(AUTHOR'S NOTE: Hey, guys! I'm trying to make the chapters a little bit shorter, since they're usually about 10-12 pages. I knw the story isn't moving incredibly quicly, but I plan on this being a long fic. The story's getting a little more complex, and don't worry, Yuffie fans- I brought her in, finally! Enjoy, and please do leave a review if you have anything to say.)

Yuffie was hanging upside down in a tree.

Her father, Godo, had told her that the greatest and most powerful of ninjas was a man who had hung upside down for a week without any problems. What Godo hadn't told her was that it was a ploy to get her out of the house and out of his hair. Yuffie knew he was trying to mess with her head, but she also thought it might be a terrific joke to pretend to proudly go back and show Godo that she could do it. The trick was eluding her.

She had just opened her eyes after taking a short snooze, her legs maniacally clamped around the tree branch, when she saw a sudden flash. Shocked, Yuffie let go, and plummeted towards the ground, catching herself at the last moment. "What the hell?" she exclaimed aloud. Her eyes went to the origin of the light- Wutai.

Yuffie remained still for a second. She was nearly a kilometre from Wutai, and therefore was unsure as to whether she had really seen the mysterious flash. She had always had fairly keen eyes, and from what she could see, there was no sign of distress. The young ninja was about to ignore what she thought she had seen when, as she gazed directly at the distant town, another flash- a bigger one- went off.

With that, Yuffie broke directly into a run and went racing towards Wutai, fear choking her.

The real estate agent in Kalm was a small, plump, cheerful-looking woman with reddish-brown hair wound in a perky knot atop her head. "So, Mister…LaForge? You say you're looking for a new home?"

"Yes, ma'am." Reno took off his hat and bowed in what he hoped was a folksy manner, combined with a friendly wink. The little woman coloured, as she assumed the younger man was flirting with her. Stupid cow. "In fact, we've actually got a specific problem for you."

"Oh?"

Reno nodded towards Elena, who had stuffed a small cushion into the front of her blousy peasant top. On cue, she giggled a bit. "My wife, see," Reno said, carefully attempting to sound like a rube, "she's…in the family way."

'Oh, Jim!" Elena said in mock-embarrassment.

"We'll be needing a new place soon," Reno continued, and "we heard from a friend- we got a friend here, says he's about to sell his place and move on, and we were wondering if maybe you knew of his property."

The agent opened one of the drawers in her file cabinet and started rifling through it. "Has he put it up for sale yet?"

"I don't know, ma'am," Reno said, trying to look ashamed. "I hate to be a bother, but our friend told us he'd save the place, you now, seein' as how we'll be needing to cut corners, what with the little one on the way."

"So, it'd be a direct sale, then?" The little woman smiled at him. Reno looked in her eyes for any hint that she knew she was being fooled, but they remained brown and sparkling and utterly guileless.

"Yes, ma'am."

"That's no problem," she said, shutting the drawer. "Although, I'm not sure why you'd come to see me and trouble yourselves, if you just need to speak to your friend."

"Well," Elena said, coming forward with a caressing hand on the bulge in her shirt. "It's just so embarrassing, but we lost his address and phone number on the way over, and we simply don't know what to do!"

Now, the woman looked quite confused. "Did you look in the phone book?"

They hung their heads. "Unlisted number," Reno mumbled.

The real estate agent smiled reassuringly at them. "Now, now," she said soothingly, "there's no need to look so down! It's no trouble at all to look it up for you. Now, what's the name?"

Good, she's buying the idiotic act. "Cloud Strife, ma'am." Reno raised his head and examined the woman's face as she looked through her pink leather properties binder.

"Strife…S-T-R-I-F-E?"

"Yes."

She looked for another few moments before shaking her head. "I'm terribly sorry, sir. I don't seem to have a listing for Strife."

"Oh, are you sure" Elena interjected, sounding terribly upset. Reno gave her a quick warning look, but her big blue eyes remained focused on the woman in front of them, an expression of mild panic on her face.

"I'm so sorry, dear." The agent closed the binder. "There is one other agent in town who may have the listing- I do mostly houses. Was your friend's place a full-sized house?"

"Yes," Reno said quickly. "At least, we think so- all he said was that it was big enough for three."

