Chapter Seven
A/N: Btw, Guest-anon who appeared from the ether to proclaim mysterious, extremely precise character ages...gotta source, man. Otherwise you're not helping anybody.
They were ambushed by a trio of Twin Brains halfway up the trail, and she flung herself at the first one with a shout she stifled at the last second in case it carried to any pursuit, and a flare of relief in her chest. It was so nice to have something she could hit.
"These things Stop you with their flash attack!" she called out to Vincent as a bullet streaked over her shoulder. "If I get hit, smack me!" Don't shoot. Her life was alarmingly fragile just now, and neither of them had a Phoenix Down on hand.
"Hm," Vincent agreed.
In the end each of them needed to be smacked back to alertness by the other once before the Twin Brains were finished, and Vincent got clawed rather fiercely coming forward to wake her. At least he hadn't been frozen alongside her; that was when this sort of status-affecting monster became really dangerous. It was why only the foolhardy hunted solo. The power of a well-coordinated party was multiplicative.
"Ugh," said Tifa, as they shared her last potion evenly between them to mend the worst of the damage. Now she sort of regretted leaving her healing incomplete earlier, except if she hadn't she wouldn't have anything to share now. "That was a lot harder without any materia." At this rate she was going to find out the state of her Limit Break in this body sooner than planned.
Vincent gave her a hard look. "This seems like a good night to have equipped everything you own," he said.
Tifa snorted. "I did." She stood up again, pressed her folded hands into the small of her back and stretched in a backward arc to get out the kinks. Not as necessary in this springier younger body, but already part of the price she paid for being so top-heavy in front.
She squinted through the dark, lit by the stars and a sliver of moon. It had been a long time since she had needed to know these trails, but she'd learned them young and her mountaineering skills came in handy often enough to avoid rusting away, even after all these years running a bar. "This way."
She led him through the dark to a spring—an ordinary one, clean of mako, that ran nothing but water, gushing out into a pool that fed a mountain stream that remained largely barren of life until it had gotten a few miles away from the reactor and the scouring winds of the Nibel peaks. Water was the most important element of wilderness survival—as vital as fighting monsters or resisting cold, and more essential than food, which could wait a few days if necessary.
She hadn't geared up for hiking on this outing, and maybe that had been her first mistake—maybe she should have stolen up to the reactor in the dead of night to try to cut the problem off at the root. But it was easier to determine how to destroy the books, and she'd wanted Vincent at her back before she tried to face Jenova.
But at any rate she had no canteen, and after the long hike up here she was more than ready to fall to both knees and scoop up double handfuls of aching-cold, crystal-clear water. Once the worst of her thirst was quenched, she realized Vincent was still looming over her, and craned her neck up to point out, "There's room for two." Maybe he was watching her back in case of monster attack. There were some predators that liked to stake out water holes, day or night; it would be embarrassing to be carried off by a Zuu. Also inconvenient, and conceivably deadly.
He shook his head. "I don't need it."
Tifa snorted at him. "Not everything that won't kill you is something you're best off enduring. You'll feel better with some water in you, I promise."
Vincent shrugged, and knelt, filling his cupped right hand with water and taking a slow, careful drink. She watched his facial muscles twitch as his long-parched throat at first reacted with panic to being asked to swallow, and then ease as his body slowly realized what it was being offered. He knelt in place for several seconds after his hand was empty, the golden claws of the hand that was no use for holding water working a little against the stone, then bent to scoop up another drink.
Luckily his hand was large enough not to be useless as a cup; Tifa would go crazy with frustration trying to satisfy a thirst one-handed. Or more probably stick her face in the pool and drink like a dog. Then again, patience was definitely a virtue in which Vincent had her beat.
They both drank as much as they could bear, long after they were presently thirsty, and then stayed in place even though this place was vulnerable—Tifa because her stomach was uncomfortably full; Vincent who knew. Tifa wished she'd brought her canteen into the Manor. It had seemed like unnecessary weight at the time; she hadn't intended to have to flee into the hills. Now she couldn't carry water, which was one of the great advantages humans had over most monsters.
