Chapter Fifty-Six:
A/N: Screw my rules. This chapter is told from Irvine and Fujin's POVs, since I couldn't make it work with Tessa or Hunter. Anyway, enjoy! And thanks for the reviews.
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The cowboy liked the heft of his new firearm. It was similar to that of his shotgun Valiant, which had been taken from him when the group was captured and imprisoned. The new weapon was an antique, and Irvine considered this as he checked the ammunition in it. Nine bullets waiting to fly out the barrel and into an enemy. He savoured the feeling as he slid the Peacemaker into the inside pocket of his tan duster. Irvine was slightly surprised that he still had his favourite garment. let alone the hat perched on the top of his head.
He didn't know why, but he was in the Junon headquarters of the infamous Shinra corporation. Add in the fact that he was accompanied by Vincent Valentine, the former Turk and owner of Peacemaker, and Fujin, the only person who could give Squall a run for his money in the silence department, in an attempt to find a couple of girls within the large base...
What the hell happened? he asked himself as the trio rounded a corner and into an empty hallway. Less than a week before, he had been a normal life. As normal a life as one could have while being a SeeD, that is. On one hand he had Selphie and his missions which everyone saw, but on the other he held a secret that had often caused Selphie to lose control and viciously attack any girl that even dared to look in his direction. Selphie believed that Irvine was cheating on her and she wouldn't stand for it. She was right. For about six months, Irvine had been sneaking around with her best friend, Quistis Trepe.
Now, Selphie was dead and, Irvine thanked whatever deity was out there, the small warrior had stayed that way. The memories of Raijin tearing out her throat and Squall ramming his gunblade through her head still caused small shivers to travel up his spine. A quick glance at Fujin, the only surviving member of the former Balamb Garden Disciplinary Committee, left him mystified. Her only friends, Raijin and Seifer, were dead. He'd heard Seifer tell Tessa, one of the missing girls, that the other missing girl, Adette, was a friend of theirs as well. The Galbadian guessed that the reason Fujin wasn't escaping with Quistis, hunter, and Yuffie was a sense of loyalty to the dark-haired girl.
Irvine grew up at Galbadia Garden, which didn't use GFs. Instead, the SeeDs were trained in using Materia as their source of magic. He hadn't junctioned once after the final battle with Ultimecia and was never very proficient in Materia, one of his few professed character flaws. Fujin, having no weapon with which to defend herself, had no trouble in accepting the offered Ice Materia.
Odd as it was, the silent girl was the one leading the group. Common sense would dictate that Vincent do it, but Fujin seemed to know precisely where she was going. It was almost as though she had been there before...
Shaking his head, Irvine rationalized that it wasn't possible. How could she know? She's never been here before.
"Halt!" a rough male yelled, snapping the cowboy out of his thoughts. He looked ahead and saw a group of five men in blue uniforms with black masks over their faces. At least, he believed they were men.
He reach for Peacemaker, but the men were dead before he even had it drawn. A series of large icicles, slowly turning red with the soldiers' blood, stuck out of each man's chest. Fujin lowered her hand, which was clasping a still-glowing Materia. Without even a second thought, she stormed past the corpses, leaving the other two to keep up.
---
Her eye swept across the expanse before her, and she fought down nausea. It had been four years since she was last in Junon, and the memories hadn't been pleasant ones. Seifer and the others had grown up together: first in the orphanage, then at Garden. Raijin hadn't been an orphan, but his abusive father sent him off to Garden just to get him away. Yet, Fujin's own past was much darker than that of her friends and enemies from during the war.
"Where are we going?" Irvine asked as he and Vincent caught up to her. The short woman grimaced but looked straight ahead. No words escaped her lips, something she had excelled at. She learned long ago that noise did nothing to end the pain, so she might as well be silent.
Another hallway, another battle. This one was full of soldiers and would take more than a simple spell from the Materia in her grasp to finish. She ducked and weaved beneath bullets and spells, firing off her own with unbelievable accuracy. A soldier rushed her and she spun, grabbing a knife from his belt and returning it to him a second later with a deep thrust. he fell to the floor, holding his abdomen as the silver-haired one stepped over him and let off another series of frigid magic. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Vincent and Irvine trading fire with the soldiers as she pressed ahead. Another soldier approached, a kick to his head threw him back, and he stopped moving. She reached down, pulled something off him, and lobbed it into the middle of the opposition. A second later an explosion rocked the building as the grenade went off. Bodies were vaporized and appendages flew in every direction. Blood and other bodily fluids showered the warrior as she stood still and glared at something at the end of the hallway. When the smoke cleared, a single doorway could be seen at the end of the hall.
