Top Guide (In This Town)
Chapter Five
A/N: This is posting later than necessary or for a Dumb Reason. Namely, that the only review for chapter four was an anon (hi Guest! thank!) so I got into a loop of going 'oh right must reply before post! oh. can't.' And then I'd wander off only to do the same thing a day or two later. This happened at least twice. Now you know how my old lady brain works.
"Uhm," said Cloud, and Fair's expression said that had made her seem more than slightly mentally unbalanced. Ugh, whoops. (Vincent was unperturbed.) "I saw Zack headed over here, and I wanted to ask him something, so…"
"No, it's fine, join the party," said Tifa, beckoning him up. He wound up on the steps below Fair before he stopped.
"What'd you wanna ask?" Fair said cheerfully, turning on the landing to look down on the trooper, and there was just the faintest edge of something that said he actually had noticed he was now surrounded, and was ready to move if Cloud turned out hostile or the other two tried to strike while his back was turned.
Tifa couldn't claim she wasn't thinking about it. She didn't think she could put him down in one stroke even if she managed to surprise him, and Vincent would have a hard time taking him down without killing him, and she was (probably stupidly) still hoping to have him as an ally. If nothing else, they could rely on him to fight Sephiroth once he did go mad, and there was no way to know whether burning the books would actually make the difference.
Sacrificing Fair's power would be stupid, but telling him as much as she had in a bid for trust had clearly also been stupid. Ugh. Tifa could do logistics fine, but strategy was a bitch. There were never any good options.
Cloud made one of those little sniff-snort noises he made sometimes, some lesser ancestor of a laugh. "Feels stupid now," he said, and reached up to pull off the helmet. "I mean, whatever's going on…" He wasn't carrying his gun, Tifa noticed. Wasn't armed at all. That was actually stranger than the youth or the uniform, somehow. He'd gone out without a weapon. Cloud never did anything without a weapon. Cloud carried at least one giant sword with him while snowboarding and while racing chocobos. She had seen him swim with a weapon on his back.
"Your friend Tifa is planning to set Shinra property on fire along with this guy," Zack explained. "She says he's a Turk, I dunno, none of them really have this kind of dress sense, you know?"
"Tifa's setting a Turk on fire?" Cloud asked, and she was only ninety percent sure he was being funny on purpose. He'd tucked the helmet under one arm against his side, like a familiar weight.
Fair laughed. "Yeah, no. Did you know about this?"
Cloud shook his head. "We talked earlier, but she didn't say she was setting anything on fire. Tifa?"
"It has to burn," Tifa said, grateful Cloud wasn't planning to spill everything to Zack at the first opportunity. "Before Sephiroth can see it.
"The thing in the Reactor…I've seen it," she continued, and she hadn't, not in the reactor, she'd been cut down before Sephiroth got that far, but she'd seen Cloud's memory of it and confronted half a dozen faces of Jenova herself, knew the slick Poison-Elemental taste of her in the air. She knew what they were dealing with. "And the misinformation downstairs will make it so easy for that thing to get to him."
She didn't think much of Sephiroth, honestly—seriously doubted Jenova had made any of his choices for him. But there was a difference between the man she'd led up to the Reactor and the one she'd followed there again a few days later, intent on vengeance, and it could be distilled to 'lost all his marbles down a very deep hole.'
"And then," she pressed, "there will be nothing left to do but try to stop him. And I doubt the four of us together could put a scratch on him."
Fair's reaction was less…he wasn't angry she was talking about taking his boss down, or offended she doubted his own power, or disdainful she was considering herself and Cloud as part of an attack force alongside him and the scary mutant Turk. No. Something about what she'd said hurt him. "I've got to look at this stuff," he said, through his teeth. "If I'm gonna even consider hiding anything from him, I need to know."
Tifa sighed. "Fine." She didn't like the idea of this information in the hands of a free agent she couldn't burn, but realistically, Hojo had the information. The information was not the threat here, it was Sephiroth's reaction, and there were probably few ways for him to get it that were safer than a potted summary from a trusted subordinate. It still wasn't worth trying to kill him, and what other way was there to stop him? So, fine. "This way."
Fair nodded, and took a step up after her. His boots scuffed up their neat gunpowder line in passing in a way that looked careless, but Tifa suspected it wasn't at all. Nobody else stepped on it. "You seem cool, and you're a friend of Cloud's," he said, as they went into the study-bedroom and the least secret of all secret doors slid open at their approach. "I don't want to have to take you in for terrorism."
"Thanks," said Tifa.
