A/N: I think I've mentioned this before but I'll say it again—I mixed the uniforms from both OG FFVII and Crisis Core. As many of you will know, CC uniforms were light blue, blue and black for third, second and first respectively, and VII was blue, red, purple/black (we know it was black from the FMVs but I give an honourable mention to the purple because how could I not it's iconic). I, in all my infinite wisdom *cough* god complex *cough* decided to take the pale blue from CC, the red from VII and the shared black for First. Thx 4 listening to my ted talk x

Can I also just say a massive big fat thank you for all the reviews since last update and the ones before, honestly I was so excited I couldn't even sleep as I was reading them as they came in. I really really hope you continue to enjoy the story-I have the whole thing planned out and know exactly what's going to happen so I hope it lives up to your expectations! hifivebuddy you literally made my whole week so thank you for that!

18th Mar '20

Chapter 26: Fool For You

Infantry training resumed—began?—the following week with a new form of Skill at Arms. Sword Practice. It wasn't quite as glamorous as it sounded. By mid-week she was over it.

A four-and-a-half-foot blunt pole smacked into Aster's ribs and flung her into the handrail against the mirrored wall in the training room. It was fixed, incidentally. The mirror. She noticed in the corner of her eye as her reflection fell to the ground in a spineless heap of limbs. Her sparring-partner and personal tutor was Cloud. Apparently he didn't suffer fools lightly.

He lifted her under the armpit. Aster had half-expected some kind of apology or maybe some encouragement from the SOLDIER Third. She was wrong.

"You didn't block," he said matter-of-factly.

"Cloud, are you serious?" she asked, whipping her head around to the others in the room. Each infantryman was paired with a SOLDIER member to receive one-on-one instruction. It didn't take a minute to notice no one else had just been flung to the floor. She watched Rex deftly sidestep and lunge, slicing through the air with his pole, then nod when his instructor commented, and try again. Gently learning the calisthenics and footwork involved in parries and thrusts and blocks.

Cloud must have decided Aster needed a rougher approach. No molly-coddling, just improvement every damn day. How she liked it. But still. He threw her into a wall.

"What?" he asked, and his training pole twirled as he swung it with his shrug. He made it look as though it wasn't weighted. "That wasn't even SOLDIER-strength."

She squeezed the skin of her arm that had just taken the blunt force of her bodyweight against the handrail, wincing, then picked up her pole.

"I think you need to be more aware of how strong you in fact are, then."

"Distancing isn't my strongest suit," he said nonchalantly.

"No kidding," Aster said, picking herself up to her feet and inspecting her exceptionally reddening flesh. "That is gonna bruise so bad."

Cloud wasn't one to pander to whining. "Then be glad it wasn't my actual sword. I'd have cut you in half."

"Can you try not to?"

"If I did that, it wouldn't be a true-to-life experience."

"Cloud, this is my second session!"

He dropped his pole with rattling clunks against the floorboards and adjusted Aster's grip on hers.

"Pommel needs to be near enough in front of your belly button—okay, it's a pole, it doesn't have a pommel, but you understand—and point the tip," he said, tapping the point. "towards the enemy's throat or chest. That'll keep them from getting too close." His lower lip jutted upward for a moment. "Probably chest since you're kinda short."

Aster stared at him. "You are exactly two inches taller than me."

"Keep your right arm straight but not locked or you'll break your arm under the force. I'm stronger than you."

"Are you listening to me?"

"I generally find it easier not to."

"Cloud!"

He started to laugh. At first glance, Cloud's features, from the corners of his eyes and mouth to the shape of his hair, appeared sharp, hard, and serious. His soft laughter seemed out of place, almost, a little like the common language coming from a foreigner's tongue. It made Aster smile.

"Try some strikes," he said. "I won't hit back this time, but it was a good example of what you can expect if you don't get good, quick. I'm not gonna go easy on you. Alright, so I won't go SOLDIER either, because you won't be able to handle it, but we're not gonna pretend you're better than you are."

Don't ask Cloud to offer sugarcoating, but it was really no different from her coaches back home. It was she was used to there, it was what she was used to from Tseng, and was what she had come to expect here.

