A/N: Hey! Another Wednesday, another update. Let's see what was waiting on the other side of the air vent grate, shall we? Going to subtly raise the whole 'rated T for mild violence' thing here again. Shit's about to go down.

Yet again some kind of miracle washed over me that this update is on time—which is ridiculous because I've been so into it this week and even started writing *actual new content* (aka started working on chapter 28). But it's late in the day because I'm running a stupid high fever and have had less than twenty hours of sleep in five days so I'm going to go to BED because I've made myself ill.

Remember to take care of yourself people, love from an idiot that seriously can't x

17th Jul '19

Chapter 18: Hell Out Here

"Don't freak out," she said almost silently, and smashed her heel through the grate with an enormous but unavoidable clatter, and shoved herself out of the vent.

"Aster!"

Her feet slammed the ground. A stationed Wutai troop in the dead-end of what seemed to be a library or archive spun to face her boot heel connecting with his nose. With the element of surprise duly on her side, his head cracked to the side and he fell in a crumpled heap.

Zack threw himself from the chute, landing light on his toes, and swung his sword from his shoulder. His eyes drew to the unconscious guard by her feet.

"Shit," he hissed. "Are you alright?"

She was a civilian, after all, with no training past basic self-defence, certainly nothing that could compare against heavy arms and artillery. She was a skater, for Gaia's sake, it wasn't like she had the drill and training to be able to deal with the trauma of what could be beyond the maze of bookcases.

So he may have thought.

"I'm fine," she said as she pressed her back against the shelves before a corner. Voices travelled closer — the clank of metal armour, sound of boots against the ground. Red lights swarmed the room. She closed her eyes in wait.

Footsteps grew closer, a run. Zack lurched to yank her from the reach of the soldier surely about to shoot or impale her, but he was too far away.

The moment the first soldier's armour reflected the red glare of emergency lighting upon cresting the corner, Aster grabbed him by the breastplate and swung him headfirst into the bookcase. Books toppled into him.

Zack staggered forward in shock. "What the hell?"

Aster hedged a well-placed bet that his military-wired brain would snap to respond to an order. "Zack—go!"

He pelted forward and met the two others with a clash of steel, wielding his blade as though it were weightless. He sprung off one grunt with a kick to the chest only to charge into the other, swinging and parrying with the Wutaian and his comparatively trivial halberd.

Sounds like sharpening knives filled Aster's ears. The man she'd thrown into the bookcase stumbled to his feet and raised his fists at her. Inhaling sharply through her nose, she ducked under his straight and came up with a punch to the jaw. Her knuckles cracked in resistance, but she ignored them and booted him square in the chest with a well-timed push kick that knocked him back off his feet.

His uniform was clearly of lesser status compared with those she'd fought in the slums, but the ones fighting Zack were different again. She tried to switch off the part of her brain that was racing to work out their hierarchy and switch on the side that would aid her combat. Struggling with that left an opening for the man to jackknife and kick her the gut. The force brought her immediately to the ground, and she dodged his incoming punch to the face. She kneed him high in the stomach, sending him into the wall behind them and into submission.

She scrambled to her feet and sprinted around the corner toward Zack. He blocked an incoming slash from slicing through his shoulder or Aster's neck and ran his sword through and out of the troop's stomach so quickly that Aster wasn't even sure it had happened. That is until blood gurgled in the slumping guard's throat.

Zack grabbed her hand before she could dwell on it. They charged through aisles of bookshelves between bullet streams and smouldering heaps of files and books. Zack stomped to a halt at a crossway, where a group of five Wutaian soldiers awaited them. But Aster saw only through them, beyond them. To where bodies clad in blue uniforms and painfully familiar infantry helmets that hid their identities laid in silent piles.

It was hard not to imagine them as people she knew. Rex, Matt, Rohrbach, Sparrow. Those men, lost, soaked in their own blood, could just have easily been someone she knew. Her face blew hot in rage.

Zack, acting as always on instinct, covered Aster with a protective arm, waiting for the first to strike. All at once.

He swiped his sword through the air warningly and charged forward, leaving two foes to change their minds and head for the weaker of the two. The girl. She resented that they had helmets. They were in a much better position than she.

She threw herself to the ground to avoid impalement via halberd. This was where she would die if she didn't fight back hard enough. This wasn't training. She scrambled for the switchblade buried in her back pocket.