Going down the spiral stairs she walked carefully on the right, leaving the line of boards with their improvised wick undisturbed, and to her surprise the SOLDIER copied her.
Fair reacted to the creepiness of the lab, but not strongly, reacted a little more to the bomb and asked Cloud to disarm it, finally turned to squint at the rows and rows of unlabeled volumes shelved over most of the walls, down the brief tunnel and even more covering the next room. Tifa guessed there was probably a system? She didn't care. When Fair asked, "Where should I start?" she shrugged.
Fair was twice the musclehead Tifa had ever been—picture him on a piano, hah, she bet he couldn't even cook—so it wasn't like he'd manage to learn much before he got fed up with trawling through densely printed science text and moved on to action. And then she'd know how she needed to react.
"Ancients?" Fair said, pulling his head out of a book sometime around half past midnight. It turned out he could handle more than an hour of reading, if he kept moving around the whole time and mumbling to himself. Seeing him lying flat on his back with a book open over his face, Buster Sword propped up beside him, kicking his heels over the edge of Hojo's operating table, verged on the surreal. "SOLDIER is about copying Ancients, this is what I'm reading. That's…"
"Wrong," said Tifa crisply, turning her back to the door.
She had flipped through some of the material while Fair buckled down and Cloud, with her nod, opened their little bomb and took the incendiary components out, and it had quickly become obvious why in the original version of this week Sephiroth had spent days down here doing his research before deciding to murder everyone in existence. Everything was dense scientific theory and data, with clear statements about anything appearing maybe once every thousand pages.
"It's wrong. The Jenova Project is about copying Jenova, and Gast Faremis was wrong when he decided she was an Ancient. She killed them. Almost all of them. With nightmares and monsters and plague. And she'll do the same to us if she gets the chance."
He sat up. "Yeah? And how do you know? Did she tell you?"
Technically, yes. Tifa did get some small fraction of that information directly from Jenova. "Gast found out he was wrong later," she said, "but none of that information is here, only his initial conclusions. Along with some lies Hojo added. And Sephiroth trusted Gast. If he finds this, he'll believe it, and then he'll trust her."
Cloud frowned, and Vincent (where he had tucked himself into the one corner of the room not lined with books, behind the operating table desk, surrounded by equipment that had once been used to warp his body) narrowed his eyes.
Fair leaned forward on the desk, shaking one of the bound reports in one hand. "Jenova is a mummified corpse being dissolved in mako from the inside out. I don't think trusting her needs to be on anybody's list of concerns!"
"Shows what you know," Tifa muttered.
"So tell me."
Tifa bit her lip. What could she tell him, that would make the threat of Jenova seem more real, that would actually be believable in this time? The Calamity's call could reach anyone with her genetic traits—even ordinary SOLDIERs; even the children born after enough SOLDIERs died and started polluting the Lifestream with her essence, if she got enough of an energy boost.
But it was harder for the Calamity to control her puppets the less of her they had in them, and there was no record of her taking any overt action in the two thousand years between her last battle with the Ancients and Sephiroth's madness. Or even the twenty-seven years between Shinra breaking whatever seal the Ancients had used, and the Burning of Nibelheim. No definite record, anyway.
"Sephiroth's mother," Tifa said. "Doctor Crescent. After they implanted cells in her and the child she was carrying. Jenova was in her head." I think. Probably. Not that Hojo wasn't a plausible motive for despair on his own. But the woman's ability to survive thirty years in a cavern and encase herself in crystal at will showed there was something going on there. "And she couldn't…die. When she tried."
She hadn't wanted to introduce Vincent to this concept so brutally, it had been bad enough asking him come down here again without setting it on fire, and now she felt him look up sharply from his corner.
Zack Fair rubbed his forehead. His feet were dangling a few inches from the ground. "Lots of people who have these cells have died already. Trying or not. Some of the ones with the most of them have also gone crazy." And oh, that explained a lot about why he was going along with this. More than just Sephiroth's worryingly erratic behavior. High-level SOLDIERs were probably all a little cracked. That made Fair more remarkable, she guessed. Or maybe he just hid it better. "I can't…call what you just said any kind of evidence, sorry."
"Zack…" said Cloud, who had over the last hour built himself into a little fort of books against one wall that was disturbingly reminiscent of the ramparts Sephiroth had accumulated when he was ransacking this same room, a few days from now, which had still been there five years later when they came back.