"Good," she said. "I wouldn't want anything less."

Cloud nodded and grabbed his pole from the floor. "What's the point in training if you can't transfer your skills to the field?"

"Exactly," she said with a growing grin. She lunged in to strike as he showed her, and the contact of pole on pole made a satisfying, sharp crack sound. Pain shot up her elbow. Okay, so he was right about the whole don't-lock-your-arm thing. "I want to get strong enough that I can head up against those anti-SOLDIER monsters like you did in Fort Condor. Who trained you?"

He blocked her incoming strikes effortlessly, as if she was patting him with a pool noodle, not a weighted training instrument. She found herself stop trying to not hit him by accident because it became very clear that that was simply not going to happen. It was almost frustrating.

"I got a lot of one-on-one with Zack since we've been friends since way back when I was a cadet and he was a Second," he said. He dodged her next blow and, since she wasn't expecting it, she stumbled to keep the weight of her own swing. He said nothing, but the lesson was noted. "Uh, I've done some training with Sephiroth, too."

Her mouth fell open and she hesitated. "Are you serious?"

As if his words had conjured them like spirits, Aster became very suddenly aware of the other members of SOLDIER in the room. SOLDIER uniforms of deep red, Second Class, realistically the pinnacle of the SOLDIER Dream since First Class was reserved for the truly exceptional. It was a room full of deep red SOLDIER uniforms and blurs of blue and gunmetal grey from the infantrymen in training. And then there was Cloud, in his pale, Third blues amongst them all, doing far more than simply keeping up.

When she looked back at Cloud, her perception had changed, somehow. She wondered how often he was underestimated.

He was staring into his memories just over her shoulder, unaware. "Sephiroth's strength is unreal, but he's not much of a teacher. His 'teaching' is along the lines of 'just kill it in one hit' like it's easy."

"What, like, 'just block, Aster'?" she asked, mocking his voice.

He laughed again. "That's not what I said, but I get your point. Excuse me for thinking you could handle it."

Aster's eyebrow cocked up. "That sounded like a challenge."

"Thought that might have an effect."

And it did. Training did not end until loose hair fell wet against her forehead, flat with sweat, and everything ached. No bell tolled at the end of the session, but for a resounding shriek from Aster's throat as Cloud's dupe sword pounded into her hipbone at exactly the worst angle and doubled her over.

"Just block, Aster," she murmured to herself deliriously as she stumbled weakly into the handrail against the mirror that mocked her with her own sorry reflection. Cloud was too fast and too strong, and too often forgot he was only training with a grunt and not a fellow member of SOLDIER. He wasn't apologetic about that fact, either.

"You got time for extra training today?" he asked after the instructor bellowed dismissal.

"Sorry, no. Tseng's taking me out of lunch." Aster racked her training pole then waved her hand at Cloud. "That's out of lunch. Not out for lunch. That would be nothing short of terrifying," she muttered as she patted her blotchy cheeks and forehead with a towel. "I've got marks tests, SAA for short blades and 'makeshift weapons'—hyped, by the way—and 'Advanced Survivalist Measures' or something, today."

"Do you even get time to sleep?"

"Actually, I got a full four hours last night so I feel pretty good."

Cloud looked at her like her nose morphed into a chocobo's beak.

She smacked him on the arm, a mannerism she'd picked up from the overtly masculine energy in the barracks (she was starting to think testosterone was actually tangible and that it was soaking into her skin at night while she slept), and grinned at the blonde.

"See ya later, Cloud. Thanks for today. Not for the bruises, though."

He blew a laugh through his nose and gave her his signature barely there smile. "Noted."

No time to shower. She limped out on a sore hip through the training floor, past many less beat up looking soldiers, into an elevator. A glass one. A conscious decision; the logic was that if there was another break in, she'd be able to climb up using the treads of the platform in order to get out safer. She didn't even consider how absurd it was to adapt her daily life to accommodate for wartime disasters, when previously the most she might have to navigate was how heavy the snow fall was the night before and if she'd have to wake up earlier to shovel snow manually before the snowplows were out in earnest.

The doors pinged apart onto the SOLDIER floor without political catastrophe.