"No water bottle?" Vincent asked. He was definitely judging her on lack of preparation now.
"I was planning to go home after we set the fire," said Tifa. She did have a canteen, at least. Teenage self was not hopeless.
She stood. "Come on. I know a good cave near here."
The only monster they met on the way was a single kyuvildun they managed to take by surprise, so it had no chance to do any damage before it died. This part of the mountain wasn't very popular with monsters, too low for the large things that frequented the peaks, but far enough above the green zone to deter most of the small prey creatures that Nibel Wolves depended on for their staple diet. The cave was where she remembered, and still unoccupied. It was narrow, and had no rear outlet, which if they were trapped here would be unfortunate but meant they didn't have to worry about anything dangerous making its way up from the tunnel system, or anything huge coming in the front.
Tifa wrinkled her nose, dug the matches out of her bra, and lit one just to make sure there was nothing lurking at the back. There wasn't. Vincent watched this, notably unimpressed. He could shut up. His low-light vision was better than hers, but he couldn't see in the actual dark either. After she'd put the match out and tucked the booklet away, he asked,
"Did you lose your materia."
Hah. She wished that was all.
Tifa thought longingly of the collection at home. She wouldn't allow herself to miss the people there, not now while she had things to do, but her missing equipment was impossible not to feel wistful for. At some point in their world travels they'd become both supremely confident about ordinary monster fights and obsessed with preparedness for the really dangerous ones, and almost never carried a mastered materia when they could be mastering a new one, with the result that even after Yuffie had made off with a full third of the hoard after Meteor they'd still had at least one of everything.
(Cloud liked to carry a fresh Restore whenever he went out on his deliveries, leveling it up in the inevitable monster fights, so that once it duplicated he could sell the mastered one cheap to people who needed it, and start over with the fresh version.)
Most of the orbs the Sephiroth Remnants had stolen had been mastered, thankfully, so the chain of replication hadn't been broken for anything unique like Ultima, when the plundered materia dissolved or exploded along with the thieves. Cloud had moved the rest of his collection to his room at the Seventh Heaven, after that, and combined with Tifa's stash they'd had a comprehensive arsenal, to the point that Tifa had been as unlikely to bother equipping mere elemental magic materia for battle anymore as Cloud to ride a wild yellow chocobo.
But all that was further away than the moon, and even more untouchable. She put her back to one wall and sat down, deep enough to be out of the wind. Very little starlight made it in so deep, either. "You could say that."
"Tifa Lockhart." Vincent tried out her name in his mouth, it sounded like. It had been a supremely uninformative answer to what are you, if she was honest. She leaned back against the stone. It was a little too cool for comfort.
Vincent lowered himself to sit not quite across from her, his back to the opposite wall. That was—a lot more social than she was used to him being, wow. Then again, he was always more comfortable one-on-one than in groups, she knew that.
And comfortable or not, he wouldn't be looking at her so hard if he wasn't expecting something.
Tifa smiled, almost in spite of herself. Their group had scattered, after Meteor, and Vincent had vanished most of all, but he'd gotten a phone after the Remnant incident and started checking in, and actually started visiting for no real reason after Deep Ground. So she was used to seeing him in ordinary, homely spaces, not just in the kind of place you wound up on ridiculous word-saving adventures.
It was still far less weird to be with Vincent in a random cave than a young Cloud in her childhood bedroom.
"I'm a time traveler," she said, answering his question from the room of coffins a few hours late. "As far as I'm concerned, you and I have been friends for years."
She should really go on, tell him at least as much as she had Cloud. Should sketch out all the ways the world was in danger—Jenova and Sephiroth with Meteor; Omega; Shinra's mounting energy depletion—or at least what was relevant to him. At least a little about his Lucrecia, because Vincent not asking didn't mean he didn't want to know. But she was tired. Tired of telling people the truth and having them think the worst, or disbelieve her, or figure out more than she could afford for them to know.