A second stab ripped a line of flesh from her side and earned a yelp that made Zack wince. He spun to aid her but was punched in the face by another grunt.

Aster grabbed the polearm that almost ended her and yanked herself to her feet. The soldier shook it vehemently, trying to beat her away and dislodge her grip. Up close and personal it couldn't do him any good. She cracked the hilt of her switchblade into his nose. With a crunch, his blood sprayed over her clothes and he hit the ground.

Behind her, the second man clouted her over the head so hard she fell to her knees. A flash of silver caught her eye. Desperately, she lunged to tackle him to the ground and pinned him there with a stab to the gut with her knife. Twist. Pull. She squeezed her eyes shut when his widened at her in horror and stumbled back to her feet, blood dripping from her hand and blade, jaw agape.

"Aster!" Zack yelled, shoving a grunt off him only to be attacked by a second.

Her eyes flicked to the soldier whose nose she broke as he grabbed her shirt and punched her square in the face. For a second, she only saw blotches of black and bright light. Her knees failed, but she didn't hit the floor. She hung limp in her shirt in the soldier's hand until he hurled her body into a bookcase, breaking shelves and sending books and files tumbling. Aster fell flat into the ground with a groan. The bookcase teetered.

Zack lunged and grabbed her shoulders, yanking her out of the way as the ceiling-height unit toppled over. The man that threw her into it dove out of the way. The one she stabbed was crushed.

Zack lifted her from her daze. Adrenaline shot back through her system like it replaced her blood. Over the toppled bookcase, the surviving soldier aimed with his halberd-rifle hybrid and fired off several shots that Zack deflected with the swipe of his sword. There was no time to awe.

Aster vaulted onto the bookcase, ignoring the pain, and drop kicked the soldier in the face and chest. Her back splintered the spine of the shelving unit and boy, did the impact sting, but she rolled to stand anyway.

Zack snatched her hand again. "C'mon!"

He hardly waited for her to jump down before running on through the aisles. They burst through a secured fire exit and into a stairwell with the number forty-five embedded against the wall. Aster looked over her shoulder. The door slammed shut, and there was no handle. No way back in.

Zack started for the stairs down, but Aster dug her heels against the floor and ground to a stop, slipping her hand free of his. The sudden cold where her hand had been was enough to stop him in his tracks. He spun and scooped her hands in his again. Gentler. "Are you okay?"

Cuts and grazes smattered her skin—partly from Zack's Blizzaga spell—her nose was bleeding profusely over her lips, and a shredded section of her top revealed a wound across the side of her waist that turned the fabric a very fresh red. Yes, she was covered in blood, and it wasn't even all her own.

But she nodded. "I'm fine," she said, scanning his body for wounds too. Besides a split cheekbone, she couldn't tell. "How about you?"

"Just scratches—let's go," he said, making for the stairs.

"Wait!" She snatched back his hand with both of hers and tugged him to look at her again. "People are dying here…"

"Leave it to me. I won't let them hurt you."

She shook her head vigorously and wiped the blood that ran down her chin. "That's not it. Zack, we have to help them. All of ou—your forces are upstairs, so whatever is happening is happening up there, not down."

"You've gotta be kidding," he almost yelled. "I can't take you into the danger!"

"You don't have to," she said, offering a smile in advance apologies, "but you'll follow me, won't you?"

"Aster—no!"

She pelted up the stairs two at a time and only stopped on the next floor when Zack swiped her wrist from her again. "You're injured…!"

She glanced down at her previously white tank top and made a mental note to stop buying light-coloured clothes. "It's nothing—"

"—Goddess, are you insane?" he said. Stress gave an edge to his voice. He pulled her into him, one hand pressed to her back and the other firmly over her wound. As soon as the gasp of pain shot into her lungs, it was replaced with relief. The warmth of a Cure spell released from his fingers and stitched her side back together to stanch the bleed. "How can you say this is nothing? Aster, this is war."

She didn't have a response to that.

She placed her hands against his chest, staring at her swollen knuckles, bruised from making poor decisions in combat. She looked up at him. "I can't reconcile our differences of opinion here, but what I am certain of is that the longer we waste in here, the more people die out there. They need you."

Ultimately they were similar people. Because as soon as an explosion blew from several flights above, they both hit the stairs up without further discussion.

