Top Guide (In This Town)

Chapter Four

Nibelheim didn't sleep with the sun like it once had. Shinra had brought cheap electric light, and with that far more use of the evening hours. But by ten-thirty all but a few small lights were out, and by eleven nobody stirred.

Except Tifa Lockheart, creeping up the path to Shinra Manor.

She wasn't exactly creeping. Humans had the instincts of both predator and prey, and that meant most kinds of surreptitious movement patterns tended to grab their attention. If anyone happened to see her, she didn't want to be obviously up to something. But she was being as quiet as she could, and had let herself out a back window of her house rather than cross the square under everyone's noses. Just in case there was anybody awake to see.

The manor door opened without a creak and she slipped inside, the barren dusty interior a comfort in its desolation. Nobody to see her here. She waited a few minutes, to see if anyone was following, then went to climb the overly ostentatious front stairs.

She'd made her plans while sharing dinner with her dad, and doing the washing-up, and finishing off the cookies, and waiting after that for everyone to go to bed.

Vincent was her first priority. If Hojo had already hidden the key and left the clue to the lock combination (which she definitely had not memorized the first time, though it had taken Cloud enough tries to input it fast enough that he probably had) and if Tifa could successfully kill the Lost Number monster by herself, if it had been created and was in the safe at all—all of which were extremely questionable 'if' values—then she could let herself into the coffin chamber the normal way.

Honestly, though, Tifa liked her chances against the door better. If nothing else, it had the advantage of efficiency. She only had so much time at her disposal.

Only one of the two-headed zombies in the basement corridor lurched out at her on the way to Vincent's room. This was lucky, because it left her so battered she might have died against a second one.

That was embarrassing, especially since the ones in Dio's Battle Arena had been stronger, and still only really dangerous because by the time you got to them you were usually up to your neck in handicaps. She leaned against the wooden door once she reached it to drink a potion, getting her pitiful reserves of health up near enough to whole that she saved the second potion for after she took another injury, because a lot of its efficacy would be wasted if she took it now—it was so strange being weak enough to recover with one potion. She didn't like it. She guessed it saved on gil, though.

Stowing the empty bottle away, she squared up against the door, breathed in. Breathed out. She was weak, now. Barely more than a child. Most of the way through her training—nearly a first-level master of the Zangan style—but weak, still. There was no room for sloppiness in her forms; that was what her first monster fight since waking up in this time had reminded her. She had no extra strength to waste. Even against obstacles and enemies that didn't feel like any sort of threat to her adult mind, everything needed to be perfect.

Her kick made the door explode.

If Vincent had been asleep when she arrived, he was probably awake now. She advanced through the splintered opening, alert for more monsters, but nothing stirred.

The lid of his coffin came up easily when she pulled. Because he actually could have gotten up at any time, and had chosen not to. Right.

Tifa couldn't remember what they'd said the first time, except that Vincent had been at his melodramatic worst and Cloud bringing up Sephiroth had gotten his attention. "Vincent Valentine," she said, as his eyes flicked open, red and cold and menacing.

Looking like the monster he thought he was. But she knew him. She knew how brutal and heartless he could be, and she knew how carefully he could use his golden claws to lift a child out of danger. She knew his favorite cocktails all had cherry or strawberry syrup in them, because of his sweet tooth, and that sometimes when some percentage of 'everyone' got together for a pint, if she slipped him one full of soda instead of beer he'd give her a grateful look, even after he'd stopped being so afraid of allowing any lapses in his self-control.

He'd been so much better, after Chaos and the Deep Ground crisis blew up. There was a special sort of medicine in making peace with your ghosts and saving the world.

Vincent froze at the sound of his name, and then his eyes narrowed in suspicion. "Who are you?" he demanded. His voice rasped a little, but not as much as it should have after decades in dusty silence. "Did Hojo send you to disturb my rest?"

Tifa snorted. "No. I can't wait to punch his face in." She had tentatively placed this part in the 'plus' column: the fact that various horrible people were still alive meant she got a chance to hit them. Never having punched President Shinra in his double chin had always disappointed her. "I'd like your help," she added, and waited to see what Vincent said to that.

His expression flattened out. "It's none of my concern now," he said, and reached for the coffin lid. Tifa put her foot on top of it, holding it down with her full weight. Vincent frowned, and yanked.

He was several times stronger than she was, now. She had to hopskip backward to stay upright, and Vincent settled sulkily back into his box like someone woken before dawn for frivolous reasons. "Go away."

