Top Guide (In This Town)
Chapter 6
And then, for the first time since that day in the Northern Crater when Cloud broke under his onslaught of words and Tifa's lies of omission (because the thing they had fought in the center of the Planet had had no voice, and she had not come close enough during the Remnant incursion to hear him speak) Sephiroth's voice reached Tifa's ears.
Cool and dry, like lizard skin, but the tension underneath a little better leashed, less achingly devouring than in the hovering murder-ghost she knew best:
"And I was looking for you, Zack."
He wasn't happy, but he didn't seem immediately homicidal, and as Fair laughed awkwardly Sephiroth continued, "There was something you wanted to tell me?"
"Uh, yeah, but it's kind of complicated, we should get to someplace everybody can maybe sit down, and…you can tell me whatever you wanted on the way because I bet it's way more straightforward."
From the sound of things, Sephiroth didn't move. "Less a message, more a general interest in where my second in command might be at one in the morning before a potentially demanding mission. I told you to get plenty of sleep."
Tifa finished climbing the stairs and elbowed her way around Fair to get into probably-formerly-Hojo's-bedroom, which felt very small with Sephiroth blocking the only other entrance. Fair shot her an anxious sidelong glance, and she realized he was worried she was about to carry out her earlier threat to burn everything down around their ears in frustration, rather than risk Sephiroth accessing the basement library.
There was a real possibility. She hadn't entirely been joking. If she'd had a Fire materia equipped she might well have shoved her way back down the stairs, fired down the hall into the laboratory, and hoped for the best. But she didn't, and she couldn't, and Fair had disrupted the gunpowder wick in his dash up the stairs. The book of matches tucked into her bra pressed against her ribs, feeling briefly like a much larger object than it was, but she knew Fair would never stand by and let her get the blaze going hot, so there was no point in trying.
"This is Tifa," Zack Fair announced, once he was apparently convinced she wasn't going to dissolve into a wild fit of pyromania. "She's volunteered to be our guide up the mountain tomorrow, except she doesn't think you should come."
Slit-pupiled attention narrowed on her, the air humming, but before Sephiroth could ask any questions, Fair reached backward into the stairwell and hauled Cloud out by the shoulder of his uniform, so that he stumbled into view like a startled kitten. "And Cloud here is the native guide Shinra assigned us. And the gentleman in red who's probably lurking over my shoulder by now is called Vincent Valentine. He says he used to be with the Turks."
Sephiroth's gaze glanced off Cloud like he barely existed, and fell on Vincent, who was indeed lurking in the empty space Zack had left by dragging Cloud into the room. His eyebrows twitched fractionally. "Not exactly the regulation uniform."
The back of Vincent's golden claws smoothed down the edge of the cape. "Not my choice," he murmured.
"I woke Vincent out of a coffin in the basement about an hour and a half ago," Tifa stated. Her voice was level and firm, but the air seemed to swallow it whole. "He'd been there for more than twenty years."
"Twenty-six," said Vincent.
"Right, this is exactly the kind of explanation business I want to have somewhere we can all sit down. Come on, General, this room is not big enough for five people, we're all gonna smother."
With that, SOLDIER First Fair advanced, making little shooing motions with both hands, and astoundingly Sephiroth gave way before him, and allowed himself to be chivvied out into the hall. Well that was…a good sign, probably. If Sephiroth was still sane enough to listen to people, he probably wasn't within less than an hour of staging a genocidal massacre.
Tifa shared a look with Cloud, who looked more baffled and less grim than she automatically expected, but the vague disgruntled embarrassment at weird bossy friends was the same as ever, as the two of them and Vincent trailed after Fair, up the little hallway filled with chairs that gave Tifa the impression of some sort of waiting room, and out onto the landing, gunpowder crunching underfoot.
