Top Guide (In This Town)

Chapter Eight

A/N: 12/2/17 i love you guys have update :']

Tifa spent Vincent's nap plotting, and having a very long pee over the edge of the path, as discreetly as she could manage, and when the sun nudged its way up over the crest of the eastern mountaintops, she was ready. She gave Vincent another twenty minutes after that, as dawn crept down the mountainside toward the valley floor dyeing things gold, then went and stood over him and called his name until he woke up.

He didn't point his gun at her when he did, which seemed like a good sign. Ranged fighters could be trickier to wake without incident than people who needed to be able to reach their opponents.

On the way back to the spring for a morning drink of water, she gave her teammate a rundown. The plan relied fairly heavily on him, so his input was important. He didn't have any major amendments to suggest, but seemed pleased to have been asked. Especially because it gave him a chance to give her flat disbelieving looks when she got to the weirder parts, and make her back up and explain the relevant piece of the future for context. (This didn't always help.)

Somehow they avoided being ambushed by anything, which was just as well. They were out of potions, and Tifa wanted to be at her full strength, such as it was, if they had to fight Sephiroth.

Vincent was faster than she was, though at this point only a little—ten years into the future, he'd learned to take advantage of the alterations to his body in such a way that he could glide over the surface of the world faster than most land vehicles, but for now he merely had the pace of a long-legged man.

This was still enough to give him an edge over her, once he knew the route, and once they'd done all she thought they could afford by way of preparation and there was still no sign of Sephiroth, Tifa stationed him overlooking the base of the trail from a convenient vantage point on one of the lesser peaks, below the Ice King itself.

What she wouldn't give for a PHS.

Tifa herself adopted a position three-quarters of the way down a certain near-vertical mountainside, perched on the upper curve of one of the wild spikes bursting from the main peak of Mount Nibel. Because her memory of this week was mostly irrelevant now, beyond her certain knowledge of what Sephiroth had done once and could do yet, but one detail still mattered: the rope suspension bridge up to the reactor had fallen out from under them, on this day ten years ago.

They'd lost one of their party then, the Shinra trooper who was not Cloud. The rest of them—especially the normal humans, her and Cloud—had been extraordinarily lucky to reach the ground whole. Just as she and Cloud had been lucky to survive the fall they'd taken when they were eight, the day her mother died.

If the bridge fell again today, there was no guarantee Cloud would be as lucky a third time. Even at the lower end of the bridge, it was a thirty-meter fall onto hard rock. In the worst-case scenario, the fall could leave you spitted on a needle-sharp stone spike for the Zuu to nibble on as you decayed. And Tifa was not willing to live in a world where she had gotten Cloud killed for trusting her, due to a stupid oversight.

But who knew, maybe Sephiroth would get unlucky and break his neck.

Vincent took a while to arrive, dropping liquid-like at last over the far cliff. Tifa watched him pick his way across the space below with jumps already too long for anything purely human. He was adjusting. By now the sun was nearly directly overhead, and she had been starting to hope that the Shinra weren't coming today and she'd be free to spend the afternoon doing something about Jenova after all.

…that was Tifa's least favorite of all the decisions she'd made so far, ranking below even the brilliant 'draw SOLDIER's attention to house, then attempt to burn same house down under cover of night.' She hated it, but she couldn't see any way around it.

The plan, as it stood, didn't involve destroying Jenova.

The biggest reason for this was that Tifa still didn't have a Fire materia, and hauling a slimy mako-oozing Poison-aspected carcass, that outweighed her, by hand down the mountain to somewhere with enough fuel to build a bonfire would have been impossible in the dark, and would take too long now that it was light, when Sephiroth might be along at any moment. Even assuming the operation went off without a hitch otherwise, it didn't seem wise to be caught in the act of stealing his 'mother's' corpse.

Tifa didn't think Jenova could adopt any of her mutant attack forms without Sephiroth's input from within the Lifestream, but she didn't know she couldn't, and even the weakest of those forms would utterly crush her and Vincent fighting alone, at their current strength.

The heart of a Mako reactor was a reliable way to destroy most things, and Vincent had brought this idea up, but of course for Jenova it was only a shortcut into the heart of the Lifestream.

Tried that. Bad plan, fail.

What Tifa wouldn't give for Aerith's healing water right now. Seriously, it should have been Aerith here. If she'd woken up in Midgar just a few weeks ago, she could have made it here and wiped Jenova out with her Limits before Sephiroth even arrived!

Even Tifa could have gotten a lot more done, with even a day longer to prepare, a day with no SOLDIERs on the horizon. Whatever was responsible for this either hadn't had many options or didn't care to make this easy.

She really hoped it wasn't Jenova, using the last of her strength to wind tings back and take another shot at the Planet. But surely she would have brought Sephiroth back with her instead.

Of course, Tifa had already taken steps to prevent Cloud becoming the Hero he had been…

She shook herself free of the doubts. It was too late for them.

The point was, there had been no point smashing down the door to Jenova when there was no immediate way to destroy her. So she was still waiting, sealed away, an evil promise.