"Came back through time," Vincent assessed, and in the near-dark the faint red mako glow of his eyes was easy to see, and it was easy to see that it brightened, his attention intensifying. "How?"
Oh. "I don't know."
"…ah." Well, of course he'd be disappointed. His regrets were another twenty-six years or more in the past. "So that's…how you knew."
"We've been through a lot together." Tifa drew up one knee under her chin. "I wouldn't have wanted to kill you anyway, but I wanted to save you especially, because it was you."
Vincent was silent for long breaths. "You do realize that whatever memories you may hold, I am not your friend."
Tifa shrugged. "Well, yes. But at the same time, it's still you." This Vincent wasn't bound to her by shared horrors and triumphs and quiet sunrises, but time could mend that. He might yet betray her as that one never would have, but he hadn't yet, and she couldn't see a likely reason for it looming. He certainly retained no loyalty to Shinra.
Because she was his friend even if he wasn't hers, and also because he might unpredictably side with Sephiroth if he decided Lucrecia would have wanted it, she leaned in a little and said, "It wasn't your fault, you know. Dr. Crescent's decisions. She was an adult, and I don't know how many women you knew in the Turks or wherever, but we don't actually need the men in our lives making our choices for us."
Vincent's eyebrows drew together. "I know that," he said, a note of bafflement entering his monotone. "But she asked."
Tifa squinted. "What?"
He stared into the wall. "Taking such risks with her body…I suspected Hojo was pushing her into it for his own purposes. When I tried to ask, she…" Vincent fell silent, and for a second Tifa thought that was where he was going to stop. It wouldn't be the first time he'd left a story unfinished. "I only realized afterward…" he murmured. "That she meant for me to say that what she did to herself affected me. To volunteer myself as a reason to take care. That I'd hurt her, and she was still…"
He shook his head. Didn't know the phrase 'on the rebound' or was above using it. "I didn't understand, and then…it was too late."
Suddenly his eyes were on hers, piercing. "You didn't know this?" There was the suspicion of an accusation, the suggestion that if she had tricked him…
Tifa felt a small smile starting even as she shook her head. "Nah. You usually talked out the heavy stuff with Cloud."
Incredulity, as polite as Vincent was capable of. Hah, right. He'd met baby Cloud. All fresh-faced and hesitant. He probably didn't see what they could possibly have in common. She scrunched her face up. "He…was kinda different, by the time Hojo was done with him."
"Most people are." Vincent unfolded, made his way to the mouth of the cave. "I'll take first watch."
Tifa opened her mouth to debate this, then realized with two of them it was a simple binary choice, and she had been awake for twenty-two stressful hours but woken him from his long nap about three hours ago. Easy decision. "Thanks," she said. Curled herself up as best she could, grateful now that the blue skirt was longer that she used to prefer, because it kept more of her off the cold stone. Tents were another thing she did not have a stash of in this time.
When she woke up, injuries much recovered for the rest, it was to find Vincent's red cloak had been tucked carefully around her. She'd always been a heavy sleeper and her subconscious knew Vincent as safe, so she wasn't surprised to have slept through it. Surprised, and touched, that it had happened, though, that certainly. So much for 'I am not your friend.'
The front of the cave was grey with the coming of dawn, and Tifa folded the cloak over one arm and went that way. Vincent was crouched gargoyle-like in the mouth, looking frankly odd with that little red about him. "Hey," she said, offering the cloak back. After a second, Vincent took it. It puddled in his lap.
Tifa sat down beside him. On his left, beside the prosthetic arm. Not so close that her shoulder or hip was in danger of pressing against him, because Vincent liked his space and she'd been presuming too many privileges so far probably. But fairly close, because she was better at actions than words, even if she was better at words than most of the jackasses she knew, and just because she wanted him to get past the idea that he should never do anything didn't mean she wanted him to feel like the only thing that mattered about him was what he was good for.
Like he was a monster she wanted to use. Like he would ever make her feel unsafe.
"Sorry," she said.
