A/N: Can you believe we're 125,000 words into this story? That's insanity! This story is gonna be like 250,000 words I can see it happening *cough* and the rest *cough* I was going through my notes last night to get some plot threads untangled and I was SWEATING with how many interconnected plot lines I've got going on. I could have written a simple story. Could.

MIGHT take next week off because I go back to uni next week (which actually means I'll probably be writing more frequently as opposed to less because I travel so much and sit in the library with nothing to do okay so i could study at uni but why the heck would I do something like that?) So I might. Dunno. Check on my profile for updates or smash that follow button and then you won't even have to worry about that first bit.

I hope you're having a lovely day wherever you are in the world and I will see you in the next one! Bye guys!

18th Sep '19

Chapter 24: Fact of Light

"You look troubled," Tseng said, folding his arms and leaning his back against the helicopter door. The Shinra logo gleamed with polish behind his head. A diamond halo.

"Like you care," said Aster, and she meant it to be snarky, belligerent. It came out lifeless. Sharp as a wet leaf.

"Quite right. I don't."

His black eyes pulled across the horizon. Aster could only assume he was following Zack Fair with his gaze as he rounded up the unit and dispersed them back to Junon. Cloud had mentioned that they would be undergoing some small missions in wait for the Turks' return.

Zack would probably be glad to get away from her.

The coward within her preferred it that way.

"Tell me about him."

Aster snapped her head up to meet Tseng's narrowed eyes. Half-lidded, like he was bored.

"S-sir?"

He pointed a long finger.

She followed it, shame on her face, expecting to see Zack still staring. He wasn't. Tseng had indeed watched him off. What Tseng pointed his finger towards was the body of the Crescent Unit soldier. Laying in a crumpled heap, clutching a pistol like a baby bottle.

Tseng strode over and kneeled beside him. "It is unusual to see a Wutaian with a modern weapon. Very out of character. Do you know what the significance of this might be?"

Aster thought to speak but just shook her head.

"Come and take a closer look."

She didn't want to go back over there. She never liked facing the consequences of her actions. It was childish, but also human nature. At least, that was her justification.

Still, her feet planted one in front of the other.

"Inspect the weapon."

Around eight and a half inches long from firing pin to muzzle. Nine-millimetre. Weighed a little more than a bag of sugar. Steel and shine, save for the handgrip and splatters of blood. She swiped the blood across the slide of the gun and it filled the engraved serial code like red ink. SX-93FS. Which she knew. It jolted her memory. Because she had trained with an SX-92F.

"It's a Shinra model," she said.

"Correct. And what's the significance of that?"

She stared at the handgun as though the serial code might rearrange itself into the answer. "I don't know. He stole it? He was in Midgar?"

I won't let you take me twice, he had said. Shinra scum.

"He was probably in Midgar," she said again, surer of herself.

"Perhaps. But Shinra sell their weapons in Junon too. It would not be difficult to imagine the Wutaians stocking up nearby."

"Do you know the answer, Tseng?" she asked.

"He is dead. It is speculation. Though the picture is becoming clearer."

"Classified?" she asked, hoping he'd say yes. Hoping, because if he acted in the unpredictably predictable way he always did, and there was but one thing she could be sure of, her life might return to some strain of normalcy.

The new normal, anyway. Not the normal that was back in Icicle Inn.

"Of course," he said.

It didn't make her feel better.

He peeled off the man's helmet. Aster squeezed her eyes shut as horror gripped her by the shoulders and rattled her until her organs reduced to slush. The wet sound, a squelching sound, and the smell of iron, steam and sulphur.

Cloud made it sound so easy when he said to push things out of mind. Easy. Print the data and store it alphabetically in a filing cabinet. Lock it up. That kind of easy.

But he'd had more training than she.

"It's a shame," Tseng said. Aster didn't watch him place the helmet down, but when she looked back again, he'd simply placed it over his head. Not on it. She suspected that he was unable to fit it back on a skull without shape. "I saw the altercation from aboard the helicopter. Unfortunate. But you are more useful to us alive than he is."

Useful. It was the wrong word to choose.

She snapped with sarcasm in her fangs. "Don't sugarcoat it, Tseng, it's unlike you. If you're trying to say you care about me more than some random Wutai soldier, I'm flattered."

"I merely meant to suggest the outcome was preferred."

"Yeah, well, I don't care. I don't care for your stupid version of kind words."

He didn't bite. Instead, he sighed and pressed the palm of his hand to his forehead. "You are such a brat."

She ground her teeth.