The agent took a small piece of paper off a note cube and wrote a number and address on it. "This is the contact information for North alms Real Estate," she said. "Ask for Lynnette and tell her what you told me. If I don't have the listing, she definitely will."

Reno stood up and bowed quickly, taking the scrap of paper. "Thank you, ma'am. We'll check it out right away." Elena also sketched a small bow, smiling at the woman, and they both turned and began walking out.

"Good luck! Have a nice day!" the little woman behind the desk called merrily after them as they left.

After they had gone, the woman picked up the phone and dialled a series of numbers. The machine picked up. "This is Elmyra," she said, being careful not to address the recipients by name. "Some people…are looking for you. They're not friendly. Look out." She placed the phone back into its cradle carefully, then ran to the door and looked out. The lobby was bare, except for the chairs and a potted plant. Her secretary was gone, probably out to get coffee. Elmyra ducked back into her office and dialled again, her tone more urgent this time. "It was the Turks," she whispered into the phone after she got the machine again, "be careful!"

Cloud lowered the PHS from his ear, stunned. Tifa, recognizing the expression of shock on his face, asked, 'What's wrong?"

"The Turks are in Kalm. They're looking for us," he answered shortly.

"Damn it," Vincent said softly.

Night had fallen just as the travellers had started to leave Midgar. Even though they felt the city wasn't safe, Cloud, Tifa, and Vincent agreed that it was better to spend the night at an inn than to try to get out. Keira, who was still with the group, mentioned that Tentacle was particularly bad at night, and that traveling in and out of Midgar once it got darker was just a hair short of completely stupid. They now sat in a small bar in Wall Market, a place that Cloud remembered from two years back, not far from Don Corneo's old mansion.

"Did you get that off the machine?" Tifa asked.

Cloud nodded. "Reno and Elena came into Elmyra office earlier, pretending to be friends of mine who I'd promised could buy my house off me."

"Is she all right?"

"She said she's fine." Cloud shook his head. "Damned Shinra…"

Keira glared at him. She had put her shading contacts back in, but her eyes had lost none of their intensity. "Keep that to a minimum," she said quietly, "they've been rebuilding like crazy. A lot of people got their homes and still get their food from them."

Cloud hunched over. Vincent drummed his fingers on the tabletop, the soft leather of his glove doing a poor job of concealing the noise of metal tapping on wood. Tifa sighed.

"You still haven't explained why you needed to talk to me," Cloud said suddenly.

"Holy and the fucking Moon, you have bigger problems than that," Keira said, irritated.

"Look," Cloud said, leaning across the table with a scowl on his face, "you took care of Tifa when she was hurt, sure. Thank you for that. We don't want any Shinra hanging around."

"Shinra!" Keira's voice rose slightly. Looking quickly over her shoulder, she leaned in towards Cloud, her face stormy. "I'm no more Shinra than you are, Strife."

"Prove it."

"Cloud, why are you being like this?" Tifa hissed.

"Well?" Cloud ignored her. "Come on. Prove you're not with Shinra."

Without breaking her stare, Keira started unbuttoning the front of her black shirt. Tifa's eyes widened and she moved in closer, so as to shield the other woman from other patrons. A few buttons down, Keira opened the front of her shirt and bared her chest and the top of her breasts to the other three.

A long scar, about two inches thick and white, curved from an inch below her clavicle, stretched into her cleavage, and disappeared into the middle part of her bra. Keira kept her shirt open for a minute, then closed it and started re-fastening it. "I think you can guess what that's from," she said, her voice slightly shaky.

Cloud sat back, stunned. Tifa's mouth was open in surprise. Even Vincent seemed a bit uncomfortable.

"So, you know I don't want to exact revenge on you," Keira continued. "I want some of my own. I need to know how he died."

"Sephiroth attacked you?" Tifa asked.

"He did more than attack me," Keira said bitterly, "but that's not important right now."

"I'm sorry," Cloud said, stunned.

"I don't blame you," Keira said, leaning back as if nothing had happened. A bleary-eyed man at the bar turned around, ogled her and Tifa, and then went back to his drink. "If I were you, I'd be cautious."