He wasn't reading nearly as thoroughly as Sephiroth probably had, just skimming, occasionally stopping at a single passage, his lips pressed together in that almost-pout of concentration she was used to seeing when he was trying to master a new Summon or a chocobo was being really recalcitrant. "I don't want to take any chances with the General. I mean, what if it turns out like…"
"You think I'm not thinking the same thing?" Fair asked, leaving Tifa the one out of the loop. "Ugh." He gripped his sword, hefted it in a gesture curiously short on menace; held it up to catch the light on its polished edge and then rested his forehead against the flat of it, briefly, as if his hand just wasn't big enough to satisfy the depth of his need to knuckle himself between the eyes.
Straightened up, and returned the sword to its place beside him. "I'm worried, too, but keeping secrets has never been the solution to any of Shinra's screw-ups before. I want this mission to turn out okay, for all of us and Seph and your hometown. We do not need this turning into the kind of problem Management tries to solve with carpet-bombing."
Tifa knew the irony was unintentional.
"You were at Modeoheim with me, Cloud," Fair said, and she'd never heard this story. Modeoheim…there were ruins, she thought, on the Northern Continent? Nothing good ever happened on the Northern continent. "A lot of that mission was classified, but…I know you have some idea what we're up against here. Talk to me."
"…the most dangerous thing," said Cloud, and she'd really never heard him this deferential. Acknowledging somebody else as fundamentally more important than him. There was a subtle difference in the tone from the hesitation earlier, or from when he just felt too low to muster any forcefulness. He'd deferred to Aerith, but never this obviously. "Is if Sephiroth starts hurting people."
"We don't know there's actually any risk of that," said Fair. "We don't know that's something that even happens because of this Jenova thing! That happened one time. They aren't the same person. And I mean, Angeal—"
He cut himself off, but too late to hide a pain that Tifa knew intimately. The guilt of living on when someone else had died. The weight of that death bolted to the bones of your wrists.
"…I think we should trust Tifa." There was still deference there, but the words were firm, after a brief considerate silence.
"No," said Fair. A hand up as if to physically block Cloud's words, then carded back through his hair. "No, no. Don't just tell me to follow your childhood friend's lead without explanation, I can't do that kind of thing anymore, and Tifa here's not even my CO. Did she let you in on her plans, are you part of this scheme already?"
That stung, both of them, because technically yes, Tifa had, and Cloud was, but Fair made it sound so villainous. "She just told me what she was afraid would happen," Cloud said. "Earlier today. After she talked to you."
"Technically, yesterday now," Fair said, heaved a sigh. "I can't trust you right now, Cloud," he said. He seemed really genuinely broken up about it, too, remarkably so considering they didn't really know each other very well. Maybe because between being his subordinate and his friend, Cloud ought to have been someone he could count on, and instead there was nobody. Tifa really felt for him, she did.
It didn't change anything.
Cloud flinched, just a little. Raised his chin. "I trust Tifa," he said distinctly, and Tifa's heart hurt because Gaia she did not deserve that from him, not in this time, when she had never stood by him once.
Fair sighed again, covered his face with the open book for a second. "Man, oh man," he muttered. Looked up at Tifa again. "I can't let you burn this," he said. And his eyes weren't cold this time but they had no give in them. "Not without giving Sephiroth a chance to decide for himself."
"It's not true," Tifa said through her teeth. Could she and Vincent together take Fair? Which way would Cloud fall, if they tried?
Even if they won, could she really kill someone Aerith loved for trying to do the right thing? It would be a waste anyway, she'd already decided that, but…
"How do you know?" The look in his eyes—it wasn't crazed, wasn't even angry, wasn't anything like the distance between Vincent and the world. It was just hurt, a hurt that went all the way down and that was so much like her Cloud that Tifa just…
"I know Jenova isn't an Ancient," she said, and it came out gently, like Fair was a child she needed to get back to his parents safe and sound, "because Aerith is."
His mouth dropped open, and his eyes went wide, and for a second Tifa thought inanely eighteen is so young.
He rallied after a second, badly. "What? You—wait, Aerith who?"
"Gainsborough. She sells flowers, right? In Midgar, where nothing grows."
She couldn't read Fair's face. If he got angry…well. They would handle it. They had him outnumbered.
Mostly he looked just…rattled. On the brink of scared. Vincent slunk out along the wall, nearer the door, and it looked menacing but was probably meant as a favor, getting into Fair's line of sight so he didn't have to deal with having the most dangerous person in the room behind him while freaking out about his girlfriend. Or maybe he thought Zack was going to bolt, or wanted a better view of the look on his face.
