Prompt: Turk!Tifa
Tifa straightened her tie and adjusted her suit jacket. She resisted the urge to clear her throat.
Sephiroth looked her up and down with the slightest quirk of an eyebrow.
"Is this your first mission?" he asked.
"No sir." It was just her first without Cissnei or one of her other trainers looking over her shoulder, but he didn't need to know that.
He did not look impressed. The eyebrow arched.
"You don't need to call me 'sir', you're not in the army."
"Yes s- Sephiroth." She winced on the inside, but her face remained calm. She wasn't a junior Turk anymore. They expected more of her.
Sephiroth looked up. He turned and got into the back of the helicopter without further ado. She got the impression he was more resigned than convinced. He crossed his arms and looked directly ahead without comment. She hoisted herself up into the pilot's seat.
She had already gone over her pre-flight checks, and the tower gave her permission to take off. There was no reason to be nervous. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, then reopened them and focused on the controls. The engine roared, the rotors spun, and everything was ready.
"Please brace for take off," she said into mic, an old Turk joke, supposedly invoking good luck. She heard a very faint scoff over the headset and smiled.
They lifted off the roof of the Shinra building and Midgar fell away smoothly beneath them. She knew she was good, Cissnei had been a thorough and patient teacher. Even Tseng told her she handled herself well, considering.
Considering she didn't want to be there.
Considering they were her jailers first and co-workers second.
She set her heading to the west. The skies were empty, the wind low, and were expected to be so all the way to the coast and over the centre sea.
Becoming a Turk had not featured in teenage Tifa's life plans. She hadn't really planned anything, besides wandering Mount Nibel and besting Master Zangan. She hadn't given half a thought to Shinra.
About three years ago the Nibelheim reactor had started to make some odd noises. She heard, on one of her mountain treks, and went to investigate. Two men in suits she now knew as Reno and Rude, the bastard who stole her lunch from the staff kitchen and the gentle soul who bought her a replacement lunch in apology, came sniffing about the village.
They had asked her many questions about what she'd seen and the monsters she'd killed in self defense. She had down played it as much as possible but they were clever and talked it out of her. Then they gave her a job offer. She had been young and naive then, but already smart enough to know it hadn't been optional.
Less than six months later, the reactor exploded. It wiped out the whole town.
She looked down at her black fingerless gloves, custom made, stamped with Shinra's logo. She was no longer naive.
She shook away the thoughts and focused on the gusts of wind blowing up over the Western Continent. This was her job now, the only one available to her. All she could do was make the most of it.
The mission was to Corel to inspect the new reactor. She hadn't known until she was literally on the landing pad and got sent even that little information. All she knew was that she was to watch and assist Sephiroth as he did… whatever a SOLDIER might do in a reactor.
Maybe the whole mission was a hazing ritual.
Sephiroth didn't work with the Turks often, having half the training of one himself, if not the clearance. Maybe he was assessing her. Tseng didn't fully trust her, it was the sort of thing he'd do.
They flew over the pass of Mount Corel, where some kind of building project was underway, and then the dry valley opened up before her.
It had… snowed?
Where was the town? There was a tiny collection of huts nestled under the mountain, at the base of a railway line, but where was the township? The coal mine? The chocobo trail and depot for the post that came through this way?
She circled the area, unsure of where to put down. There was the reactor glowing on the mountainside. Glowing a lot, actually.
Dread clenched in her stomach.
"Land on the flat beneath the reactor," Sephiroth's voice came over the headset.
She brought them down gently on a flat of stone. The force of the rotors threw the snow up to gently rain down again onto them. It smudged grey against her bare fingers as she got out.
Oh. It wasn't snow.
Sephiroth led the way towards the only two buildings that were more than shacks. Both were part of the rail complex and looked new and hastily built.
What happened to the township soon became very clear.
Some of the people came out of the tents to stare at them. An old lady with a burn on her face leaning heavily on a walking stick hobbled towards them, staring daggers at Sephiroth.
Tifa looked up at the glowing hunk of metal on the mountain, dripping its melted pipes and contaminated Mako down into the valley, contaminating the coal mine. So that what was a reactor meltdown looked like. She hadn't seen it the last time.
The old lady spat accusations and poked at Sephiroth with her walking stick. He stopped moving. She blamed him for his men who had burned the town down, who accused them of causing the meltdown, at the men who convinced them to have the cursed reactor they didn't need in the first place.
Tifa didn't know what to do, what to make of any of this, except for the cold and horrible realisation of why it had been her sent on this mission.
Sephiroth made no move to interrupt the old woman. His expression had closed off, in a way Tifa had never seen before and didn't expect from the most feared weapon Shinra ever made. It was like he had just shut down.
The old woman threw everything Shinra ever did at his feet. Including Nibelheim.
Tifa stepped forward, her hands raised, placating.
"Ma'am," she started.
"And you!" the woman said, whirling on her. "With your pressed suit and shiny shoes, come to look down at what you've done to us! Shameless, arrogant girl-"
"Ma'am, please, I understand. And I'm, I'm sorry-"
"You understand?" Her eyes flashed and her lips peeled back from her teeth.
