Top Guide (In This Town)
Chapter Two
A/N: Zack's first two lines in this chapter are official Crisis Core dialogue. Zack and modesty are not close friends.
SOLDIER Fair noticed her right away—probably he'd been aware of her all along, if he was half as good at his job as Cloud's initial skills suggested. She'd been staring, after all, even if she'd been doing it from under a cistern.
"You're one of the SOLDIERs Shinra sent?" she asked. It was more or less how she'd started last time, and she'd made an okay first impression then, so she could rely on it seeming both natural and inoffensive now. She hoped.
The dark-haired SOLDIER grinned at her. He was exactly as she remembered, really, not that she'd thought he was anyone of significance at the time. Vibrant, she'd called him once. The incongruously familiar hilt of the Buster Sword jutted over one shoulder. "Yeah, name's Zack, and I'm with SOLDIER," he confirmed. "First Class, mind you, First Class!"
No wonder Cloud had picked that part up.
"Huh. Are there a lot of those?"
"Nope," definitely a little smug, but only a little, "we're a small, elite group."
Last time, Tifa thought she remembered complaining about there only being two of them, and then she'd chickened out of asking about Cloud, and left. She also hadn't waited until Sephiroth went inside to approach, that time. "My name's Tifa," she said. "You're going up to the reactor, right?"
Fair nodded. Nothing classified about that part, at least. "That's right."
"The path's pretty tricky, so you'll need to hire a guide. I'm the top guide in this town," she boasted. It was nothing but the truth, but it felt right to brag a little—he obviously didn't believe in modesty, and pride gave her a reason to bring it up, right?
The SOLDIER grinned. He was only a couple of years older than her, she realized, for all his height and confidence. Years younger, now. He'd died younger than she was inside her head. "Okay, then I guess we'll be relying on you."
He gave a broad, friendly feeling with his hands braced on his hips. Cloud had moments, even ten years on, five years after Fair's death, of moving like this man; mannerisms that didn't quite belong if you'd known him before. But even at his most confident and charismatic he'd never had this kind of presence. Cloud wasn't an outgoing person by nature. Zack Fair was, like nobody else Tifa had ever met. He reminded her of Cait Sith, a little bit, which was weird.
She guessed Reeve was sort of like him, too. Reeve was always weirdly idealistic for such a morally compromised person. It fit. They were both Shinra, after all. Tifa was more fond of Reeve than she'd normally be willing to admit. She didn't think talking to SOLDIER Zack Fair would be much like talking to Reeve, though.
Cloud had adored him. Aerith had loved him. He'd been loyal to a mako-poisoned Cloud, which meant part of him reflected part of her, even if their reasons weren't quite the same.
Even if he was SOLDIER, she had to believe he was someone that could be trusted to try to do right.
"I'll do my best," she promised.
It didn't come out as girlish and charming as it would have when she was really sixteen, or even with youthful determination to prove herself. It sounded serious, like a promise, and she knew Zack Fair had noticed by the way his eyebrows twitched. "Yeah? Well, all a guy can ask."
Tifa bit her lip. "Yeah, nobody can do better than their best."
Mako-blue eyes darker than Cloud's lingered on her face with more attention, now. "Something wrong?"
"Uhm." She stepped a little closer, not wanting to say any of what she was considering saying too loud.
To her gratification, Fair mirrored her, closing the distance a little more. He was smiling again. She wondered if he was always smiling. "Come on, you can tell me. What's up?"
Tifa decided to spit it out. "…Sephiroth can't go to the reactor."
Fair frowned, suspicion chasing good nature abruptly off his face. He immediately looked years older, and a little like the incredibly dangerous person he had to be, considering his rank. (Still kind of stupid, though.) "Are you…"
"Shinra's hidden things there," she said, and then because she was talking to a loyal Shinra employee, even if that was a strange way to think of someone who'd died for Cloud, she changed it to, "Hojo has hidden terrible things there, and in the mansion."
"Hojo?" Zack repeated, and if it wasn't with the alarm that name deserved it was at least full of disgust.
"Secrets…and lies…that he won't be able to handle. Sephiroth won't." She bit her lip. She needed an ally. She was just one girl, even with everything she knew; she wasn't strong yet, didn't have a team of terrorists or a raft of mastered materia to rely on. She didn't even have any connections. There was no way she was going to let the destruction of Nibelheim happen the same way again just because she wasn't strong enough to change it alone. SOLDIER Fair was her best hope.
"Listen, uh…"
Fair was looking spooked. Well, no way out but through. "There's nobody alive who could stop him if he lost his mind," Tifa said, knowing it was true. "Is there?" she asked, to get him to admit she was right.
