The bar's dark, silent, and it looks empty, but he knows it's not. He knows by sight all the people now inside it. Barret Wallace, her bouncer friend with the prosthetic arm - he has a gun where he used to use a hook, now. Wedge Antilles. Jessie Clavis. Justin Biggs. Someone new, with spiky blond hair and modified Shinra gear - he snapped some photos so they can try to trace him later. And Tifa.
Two months ago, they'd been sent a security tape from an Avalanche attack at a Mako pump station - three killed, another nine injured - and he'd immediately recognized Wallace as the killer. Closer study of the tape let him tentatively identify two others as regulars at the bar, friends of Tifa's. Other research had turned up Tifa, in company with them, at train stations during the windows of time around other attacks. Reno kept his mouth shut about the whole thing, except to come to his desk, after Tseng had left, to say "He doesn't know about her. Shouldn't have any idea unless you let something slip."
So now it's New Year's Eve, and he watches from the second floor of a condemned building so decrepit no squatters will touch it, and he keeps thinking of a year ago, two years ago, other December nights in that room. Two years ago, he met her. A year ago, he'd walked in, noticed that she barely acknowledged his presence, noticed the way she'd shooed her friends out, then shut the door, turned, and stalked right up to him.
"Something wrong?" he'd asked, knowing something was, and she'd said, voice low and rich with fury, "You lied to me."
And that was how it ended. He remembers her screaming at him, about Shinra, about Nibelheim, her father cut down before her eyes and when she woke up in the hospital, they said she'd been hurt in a reactor fire, even though she'd been slashed open and they could all see her stitches. Shinra lied and killed and he did the same, and he'd lied to her, and then she was screaming at him to get out. When she shoved him, he noticed she was wearing the gloves he'd gotten her, and when he tried to approach her, she fell into a defensive position and he realized why. Realized she was actually afraid of him.
When he's staked the place out before, he's noticed she always wears those gloves.
That Christmas Eve everything had been perfect, except for the fact that he was still telling the lies that she'd kick him out for the next week. He'd given her the gloves, and she hadn't been able to stop smiling even as she said she didn't have anything for him. "You don't need to get me anything," he'd said, squeezing her hand, and she'd said he needed to come by her place after she closed up.
She still had the flat then. Four months later, she got evicted from it and moved in at the bar. He'd done his best, without fanfare or visible-to-her meddling, to delay it, but her landlord had eventually gone ahead over his threats and protests. Maybe he should have carried out some of the threats, but it was hard to justify a maiming on behalf of the girl who'd dumped you, no matter how much you weren't letting go.
The apartment was a neat, well-cared-for, one-room disaster; hard to blame her for not wanting to pay any rent for it. You couldn't have paid him to spend a night there without her. She'd done everything she could to it, obviously, and while the furniture was all shabby and secondhand and there wasn't much of it, she kept the place clean and she'd tacked up things torn out from magazines or calendars to brighten the walls. Scenery shots, mostly of mountains.
There was a tiny tree covered in red and gold sparkles on her chipped, stained, elderly kitchen counter, lights around her windows on the inside - "I like to look at them," she'd said, "and I'm not sure anybody else does" - and a wreath on the inside of the front door. She didn't really have a bed, just a mattress on the floor. He might have said that he loved her, he wasn't completely sure. He couldn't stop saying her name. She held onto him like one of them might float away, and he saw the long scar across her chest but didn't ask about it.
"Merry Christmas," she'd whispered, and kissed his shoulder, and he'd pulled her close and said "Just what I always wanted," and she'd giggled and said "We're being lame, you know," and he'd laughed too.
And a week later, she'd known somehow, and he hadn't spoken to her since then. A full year.
There's a basement only accessible through a hidden elevator, and they're planning something - probably something bigger than they've done before, he thinks, and that bothers him, because he doesn't want to kill Tifa but thinks he may have to.