Vincent cleared his throat. "Do you really want to know what happened to Sephiroth?"

"I do," she responded.

The dark-haired man looked at her with something like sympathy. "If I may say so, you seem to have an emotional investment in this information."

"I was very much in love with Sephiroth," Keira said, her voice so calm and flat, she might have been talking about the weather. "When he went mad, it ruined my whole life. I want to know exactly what went on so that I can finally consider him dead, buried, and gone."

If the other people at the bar hadn't been making noise, the silence coming from their corner table would have deafened them. Tifa had clapped her hands over her mouth in shock, and even Vincent's stoic face had contorted into a surprised look. Only Cloud looked anything short of staggered.

"Can we please talk alone?" Keira said to him. She stood up. "Outside?"

"We'll be back," Cloud said to the other two, then stood up himself. As he and Keira made their way over to the door, he heard Tifa furiously whisper something to Vincent.

The night was cool and dank and smelled vaguely of mildew. "Shall we walk and talk?" Keira asked.

Her accent sounded strange to him. "Where are you from?" Cloud inquired, as they started slowly walking up toward Don Corneo's mansion.

"I'm from the North Continent," she told him, "a little town called Crimson Peak."

"I've never heard of it."

"Most people haven't."

They walked a little ways farther until they reached a large metal column that had fallen across the path. Keira walked to the end and sat down, smoothing her black pants over her legs. "Want to sit?"

Cloud took a seat a little ways away from her. He studied her face. Keira was looking straight ahead, not at him, her mass of burnished hair falling over her shoulders and halfway pinned up in the back. She's really beautiful, Cloud thought, looking at the elegant sweep of her high cheekbones, the ski-jump shape of her slightly long nose, the full lips.

"So. Tell me what happened."

Cloud began telling the story, watching her closely for signs of distress or crying. When he got to the part about Sephiroth falling into the reactor, Keira nodded in recognition. "I thought it was something like that," she said. "I remember them telling all the other SOLDIER members that he had died in an accident, but I knew there had to be something more."

"It was no fault of his," Cloud said softly.

"I know. I'm not looking for you to compliment him, Strife." Keira looked down at her hands, twisted in her lap. "Please go on."

He picked up the story again, describing how he had woken up with Zack and how they had tried to escape, until his companion was shot down by Shinra troops. Keira looked unhappy at that, but waved at him to keep going.

It was hard for Cloud to tell the story without giving too much away- namely, his own bizarre connections to Sephiroth, the whole issue of Jenova- and stuck to when he had last seen Sephiroth, alone with him in the Crater. Quietly, he explained how Sephiroth had succumbed to his sword, how the body had disappeared when the Crater caved in, and how he and the rest of AVALANCHE had escaped by air.

When he finished, Keira was silent for a minute.

"I want you to know, he died fighting," Cloud said.

She remained quiet.

"Are you all right?"

Slowly, she nodded. Cloud, not wanting to press her too much, looked away and out at the Midgar night. Despite the overall gloominess and oppressive upper plate, the lights of the lower city were actually quite pretty, in a garish way, and he had slipped off into a reverie when Keira interrupted his thoughts with, "Thank you, Strife."

He glanced at her. She didn't look upset. "Call me Cloud, okay?"

"All right." She stood up. "I suppose we'd better get back, now."

" Just a minute." She turned to face him. "What about you?"

"Me?"

"Your story." Cloud looked up at her face. "Were you and Sephiroth in a relationship? No one ever knew."

Keira sat back down and sighed heavily. "We were pretty good at keeping it a secret. I took care to never be seen with him in public, at least, nowhere SOLDIER trainees ever went. He thought it would be too dangerous for me to be linked to him, and I didn't want people to think I had gotten a job with SOLDIER just because I was fucking Sephiroth."

Cloud was slightly taken aback by her coarseness. Keira looked at him and laughed. "I'm sorry; it's been seven years in the Midgar ghetto."

"It doesn't bother me."

"Good." Keira's eyes became distant. "We never wanted it to get out, and as far as I knew, it never had."

"Were you still together when…?" Cloud asked, trying to be delicate.

Her lovely face became sad. "He had proposed a week before he disappeared."