A set of floating mirrors ambushed them at the far end of the landing as it became upstairs hallway again, but Sephiroth's sword lashed out and shattered them all before anyone else could move. Tifa did her best not to react—to fight that weapon right now would be idiocy bordering on suicide, but to flinch as if she was afraid could ruin her differently.
(Mirages weren't even very strong, the danger was in casting at them and having your spells rebound. Not that it mattered. Sephiroth was strong, and nothing seemed likely to change that in any convenient time frame.)
They settled into the two-bed room at the far end of the second floor, beside the greenhouse. Tifa would have expected Sephiroth to remain standing, looking down on them, but instead he settled himself in the desk chair immediately opposite the door, putting his back to the wall. The sword was gone again. Tifa awkwardly sunk onto the corner of the nearer bed, while Fair unnecessarily called dibs as he rushed to drag a red-upholstered rocking chair from beside the window into the open patch of floor on Tifa's left.
This was the logical place for it, but it also blocked anyone from walking to that end of the room.
If necessary, she could still vault both beds and exit through the window—it might give her better odds than making for the door, even if she was slightly closer to that than Sephiroth was.
Vincent seemed content to stand, arms folded, his back to the decorative hutch sort of thing at the left of the door—which was an odd choice considering there was bare wall on the far side of it, but maybe he was being protective of her. Or making sure Sephiroth wasn't between him and the window.
Cloud had ducked out again while Fair was retrieving his chosen seat, and reappeared now carrying the desk chair from across the hall. He set it down in the space to the right of the door, under a rather nice landscape painting featuring a large tree, and sat. He wasn't looking at Sephiroth, and Tifa didn't think having set himself up directly facing the man who would have been his hated eternal nemesis in another life had been intentional, the way it would have been if the two had ever somehow found themselves sitting down in the same room together, in her future.
But the fact that he was sitting down in front of the ultimate commanding officer who'd once been his idol, without demur or awkwardness, was definitely on purpose. The helmet was still in the basement. Cloud was here as part of her team to save the world from Sephiroth even if that meant saving Sephiroth from himself, not as a Shinra trooper.
(He'd chosen her, chosen trust in her, over Sephiroth, over Zack, and Tifa hadn't even realized she'd still worried he wouldn't until she felt the relief.)
"Soooo…" Fair rocked back and then forward, propped his elbows on the arms of his chair and laced them together. "Explanations. Tifa's being a mysterious lady of mystery, but I checked out the stuff downstairs and it is definitely weird."
In spite of Tifa being the spokesperson for her team and the first one introduced, Sephiroth had so far been reserving most of his attention for Vincent. This was fair, really; Vincent was both very weird, and the one who looked and was the most dangerous of the three of them.
Cloud was apparently beneath Sephiroth's notice, which remained bizarre, and he stayed that way as Sephiroth now turned his head and fixed his eyes on Tifa. "What are you planning?" he asked.
It didn't sound quite as bald a question as it should have, because of the reserve in his tone; the suggestion that he was judging her on her response more than asking with the expectation that he would learn any actual truth.
This was the first time Sephiroth had spoken directly to her since the forced hallucinations at the Northern Crater, and she felt reproached in a remarkably similar way considering he wasn't amused at her expense this time. Considering she knew more than he did, this time.
"I…plan to save you," she said. Held up a hand. "And before you say anything paranoid, no, I'm not pretending to care about you. I don't even like you. But Hojo is planning to drive you insane. Literally, more than the normal level of maddening that comes from the fact that Hojo exists at all."
She thought Sephiroth might have smiled slightly at that last part, a startled involuntary little twitch that had to have been genuine if it had happened at all. He certainly looked taken-aback. Fair made a sort of astonished sputtering sound. Cloud's face was locked into a frown of concentration, and Vincent of course was impassive.
Tifa reluctantly ruined the slight uptick in the mood caused by her own poor joke. "And…if his plan succeeds…it will be dangerous for everybody." She hadn't wanted to explain anything to Sephiroth, didn't trust him to have good judgment or good intentions and would prefer to keep him as much in the dark as possible so he could make as few choices as possible.