"The outcome is preferred because we have captured the second member of the Crescent Unit," he said, searching the body before him for any form of identification. Nothing. He took the pistol instead. "If both were dead, perhaps I'd speak differently. Especially for how you love to run your mouth."

"Do not forget," he said with a hard scowl before turning away, "that you are as disposable as the toilet paper our enemies wipe their arses with. Your ego is much larger than it warrants, Doe."

She stood up.

"Bring the helmet," he said.

And she knew which one he meant. And it wasn't hers.

Aster felt like a doorman to an exclusive club, only it was a club no one would have wanted access to. A curse, not a blessing. She couldn't go in. It was an interrogation.

Instead, she stood beyond the door to that largest of tents. Mostly still intact. On closer inspection, the fabrics that hung from its thick, tall tentpoles were tightly woven tapestries. Once spectacular and vivid, no doubt, now faded like the pages of old tomes. Aged. Covered in a fine layer of dust and soot.

Heavy drapes covered the entryway. It was by no means soundproof, but Tseng's voice was muffled beyond comprehension, as though he spoke into a pillow. That was when the Wutaian soldier wasn't screaming. When he was, no note of Tseng's chords could be heard.

He didn't scream constantly. There were moments. Seconds. Where a thud and a sound like crackling would land, then silence would pull deep for a long time.

Aster clung to the helmet. More ceremonial than functional. She held it away from her body, waiting for someone to take it from her hands. It wasn't dripping with blood anymore. The ground around her feet had swallowed that up in the past thirty minutes. She couldn't work out, staring at it, why it vibrated in her hands.

Of course, it was her hands that were the very problem.

Polished, brushed steel. A black visor that stretched over the eyes with a golden lining. A crescent horn-shaped detailing rose from the forehead, and from it, a pointed diamond in gold. Ornamental. As though it could be worn to a state dinner as easily as it could a battlefield. Easier, perhaps, since it clearly did its owner no good in the latter.

And a small lump, maybe the size of a grape at the crown. She didn't turn it over to check the damage to the inside.

Looking at it once more, she couldn't help but feel that the gold detailing was bespoke. That this was their form of identification. So she looked away, to distance herself from her victim.

The settlement was holding itself up by leaning against itself. Like how a big gust of wind might blow over a bundle of sticks. They might fall into one another, hold each other up. The rest collapse into the ground. That was how the camp stood. That which fell into something sturdier stayed upright for another day.

Stacks of crates still remained. A lot of them broken and empty, but a few remained whole. She could waste her energy wondering what they had been storing and why, but the screaming resumed.

The vertebrae in Aster's neck ground against each other in her tension. The screaming, wet in the throat and from the chest, died into laughter. Hellish, deranged, out of place, like laughing at a funeral.

His voice carried a thick accent, mania. "You won't kill me. You need me alive."

"Is that so?" Tseng's voice drew nearer, words became clearer. "Perhaps you ought to reconsider your value. Because at the moment, you are worth nothing."

The curtained door pulled aside in Tseng's fist. "Doe. In here."

The curtain brushed against the stones as it fell behind her. The tent was not grand. The floor was covered in a woven straw rug, but the straw was poor quality, as though taken from a haystack for fodder, not furniture, and it was weak. Ragged would be incorrect because that would suggest used. Rather the holes in it were of poor craftsmanship, or that it was created in a hurry. A few square duvets were spread on the floor with pillows. Nothing seemed permanent about this camp.

Tseng led her through another curtain door and another. He said, "Provide us with a reason to keep you alive before we eliminate you like the rest."

Behind the curtain, a vaguely charcoal-like smell barrelled past and Aster stepped through it with the helmet behind her back. Reno stood to the left with his tinted goggles over his eyes. His stun rod flickered.

The member of the Crescent Unit was smirking, panting, tied and slumped against a tentpole. Blood slipped over his lip. Atop of his helmet, adorned in gold, not a diamond shape, but a cross.

"Show him," Tseng said.

Aster thrust the bloodied helmet in front of her chest.

His smirk fell. His cheeks sagged. He writhed against the ropes at his wrists. The pole rattled and creaked as he struggled to his feet and the tapestries swayed. The truth as he understood it had been overturned; there was no safety in his rank when his equal had been dispatched so mercilessly. Shinra did not need them as alive as they might have believed.

"N-no."

"Let's try this again, shall we?" Reno said. The words rolled from his tongue like syrup. A treat.

"Be of use, or we will simply remove you as we have your colleague." said Tseng. "So. Can you confirm?"

"Okay—stop, please! W-we have no connection with the group in the slums. I don't have any information to give you, I swear," the soldier said, pulling against the tentpole. "We lost contact with them over two weeks ago."