They blasted through the doors onto the fifty-second-floor lobby—or perhaps that was what it once might have been before. Walls laid in crumbled piles and bodies littered the puddled floor. Under red light, it was easy to pretend it was just water.

A massive hole in a wall nearby undoubtedly led to the elevator shaft from which they came. But worse than the destruction that war wrought was, of course, the fighting. Infantrymen and SOLDIER members in dark red armed with swords and guns and fists and grenades, yelled and screamed. Sobbed over fallen comrades through battle cries. There weren't many left in action. Many were injured.

"Zack!" A SOLDIER member in Zack's same uniform grabbed him by the wrist and dragged him to the relative safety of a decrepit, half-standing office that smelt of gunpowder and had a whole wall missing. They crouched behind a desk. Zack's skin paled around the man's tight grip. "Where in Gaia have you been? Our orders have changed."

Aster stopped breathing. It was Angeal.

Zack shook his head. "Sorry, 'Geal, but I've been tryin' to get my girlfriend out of here!"

Aster felt the heat rise to her cheeks; then she pushed the thought from her mind. Ease of language. That's all.

Recognition flashed across Angeal's face. "You're—"

"—Good to meet you," she blurted out, stretching her hand to him and praying that he might not say another word.

He didn't. He eyed Zack then looked back to Aster's imploring face before shaking her extended hand brusquely, but not impolitely.

"…Pleasure," he said. "Under unfortunate circumstances."

She barely nodded in response.

"Secure and maintain this floor, understood?" he directed to Zack. "They seem to be targeting the labs. Do not let them pass. We are under strict instruction."

"You got it."

Zack slapped Angeal on the shoulder as the latter stood and left the room. The sword on his back was wider than Aster's waist. She blanched.

"Okay," Zack said, snapping back her attention. "Wait here."

"Where are you going?"

As if in response, the floor shook beneath heavy footsteps of what Aster could only suspect belonged to an even bigger version of the monster that destroyed the elevators and fell down the shaft. The vibrations knocked her back against the rattling desk drawers.

He pursed his lips and nodded. "You heard my orders. Please, please hide. If you need me, shout for me. I'll come back."

"Zack, but I—"

Beyond the crumbled wall, a body flew through the air and smashed straight into the remaining elevator doors. The brickwork around them crumbled just a little more. He wore a burgundy uniform, Second Class. Out like a light. Down that easy.

"These are anti-SOLDIER monsters. I'm sorry. I can't tell you what to do, but I'm asking you to stay out of their way."

Aster saw the ache in his sky blue eyes and gave in to it with a jaw clamped so tightly her teeth hurt. It wasn't frustration, or not the angry kind, anyway. Helplessness. Caught. He didn't know the training she had received, so she couldn't say his worry was misplaced. Eventually, she brought herself to nod.

He took her head in his hands and kissed her forehead. "You need me and I'll come running."

With which he turned tail and ran through the battlefield towards the loudest of shrieks and bangs and yelling, sword drawn. Aster leant back against the wall and pulled her PHS from her pocket. Since it was in the same pocket she had shoved her switchblade back into earlier it was scratched, and the small screen was covered in blood. She wiped it clean with her thumb to reveal seven missed calls.

She dialled a number. "Tseng."

"Doe." His voice was sharp. Sharper than usual, anyway. "Where the hell are you?"

"Long story. Fifty-second floor as of right this moment," she said, then inhaled a breath through her nose, steeling herself for the betrayal to Zack's wishes she was about to commit. "Orders?"

He paused for a moment. "Remain on the fifty-second floor. I am working downwards from fifty-six; the situation is contained. Are you with Fair?"

"Uh—yeah? How did you know that?"

"Because you don't answer your goddamn PHS when you're with him—keep relatively near him but not near enough that he accidentally slices your arm off, understood? Don't do anything stupid."

She cocked her head to the side with the barest hint of a smirk. "Is that my permission to go for it?"

His sigh crackled through the line even over the sounds of conflict. "Don't do anything stupider than usual."

"Got it," she said, hanging up on him. "I never do anything stupid."

The stone that sank to her stomach reminded her that she had put herself into an uncomfortable position, having received orders from her professional superior to act and having been begged personally by someone else—who was still very much her superior—to omit. Sat with her back against the wall and her foot against a felled pillar, she was very much between a rock and a hard place.

