Disclaimer: I do not own Final Fantasy VII or any of its characters.
(Author's Note: Once again, I apologise for the long delay in updating.)
Handfuls of Dust and Splinters of Bone
The two figures standing opposite the Plate Support looked vaguely apprehensive. They had heard the rumors about the next move to wipe out the terrorists of Sector 7, and however much they might support this action, which could come at the cost of the lives of an eighth of Midgar's inhabitants, neither really wanted to be in the area when it happened. Not that they had any choice in the matter – they were, as one of their instructors had put it, the dregs of the dregs, and were happy enough that no-one had thought to reassign them to cleaning up the reactor explosions.
"Look on the bright side," one of the soldiers muttered. "At least someone else is talking to that lunatic today."
"What, the man who sleeps outside the gate? He's probably one of the sanest people left in Midgar. He's giving up trying for anything better than what he's got."
Both guards laughed awkwardly and did their best to ignore Sector 7.
"Have you ever climbed up the pillar?" The citizen of the gate had been talking about the Plate Support for the last half-hour, and was showing no signs of losing enthusiasm for the topic.
"No, I don't possess any great desire to die of exhaustion. A few people I know went up there once, before they tightened security, and they said that it's nothing special. Unless you really like stairs, I suppose." Wedge was not entirely certain of where this conversation was leading, but he needed an excuse to watch the soldiers. He had never seen them so tense before.
'You're probably right. But this place is my home, and I've always thought I'd like to see it from the top of…" The man's voice started to fade away as he saw the group of Shinra troops marching towards the base of the Plate Support. "… the pillar," he concluded softly.
Wedge took a few steps backwards and began fumbling for some sort of weapon reflexively, although he knew had had no chance of taking on the entire group and had left his gun back at the bar in any case. He cast a glance around for somewhere to hide, but there was nowhere he could move to without drawing too much attention to himself. The only thing to do now was to wait for the soldiers to pass, hope they didn't notice him, and then run back to the bar and alert the others.
Turning to look at the vagrant he had been talking to a few seconds earlier, Wedge was reminded of illustrations of the effects of the Stop spell from the books on Materia he had loved so much when he was younger. He had frozen completely and was watching the soldiers with an utterly expressionless face. "Come on," Wedge whispered urgently, "you don't want to be stuck here if these troops plan to hang around."
With a strange kind of exhaustion in his voice, the man replied, "I'm not leaving. I've lived here for ten years – do you think it's because I enjoy it? My family farmed the land around Midgar for generations, but after they built those reactors, almost every living thing from here to Kalm just… died. So I came here, and there was no work. But I survived, and I found this place, and I'm going to stay here whatever Shinra does!"
Wedge grimaced. Even in Midgar, after years of Shinra rule, which should have been enough to crush anyone's spirit, people were still prone to outbreaks of pointless self-sacrifice at the most inconvenient times. "Fine, stay if you want, but can you at least try to be quiet?" The troops – about twenty, he guessed, far more than any situation he could think of would warrant being called out to the Plate Support – didn't seem to paying any attention to them, but there was no point in taking risks. Their leader had unlocked the gate between the street and the tower, and the other soldiers climbed, with two stopping after every few flights of stairs to act as guards. One of the troops starting to ascend was carrying a large package rather nervously, and Wedge, although he could not be certain of the contents, was able to guess that it meant nothing good.
The regular guards of the area, still trying and failing to pretend they weren't scared, watched from the other side of the street as one of the two men there started moving very quickly towards the best bar in all Midgar.
At the sound of the excited shouts of the small crowd which had formed in the street, Jessie looked up, seeing nothing but the group of slum dwellers – and Wedge running towards her. "What's going on? Why is everyone out here?"
Pausing slightly to catch his breath, Wedge pointed in the direction of the Plate Support. "There are some Shinra soldiers climbing up, and I think that one of them has a bomb."
For a few seconds, Jessie could do nothing but stare at Wedge in horror. "That's ridiculous. They wouldn't do - why would Shinra want to destroy Sector 7?"