Vincent bent his head around to stare at her down the length of his own shoulder. It was one of those poses that looked intensely choreographed, and she'd always assumed he did this kind of thing intentionally, until that time on the Highwind right before the final battle with Sephiroth when Cloud had pointed out he acted cool all the time, and Vincent had been genuinely baffled by this information. She'd watched since, and it was true. He did not do this stuff on purpose.
Well, most of the time he didn't. Some of the acrobatics were definitely just showing off.
She elaborated: "If I was too harsh yesterday. I do know what it's like, to regret not acting when you had the chance, so much it steals the breath from your lungs. Don't run, I learned. Don't stand still if there's some place you need to get to. Right now…this is me, getting a second chance to protect everyone."
"There's nothing more precious," Vincent said.
Marlene and Denzel's faces flashed across her mind, and Tifa curled in around them and swallowed it down. "I know," she said. She did appreciate the chance.
"Aren't you afraid," he asked, "that this is only an illusion? Or…would you prefer to hide in it, even if it were?"
"No," Tifa said. Her fist closed. "No, I refuse to be afraid.
"And I wouldn't want…I was happy, Vincent. I'd built a new life. I had people I loved. The world wasn't ending, not anymore, not any time we were there to fight for it. I was prepared to wear mourning for the rest of my life, for everyone we'd lost, but I was happy." Bit down, then, trapped any further words behind her teeth, because these were the things she couldn't say, the things she mustn't think. She had to live, now. In the now.
If now was the past and what she couldn't afford to cripple herself mourning was a future, well, that didn't change anything. You can't stand still. You can't run away. You have to walk forward.
There ain't no gettin' offa this train.
Corel would be destroyed next year, if she changed nothing. If a year from now Shinra still stood and Scarlet was still in a position to throw tantrums backed up by battalions of guns held by men who didn't ask questions.
For a moment she was seized by the wild impulse to go scrabbling away east over the mountains, to fight and climb until she found herself at the edge of the impassable desert's edge, and then find a caravan to carry her in to the fading coal-town, to see it whole.
To see who Barret had been before he lost everything. To meet Myrna and Eleanor, and Dyne before he'd broken.
But of course it wouldn't help, except perhaps to make her situation that little bit more real, and anyway it would just be fleeing the weight of responsibility. She couldn't lean on Barret anymore.
For so long they'd picked up one another's slack in so many little practical things, from Barret not being able to do Marlene's hair with only one hand to how long Tifa had spent avoiding situations where she'd need to punch humans to death. But he had his family back, and unless Tifa failed he'd get to keep them, and never need her.
She had to save the world.
So first, she had to save Nibelheim.
"How long?" Vincent asked, breaking into the pain in a cool voice, and Tifa breathed again. "How old are you, really?"
She liked the way he'd put that.
"I'm twenty-six." If she judged that blink right, he'd been expecting more. Flattering, actually. "Which I admit is still younger than you, although…come to think of it, I'm not sure how you rate the life experience gained in that coffin."
"You don't?"
"It never came up."
"…I slept most of those years away, anyway." Vincent stared abstractedly at the dim, lichen-roughened outline of stone for several seconds, then turned his eyes back to her. "Twenty-nine," he said firmly. "I'm twenty-nine."
"There you go, then. We're practically the same age."
Not that an age gap would have worried her; she'd never considered herself less than an equal even of Cid, who'd been old enough to have worked for Shinra since before they became a power company. But it was pleasant anyway, to think of them that way. Only three years apart. Vincent was usually so distant, and she normally didn't mind, but right now he was all she had. She'd try not to cling too hard.
More than a little, she doubted Lucrecia Crescent had deserved his loyalty much more than Shinra had, but she knew the kind of idiot love made of you, and fear, and she never passed judgment without knowledge of the particulars, no matter how much easier it would be.
She raised one hand, pointing east and south, over the ridge they were within and part of the plains below, and more mountains beyond that. "Lucrecia is that way," she said, and watched Vincent's head orient like a compass-needle toward north. It was sad, but Tifa did understand. "It's pretty much impossible to get through the ring of peaks she's inside on foot, but if we can steal a helicopter or something later on we can go visit."