She crept over to the fallen office wall and surveyed the room. From here she could see the exposed the concrete and brick of the elevator shaft, and further beyond the foyer, far across the floor, panels of glass that stared over the sectors of Midgar, at least one of which was shattered with splintering shards still reaching into the growing night. Zack must have wound deeper into the floor. Her shuddering breaths would have given her away had she been lurking in silence. Trying to contain them with deep ins and outs, she watched the Wutaian grunts fighting with the Shinra, overrunning her brain with her next two, three or four steps.

Something cold licked her neck.

Slowly, she turned to face a man of maybe thirty in thick Wutaian cladding at the less sharp end of his rifle-halberd hybrid. Her eyes traced the polearm, a glorified mop handle with a foot-long bladed head to it, the other end a barrel of a gun. She dragged her eyes up to his.

His narrowed as he pressed the blade against her skin, enough to draw a bead of blood.

He pulled the blade back and went for the stab but met with concrete when she ducked. She kicked out his knee with intent to break and bent beneath the swing that almost capped her neck.

He booted her in the chest and her spine struck the crumbling wall. Some kind of missile burst towards her from his halberd and narrowly missed. The blast knocked brick and plaster out of the wall, and Aster choked on the air.

The smell of sulphur filled her nose, but through the dust and smoke, she darted for him. She jabbed for the face until he brought his halberd up to block. She kicked it with all her strength between his hands, snapping it in two and connecting her heel with his face. He stumbled backwards over the rubble, sending him down groaning.

She snatched the sharp half of the broken weapon and ran from the office space. An infantryman stood facing two Wutaians. Aster slashed the blade across the torso of one guard while the infantryman shot at him with his all-familiar rifle.

"S-she's with me?" he asked, trying to convince himself that this was a good thing.

She nodded, threw the broken weapon at the second man like a throwing knife which he sadly deflected, and bared her fists. "Yeah, I'm with you. I'll be passing out in under a month," she said, wiping her upper lip with her wrist. "Name's Doe."

With the infantryman at her back, a smile passed her lips — kinship in a uniform.

It was a violent crash of bodies and blunt thuds, and her lungs screamed with each impact as breath forcibly left her.

Fights weren't long. Not really. Lasted only as long as it took one to down or end the other, of course. A well-placed punch. A quick stab.

"Doe!"

Aster whirled around to face an enemy that shivved for her gut. The spear grazed past her stomach. She felt it cleave the air. Nicked her shirt fabric. Her hands wrapped around the pole as she gasped.

The man at the other end let go of the weapon limply when Angeal swiped his sword skyward, sending the Wutaian flying into the door to the stairwell. He holstered his sword.

Aster strained against the strength shock possessed, and deflated with her hands—and newly acquired polearm—across her knees. "Thank you," she breathed.

The SOLDIER stepped forward and nodded to her. "I know you. You're the cadet that's been causing all the problems in basic training."

She stiffened. "With respect, I resent that statement. I'm not the one causing the issues, sir."

Angeal barked a dry laugh. "That is a matter of perspective." Then he lowered his voice. "Zack doesn't know?"

"No." She shook her head and caught her breath. She stared solidly at the ground between her feet. "I've been trying to separate my personal and work life, sir."

"Given your circumstances, I suppose I can't blame you. But this raises even more problems," Angeal said, hand at his chin for just a moment. The pensive tension in his forehead released. "Tell Zack I'm going to aid Genesis upstairs. Orders stand."

Her lips pinched together. "Yes, sir."

He passed her but hesitated. He didn't turn. "I won't tell Zack. Not while it is none of my business. I sympathise with you, but only so far."

She nodded faintly, though he wasn't looking at her. "I don't want to worry him."

Angeal turned a Mako eye, something Aster had previously regarded as warm. Now it looked cold, critical, and unconvinced. But he nodded and headed through the stairwell door.

Aster gripped the halberd tighter, palms slipping against wood and metal, and ran across the expansive floor towards the skyline windows. Searching for Zack. She found him before the dark sky amid combat, dancing so similarly and yet so differently than in the late night of the week before, slashing and twisting and diving and lunging.