Wedge glared at her impatiently. "Us. You grew up in Midgar, and you don't think Shinra would be willing to destroy a sector if it meant the end of AVALANCHE?"
As one, Jessie and Wedge turned and ran towards the hideout.
Jessie burst through the door to find Biggs sitting at the bar, lost in thought. "Biggs, there are some soldiers at the Plate Support, and Wedge thinks they're planning to blow it up."
Wedge was rather more direct. "Biggs, get our guns, Barrett, and anything else that we could hit some Shinra grunts with." The other man leaped up from his stool, threw himself at the elevator, and was downstairs looking for weapons within a few seconds.
Jessie stared around the bar, trying to decide what they should do with Marlene. It would be too difficult to get her out of Sector 7, but on the other hand, staying would be incredibly dangerous…
Barrett clambered up the elevator shaft at that moment, Marlene held in his undamaged arm. Biggs followed closely behind him, having loaded the seat of the elevator with their guns and grenades. "Are we ready to go?" Biggs asked, hurriedly distributing the weapons.
"Hold on!" Barrett exclaimed. "What're we goin' to do with Marlene?"
"Leave her here," Wedge replied, "we don't have enough time to take her anywhere else." Barrett hesitated, and seemed about to start arguing, but a sudden increase in the volume of the shouts from the crowd outside seemed to convince him that they needed to get moving. He put Marlene down and hugged her tightly before running outside, waving his gunarm as though already seeking a target.
"I'll see you soon, Marlene," Jessie said, hoping her voice was more confident than her thoughts. With one last look around the place that had been her home for four years, she followed Barrett outside.
There was no time for Jessie to turn back and make sure that Biggs and Wedge had followed her, no time for anything expect running. This was a situation which years as a member of AVALANCHE had caused Jessie to be in quite often, but somehow she felt herself to be even more danger now than a normal mission put her in. Perhaps because this time, there was no chance of avoiding physical conflict, which she had always preferred to be a last resort. As Wedge, ever the realist, had always been so fond of pointing out, heroic battles and desperate last stands only look good in the history books when you manage to win the war as well, and with a five-man army, it was difficult to pull off both.
The distance between the hideout and the Plate Support had never been so long before, Jessie was certain. Her legs seemed to be moving automatically, with her thoughts fixed on what would happen if they failed to stop Shinra. Biggs was running beside her, his shotgun at the ready and a look somewhere between enthusiasm and desperation on his face. Barrett was at the base of the tower, and Jessie could hear the shouts of the soldiers already.
"Halt! What business do you have here?" As the others came to a stop at the gate, Barrett raised his gunarm threateningly, but was stopped from firing by the sound of Wedge's voice.
"Hey, don't you recognise me? There was something I wanted to talk to your captain about – is he around?" The troops looked at each other with a total lack of comprehension - as did the other members of AVALANCHE – and remained silent. "Oh well, I'll have to tell you two then. Listen very carefully: standard-issue Shinra armour is worthless for two reasons. These are that anyone can disguise themselves in it because it's too strong for your own bullets to penetrate, and –" Wedge lifted his gun as he finished his sentence, "- it provides absolutely no facial protection if you're talking to someone." With this, Wedge fired at the face of one of the soldiers, with Barrett spraying the general area of the tower with gunfire at the same time. Both of the guards fell to the ground within seconds, one having evidently died almost immediately after being hit, while the other thrashed around for a few seconds before becoming still.
"They were the ones from the train yesterday?" Biggs enquired brusquely. Wedge nodded.
"I recognized the one on the left. His eyes were glowing slightly. Obviously dropped out of SOLDIER pretty quickly, although I'm amazed that they admitted him in the first place. I mean, that was one step above 'Hey, look over there!'" As Wedge spoke, two more soldiers ran down the stairway towards them, having heard the earlier shots.
"My turn now." Biggs grinned slightly before bounding up the steps towards the troops, firing wildly as he did so. One of them was hit by pure chance and tumbled down towards the base of the tower – as one of the Shinra airborne soldiers, he wore no armour – but the other, slower but better protected, was unharmed by Biggs and got in a shot to his stomach which sent him sprawling across the stairs.