He'd looked up Nibelheim, during one of many sleepless nights that had followed that New Year's Eve, and it did, at least, explain the anger, though he still couldn't quite follow what she'd expected Shinra to do - Sephiroth's rampage was no more a part of their plans than it had been of hers. But maybe she needed someone to blame, or maybe she'd just wanted acknowledgment, something other than a coverup. But that was Shinra's policy and his own job; he can't see another option easily.
That was the whole point, of course. That's why he'll never touch her again, doesn't expect to ever see her in person. That's why he bothered her landlord, and volunteered for surveillance duty, and why Reno tried to set him up with that tiny blonde rookie and the girl from Urban Development and the lab assistant, and why none of it does him any good.
.
The bar's called Turtle's Paradise, for reasons unknown to him. Elena's showing no further inclination to stir from it. She's upset - more upset that Corneo's men got the drop on her than she is about the danger she was in, he thinks - and the obvious solution to that is for her to drink herself into a stupor. It wouldn't be polite for Reno and Rude to let her do so alone. But she's substantially smaller than the two of them, and so she's napping on the table early in the evening while he and Reno are still working on their drinks.
And that's when Tifa comes in with Highwind, the would-be astronaut wanted in Palmer's death, and Yuffie, Godo's kid. The girl runs behind the bar, yammering about karaoke, and Highwind sits down, grumbling about his knees, but Tifa hesitates by the bar, and that's when Rude notices the bottle's getting low and stands up to get another.
She looks like she might bolt. "Off duty," he reminds her.
"Right. Okay. For how long?"
"Long as we're here."
"Oh."
"Tifa..." he says, and she looks over her shoulder at her friends. "I'm sorry," he says. Once he'd been so angry he wouldn't have dreamed of saying this to her, but he's had a lot of time to think. Her head snaps back, her mouth opens slightly. "I didn't mean to hurt you," he adds, keeping his voice low. No one seems to have noticed them. He'd bet money that Reno's watching, but he doesn't care. She cares, he knows, but she's not looking at Reno.
"But you did," she says. "You're Shinra, you dropped the plate, you killed all those people–" She catches her voice rising and stops, folding her arms tightly over her chest. "You're tracking us and spying on us and fighting us and the people you work for are killing the Planet."
Not tracking them, really - tracking Sephiroth, the same thing they're doing. Avalanche is no longer a primary concern, now that they're not blowing up power plants and the people who work in them anymore. "...it's our job."
She sighs. "Then why are you talking to me now?"
"Think I'll ever get another chance?"
"How can you... act like that, like you really mean it when you say you're sorry, and then fight with us and try to kill us–"
"It's our job. It's nothing personal." He can't explain it any better than that. "Besides, I never tried to kill you."
"Oh, so those are just play weapons?"
"I never fought you. I fought your friends." It seems to dawn on her, then. Even when she attacked him, he didn't counter, just blocked if he could. He didn't know if she'd realized.
"That doesn't make it– that doesn't make up for anything," she stammers.
"What else can I do?" He sounds weary, he knows, but he can't help it.
She moves closer to him, and he might be holding his breath. "You could quit, you could–"
"I can't quit," he says. "Could you leave Avalanche?"
She pushes her hair off her face, staring at him defiantly. "That's different. And I know you don't think everything Shinra does is right."
"...don't start." It's true. He used to say as much to her, sitting in her bar after closing, and he'd wax loquacious, half-intoxicated with feeling free to criticize Shinra's policies and not just their pay scale.
"You told me–"
"I know I did. But is Avalanche going to make things any better?"
"By saving the Planet, by–"
"Hey Tifa!" the girl yells, and they both jump, and she giggles and says "Get away from the creepy assassin and check this out!"
"You realize you're still on probation with us," Tifa snaps at her, but she moves away from him, quickly, as if relieved, and he goes over to the bartender, and when he returns to the table Reno doesn't say a word about her.