That expression changed, firmed up slightly at the sight of Vincent. "Look, if this whole thing is some weird—test from the Turks, just tell me whether I've failed or not and stop drawing it out."
Tifa shared a look with Vincent. It was Cloud who asked, "Why would it be a test from the Turks?"
"Pffft." Fair slumped a little on the top of the table, ruffled the spikes at the back of his own head. "Because Tseng promised to keep an eye on Aerith for me while I was gone, but he has the most godsawful sense of humor and, you know. Turks."
"I'm the only Turk involved," said Vincent. "For now."
He'd saved Tifa having to have an immediate reaction, which was welcome because the reaction had been a fury that she didn't want to have to explain.
Tseng had slowly over the years since Meteor become her favorite of the surviving Turks still working for Rufus—Rude came as a set with Reno, and Elena reminded her of some of her less-favorite parts of herself—but she would never actually forget the sight of him hovering in on a helicopter as the Plate Release Mechanism was about to blow, gloating about his capture of Aerith and the thousands of innocents about to die, slapping her across the face when she called out to them.
He'd been helpfully giving them a hint, of course, in hopes her new terrorist friends would come to rescue her. Given Aerith a chance to assure Barret that Marlene was safe. When Aerith was involved, he'd always bent his mandate of villainy to its breaking point, and Tifa had never much questioned why, once she'd learned how long they'd known each other.
But Zack Fair had been a hidden thread in that story, too, it turned out, and she just…Shinra. Damn Shinra. There had to be a way to see it burn that came at less cost than Meteor.
"Aerith…" she said once her temper was under control. "Aerith is special."
"You don't have to tell me that."
"Shinra kidnapped her as a baby," Tifa said, and it was unfair of her to share Aerith's secrets like this but she had to say something to stop him ruining everything. "She escaped as a child. Tseng has been pretending for years that he hasn't found her yet." She licked her lips. "He won't be able to keep pretending forever."
Fair was beginning to look the kind of hunted that often led directly to weapons-up.
"You could call her," Tifa suggested gently. She hadn't been in control of the situation since Fair had stepped into the Mansion. She really had been hoping to fly a little less by the seat of her pants now that she knew what was happening. "I don't know what she'll say, since if she'd been ready to tell you, you'd know. But I don't think she'd lie to you, either."
Fair took out his phone, lit up the screen and stared dully at it for a second. "No signal."
"Well, we're underground," Cloud pointed out reasonably.
Fair glared at him. "I know that." Scrunched his eyes shut. "Sorry." Opened them again to glare at Tifa instead. "You realize this is sounding more and more like something you made up specifically to screw with me personally, right?"
Yes, SOLDIER Fair, the universe is out to screw with you personally, because you're just that important.
He wasn't, except in the way everyone was important. But he was important to people who were, so…. Tifa shrugged. "I don't know what to tell you. Aerith and Sephiroth are mixed up in opposite ends of a single Shinra conspiracy, it's not my fault you know them both."
"But how do you know."
Damn. "It's complicated," she said, which wasn't even a lie. "And I've already told you more than I should have. Putting people in more danger just to satisfy you…there's a limit."
Fair made a face, but didn't actually contest that.
For a while, he stared a hole through the bookshelves above Cloud's head, the last book he'd looked at himself tap-tap-tapping against his knee. Finally, he looked her in the eye, all levity fled so that unnamed sorrow stood out stark and ultramarine. "You really think Sephiroth's that close to the edge?"
"You really think he isn't?"
Fair looked away first. "I don't know."
"Well, I'm not ready to gamble everybody's lives on your hope that he isn't."
Fair's left hand shook. It might not have been noticeable, except the pages of the book he was holding fluttered, and he dropped it onto the operating table with a mutter.
"Screw this."
In an instant he'd snatched up his sword and was striding away, slashing bats to death as they dived at him screaming, hungry for blood.
"Zack!" said Cloud, leaping to his feet, but he was still behind Vincent, who was behind Tifa, chasing the SOLDIER up the tunnel toward Shinra Manor.
"We are not going behind his back," SOLDIER Fair said, as he approached the foot of the spiral stair, "I don't care how scared you are of him. Nobody telling anybody the truth about anything is half of the problem with this entire company!"
The secret door slid open for him as he reached the top of the stairs at the end of this sentence, and he stomped over that threshold and—pulled up short. Tifa, immediately behind him, did not know why for a moment until Fair's voice resumed, somewhat subdued under the sound of a brittle smile,
"Uh, Sephiroth, hey. I was just looking for you."
A/N: :}