Barrett continued to fire in the general direction of anyone wearing a Shinra uniform while the other two ran towards the approaching guard, Wedge pulling the propeller from the uniform of the dead airborne soldier and stabbing desperately with it, not willing to take the risk of using his gun with Jessie and Biggs so near. The force with which Wedge slammed the makeshift weapon against the guard's armour was sufficient to knock him backwards, allowing Jessie to fire at the exposed section of his face until he stopped moving.
"Biggs, you ridiculously brave idiot, what have I been telling you about throwing yourself against superior forces for the last four years?" Wedge demanded as he rushed towards the severely injured Biggs.
Biggs was still capable of speech, if little else. "We don't have time for this, you three keep going." Seeing the look on Jessie's face, he added, "There's no point in the rest of you getting yourselves killed helping me. I'll manage, now go!"
Jessie knew that Biggs would be perfectly happy to die at that moment, if it meant the fight could continue. There was nothing she could do to please Biggs but go on up the tower, whatever that meant for him. Jessie didn't dare to look back at the figure draped over the railing of the stairs, knowing she wouldn't be able to bring herself to leave if she did. So, with Barrett and Wedge behind her, she ran on.
The soldiers appeared to have concentrated themselves at the top of the column, meaning that Jessie was only a few flights of stairs from the area where any bomb would have to be detonated to destroy the Plate Support before she encountered any further opposition. This group was composed of three grunts and a soldier who appeared to be their leader. As he raised his finger to the trigger of his gun just slightly before Jessie could aim hers, he realised that he had seen the woman before, but not until after the bullet had pierced her chest and the sounds of Wedge and Barrett firing in return could be heard throughout the tower did he realize exactly where and when.
"You see, men," he said with a smirk, steeling himself for the fight against these other rebels, "I told you we'd have our revenge."
Biggs had known that rebellion against Shinra was a very dangerous thing, and he had accepted that he it was very likely that he would die in doing so years ago. In a way, he wanted to sacrifice himself for the cause, but somehow he had never imagined his death being like this. He didn't necessarily want a glorious or even a dramatic end, but a quick one had always been something he had hoped for. The only thing to do now was to hold onto the hope that the others would succeed in stopping Shinra somehow.
Even as consciousness began to drift away from him – the bandana he had been using as a bandage had slipped from his weakening grip, and he could feel the blood flowing down his body – he heard footsteps and tensed, expecting a Shinra soldier to have come to finish the job off. The voice which he heard, without being able to make out the words, belonged to the mercenary Barrett had brought in a few days ago. Cloud, that was his name. He was a good fighter, if not much of a person. Not the man Biggs had managed exchanging his last words with, but better than no one.
"Cloud… so you don't care… what happens… to the Planet?"
The man seemed to be struggling fiercely to find the words he wanted. "You're wounded…"
Biggs smiled at this, quite possibly the first time he'd smiled from pure happiness since he had left Gongaga. "Thanks, Cloud… don't worry about me… Barrett's up there fighting… go and help him…"
Biggs allowed his eyes to close, knowing that Cloud would go to help Barrett. AVALANCHE would win this battle somehow, or at least survive. Cloud was a survivor, if nothing else. Shinra would be destroyed, the Planet be saved. At that moment, Biggs realised that his death meant nothing. He didn't want glory; he wanted his cause to succeed. His thoughts returned to Cosmo Canyon, to what he had been taught about the Planet and the Lifestream there. If Shinra was destroyed, the Planet would survive, and his body and spirit would return to it.
Biggs did not hear the sound of the Plate Support collapsing. He did not feel the weight of the Plate crushing his body into no more than a few patches of blood and skin surrounded by rubble. The thought stayed with him as he slipped into unconsciousness – he would return to the Planet. If no one remembered him in a few years' time, or if he became an historical figure with which to bore generations of future schoolchildren, it would make no difference. When time had destroyed his body, his own fight would have preserved his spirit. There could be no better death than that.