Tifa pulled the lid aside again before Vincent even got it fully into place. "I can't. I need to set a fire that will probably burn this building to the ground, and I can't do that with you inside."

Vincent drew the lid shut, for all the world like he was bunching covers over his head. "Go ahead."

Tifa ground her teeth. Self-destructive asshole. "I can't do that," she said. "Sephiroth can't see the documentation Hojo left here, or he'll kill everyone. And I'm capable of murder for the good of the world, but I'm not going to burn you alive just because you're lazy."

Unexpectedly, the coffin lid did not move when she mentioned Sephiroth, nor did Vincent speak into her silence.

Exasperating man.

"It's easy to decide to die," she told him, at length. "It's easy to stop fighting when there doesn't seem to be any hope. I know.

"But you'll always regret it. You know that. If you'd been brave enough to choose Lucrecia over the Turks before Hojo got his grubby claws into her, maybe none of this would ever have happened. If she'd been brave enough to choose you sooner, it might have been okay. Not choosing is almost always a bad choice. If you come out of hiding, more things will happen—things that can't unhappen. I know that's frightening. But things happen without you, too. When you're not there. When you do nothing."

Tifa rocked back on her heels. "You can't make the world go back to the way it was before, get back the same happiness or hope from your memories…not even if you could wind back time."

She smiled a little, at herself. She wouldn't go back to the girl she'd been if she could—she hadn't really been happier then, for one thing, and that girl had already tried and failed to make a difference so leaving it to her would just mean everything turned out the same way again. But Vincent's experience was different. And it was still true, for both of them.

"But…there are still possibilities. Still things you can do to make the world better. Her choices…they weren't your fault. But whatever you're blaming yourself for right now…lying here until you die won't make it better. The biggest sin of all, to me, is not trying to make things better.

"You aren't a monster, Vincent. Nothing Hojo did to your body, nothing Lucrecia did to bring you back, could make you one. As long as you have your mind, you decide. And it's what you decide to do that makes the difference between a human and anything else."

She waited. But the man in the box didn't move, and he didn't speak. "Lucrecia is still alive," she told him. "Preserved in crystal. Hidden away. You two really are a pair, aren't you? And maybe you're both right to be concerned—she's got Jenova in her, and you've got those things that replaced your Limit Breaks. But they don't control you."

Vincent probably didn't believe that yet—had probably never really tested it, yet. Didn't know that even when he ran out of control, the worst his monsters ever did was be too stupid to stop using fire attacks on a dragon. Tifa had fought beside him the world over, against monsters and nightmares and men, and the only times he had ever been a threat to her had been under the kind of heavy Confuse that left anyone lashing out at random.

"They don't control you," she repeated. "Hojo doesn't control you. You can choose to do nothing for the rest of your long life if that's what you really want. But it's not your destiny. And it's not what's right.

"Sephiroth is an adult now," she said, and—they were the same age now, weren't they. Twenty-six, give or take a year. She wondered if he felt older to himself than she did, or younger—he'd been part of Shinra's Wutai campaign when she and Cloud were still small children, she thought. Couldn't even remember the first time she'd heard his name, because it had come up in adult conversation around her before she'd had the first idea who he was, or cared at all. "They put him in the Shinra military. Made him a General."

Whatever that rank actually meant. Tifa didn't take Shinra's ranks and titles very seriously, and it wasn't just a matter of enmity—she'd learned from Reno a few months ago that Rufus might have been the official Vice President since his teens, but had spent several years after trying to assassinate his father under house arrest on the Turk level of Shinra Tower. Which explained why he hadn't been at the executive meeting where the plan to drop the Plate had been finalized, and how quickly he'd turned up after his father really had been killed.

Whether Sephiroth had had any authority in the company when he was alive was something of a mystery, and one that might for the first time actually be relevant soon. But it could wait.

"If Hojo and Jenova have their way, he'll become a monster soon," she confided in the coffin. "Maybe there's no way to change that. Maybe it's too late for him. Maybe it's his destiny. But it's not too late for the rest of the world, not yet. I know that much. Everyone who has the power to fight him has a responsibility to try."

And still, Vincent Valentine lay still and silent. Like the dead.

Well, then.

Tifa walked around to the side of the coffin, set her feet, pulled back her clenched hand, and drove one of her best board-breaking punches straight into the middle.