"Mm. That is disappointing."

Bang.

The soldier's head flung back and smacked into the tentpole with a crunch. He slumped forward at the waist as blood dripped from his face into the straw and mud beneath him until the weight of his body dragged down the ropes on his wrists around the tentpole that held him up.

"And a lie," Reno said, pulling the long and thin ponytail at the back of his head smooth and throwing it behind his shoulder.

"Not so much a lie," said Tseng. He threw the pistol next to the body with a clatter. "An attempt at contact was made. And it failed. Because we intercepted it. A foolish error. An incredibly costly one, for them."

Then Tseng and Reno turned to Aster. Her lips were folded into her mouth, eyebrows pushed together and eyes wide. Still, she held the helmet in front of her.

"If you are going to cry—"

Her eyelashes fluttered a few times, out of time with each other like she chewed something bitter. "I-I'm not."

"Good," the Turk leader said. "We will search the area before we ensure no one will ever return to it."

"Doubt we'll find anything in a beaten up wreck like this," Reno said. He peeled off his goggles and pushed them into his hairline, then holstered his stun rod and locked his fingers together behind his head.

"How," Aster said, and her voice came out as a rasp. "How are you so relaxed?"

Reno considered her with a cool blue eye. "This is how the game is played. He knew that," he said, nodding towards the body. The straw matted with his blood.

"Reno," Tseng said, "Find Rude. Commence the routine search."

The redhead shrugged and sauntered out. "You got it, yo."

Tseng looked at Aster. He pulled the helmet out of her hands and dropped it near the pistol. "It gets easier," he said.

She couldn't imagine it.

Tseng had encouraged Aster to eat an MRE, a military ration that was ready to eat in a self-contained parcel, because the intelligence sweep took over a day. They slept on the camp.

But she couldn't keep down the mouthfuls she took. Gave the rest to Reno. For some reason, he was happy to eat it. It tasted like the prison loaf she'd been given, way back when.

It was a problem when that became a comforting memory.

The search was as fruitless as Reno anticipated. Aster pulled a rag off the supply truck that was destroyed by the anti-SOLDIER monster's flail—or what of it that wasn't crushed.

More crates. Most of them had been empty. Tseng suspected that they stole them from one of the cargo ships in Junon. The ones that were still sealed by industrial staples that needed prying apart were mostly full of ammunition or other sharp paraphernalia, as well as the tools and parts they used to set up this camp. Fabric, tinned food. Definitely stolen. Junon was not far away.

The crates and barrels on the back of the truck were crushed and spilling. The way they had been ordered, before the crash, suggested these had been packaged up decidedly.

They were not factory sealed. They were not organised by product. They were mixed bags, as though they had chosen what they needed and packed up. As though they were packing up to leave.

"Tseng."

He approached her.

"What do you make of this?"

He looked at the contents of the truck bed and came to much the same conclusion as she. "It appears they did not intend to stay."

"These are their possessions," she said, pulling the lid off the box nearest to her. The sides crumbled, and out fell Wutaian grunt uniforms in green and orange. "Were they heading to Midgar? Or Wutai?"

"It's difficult to say."

"Nothin' here, boss," said a deep voice. Rude approached besides Reno.

The latter chimed in, "Hey, just like I told you."

"Alright. Prepare the airstrike."

"Oh yeah," Reno said. "Explosions at sunset. This is gonna be beautiful."

In some kind of dark, destructive way, it was. Aster pressed the noise-cancelling headset into her ears until they hurt as she watched the aftermath of Shinra's missiles erupting into giant clouds of smoke and balling flames, and how one explosion gave way to another, and the exploding petrol tanks in the few trucks scattered around sounded like tiny pops in comparison to the grand impacts of the chopper's artillery.

Reno cheered. Even Rude was chuckling over the headset.

But Tseng and Aster were more subdued sat opposite one another in the cabin, sharing a window barely larger than their heads. The light of the flames and blasts lit their faces like the flash of a camera capturing their expressions. One solemn. One disturbed.

Aster only had enough time to shower and change her uniform before she had to board the ship. Less than four days, she'd had that uniform. Already issued a new one.

She had been staring at her gloved hands for twenty minutes. Those and her boots were the only parts of the uniform she hadn't needed to replace. The underbelly of the ship creaked and rocked, and although the sound of laughter and chatter echoed all around the high ceiling, it did not penetrate the bubble in which she sat.

Her head was tucked near her knees, back against a storage box whose shadow she resided in. The same kind of crate she'd been rummaging in for the past day. Maybe the Wutaians really had been stealing from Junon.