Tseng was due to be around here somewhere; for ease, they were meeting here to move on to marks immediately after his conference—or whatever he was doing—no time to waste, and all that. She didn't exactly know where, though, and found herself wandering through hallways and foyers, eyeing the glow of SOLDIER members from beneath the shadow of her helmet. She stopped abruptly, watching a SOLDIER Second step through a frosted glass door, and stole a glimpse at the inside of briefing room 02 where he approached one of the great armoury deposit pods that looked slightly like futuristic vending machines which, she supposed, they were. The door slid shut just as he approached the mission board.

Aster turned the corner wondering what mission he'd accept and how much he'd get paid for it when she stopped again to watch and unidentified Third scrubbing the floor on his hands and knees with a ragged mop head and red bucket. Clearly punishment detail. She smiled, then a figure striding out of briefing room 08 caught her eye.

"Zack?" she said, then kicked into a jog to catch up to him as he pulled down a corridor. He didn't stop. His shoulders were tight and a dark air followed him, perhaps that fog clouded his mind, and that was why he didn't answer her. Maybe. "Zack!"

Her fingers found the crook of his elbow and she pulled herself in front of him, but when she looked up at him her jaw fell.

"Goddess, Zack, what happened?"

A bead of blood, dark but fresh, swelled and rolled down his upper lip, and his cheekbone shone and blushed in a way that could only imply he'd taken a blow. Recently.

"Run in with your boss," he said curtly. There was something about the way he said it that felt weaponised. Sharp.

"My boss." She scrunched up her nose. "Tseng?"

Zack nodded and brushed past her. She felt her ribs crush in on her lungs and a distinct twisting feeling in her gut as she watched him go, and the feeling quickly turned red hot because Aster didn't do sadness, only anger.

"Hey," she called, snatching his wrist. She circled to his front again, and as quick as it had boiled, her anger dissolved. It might have been the colour of his eyes on her.

It was weird. Still. That he knew. Uncertainty writ over his features again, and for fear that she might mirror them in her own, she focused on gently wiping the blood from his face with her thumb, then smeared it over her combat pants. It gave him a second, a thought, a breath long enough to compose himself.

"I'm meant to be meeting him here," she said, wondering if that fact might make things worse, more uncomfortable. She hoped he couldn't tell she was nervous. "What happened?"

He didn't quite meet her eye. "I've got a mission with him soon. You came up. I got mad. Now he's got a black eye."

She took a full step back and jutted her head forward. "You hit him?"

"In my defence, he pissed me off," he said with an uncharacteristically dark smirk.

"That's not a defence!"

"Now 'Geal's mad at me too, 'cause I 'caused a scene'," he said, waggling his fingers around near his face. "That's nothin'. If he wants to party—"

Zack's theatrics weren't instilling confidence. "You'll get in trouble."

He puffed out his chest and his smirk morphed into a grin. "I'm in a perpetual state of trouble."

"More trouble."

"Maybe a bit," he said, then dropped the grin for something more subdued. He shrugged once and his shoulders never quite returned to the height before. With downcast eyes and a voice smaller than she knew it to be, he said, "Angeal just told me to go home."

Aster sank her teeth into the welt inside her cheek. Was it selfish of her to wonder if he was struggling to come to terms with the truth she had delivered him? Was it self-centred? The world did not revolve around her; Tseng sought to remind her of that fact every fifteen minutes.

So she forced a smile and reached to take one of his hands in hers. "Have a drink for me then, won't you?"

His cheeks bunched in amusement. "It's two pm."

"Never too early."

"Then I will do," he said with a laugh. He closed some of the distance between their bodies until she could smell the aftershave on his neck, and she prayed he couldn't smell the dry sweat on hers, and he set his free hand against her hip. She stifled her wince expertly. Didn't even let out a squeak. He wouldn't have known at all as long as he hadn't watched the faint twitch of her jaw as her teeth cut deep into the sore inside her lip.

He couldn't hate her. She was certain she'd been hated before—even besides the obvious—and people that hate you don't hold your hand. They don't touch your body. They don't smile or stand this close.

"I still owe you a date, remember?"