The black or green chocobos to cross the ring of mountains without Shinra-tech required an investment of time and gil and access to multiple continents to capture breeding stock that she didn't anticipate having remotely soon. A helicopter almost had to be how Lucrecia had gotten in in the first place. Which of course raised the question of the pilot.
She lowered her hand. "I don't think locking herself in a cave for thirty years did anything for her conversational skills, but I know enough this time I might be able to convince her to talk at least a little bit sensibly." So far she'd only gotten anywhere with people she actually knew, but Crescent wasn't in a position to kill her or sell her out to Shinra. "If we tell her Sephiroth needs her she might even come out." That might be feeding false hope, on both ends; she wasn't sure it was even physically possible for the good doctor to leave her crystal altar anymore. But she hoped.
Doctor Crescent's judgment was questionable and her priorities were strange, but she had esoteric expertise and a brilliant mind, and if the maternal fixation that had cropped up during Sephiroth's breakdown hadn't been a fluke of alien biology, she might be very useful in keeping him grounded.
Tifa would endure a lot more than making sure an annoying scientist didn't take advantage of Vincent too badly, if it meant Sephiroth not throwing in his lot with Jenova. He was terrible and deadly already, but he was only a man.
Vincent stared out across the dim humps of the mountaintops. "Decades…in the darkness of a cave?"
Tifa blew out a gust of air. Explaining things always led to explaining other things. You'd think she'd have learned. She refused to discuss Chaos and Omega, on the grounds she didn't understand anything about them. "Like I told Fair earlier, something about the experiment made her…immortal, I guess, but she doesn't trust herself around people. As far as I can tell she's been in this one cave since she left Shinra, which wasn't long after Sephiroth was born." She did not have a good timeline. For any of this. Why had she never cared about who had done what when?
"Was she…waiting for me?"
And that, that was why Vincent was so distant, Tifa sometimes thought. Because his blank expression was pretty impeccable and he was genuinely indifferent on plenty of subjects, but he really couldn't lie worth a damn, and if he opened his mouth while he was hurting he could break your heart from sheer proximity.
"No," Tifa promised. Which probably hurt in its own way, but she couldn't explain Crescent's choices much better than she could Hojo's. She just knew that if Lucrecia had wanted Vincent, she could have gone to him. She'd left him in his coffin against the Planet's need for an avatar of Chaos, instead. Maybe that was selfless, and maybe it was just the opposite kind of selfishness from her own clinging to Cloud when they found him in Mideel. That was between Lucrecia and Vincent. Tifa wasn't getting into the middle.
She swayed a little sideways this time so her shoulder bumped his arm, just above where metal joined flesh. "When we found her before, she panicked whenever anyone tried to go near her. She's not okay. But it's not your fault."
Vincent was her fault, at least a little—probably more Hojo's, but Lucrecia supposedly cared, and Tifa only cut a grown woman so much slack for being bullied. But it wasn't her place to say so.
She stood, stretching her arms in front of her this time and rotating her torso, getting out the kinks that sleeping and sitting on stone had left in even a sixteen-year-old back. "It's not quite day up here yet, and they're almost an hour behind down in the valley. Want to catch a few winks before we move out?"
Vincent straightened up, whirling the cape back around his shoulders. "I have slept too many days away already," he declared, but headed back into the cave all the same. He chose a different hollow to curl into than she had, having a larger frame, and stayed half-sitting against the wall, but he really did seem to go to sleep pretty quickly.
Tifa settled into a new perch on the stone lip of the cave, letting her feet swing over a twenty-foot drop. "I'll wake you up in less than an hour," she promised.
Important note: As of the end of March 2019, the portion of this chapter discussing Corel has been amended to reflect that my chronology of when it was destroyed (based on a typo, Marlene's AC character model, and the vague impression that it was ridiculous for Gongaga and Corel to have been destroyed in reactor-related incidents in the same year) was wrong.