"I'm from Nibelheim," Tifa blurted, not meaning to. "Of course I understand. Shinra did this to you after promising to help, and I am so sorry."
The woman recoiled. She looked her up and down, then spat on Tifa's patent leather shoes.
She stormed off.
Tifa sniffed and sucked in a trembling breath. There were tears in her eyes threatening to overflow. She'd screwed it up. She'd screwed everything up.
In the back of her mind the lessons beaten into her droned on, Turks didn't apologise, they didn't bend, they didn't accept accusations, and they didn't ever, ever allude to the flaws of the company except for how to hide them.
Somewhere on the other side of the mountains her dad's body was rotting under the rubble of a broken reactor.
Sephiroth's shoulders sagged next to her, the first movement he had made since the old woman started.
"Are you going to report this to Tseng?" she asked. Her voice was wobbly. Unprofessional. She hated that she cared, but her life rode on it.
"Are you?" he asked. He looked at her with his brow furrowed.
She met his eyes, and saw something inexplicable there, something furtive, entreating, and more complex than she could understand from someone she didn't know.
"No," she whispered. "I won't tell."
"Then neither will I."
He turned on his heel and marched to the nearest building. She stared after him for a moment, still shaken and confused. Then she rushed to catch up.
The building was a dead empty tavern and inn, and Sephiroth got them a room with ruthless efficiency, and the next thing Tifa knew he was closing the door behind them in a small and sparse room with two single beds in it.
"Are you really from Nibelheim?"
She ducked her head. She wasn't supposed to be. She didn't come from anywhere, didn't have family, didn't even have a last name.
"Yes," she said.
He studied her with narrowed eyes. She didn't know why.
"So am I. I was born there."
Her eyebrows shot up. "What? Nobody ever said…"
Oh. She sucked in a hissing breath and straightened her back.
"Even I didn't know," he said. He scowled. "They blew it up before I could learn...whatever they were hiding."
The tears in her eyes had dried up. She stared at him, puzzle pieces snapping into place in her mind, and missing gaps she'd avoided it too much to notice before were suddenly in sharp relief. Her hands balled up into fists.
"They stored medical research in the reactor. The Science Department did. They recruited me to make sure I could never tell anyone about the things I saw inside."
"What did you see?" he breathed.
The danger of it all struck her, the reality of just who she was talking to in a tiny enclosed space. SOLDIER Firsts had rebelled before, but they were all dead now and Sephiroth never waivered.
"How do I know you're not a Shinra plant?"
He scoffed.
She stepped forward, her fury igniting. "How do I know you're not going to kill me for opening my mouth, how do I know you won't bury me under Shinra's sins like I should have been from the beginning!"
"Keep your voice down."
He turned and locked the door. She shrank back.
He didn't look at her for a moment, his brow furrowed and a slight thoughtful pout on his lips. He looked utterly unlike the man on the news reels, unlike even the impression she had gotten of him as he swept through the Shinra building, disengaged with the world around him.
Did Shinra realise just how disillusioned their strongest SOLDIER was?
"If you didn't know what happened to Nibelheim, to your home, what would you give to find out?"
"Anything."
He faced her. There wasn't much space between them.
"What do you need me to do to prove I am sincere, before you will tell me where I come from?" His Mako green eyes were entreating and intense. "I will do anything."
She was stunned into silence. She pulled off her earpiece and her phone from her pocket and handed them to him. They were already off but there was no real knowing. He crushed them in his hand and dropped the pieces. Her heart raced at the open defiance. The Turks weren't here, wasn't listening, wasn't holding her leash.
"In the reactor I saw a dead woman in a mako tank," she reported, resurrecting the memory she had held and cursed but never buried. "She had silver hair and growths on her back, like fleshy wings. There was a thick pipe stuck into her stomach and a metal thing bolted across her forehead. It said 'Jenova'."
Sephiroth didn't respond. His eyes were wide.
"She looked at me," Tifa said.
"But she was dead?"
"Yes."
He stepped back, not really looking at anything. "Thank you... for telling me."
"I don't know what it means. But they didn't want anyone to find out about it."
He nodded.
He didn't do anything else for a long time. She wasn't sure what happened now. She felt the rush of mutiny start to eb away, and Sephiroth looked like he needed to be alone. Frankly, so did she.
"I'll get us some food," she offered, and then squeezed past him to the door, and downstairs into the tavern.
She looked out across the dead valley for a long time. The old woman was sitting on a rock outside of a tent, crying into her hands.
Tifa pulled herself back up and returned to the room with some basic food and water.
Sephiroth stood by the window as she pushed the door open. His eyes landed on her immediately, sharp and focused.
"Have you been back to Nibelheim?" he asked. "Have you seen what's left?"
She shook her head, her throat dry at the potential of that question.
"Would you like to?"
A/N: Sorry I missed yesterday, day 3 will get shamefully posted after the week is done.
Next Time: In each other's arms