Infantrymen and SOLDIER members also sat on and around the cargo. Others sat on the bonnets and roofs of their trucks. Beer slopped over their overzealous fingers out of plastic cups as they shouted to one another over the rumbling of the ship.

Apparently, drinking on the Junon cargo ships was a tradition for Shinra soldiers returning from missions. Aster didn't partake. Neither did Cloud—he was passed out in the back of one of the trucks with a sick bucket. And neither did Zack.

No one had seen him for a while.

She knocked her head back into the crate and let her hands fall to her sides, unsure which wound to lick first.

The Wutaian officers. That one was over now, after all. Game, set and match. Men prepared to die for their country. How a hot metal helmet searing her palm, scorching her bones, had been more powerful and frightening than holding a gun to the second CU soldier's face. Whatever Wutai was up to—and Rex's voice in her mind was telling her not to jump to conclusions, but still—it wasn't good.

Willing to die for that belief.

And she was surrounded by men just the same. A SOLDIER Second ahead of her jumped to his feet on the hood of one of the trucks, carrot orange hair and fists clenched, grinning like the world was his. Whatever he was getting worked up over made the others laugh. He was maybe twenty-four years old. Hell, the world probably was his, gripped tight in his fists. He made that decision, too, like the Wutaians. As had Cloud; as had Zack. The decision to die if fate made it so.

Somewhere along the line, that choice had been made for Aster. But not by her. And whose ideals was she fighting for? Shinra's? Tseng's? Her own?

No answers.

So she addressed the more immediate problem. Immediate in that she was to spend the next five hours on this ship and so it became her priority.

The stairs up to the deck were rusty and clanged under every step. It was never going to be a quiet escape. She simply pretended not to notice the few eyes of SOLDIER members and infantrymen watching her go from below.

It took more bravery with each step, and each grew weaker than the last. By the time she reached the sea breeze, it threatened to knock her all the way down again.

It didn't take her long to find him.

Zack stood gripping the cold frame of the ship with rigid fingers, elbows locked in place; he'd been there for a while. He stared out into the horizon, over each wave licked golden by the setting sun and touch of dusk. The wind flowed through his hair lazily, blowing a lock against his nose over and over. Gently tapping him for response. He gave none.

The steel cap at the toe and heel of her boots clanked against the tread plate deck. Even on soft feet, each step sounded like a cup being placed on a saucer. He didn't turn around. The inside of her lip was bitten as raw as her nerves. Bad habit. A destructive one.

She placed her hand next to his and turned to him. The dying red sun kissed his face goodnight how Aster wished to. The direct light paled his blue eyes and pulled out the Mako glow.

He didn't look at her.

So she peeled off her gloves, revealing split, bruised knuckles, and threw them to the floor with a faint slap. Her hands trembled, but she carried on. She unclipped the buckles near her shoulders and let the guards and belts fall around her feet. The infantry cowl was next, then the jacket, until she stood in her combat pants, a white camisole undershirt, and her skin.

Finally, she pulled off her helmet and dropped it silently into the embrace of her jacket. Zack turned to her as she pulled the pin from her hair. It tumbled around her shoulders to drift around the bottom of her ribs.

She stared at his boots for just a moment before meeting his eyes.

"I am Aster Doe," she said.

It fell heavy in the wind. It did not soar.

"I—"A shiver ran across her body. She couldn't tell whether it arose from the whisper of cold that blew over her bare shoulders or ran through her by the blade of Zack's anguished stare. "I was abducted from my hometown three months ago and brought to Midgar for the military. I'm sorry. You didn't deserve to find out this way."

He pushed his elbows into the fence and his face into his hands. "You're the Turk Selective."

"Yes," she said quietly. "I'm the Turk Selective."

She gestured towards her scattered uniform. "This is a part of me. I wasn't ready to accept that."

Zack dragged his cheeks down with his hands, then pushed his index fingers against his lips and nose. Like a prayer spoken between his skin and gloves. "Why didn't you tell me? Why did you lie about it?"

"I—I didn't lie, I just didn't—"

"Didn't tell the whole truth." His body stood as stock as his words. Still, hard. "Now's not the time to debate over the dictionary definition of a lie, Aster. Deceit is deceit."

She froze. "You're right."

The barrier was cold and wet against her fingers. The flames that burned on the horizon at dawn returned to char in the night. Without the harsh light of the sun, easier came the truth.

Pride is something that can be sacrificed.

So, she swallowed hard and sent it to the Gods and Goddess for slaughter. "In the beginning, I was trying to forget. I thought that I could separate myself, somehow. That…the person in the uniform and the person in the bar were two different people."