"Oh." Cloud didn't know what to say. "I'm…I'm sorry."

Keira gave a wry little laugh. "Well, it seems to have been for the best, doesn't it?" She looked down at the ground and kicked the dirt a bit. "There was always an undercurrent of him being troubled. I think he felt very isolated for most of his life- growing up the way he did."

"I heard he was adopted by the Shinra Corporation."

"In a way." The redhead started drawing in the dust with the toe of her boot. "He was an orphan. What he told me is that he had a mother, named Jenova, or something outlandish like that, who died in childbirth, and that he didn't know who his father had been, but he had worked for Shinra labs."

"Jenova?" Cloud tried not to give anything away through his tone. She nodded. "I see."

"We met in training," Keira went on, a little dreamily. "He was my sparring partner. I'd never been beaten in a fight before, and he grabbed my hand to show me how I should have parried differently…" She scoffed a bit and looked at Cloud, a little sheepish. "Well, it's not important anymore."

Cloud didn't respond. His mind was racing. This woman probably had known Sephiroth better than anyone else had, but he had more information about the man's actual life. It struck him as a particularly sad situation.

"Now, we really need to be heading back," Keira said, hopping off the downed column. "We've been gone almost an hour. Your friends must be frantic."

"I haven't thanked you properly for helping Tifa out," Cloud said, "and I apologize."

"It's nothing," she insisted.

"It means a great deal to me, actually."

They began walking back to the bar. "It's my turn to ask a personal question. Are you and Tifa together?"

Cloud coughed, uncomfortable with the question. "We have been, but…we aren't anymore."

"I was just wondering. I sensed a closeness," Keira said.

"We grew up together, and we've been through a lot," Cloud explained.

Keira cleared her throat, as if she expected him to go on, but Cloud wasn't about to start enumerating the intricacies of their relationship, and just kept his eyes in front of him.

Just before they re-entered the bar, Keira softly touched his shoulder. "Thank you for telling me about Sephiroth," she said, a touch of sadness in her voice.

Cloud glanced at her. The tremble in her voice did not show itself in her face, but her eyes were wider, more candid, and did not slide away nervously when they tried to meet his, as they had been. Her pale skin and the deep tone of her eyes gave her stare an enormous amount of power, and he found himself at a loss for words.

Then, suddenly, he realized something. "How did you know that I was the last one to see Sephiroth?"

Her eyes flickered, then went back to being evasive. "Everyone…I mean, it was news, then, that you had been pursuing the Man in the Black Cape," she said haltingly. "I just…I heard from friends who were still in Shinra that the brass was saying it was Sephiroth, and so I just put two and two together." Hurried, she added, "and it seems I was right, eh?"

He looked at her a moment. "Yeah," he finally said, "you were right."

When they walked back over to the table, Tifa looked up with a questioning expression. Cloud nodded to her, as if to say, I'll explain later, and said, "Let's get going."

"We were discussing that," Vincent said. "You obviously can't return to Kalm."

"Or Rocket Town," the blonde man agreed. "If Cid's really being threatened and the Turks are looking for me, it'll be a lot safer for him if we stay away."

"What Vincent and I were thinking," Tifa said, elbow on the table and her head resting on her fist, "is that we could go to Cosmo Canyon. Nanaki will happily hide us, and there's no Shinra presence there."

"That's a good point," Cloud said. "I like the Canyon; I could stay there for a few days."

"It's settled, then." Vincent shredded a paper napkin with his claw hand. "I'm sure the people of the Canyon will value any insight you two have about the Lifestream and other things."

"Wow, Vincent, have you of all people gotten sentimental?" Tifa teased.

Keira cleared her throat. "I need to ask another favour of you all." The other three all turned to her. "I've always wanted to go to Cosmo Canyon and study for a while, but I've never had the opportunity to travel all that way. If you three are heading there, can I join you for the journey?"

Vincent didn't react, but Tifa immediately said, "Of course, you can!" She shot Cloud a look of her own, but he smiled quietly at her and nodded his own assent.

The tall redhead looked from one person to the other, before breaking out in a pleased smile. "Well, all right, then!" she said. "We're on our way!"

Cloud smiled back at her, but couldn't shake his sudden feeling of trepidation.