Darkness.
Something burned, wet and spicy-red. He couldn't tell if he saw it or felt it, but he tasted it hot and copper in his wet mouth. The fingers of his right hand, the only one he could feel, were closed over his left wrist, squeezing and squeezing the dial on his watch like nuns squeezed holy beads. Everything was so far and so close, stroking his face like sandpaper cat tongues, the touch of a disinterested predator. If this was death- no, it couldn't be death, he believed in God and the Goddess, it couldn't be a lie after two decades of faith-
His own breath sobbed in his ears, a voice, high and childlike in the blackness asking after that first safe memory. Mother. Belatedly, he remembered his mother was dead. All mother were dead, death gaped like a screaming mouth at every doorway-
"Over here!"
The voice was new, foreign, male, and enough to clamp the jaws of Rufus Shinra so hard a tooth chipped.
"Somewhere… Are you sure-?"
"This is where the signal's comin' from, near as I kin figger-"
Rufus gasped, inhaled dust, choked impotently.
"Wait- D'you hear-?"
"Yes. Rufus!"
Rufus coughed, spat blood. "HERE!"
Something rumbled, clattered, and sparked above his head. He yipped, a bitten-off animal cry, then clamped his one good hand over his mouth. "Oh God," he whispered against it. "Oh God, oh God, someone, help me. Tseng. Help me."
"President Shinra! Sir! Keep talking!"
"HERE! I'M HERE! GOD-" He bit his own tongue, shivering and whimpering in the dark. God, please, I'm down here, down in the dark and the silence, please, help me-
A crash of nearby rubble and light pierced his tiny refuge like the sword of an angel. Rufus winced, his right eye burning and welling with tears almost immediately, but he kept staring although the light pulsed white, yellow, pink, red. Then it was blanked out by a dark shape, a long oval of human body.
A hand reached down. Fingers, blunt and callused, touched his face. Rufus lunged up, snatching at the arm behind them, ignoring the raw itching pain in his left arm, clasping and clasping and not letting go.
"President! Sir, hold on-"
Then he was being pulled, kicking hard against the remnants of an empire and emerging up, up, up into the light.