Like pulling teeth, Fair admitted, "I'm the closest there is left to someone as strong as him, so no. There isn't." His hand went up to his sword, but just to touch it, with the ends of his gloved fingers; not a threat she had to defend against.
Which was good, because at sixteen she didn't have a prayer, especially with no materia—she didn't know how strong he was, exactly, but the information she had said he really was the next strongest SOLDIER after Sephiroth. And it didn't matter how big that gap was because right now, for her, it was the distance between trying to strike the crest of Mount Nibel with a rock thrown from Nibelheim, and trying to throw one to the moon. One might be closer, but she wasn't likely to hit either.
Fair shook his head, hard. "But that doesn't matter."
"It matters if your General kills everybody I know!" Tifa retorted, stung even though she knew that he couldn't know how real the possibility he dismissed was to her.
"What, the town?" Zack Fair looked around, then back at her, eyebrows still knit. "Are you guys involved in…whatever this is?"
"No. We'd just…be available."
"I don't think the General is that kind of person," Zack said, and it was hard for Tifa not to break in and say if only you knew. But a shadow crossed his face again, and he said, "What is it you want, miss?"
"This mission is a trap." Her fists tightened until it hurt. She needed better gloves. "He's your friend, right?" You're not the Sephiroth I know, Cloud had remembered Zack saying in that reactor, ten years ago and a week from today. And she hated him and would go on hating him forever, but maybe it was true, and for all the blood he had spilled for Shinra already it was not until he'd lost his mind that Sephiroth had become the kind of person who would murder helpless people who were not his enemies.
And in this time where there was no one who could fight him, that had to be her best hope. Friendship, and a nightmare's better nature. Because right now she wasn't powerful, and she had never in her life been subtle. All she had was what she knew.
Tonight, she determined, she would sneak into the Manor and rescue Vincent, and then burn that library down. Gast had been ignorant enough to believe Jenova was Cetra right up until Ifalna set him straight; whatever good research he had done wasn't enough to be worth the poisonous misconceptions. Never mind whatever Hojo had added.
She had watched Cloud shatter under the revelation that he was not who or what he believed; he'd put himself back together with her help and Aerith's, and everyone's, and while she knew in her heart that Cloud was stronger and better than Sephiroth—just maybe, if the Calamity's son broke a little less, or even just a little slower, her home would be safe. Her father would be safe.
Her Planet could be saved.
"I'm his friend," Fair agreed, carefully.
"So…help him." And this wasn't for Sephiroth's sake and she wasn't pretending it was, but if he wouldn't believe Sephiroth was dangerous at least he seemed to think it possible the man was in danger.
Fair puffed out a little sigh. "Say I believe you. What do you want me to do?"
"He can't go to the reactor. You have to convince him to let you go without him."
A somehow heavy pause. "The last time I took a mission so Seph didn't have to, it…didn't exactly turn out well." That was grief in his voice and his eyes, though not anywhere else, really, and she wondered about it, whatever story lay behind this sorrow that Cloud had never remembered, or at least never shared.
She would never have guessed that anyone had ever called the Nightmare 'Seph,' and as if the thought was a reminder Zack Fair winced a little and added, "Don't mention I called him that, would you? I do it to his face because it's good for him, but behind his back it's just kind of disrespectful."
"I won't. And I don't think anything you could do on this mission could possibly be worse than what will happen if Sephiroth goes up there tomorrow."
"You seem so certain."
Tifa pressed her lips together. "I am."
"So who are you," Fair said, looking her up and down. They were close enough in age it wouldn't have been creepy if his eyes had lingered, the way a lot of people's did; if she minded people looking she wouldn't have dressed the way she had in the future. But (just like Cloud) he didn't linger; maybe he noticed her body and cared, maybe not, but either way it didn't show. His girlfriend had a better figure, anyway. "Besides the top local guide?"
She shrugged, a smile coming to her lips crooked and wry. "Just a Nibel girl."
Fair stared at her for several more seconds, like he was hoping she'd decide to open up to him if he waited a while. Then he sighed, shook his head—disconcertingly, the smile was back. "I can't go behind my commanding officer's back just on your say-so. Plus, you've never tried to put one over on Sephiroth, he has a real nose for intrigue."
Tifa and all her friends had been led around by their noses by dead Sephiroth, so this wasn't exactly surprising. So she needed to be more convincing? She could namedrop Aerith, but if Fair called her to check he'd find out she had no idea who 'Tifa Lockheart' was, and while that would get his attention it would also make him more suspicious.
She wanted to save claims of time travel for a last resort. Could Sephiroth hear them from here? Cloud wouldn't be able to, her time's Cloud, unless he was right inside the upstairs window listening, but she wasn't sure how their senses compared.