Aster glanced at the infantry helmet sat on the deck, watching her with three beady eyes. She looked away. "I felt normal around you. My stomach didn't churn, it fluttered. I looked forward to seeing you—I still do. I want to spend every free minute with you. I really started to like you."

She choked on her swelling voice.

"That's when I got stuck," she said. "Because I was ashamed of myself."

Her back hunched as she pressed her forehead to her arms against the barrier. "I am ashamed of myself. What I am and what I do. I hardly even feel like a human. I make it through day to day by charging through everything and…everyone…that I see. I didn't want you to be disgusted by me."

Finally, she said, "I didn't want you to see me how I see myself."

Zack said nothing until he stared down the face of the ship to the waves that knocked into the walls far below, lifting spray and foam.

"I would've checked your records eventually," he said, voice clear but distant, perhaps in the depths of the ocean where he gazed into the water. In many ways, she had expected more from him. Anger. Disappointment. Not this emptiness. "I would have found out Doe's first name. I would have seen her face on her ID one day."

"I promised," she said. "I was going to tell you when you returned from this mission."

"I wish you'd told me sooner."

"I know."

"Maybe I could have done something. Changed something."

Aster straightened her back and turned to him. "What do you mean?"

"You're a Selective." He ran his hands into his hair and spoke as though he were delivering a terminal diagnosis.

Because it was.

Aster gripped his bicep, and he finally met her imploring gaze. "Zack, please tell me. What the hell even is a Selective? You said back at the inauguration ball that I'm in for a grim fate. What did you mean?"

He held her shoulders, thumbs grazing the straps of her camisole over her collarbones. The leather covering his palms was cold, and she shuddered.

"Has Tseng given you your task yet?"

She shook her head, hair swaying limply around her. "I have to pass a test first."

Zack shook his head in return with twice her distress. "No, the test is the task. That's what Selectives are by design. They're specialists. If they survive, they become Turks."

If.

"I-I don't know everything," he said, words spilling out but filtering through a sieve before they poured over her. An audible war between blurting out everything he knew and holding something back. "Nothing that the Turks do is disclosed to SOLDIER, but… Selectives are hired individually to do something, fix something. They're not common. They were pretty much myths until you came around. No one really knew if they existed. I knew weird shit was going on, but I guess I didn't really care—that's on me. But now I definitely care, because it's you, and—"

Zack's fingers dug into her shoulders. He was shaking his head, but not with conviction. More like a tremor. Like he saw a hallucination of something horrifying that he couldn't shake from his vision.

"It didn't make sense. I knew it didn't make sense, but I didn't do anything. A member of the Turks, candidate or Selective, has never been trained this way, half in, half out. A Turk has never been in BCT with the infantry soldiers before; they always go through the Military Academy instead. Always a great big secret, but they've shouted you from the rooftops. Something is wrong. Something is horribly wrong."

"Zack, please," she said, rubbing his side in the hope of gaining a response. "I don't understand what you're trying to say. What is it?"

"There were three Selectives in the past two years, before you," he said. "They're all dead."

"What?" she said, or tried to say, but her mouth was dry as cinnamon and sand. "Wh—how did they die?"

"They failed their tasks. I only know as much as I do because of my—" Zack stopped. "An old friend's fiancée. A nurse. And a mission—it doesn't really matter."

Somehow his eyes dug deeper than his fingers. "A Turk has never made it through selection. Ever, as far as anyone knows. Only candidacy."

A ghost shuddered from her gaping mouth.

So I really am going to die?

That's what she wanted to say. But she didn't want to be so weak.

Tseng's threats had always seemed so baseless. That man should never be underestimated.

If you survive.

If you pass your test.

If you fail, your brother will be next.

She should have seen this coming.

Zack said, "Selectives are the ultimate disposable agent, trained specifically, but if they die, who cares? At least they didn't waste a real Turk, right?" He dropped his hands to clutch her hips. "But they're doing something else with you, treating you so different to any Turk candidate or Selective ever before."

Zack pulled his hands away, but she snatched them back in hers. Without them, she would collapse. She would fall through the deck, through the bottom, and down to the seabed with anchors chained to her feet. Even when drowning, it would be easier to breathe than now.

But she squeezed his hands and forced herself to come to courage.

"When I cross that bridge, Zack, I will burn it."

He set his jaw and pressed his forehead to hers. "Everything the Turks do is a state secret. I don't even know where the Turks Floor in the Shinra Building is—no one does. You can only access it with a special keycard. Something isn't right. But if I can find out anything, Aster, I will. I swear it. You're not gonna die. I won't let you."

She nodded faintly against him, even though all she wanted to do was run.