And they don't say that.

Her lips pulled into a bud as she tried not to smile too over-keenly. "Oh yeah?"

"Yeah," he said, then nudged her helmet off from her face and placed his hand back against the exact spot Cloud had tried to split her hipbone in two. Gentle, but felt like dropping a stone slab. "Could make you dinner."

She smiled up at him through her lashes, pretending that if she ignored it hard enough, the hair that stuck to her forehead would vanish. "Rather you make my breakfast."

She smacked her hand across her mouth when she realised and crippled herself laughing.

"That is an arrangement that can be made," he said, unfazed, smirking.

Although her cheeks were red she could still smile, flicking her eyes from his to his lips, where his tongue peeped over his straight teeth, his charming grin. Aster tiptoed and leaned into him until her lips brushed into his, and her lower back tingled when her closed his around hers. Her heart pounded, more than before, and it felt like maybe everything would be okay.

Then Zack abruptly pushed down her helmet and shot back from her with a hard face, leaving her heart to drop in her chest without his steady hands to catch it.

A few seconds after the fact, she heard footsteps, and finally saw a few Seconds crown the corner of the hallway. Zack had heard them before she had, of course, with his enhanced hearing. And quickly back came the feeling of dread she'd felt before. Maybe it wouldn't be okay, after all. Maybe this would always be a problem.

"Alright, soldier, you got that? Saturday, eighteen-hundred hours."

"Understood, sir," she said, gloved fingertips near her temple. She couldn't read his expression, mostly because he was acting, but she had a sneaking suspicion something else was on his mind, too. Her spine felt rigid and her salute uncomfortable, so she ducked past him towards the briefing room he had exited before her body could linger. As she did, she felt him touch her back gently, but she couldn't look back because the Seconds were approaching.

She turned the corner and peered back as she heard the Seconds greet him. His shoulders seemed lighter than before. Perhaps he felt better. She smiled and disappeared into briefing room 08.

Inside, she got a better look at the pods she had watched the SOLDIER member approach earlier. Giant, shuttle-like tubes and dispensers that gave weapons, items and apparently even materia, if the mission so called. Another door to her right sat in a wall of crystalline glass with reams of frosting, and it sheared off the mission acceptance and preparation area from the briefing area. Aster lifted her hand to knock but the door slipped out from beneath her knuckles.

This room was lit like a cinema—the primary light source was the screen at the far wall that was fixed white and buzzing with static disconnect of a concluded meeting. As if responding to her presence, the screen went black as abruptly as pulling the plug, and the dimmed lights on the walls seamlessly brightened the room in its absence.

A conference table, glass and grey, much like everything else in the Shinra Building, stretched through the room, and three men turned to face her. One was Angeal, leaning with his hips against the desk and his back to the screen, then Genesis, who draped across three chairs with his ankles crossed and a book in his hand, and Tseng, stood with his hands clasped behind his back. With a bruising cheek and brow bone. The sight of it revived the anger she had lost before.

Angeal unfurled his arms and stood to his full height.

"Just as a summon, speak of her and she shall arrive."

Aster cocked her hanging hand into a salute as she stepped through the door.

"Gentlemen," she said, inclining her head to the SOLDIER Firsts. "Tseng."

"The disrespect," said Genesis with a smirk as he kicked his legs off the chair.

Tseng didn't react.

She pointed back to the door. "What did you say to him?"

"Ah," she heard Angeal say affirmatively.

Tseng, of course, didn't react. He looked at her with the same level of disinterest as always. At least nothing had changed.

"He was making demands he hasn't the authority to make. He needed reducing a notch."

"As did you, I presume, unless your eye isn't, in fact, swelling like a deformed eggplant."

A chuckle both rose and died in Angeal's throat and it drained the abscess of building tension that seemed to form wherever that young soldier went.

"We were but discussing the disadvantages of sending the two of you on a mission together ever again. The general consensus was that you would both take even more unnecessary risks than usual. Some offence was taken," he said.

Aster flicked her eyes to Genesis, who, by the crinkling of the corners of his eyes, looked amused. So he knew now, too. This wasn't the course of action she had expected from Tseng, nor Angeal, for that matter. She would have expected at least some kind of stern talking to. She certainly never expected them to keep it in a quiet little inside pod of knowledge. Why?