A look of benign fear crossed her face. She balled her fists so hard that her fingernails dug into her palms and the rough edges of the Materia caused one hand to bleed as she skin was cut away. With one foot in front of the other, she strode toward the door. The words of her two companions were ignored. Fujin raised the Materia to shoulder-level and aimed it at the door. However, instead of large icicles like before, a cold wind blew out of her hand and a frost covered the door. Then she stepped right up to the mass of metal and kicked it, causing it to shatter like glass.
The images played again in her mind, and they matched the scene before her. Three cylindrical glass containment units that housed one person each. The bright lights set in the base and top of them, illuminating the subjects inside. However, there hadn't been a dead girl lying by the console that operated all of the cylinders' functions the last time she was there. There was something familiar about her, but before Fujin could investigate, another girl's voice rang out through the world. Even through the wiring of the almost invisible microphones imbedded in the glass units, the pain rang out cold and clear.
"That's her."
Fujin whirled around and her eye widened in surprise as she looked into the face of the one that had caused all of the catastrophes thus far, whether intentional or not. Even though her skin had been cleaned and was once again oddly pale, much like Fujin's own, and her head was shaved of all hair, it was obvious who the captive was...
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"What's going on?" Irvine asked as he skidded to a stop beside Fujin. He was in a laboratory, but what caught his attention first was the body lying on the floor. It was Adette, one of the girls that he had set out to save.
But if she's there...
"HOW?" Fujin asked a glass containers. Irvine looked at it and saw a girl pressed up against the circular wall. She was wearing different clothes and her head was shaven clean, but Irvine recognized Tessa immediately.
"It was Elena and some woman in a red dress," the frightened medic told the others.
"Scarlet?" Vincent asked. Irvine hadn't even heard him enter, and jumped slightly at the other man's voice. He looked at Tessa, and she nodded in confirmation.
Fujin said nothing more as she walked to the console and pressed a series of buttons. Her back was stiff and it was obvious that she was trying to ignore the body of her friend.
"Hold on, we'll get you out of there," Irvine told Tessa. He felt sorry for her, even if she had done nothing but insult him every time they spoke. He turned to Fujin and saw something move at her feet. "Look out!"
Fujin turned and looked at Irvine, who had drawn Peacemaker and aimed it at Adette. The girl was thrashing about despite the fact she was bound and gagged, something the cowboy hadn't noticed until just then. Adette turned her head in Irvine's direction and his eyes met hers. They were red. He pulled the trigger. Tessa screamed curses at him; he was surprised that it had taken so long. Fujin just looked at Adette's body with no sign of emotion before turning back to the console.
She's so much like Squall, Irvine thought sadly as he returned the Peacemaker to the interior pocket of his duster. Shortly afterward, a whirring noise signalled the raising of the tubes. He looked and watched as the glass columns were raised enough for Tessa to crawl out and fall to the floor.
"You are injured," Vincent told her as he knelt beside the girl.
"Of course," she spat, and Irvine finally felt some of the tension he had been carrying drift away. "If I weren't injured, I wouldn't have fallen. Hyne, men are stupid."
Vincent responded by pulling another green Materia out of his cape. He aimed it at Tessa, who winced just before a white light enveloped her. In the second or two it took for the Cure spell to work, she had risen to her feet.
"Took you long enough," was her response. "Men never think of doing something first, they always have to whine about it. Yet another reason to hate them."
Has she never heard of gratitude? Irvine asked himself. At least she's back to normal.
He watched with a smirk as the girl took a tentative step, trying to see if she still had her balance. When she didn't fall over, Tessa whirled to Vincent and practically yelled at him.
"What about the other two? Are you just going to ignore them?"
Irvine almost preferred the whine of the alarm, which ended by then, to Tessa's grating voice. However, he was confused as to what she meant. "Other two?"
