, she set her thumb over the hilt. "For all you go on about your unmatched honour."

He grimaced. "You are one mouthy bitch. You know nothing about honour."

"You're probably not wrong," she said, shaking her head. "I try and do what's right—"

"—Spare me the fucking lecture."

She cocked an eyebrow at him.

The blade tapped between each of his fingers, gently, deftly, picking up the pace. Light, quick drums to the beat of her heart. His shoulders seemed to hunch further with each hit, and his lips pared back to bare his teeth with his scowl.

Aster had stabbed her brother with a sharp pencil lead too many times to count, playing this game. Her hand, bloodied and in the shock of agony, trembled. Still, the blade touched between his twitching fingers. Nerves.

Blood flicked from her spilling wounds onto his skin. She slammed the knife with a dull thud close enough to trim his fingernail. She'd never know if she managed it because Newberry didn't flinch, he flung himself away from the table, staggering back over his chair with choking gasps.

She yanked her blade an inch deep out of the wood and shoved the table out of her way. She snatched her leggings, her old bloodied t-shirt and anything else she could carry in one arm before swiping the blade in the direction of the staring cadets.

"You got something to say?" she snapped, her voice rising into a hysterical screech. "I dare any of you to try me."

Silence.