"He was born here," Tifa said abruptly. Softly.
She had Zack Fair's attention.
"It was…obviously, it was before I was born. If you ask around, most people don't know, they'll just say a long time ago Shinra people used the Manor. If they're old enough they might remember there were scientists, it was a major secure research facility so they didn't mingle much. But I…explore everywhere, and…they made him in the Manor." She pointed toward the dilapidated hulk of it. "I don't know how long they kept him here after he was born, but this is where it started."
"Are you saying…"
"I'm saying SOLDIER goes back to the experiments they did here, starting almost thirty years ago. The Jenova Project."
And for some reason that got her all of his attention. Had Sephiroth just now, on the way into town, told them his supposed mother's name? She didn't think she remembered that happening, but her memory was hardly flawless. "Jenova…Project, huh?" SOLDIER Fair repeated. "You know anything else about it?"
"Some." Tifa hesitated, trying to decide what she could plausibly know. If the Manor burned down tonight he was going to suspect her now, no way around it. Bad planning, oh well, worth it. "His designation was Project S."
That convinced him, for some reason. "But what makes you so sure the General is going to flip off the handle if he finds this stuff out?" He didn't necessarily sound like he disagreed.
"Some of what's in the labs…it isn't true. It's set up to make him feel as alone and betrayed as possible. And he's not the most…stable person in the world right now, is he?" That laughter coming in—she was pretty sure it hadn't seemed ominous just to her. Fair was worried. She needed to make sure he was worried about the right things.
He didn't confirm, but he didn't deny.
Tifa said, "I think maybe Hojo…just wants to see how far he'll go, if he does snap."
Fair pulled a face. "You think? Man. Not a lot I would put past Professor Creepy, but you need to stop talking about Sephiroth like that. He's loyal to SOLDIER. I'm gonna trust him unless he gives me a real reason to stop."
Oh, he would. "Loyal to SOLDIER?" Tifa echoed. "I would have thought you'd say Shinra."
Another of those complicated faces that made him seem older. "Shinra is…complicated. SOLDIER is a team. We watch out for each other."
Like they watched out for you, Tifa thought, with more than a little venom because there had been SOLDIERs in the battalion that brought this man down, five years in the future on a rocky bluff overlooking Midgar. Cloud had told her he remembered that much. The scattering of broken swords around a dark-haired corpse. That was no kind of team she would ever want to join.
But she preferred people who projected their own virtues onto others over those who projected their own flaws. "Take my warning then," she said. "If nothing else. Watch out for Sephiroth."
For all the good that would do.
"I'll keep it in mind," Fair assured her. And didn't say thanks, on purpose she was sure. "By the way…I'm not sure about that building, but if you've explored inside the reactor, try not to mention that. It's a classified facility."
Without waiting for her to respond, he gave a little wave and vanished into the inn.
Tifa was embarrassed to have been so focused on being plausible she'd forgotten about Shinra's habits of secrecy. At least Fair didn't seem like he wanted to sic the Turks on her for trespassing and potential espionage.
Cloud would probably wait until nobody was obviously watching to go visit his mother, so Tifa went…home.
It didn't feel like home anymore, and at the same time it would always be her truest home, and she didn't…well, she tried not to think about it. Decided to put together something for dinner; settled on a baked noodle dish that had been a trendy imported piece of Junon-style cuisine when her mother was young. These days most people with ovens also had at least one glass or ceramic dish suitable for baking in, but Tifa had her grandmother's old porcelain casserole along with her recipe cards, and if it wasn't actually better it was certainly fancier.
It had been a long time since she'd had anything fancy that wasn't a weapon. She hadn't really missed it, to be honest, or she would have bought some since Meteorfall, but she had missed having her mother's things.
She wondered if the Shinra reconstruction team had tracked down replica casseroles. She hadn't looked in the cupboards in the false house. Possibly a careful concern for her own mental health was not one of her virtues, but she didn't actively pursue self-destruction.
Cleaning up the kitchen once she had the dish assembled was even more soothing than the cooking of it. Getting everything cleaned and put back in its precise proper place. You had to have a very strict system of organization when running a restaurant kitchen, even if you were the only cook using it, which she hadn't been in years.
She left the noodles baking and slipped outside again, shading her eyes against the sinking sun. It would be behind the folds of the southwestern spur of the Nibel range soon, and then Nibelheim's long twilight would set in, but for now everything was still washed golden. Should she go to the inn? Avoiding Sephiroth seemed like a good idea, and she didn't want to push Fair, but she would prefer not to miss Cloud completely…
She turned sharply right at the deliberate sound of boots on cobble, approaching her from the western side of the square. Closer to the direction of the shop than the inn, but allowing for the fact that you couldn't cross the middle of the square that didn't mean much.