Her fist went clear through and she felt her knuckles stop against Vincent's armored stomach, but cracks ran out all the way to the edges; with a second blow she shattered the lid apart, and met Vincent's startled expression through the falling shards.

"What are you?"

She knew it wasn't her feat of strength that had impressed him, though he probably appreciated the rhetorical force of it. "Tifa," she said. "Tifa Lockhart." She held out her right hand. "Get up, Vincent Valentine. The world isn't done with you yet."

He let her pull him up onto his feet.

The important thing to burn was underground, so she didn't want to risk setting the house on fire and leaving the basement untouched, but it was probably not a good idea to set it while they were down there—if the smoke built up in the tunnel they could wind up passing out before they got aboveground.

When Tifa brought this up Vincent volunteered his stash of gunpowder, and they set up a simple incendiary bomb at the foot of one of the bookcases and then carefully laid a line from there out the door, up the earthen tunnel, up the staircase—this was difficult and involved propping boards along the stairs, and Tifa seriously considered stopping there, and just relying on their ability to run fast enough to be out before the blast, except they had a system going and it seemed like a shame to quit before they were done. They'd gotten as far as the upper landing in the main foyer when they heard a rattle at the door.

A second later, the building's front door swung open, and Zack Fair stepped in over the threshold. Tifa straightened up and tried to act like it was perfectly normal to be drawing lines of powder across the floors of abandoned buildings in the company of men in strange costumes. Vincent took a second longer to stand, unfolding in that slow predatory way of his, but it had probably been a lost cause anyway.

The door closed behind Fair, and he came forward, climbing the curving stairs with an easy, casual attitude. Stopped on the first landing and looked up the last stretch of steps at her, hands propped on his hips, and gave an incredulous little shake of his head, a smile pulling at his mouth.

"Well, young miss, what are we doing up so late?"

Irritation took a second place to worry. She'd known he would guess she was responsible for the fire. But that was supposed to have been after it was already safely done.

If he was here, being sarcastic and condescending, could she still make this work?

"I needed to get somebody, SOLDIER Fair," she said, waving a hand to indicate Vincent, who immediately got all of Fair's attention in a way that made her think he'd already had most of it anyway, and he'd just been looking at her for some kind of show. "This is Vincent Valentine, he used to be a Turk. Then Hojo decided he would make a better experimental subject."

Fair's expression grew tighter, but it was hard to read. His eyes flicked away from Vincent to settle on Tifa again for a moment. "He the source of your info?"

"A little of it." It was true—Vincent had filled in a number of gaps in the story of How And Why Is There Sephiroth. Just not this Vincent. But she couldn't attribute it all to him to cover up her time travel, because he wasn't an unimpeachable source, especially as far as Zack Fair was concerned.

"Hm." Fair contemplated Vincent for a few more seconds. "I have friends in the Turks," he said. Vincent did not noticeably react. "Do you know Cissnei? Tseng?"

All these years and Tifa had had no idea Tseng had known Zack. It made sense, sort of, since Aerith had known them both, Tseng for most of her life…she wondered if her Cloud had known.

"It's been twenty-six years," Vincent said. "There's probably been some turnover."

Fair snorted, apparently catching on to Vincent's possibly-nonexistent sense of humor immediately. "Huh, yeah, probably…and now I want apple turnovers for breakfast…wait, hey, how old does that make you?"

Vincent turned his face away. He looked, as always, no more than thirty—in Tifa's old timeline they hadn't had time, yet, to see if he never would age, or if coffin hibernation had just put his time in suspension, but he certainly didn't look as old as he should.

"You were around when the General was born, weren't you," Zack Fair said, suddenly intent. Mako eyes tended to glow a bit brighter when their owner concentrated hard; it showed here in the dimness as it had not in the sunlit square this afternoon.

"Vincent used to date Sephiroth's mother," volunteered Tifa. "Before she married Hojo."

Fair grimaced. "Hell of a way to resolve a love triangle, Professor…oh, man, this means Hojo is Sephiroth's father, doesn't it? That poor guy." He shook his head. His eyebrows knitted. "Unless you are," he told Vincent.

Vincent flinched, but it was a Vincent flinch and therefore subtle, and Fair probably didn't catch it. "I'm not," he said.

"Which doesn't mean you're not entitled to help him," Tifa said firmly, gripping Vincent's shoulder.

Her Vincent, she'd probably have slung an arm across his back and gripped the opposite bicep, sort of a stealth hug, but this one didn't know her that well yet. "Come on," she said, letting go. "We have to get you out of here so we can wreck Hojo's schemes."