But Fair had been taking that option away even before Sephiroth showed up in the building. Because if you didn't see Sephiroth as evil, then trying to control him like that probably seemed that way instead.
"Because you're dangerous," Tifa added, when the pool of silence created by her explanation widened inexplicably.
"That I must grant you," Sephiroth said, and turned to fix his stare on Vincent. "What are you planning?"
Vincent stared back. Tilted his head a very small amount. "…the current plan is to interfere with Hojo's plans," he said at last. And wow, Tifa had to admit that right now the resemblance was striking, she could suddenly understand why Fair had asked.
"Are you sure you're not related?" Fair asked, on the same wavelength. Sephiroth stiffened.
Vincent's eyes had fluttered closed, and he gave a tiny huffing sigh. "I'm sure." Eyes open again. "I let myself be assigned away from your mother," he informed Sephiroth, which was probably a better idea than relaying the information by answering Fair directly, "and when I came back a year later, she was married."
That was fairly conclusive. Too bad, really. If the way Sephiroth had fixated on Jenova had been a result of anything other than her psychically getting into his head, being able to wave a non-Hojo father under his nose might have been useful.
Sephiroth appeared to be trying to drill through Vincent with his eyes, until he abruptly turned his head away and looked at Tifa instead. "Are you under direction from Genesis Rhapsodos?"
Tifa blinked. Her conspiracy against a conspiracy was suspected of being part of yet a third conspiracy? "Who?"
Fair squinted at her. "You act like you know all about this 'Jenova Project' and you don't know who that is?"
"I know a lot about Project S," Tifa fired back. "It happened in my town. Did Gast have other subjects somewhere else or something?" She would have expected that to come up at some point. Or…wait, there'd been something like that mentioned during Deep Ground, hadn't there? Something with Jenova but not Sephiroth, anyway. She hadn't really paid attention to the minutiae, content that Vincent, Reeve and Yuffie knew what had happened.
Tifa had the common sense not to blurt out anything about Deep Ground, and as soon as she'd congratulated herself on that she realized that Sephiroth was sitting horrifically still and she had very possibly just triggered his scheduled murderous rampage.
Well, he was at least somewhat isolated here; the only better time for it would have been halfway to the reactor tomorrow, with Vincent lurking nearby in a sniper's blind.
"Explain," he commanded, and the air shivered, and oh, that was him trying to be menacing, wasn't it.
And sure, Tifa had some bad memories associated with this menacing look, but none he wasn't calling up with just his face. And she'd seen that face much more terrifying than this, seen it blank with hate and smiling faintly with madness and smirking as he hovered on seven wings at the core of the world. And then she and her friends killed him.
She felt her lips draw back. "Shinra lies."
Sitting on a perfectly prosaic desk chair in a dusty room in the house where he'd been born—the room where he'd been born, for all Tifa knew—Sephiroth's eyes burned cold. "That's not new information," he bit out.
"Oh, excuse me for assuming that if you knew they were lying to you, you'd stop doing as you were told!"
"You certainly seem to consider yourself an expert on my life."
"I know everything about you I need to." Not quite true, maybe; the thing she needed to know most was whether it was even possible for him to choose anything but becoming the Nightmare of the World. But enough to judge him, as he was insinuating she couldn't? Oh yes.
Tifa felt lighter than air, like she was in the midst of a combat high one punch from setting loose a Limit Break. "You want to know what I want you to do?" she asked. "Go away. Leave this town and never come back."
The set of his jaw suggested defiance. Tifa rose to her feet. "And if you won't? If you insist on staying here and seeing your mission completed, and visiting Hojo's trap of a library? Stay away from the reactor."
"The reactor happens to be my mission," Sephiroth retorted. "Or would you rather have power to the region continue to be disrupted while mutated monsters become more numerous?"