"Hey, Tifa…" It was…Gregor. Gregor Yeagar. He was a year older than her, and they'd been friends as children, but she'd liked him less the older they got.
He was the only boy her age who hadn't left town to look for work, and she'd eventually realized he thought sticking around meant he got his pick of the local girls. And of course he picked her. That wasn't vanity, it was just…everyone had always chosen her, in Nibelheim. She'd been strong and beautiful and, by Nibel standards, wealthy. Everyone wanted to be around her. It had been nice, when she was little—had been a comfort, after she lost her mother—it had meant nothing, when everyone was dead.
She'd liked Gregor, when they were kids. He supported her wilder ideas, never tattled. But looking back, she couldn't really forgive her younger self for choosing someone like him over Cloud. "Not now, Greg," she said.
"No, listen, Tifa." He fidgeted. "That…Shinra guy. I saw you watching them, and um. Talking?"
"Yes," Tifa allowed, because she'd done the exact opposite of trying to hide it. She didn't want people to know what she'd said, but the fact that she had talked to Fair was pretty blatant, which should have made it less suspicious, unless she was missing something. It wasn't like anyone was in a position to accuse her of conspiring with Shinra or betraying AVALANCHE for having a social conversation with a SOLDIER First.
"Look," Greg said, very firm for this one word, and then his confidence (though not that oddly pompous edge) seemed to drain away and he said, "look, he's not going to be in town long, and I thought we could…have a little bonfire up on the hillside together? I can bring the good ale and I've gotten really good on dad's gitar since I last played for everybody."
Well. This hadn't happened last time. She guessed seeing her actually getting along with Zack Fair had pushed Greg a little. Or, well, last time she had spent the next hour or two lingering in the town square getting steadily more miserable as she struggled to accept that Cloud wasn't coming. Today, she knew he was already here.
She could brush it off, ignore the invitation, tell him she'd just been asking Fair about Cloud—not that he'd be happy to hear that, exactly, or that she would have been eager to own up to it when she was really sixteen; her promise with Cloud had been a private comfort to her, back then. But she could leave it at that.
"Greg," she said, and settled her weight on her heels. The boots made her an inch taller than him.
Goddesses, she'd been so—As a teenager, it had meant so much to her to be approved of. If she'd gone against what was expected of her she'd usually just done it, never said anything, not drawn any attention even by sneaking around, so that anyone who minded had to be the one to make a scene. She was still like that, a little, but…she'd learned. She wasn't a child anymore.
"Greg," she said, gently because there was no reason not to be, "there's something I want to make clear. I'm not going to date you. I'm definitely never going to marry you." An extraordinarily unattractive look of befuddlement had overtaken his face, but it was shading into offense. "You're…not my type," she said, and it honestly had less to do with his looks than with the fact that he was really very incredibly boring and a bit of an ass and wore a terrible hat, but she didn't feel compelled to clarify.
"So, what, you're…chasing around after that Shinra guy? He has to be like twice your age."
Tifa rolled her eyes. "He's eighteen. But he already has a girlfriend, it's not like that."
"Oh my gods you asked?" Greg looked like he couldn't decide whether to be appalled or impressed.
That surprised her into laughing. "No. With some people you can just tell. He seems nice, you should talk to him too." She paused. Fair did seem nice, and in another time he'd fought Sephiroth after he turned on Nibelheim, but he was still a SOLDIER. "Or don't. He's also sort of dangerous."
"What would I even talk to him about?"
Tifa shrugged, and then her eyes caught on a snatch of blue across the square, pinned against stone by the last fierce shards of sunset. "Excuse me, Greg."
"Tifa, listen…"
"Excuse me, Greg," she said, and walked past him.
It was rude, but you learned to be rude to pushy people, tending bar in the big city. She didn't at this point actually care what Greg Yeagar thought. Or even what he told the rest of town. She didn't think she'd be staying here very long after this, no matter what happened.
And meanwhile there he was. Cloud, anonymous in Shinra blues with the helmet hiding his hair and eyes, lurking at the place where her house adjoined his, just like he'd said he had at the inn in Kalm, years ago in the future.
A/N: 'I will remain loyal to SOLDIER' is something Sephiroth promises Zack in Crisis Core. And he does mention Jenova's name on the way into Nibelheim, which Zack connects to the Jenova Project mentioned earlier, but doesn't know what to make of it. He and Sephiroth never really talked about Angeal and Genesis, let alone pooled their data.