Genesis distracted her.

"'Disadvantages'?" he said. "Understated, by the sound of it. Try 'dangers'."

Tseng nodded. "Certainly if his most recent outburst is anything to go by."

"Outburst?" Aster asked. "But he's so—"

Angeal interrupted, of course, the most qualified to speak. "Zack is incredibly headstrong."

"The word I believe you are looking for is 'over-emotional'," Tseng said with a quirked lip.

"Also true," Angeal said with half a laugh, folding his arms back across his chest. Zack was an impressively built man, yet somehow Angeal dwarfed him. His forearms were almost as thick as her thighs. The fact that he looked ready at a moment's notice to smash a fist through a brick wall juxtaposed what next left his mouth. "I call him Zack the Puppy."

Aster spoke beneath her breath. "That is the most adorable thing I've ever heard."

To which Tseng rolled his eyes. Each day seemed to chip away at his already short supply of patience. "Zack is headstrong and you are reckless. A deadly combination given your proximity with one.

She grimaced at his chosen words.

"But listen to me," he said and his gaze grew severe. Black eyes with the hard glint of a cat before the kill. "Whatever he has said to you, and I suspect he has told you everything he thinks he knows—practically nothing—you must not allow it to interfere with these late stages of your training."

Her eyes drew to her boots. Everything he thinks he knows. Was Zack wrong? Did he even know that Zack claimed to know what he did? Did the last three Turk Selectives really die? They could have been freak accidents. Three of them. In a row. Unlikely. Possible. Maybe there were more who were successful, but kept secret by the Turks. She was different, anyway. She was being trained differently. Must be a different aim, different goal. Something better? Something worse?

She wanted to ask him. Settle her mind, since she was fairly sure she'd thought of every possible reason Zack could have been wrong yet none of them held any real weight. She'd considered that she could have been biased, Zack's word was more important to her than anyone else's, yet it wasn't exactly like she wanted to believe Zack was right either. Of course she didn't. Neither did he. At this point, the only thing that would settle her mind would be convincing, pretty lies.

Her voice came out small. "Understood, sir."

"I must admit, Tseng," Angeal said, "I am surprised you've allowed it."

It took a while for 'it' to register as the situation between Zack and Aster as a whole. The next question was whether or not the root of Angeal's statement was 'why haven't you put a stop to it' or 'is it in her best interests'? Tseng's side or Aster's side. Then she quickly realised it was neither—he was on Zack's. Tseng's games and Aster's feelings meant nothing.

Somehow, that comforted her.

"It doesn't concern me," Tseng said.

The deepening of the crease between Angeal's eyebrows suggested he found this untrue.

"Come on, Doe," said Tseng, pointing to the door. "We've no time to waste, now."

"Uh, right," she said, finding herself turning to the door at his whim. Then suddenly she turned on her heel to Genesis. "Oh, uh, sir."

He raised an eyebrow and flicked his eyes at her from across the table. The Mako glow, it wasn't a brightness in the sense of a light, just vivid, intense blue or blue-green, clear as day from any distance. On Genesis, with his red hair and red coat, quite striking. He looked at Angeal then back to Aster as though adjudicating whether she was actually talking to him or not.

"Yes?"

"A while ago you told me to seek you out if I had any—" Tseng's eyes bored into her cheek. Suspicions as to the nature of the Wutaian monsters, was the end to her sentence. She didn't feel like bringing it up in front of Tseng. Her eyes flicked to the worn book in Genesis's leather-gloved hand. It was leather bound. He had a problem. "—Uh, if I had any questions about LOVELESS."

"Infinite in mystery is the gift of the Goddess. We seek it thus, and take to the sky. Ripples form on the—"

"—I mean—not right now," she added hurriedly. "I was just hoping to get the chance to speak to you at some point. When you're free."

Angeal pressed his hands to his face and spoke through them. "Do so at your own risk, Doe."

"Er, right."

"You know where to find me," Genesis said, pocketing the small, white poetry book inside his trench coat.