It sort of made her want to laugh, having him looking up at her and sounding positively pissy, except that he could and very probably would bisect her at any time she became too much of an annoyance, and then not only would she be dead, she would have derailed the events that barely saved the world last time, without setting in motion any stronger defenses for the new future.
"Let Shinra send a technician," she said. "Someone whose job it is to fix machines. Are you going to tell me you don't think it's even slightly suspicious they sent you of all people on a mission like this?"
"Considering your mountain is covered in insane dragons," he snipped back, "not at all."
"…nn." She couldn't even dispute that; Mount Nibel was unfriendly at best. Of course, if they'd sent their technicians in a helicopter they could have stepped out right at the foot of the reactor. She cocked her head, one hand landing on her hip. "Well, if the technician was going to have to go up on foot past the monsters I guess you could argue that makes sense, but really, isn't it beneath you to be dispatched to walk up a mountain and fiddle with equipment just because Shinra can't spare a helicopter?"
"Everything in peacetime is beneath me, but I must do something. More importantly," he continued, while Tifa was still astounded at the ego on the man, "Civilians from this continent aren't usually familiar with helicopters. Who are you?"
"Just a Nibel girl," she said. Didn't smile the way she had, saying it to Fair. This wasn't fun; Sephiroth wasn't someone she could tease. "Ask anyone. I've never left this town in my life."
"You were recommended to me as the most talented local guide," Sephiroth said levelly. "You could have met with anyone in the isolation of the mountains. I ask again. Who are you, and who are you working with?" His left hand turned—did not clench, or rise, just rotated, so that now if he called the Masamune into it there would be space for it to appear in, and it would not intersect a wall or anybody's body.
She saw him see her notice what that meant.
The angle of his shoulders changed. He didn't consider her a threat—no surprise, he had never seemed to consider Cloud a threat, no matter how many times he was killed—but he wasn't sure she was harmless anymore, either.
There went her chance at getting a free shot at him while his guard was down. She was spending cards right and left and not gaining anything.
"Hey. Hey," intruded SOLDIER Fair, leaning forward in his seat so he was in her peripheral vision. "Calm down. We're just talking here. General, Tifa's been really tightmouthed about her sources, I've been letting that go so far. She's totally convinced Hojo has it out for her town and wants you to kill everybody."
"I don't think Hojo cares about us," Tifa corrected. "We're just what's available. Isolated towns are about the most controlled conditions you can get for large-scale human experiments," she added bitterly.
Sephiroth's fingers curled in their black glove, and Tifa expected to see Masamune slide into existence. Any second. "And what is the goal of this…supposed experiment?"
"I don't know. Stress-testing the product, maybe?" Cloud and Vincent had both gone a very specific shade of quiet one day when Reeve started talking about testing certain recently-developed sustainable building materials 'to destruction.' It had only taken a single discreet kick in the ankle for Reeve to notice, and stop. He'd worked with Hojo for years, after all.
"Tifa." Fair sounded outright disappointed in her, which was mostly annoying. They didn't have the same goals, and she wasn't his to reprove.
"Hojo is insane. I can't explain him." He's hoping you'll try to destroy the world and awaken the Weapons of the Planet because they sound interesting was the closest thing to a solid theory she could put forth, and it wouldn't be helpful to do so.
She needed to get access to those video logs Gast had left in Icicle, somehow. Was it possible to make copies? Hojo hadn't, and also hadn't destroyed the originals, but as she'd just finished explaining, Hojo was not a good guide to what a sensible person might do—though also the videos were probably more secure from Turks in an abandoned house on the Northern continent than in Hojo's own possession. He certainly wouldn't have wanted to give Shinra any reason for second thoughts about his magnum opus.
There was no profit to be made, after all, in the destruction of the Planet. It was very bad for business.