She pointed at the other raised cylinders with both hands, and Irvine stood on his tiptoes to see just what she was pointing at. Indeed, there were two more people lying unconscious in the glass circles. One was a naked woman, and he paid a lot of attention to her before turning to the other captive. He was wearing a SeeD uniform, had brown hair...
Squall! was his first thought, but when he noticed the young man didn't have a scar on his face he looked at Tessa in confusion.
"Yes, I know who they look like," the girl said in an annoyed voice. "So get over it and help them already, asswipes."
Vincent said nothing as he pulled the Squall look-alike to the floor and tried to wake him with the aid of another green Materia. Irvine began to wonder just where Vincent kept all of his equipment. Then, when three sets of eyes locked onto the tall cowboy, he realized that he was supposed to get the girl.
Fighting back a grin, Irvine slipped off his duster and approached the unconscious woman. She was beautiful with long brown hair, and he guessed that the eyes were the same colour. After being sure to have removed Peacemaker, he wrapped the girl in it and lifted her into his arms.
"LEAVE!" Fujin ordered from her perch at the console. It was this noise that caused the girl in Irvine's arms to wake up. She peered up at him with, he saw that he guessed wrong, bright green eyes.
"Who are you? Where am I?" she asked in a small, frightened voice as she looked around. Then she noticed that she was naked and squeaked out of embarrassment. "Where are my clothes?"
"Put her down," Tessa ordered. Then she had Irvine and Vincent turn around. The cowboy heard the rustle of fabric and he assumed that it was his duster. When given the okay to turn around, he saw that he was right. The girl was wearing Irvine's duster, and because she was short it hung on her shoulders and draped over her body to her knees. The sharpshooter actually liked the look.
"What's your name?" Vincent asked as he looked at Tessa. The medic nodded in silent agreement and Irvine wondered what had passed unspoken between them.
The girl looked at him in shock until Tessa put her arm around her shoulder and told her that it was okay. Of course, Vincent still had the Squall-looking man in his arms. It amazed Irvine that he wasn't tired.
"I'm Eisis," the girl told them all. "I grew up in Kalm, a small mining town near Midgar. My father runs a tavern there. Oh, he must be worried so worried about me if I've just disappeared to... where am I, again?"
"You're in Junon," Tessa told the girl soothingly. The change in the redhead's personality when she spoke to women was amazing. However, when Irvine looked at her more closely, he saw that her eyebrows weren't red. In fact, they had gone silver. When she noticed the attention she was getting from Irvine, Tessa glared at him and spoke in the voice he was accustomed to hearing. "What the hell are you looking at?"
"Just can't believe you're bald," he answered with a shrug.
"What the hell are you talking about?" Tessa asked as she felt her scalp. A look of shock crossed her face as she came to realize that she was, indeed, lacking any hair. "What. The. Fuck?"
"It was my idea," a new voice said from the doorway. Irvine whirled around, Peacemaker in hand, and observed three characters in dark blue suits with white dress shirts. Two were men, one black, bald like Tessa, and wearing dark sunglasses that block his face. The other was a redhead who held what looked like a riding crop against his shoulder. Finishing up the trio was the speaker, a Blonde woman with a black leather glove on one hand. She seemed to concentrating on Tessa. The cowboy turned and looked at back at her to see a look of fear on her face, but she wasn't pale. Actually, now that he noticed it, she was pale anyway. However, when he saw the same look on Vincent's face, he became worried.
"Hmm, looks like we got more than we expected," the redhead told his two companions. He was the least formal-looking of them all, with his suit wrinkled and the shirted untucked. "This just might be more fun than you told us."
Something was pressed into Irvine's arms, and he looked down to the face that was so much like that of his dead friend.
"Get him and the girl's out of here," Vincent told him. "I'll hold these three off as long as I can."
"Not alone," Tessa said as she stood behind Vincent. Her gaze was locked on the Blonde, a mixture of fear, hatred, and vengeance etched on her. Fujin joined them and turned to Irvine. He saw the Materia grasped in her hand and her face as emotionless as ever.
"LEAVE!" she repeated to him.
"Oh, yes, Reno; this will be a lot fun," the Blonde said as she cracked her knuckles and glared back at Tessa.
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A/N: I know Fujin was kind of a Mary Sue in this chapter, but there is a reason! (Isn't there always a reason?) And just what will happen to our heroes and heroines? I hope you guys like the change in format, since I'm considering doing it for the rest of the story.