"And set the building on fire?" Fair asked, and there went the hope he'd been sufficiently distracted by Vincent. His eyebrows were really high, and his eyes were several degrees cooler than his smile. "I know you said the boss shouldn't believe whatever's down there, but controlling what information people can get isn't the kind of thing that screams 'trust me,' you know? And burning down a building seems kind of overkill. I mean, it's not that far from the rest of town."

Tifa flinched. Realistically, even if the flames from the Manor did begin to spread—to the Rainside's store, or to Cloud's house; those were closest—the fact that the town was currently full of living people would make it very unlikely that anything would actually burn down. Hel, at the moment Sephiroth would probably help put it out!

But still, now the idea was in her head. The people who used to die in the reactor explosions in her terrorist days had been—bad enough, and those had all been Shinra employees. She couldn't burn down Nibelheim several days early. "Listen, I…" she said.

"Miss," Fair said, spreading his hands a little, "I don't want to get mad at you. Actually, I'm already kind of mad, but."

"Was that meant to be a threat?" Vincent asked. He didn't sound especially menacing—actually, he sounded bored—but his gun had found its way into his hand sometime in the past second. Tifa laid her hand on his wrist before he could do anything more overtly aggressive with it.

He hadn't asked many questions after taking her hand, earlier. It had been all practicalities: what are we burning, how are we accomplishing that, what's our time frame. He would want to know more eventually, she was sure, would want to know about Lucrecia and where she got her information. There would be drama. Tifa had been perfectly happy to give him time to process, but she should have thought about the potential consequences if the plan got interrupted.

For now, she only had her fingers on the back of his wrist, and sincerity in her eyes. "Vincent, no. Please."

He dipped his chin behind his collar, gazing at her under his eyebrows. If he was surprised, he wasn't showing it. "Why not?"

"Because he's our best chance of getting through this with minimal casualties." Tifa let her hand fall, felt a crooked smile rise. "And I owe it to more than one of my friends to see that he gets out of this alive."

Vincent didn't question this, even cooperatively put his gun away though he kept his hand near it, but Zack squinted at her. "Sorry, what? Who do I even know from Nibelheim?" The squint widened out again, and he actually snapped his fingers. "Cloud, right! Are you two friends?"

Tifa sighed. "Yeah," she admitted. There went that secret line into Shinra operations. "Sort of."

Damn. She wasn't cut out for this kind of operation, she really wasn't. Could keep her mouth shut around enemies just fine, unlike most of her original AVALANCHE comrades, even around friends most of the time, but lying to people's faces had never come easy to her. It should be Aerith here, that girl could wrap a person around her fingers in five minutes flat and make them grateful for it. Not that she'd ever lied much more than she could help, but—she had charm, and a cheerful poker face, and was never particularly concerned about getting caught keeping secrets.

Also, she was dating Fair, so he'd probably give her a lot more benefit of the doubt.

Thinking about how Aerith was, right at this minute, completely alive, cheered Tifa up. "We have to destroy those documents before Sephiroth can read them," she said, because that was non-negotiable.

Fair's forehead furrowed. "And I'm telling you again, I can't let you go around destroying things just because you think you've got the right to control what Shinra information Shinra employees have access to. The General's got high enough clearance to get in here, probably. Pretty sure you don't, actually. I checked, this is a restricted facility."

"A restricted haunted mansion," Tifa grumbled. (Although there had been a lot fewer monster attacks during this visit than five years in the future, for some reason. Even though Fair and Cloud had been held here, so it wasn't like nobody had been here to kill them in the interim.) Was it too much to hope he'd 'checked' in some other manner than asking Sephiroth?

It was at that point the front door opened again, and…a Shinra trooper stepped, a little hesitantly, over the threshold.

Cloud. Helmet on again; Tifa knew him anyway. He stopped when he saw the three of them, let the door swing shut behind him.

Tifa's breath came out in a huff. "I swear if Sephiroth comes in next I am just going to set everything on fire on the spot."

A/N: So fun story: First time I fought Safer Sephiroth I wasn't prepared for the way they shuffle your party between phases of the dungeon so I didn't have all my best materia, but ultimately we all died when he Confused Vincent, who killed Cloud, and then Tifa, and then rotated on the spot for a while before shooting himself in the face.

Return to save.

And yes, the first time I tried out his first-level Limit was against a dragon, and for a bit there he was healing it as fast as the rest of the party could deal damage. :D