(Such had been Rufus Shinra's great ethical breakthrough, as Tifa understood it. She wasn't sure if it could be achieved in this timeline, without a Weapon blowing the top off his Tower with him inside, and the Calamity dropping an enormous rock almost on his head, and Lifestream contamination condemning him to perish slowly and horribly.
But if Jenova's threat could be contained, Tifa would have to move on to fighting Shinra's slower but no less devastating march toward planetary extinction. Perhaps she would go to Midgar and find Barret and Jessie and the others, and come up with better plans this time than just blowing up reactors. The spiral threatened to be dizzying if she thought about it too hard, not least because nothing good had ever resulted from running up or down endless spirals of stairs—the fall of the Sector Seven plate, their doomed attempt to sneak into Shinra HQ, the trip down into the buried Ancient city only to watch Aerith die.
Of course, none of that mattered if she failed here.)
"Nevertheless," said Sephiroth, "it was intimated that you would explain something."
Well, that hadn't been her idea, had it. Tifa looked over at Fair.
Who sighed, and gave a crooked, tired smile. "No, that was me. There's a whole mess of notes downstairs," he said. "About this Jenova Project thing. They look legit. Tifa says some of it's fake and some of the rest is wrong, but she won't name any sources and believe me I've tried. Says she'd put them in danger. And as brass as she's acting, she's really worried about how dangerous you are."
Sliver-pupiled eyes, a less living green than mako or spring leaves, turned back to her.
"And?" Sephiroth prompted, as thought Tifa was more likely to open up to him than to SOLDIER Fair.
"That's all I've got to say."
Sephiroth paused, and when he spoke again he would have sounded calm to the average listener, but Tifa knew better. "I was hoping for rather more justification when Zack called this meeting. Thus far you have merely displayed an impressive paranoia and a willingness to break into Shinra property."
Tifa shrugged. These were skills you developed as a low-level ecoterrorist in the Midgar slums.
Sephiroth leaned forward slightly in his chair. "We're going to have to take you into custody, Miss Lockhart."
The heroes in novels at this point usually said something like, you'll never take me alive! but Tifa knew better. She'd been taken prisoner before. She'd been scheduled for execution. She'd had her execution initiated and survived only through the combined incidence of a slinky red psychopath's personal gloating needs, her own escape skills, and the convenient arrival of a Weapon to smash open a wall.
There weren't a lot of reasons in her view to choose death over surrender. When there weren't many people on your side of a fight, dying was the biggest surrender of all.
That didn't mean she was going down easy.
She raised her fists, watched Sephiroth draw himself back again the barest amount to put his guard up, to summon his sword...
Jumped backward from a standing start up onto the bed behind her, raising a great cloud of dust from the diamond-patterned counterpane; used its springs to launch herself, rotating one hundred eighty degrees midair, toward the middle of the other bed, with no time expended on crouching.
"Vincent!"
Tifa snatched up the lamp from the endtable between beds on her way past and flung it ahead of her to smash out the window, even as Vincent's gun whipped up to pin Sephiroth in place.
It tracked over to Zack Fair as he lunged up out of the red rocking chair, as Vincent slid past him, and then they were both at the window and Tifa was jumping. This was the second story, but the ground continued to rise behind the Manor, and the drop totaled only a little more than twenty feet.
"Plan A," she said as Vincent landed beside her and they began to run, into the cleft in the cliff that gave onto the lower crags, "is officially a wash."
"Hm," he agreed.
Tifa glanced over her shoulder only once, as she and Vincent made for one of the more obscure tracks that branched off the grassy main trailhead onto the chill and barren slopes of Mount Nibel. No pursuit had materialized, but she saw the pale shape of Cloud's face under the yellow burst of his hair, leaning out the window after them.
A/N: Sephiroth really does lecture Zack briefly on the subject of getting enough sleep before climbing a mountain, before entering the inn. This is an actual thing, I swear. Why do I not see him lecturing people in fic more, I swear it's like 60% of his total communication skills...