Beastly shrieks and wails did not let up. There were two of them. Two of the towering, troll-like beasts, one without a weapon, the other wielding an enormous hatchet similar to the one she saw earlier on, but a stronger variant, as expected. This was a Vajradhara Cala, and she could only tell by the subtle differences to its armour. The likeliness of her death if she went over there was two-fold. Firstly, she stood little chance against anti-SOLDIER monsters, and secondly, assuming she survived the first hit, Zack would proceed to destroy her for having ignored his pleas.

She sucked in a huge gasp as the Cala swiped its hatchet in line for Zack and he perfectly blocked the the blow with his sword, absorbing half of the force in his slightly buckling knees. Aster staggered backwards.

But beyond him, infantrymen and Second Classes either unconscious or almost, clung to their injuries. Zack was the last man standing. And she was more than ready to cast aside all her inhibitions until she saw his arm begin to glow, and a blast of concentrated power borrowed from the planet erupted from his hand and swelled into an engulfing ball of flames that exploded upon connection with the smaller of the two beasts. Aster scrambled to the floor to escape the blast radius that charred the walls and floors, unable to take her eyes from the spell, as the monster that bore the brunt collapsed in a heap that rumbled the floor.

The remaining one screamed, but Zack looked exhausted. Even amongst the dying flames, she could see his shoulders heaving and the sweat over his forehead. He lunged in and spun around, slashing across the gut and neck of the beast. The monster swept its arm down and across his chest with such unimaginable force that it knocked him clean off his feet. His back smacked the ground and his body bounced off the marble tiles. Sword clattered against the floor and slid from his reach. The beast pulled back the axe larger than Aster.

"No!"

She tore over from her previously safe distance, firing with the rifle end of her halberd, bullets ricocheting off the armour, like pebbles from a windowpane. She skidded to a halt between it and Zack, who coughed and spluttered behind her, pulling himself to his knees.

Her face was hard as stone. She aimed for the head, repeatedly firing, steadily, morbidly pissing it off. It was working.

Blood dripped from the slashes Zack left in its stomach and neck. The beast shrieked, deafening her and making her ears ring and vision blur as it choked on the bullets she fired. Then, it lowered its head, almost to the floor, eyes like faceted rubies dug in its flesh glaring her down. It charged towards her, and she didn't budge.

Zack reached an arm for her, screaming her name.

She took the halberd in two hands across her chest and stood her ground, feet rooted. Timed just right—and she really only had one shot—she bent over backwards, halberd against the floor, and kicked the beast in the chin hard enough to hear a crack with one leg after the other. It roared, throwing its head back, and in the same second she kicked her feet over to stand and rammed the halberd through Zack's slash in its bared throat.

She abandoned the bloodied weapon and sprung out of the way as the beast choked and fell face-forward onto the lodged spear, and though the pole snapped under its weight, it did so only after the halberd pierced through its skull. It hit the ground with a shuddering bang.

Aster pressed her back against a surviving pillar, staring out through a splintered window onto the city. All the windows were damaged. Bullet holes and spider webs. She slid down the support to sit hip to hip with Zack. Easier than to face the truth, it was to stare out into the night. The waning of adrenaline brought back the sense of pain, but also other feelings, like the cool breeze through the broken windows — the feeling of entwining fingers.

The fifty-second floor was almost silent, and the sounds of gunfire and assault waned in the levels above. The alarm siren withered away, and the red panic lighting died out and returned to bright white. Light brought reality, and the bloodstains that had been lost under red lamps now shone in dark pools that seeped from beneath bodies and monsters alike. At the end of it all, humans and monsters comprised of the same things. Blood and bones.

Everything that should be dead was now dead. And people that shouldn't be were too. A few members of SOLDIER slumped together near the elevators, recuperating, and a small group of infantrymen huddled near the stairwell. Of all the men that fought on this floor, these were the only survivors.

The night sky was a bruised black like the evening that had invited her into Midgar seemingly so long ago. Twirling ribbons of Mako splashed from the reactors, as though there were nought a care in the world. If only.

Her eyes seemed to glaze over, emotionlessly reflecting city lights. She tipped her head back into the wall. Lips hardly moved as she spoke.

"I killed a man today," she said. "In that library. I saw his light go out."

Zack didn't know what to say. That much was clear from his expression. "You defended yourself."

As she had before. Of all the people she knocked unconscious, how many never woke up? "Still murder." She closed her eyes. Her sigh made her voice breathy and weak. "What does that make me?"

Zack swallowed and looked out into the night. If it made her a murderer,

what did that make him?