It should be fine. Sephiroth had visited the reactor and left again without losing his mind, the first time. Of course, he hadn't been to the library yet, at the time, and hadn't as far as she knew gotten face-to-face with the Thing. On the other hand, in this time Tifa had hopefully weakened his faith in the library, if nothing else. The timing of his mental collapse was now utterly unpredictable.

Ideally, Tifa would like him to break down in the mountains, violently enough that Fair became willing to help her, cloud, and Vincent put him down, but fusing with Jenova beforehand would give him extra power that would make defeating him much more difficult. To the best of her knowledge, the current version of Sephiroth could not, for example, fly.

The second-best option was for him to remain mostly stable today and leave again, giving her time to get more resources together. It wasn't ideal, because the time they'd gained to get stronger the first time had always come at the expense of other peoples' lives, and she couldn't count on Sephiroth toying with her long enough to build an arsenal. She wasn't Cloud.

Even Cloud wasn't Cloud, not in the way that mattered to predicting Sephiroth. Tifa would rather take him down right here, today, but if she couldn't then she had to buy time for all her allies to get stronger.

Time. It always came down to time. It was the only resource she had, and yet she didn't have nearly enough of it.

Vincent's arrival, as he climbed the cliff below her to within conversational distance, was a welcome interruption to her latest cycle of brooding. (This was why she hated being leader, besides the fact that it meant Cloud wasn't available to do it. You were obligated to spend your free time brooding, in case you'd missed a better solution.) Tifa leaned forward. "They're coming?"

Crouching on a spike three meters down, Vincent nodded.

"How long?"

"Perhaps a third of an hour behind me."

The Shinra party had gotten moving hours later than last time. She wondered if it was the need to find and probably vet a new guide, or if after their late night the SOLDIERs had slept in. If they'd slept at all.

Didn't matter.

Sephiroth was climbing the mountain. Why was he climbing the mountain? Duty, curiosity, mind control, because he was a contrary ass. Whatever. She supposed it was better than having already locked himself in the basement lab with the books. Probably. Hopefully. Even if he was headed straight for Jenova.

Fair was coming too, and two troopers. Vincent couldn't tell whether one of them might be Cloud, let alone which. The guide was a red-haired man, almost definitely Zeke Cooper, one of the local trappers, who'd gone out of his way to dissuade Tifa from learning the trails as a girl but finally given in and shared a variety of safety and navigation tips, once he accepted her determination.

(He'd led the party she took out to re-hang the fallen bridge, on the previous version of tomorrow, and wouldn't let her look when they found the corpse of the missing trooper, head cracked like an egg against Nibel stone. She hadn't insisted, and the guilty sense of failure she'd had as a guide who'd lost one of her charges had been eclipsed a few days later by the destruction of Nibelheim, so that the memory barely felt like her own.)

Tifa cracked her knuckles. "Okay," she said. "You find a place under the far end of the bridge—don't look like that, you're bright red, you need to be out of line of sight—and if the bridge goes out, each of us tries to catch the nearest trooper."

Vincent looked down at his cloak like its bright color bemused him, and Tifa reminded herself yet again that as accustomed to it as she was after knowing him for years, they were still well within the first full day he had spent out in the world with this kind of coloration. On some level, he probably still thought of himself as wearing Turk blacks.

Without further protest, he turned and proceeded to retrace his steps across the tops of twisted rock formations, to the far cliff.

They waited. The Shinra team arrived, led by Zeke—she made out the rise and fall of his nasal voice and Nibel accent interspersed with Sephiroth's cool-leather tones and the way Fair managed to sound piping in a grown man's voice. They started onto the bridge, and Tifa listened to the ropes creak. It was a broad bridge, though less ambitious than its counterpart in Corel—what was it with Shinra, accessing their ultramodern metal monstrosities with rope-and-plank suspension bridges? Two walked abreast.

Tifa began to think that her own absence from the party, or the relative heat and dryness of the early afternoon, might have changed things so the bridge would remain whole, and she would have wasted all this time for nothing.

There was a sharp snap that echoed all the way down the mountainside, and then the bridge fell out from under everyone's feet.

Tifa launched herself out of coiled readiness to snag the trooper who'd been in front around the ribs, and knew in the moment of impact by his muffled oof! and the way he startled and then stilled in her arms that it was Cloud. She used him as a counterweight to get her feet in front of them and kicked again off another spike, and then the side of a large flat upthrust of stone that was a less extreme example of the same resistance to erosion that had created the Ice King, and then with a final somersault they reached the ground.

She set Cloud down on his side before straightening out of her crouch. Her teenage knees were aching at having been pushed past their limits, and her back, and the places where her arms attached at the shoulders were displeased with her for catching someone who outweighed her by at least a few kilos. But Cloud was fine.

"What," Cloud began, pushing himself up onto his knees, and she put a finger to her lips. Assuming the rest of the party had landed safely, they were just on the other side of this rock formation, and she would prefer not to be cornered by Sephiroth.

"Tifa," Cloud began again, softer, and his voice was heavy and almost…fearful.

It wasn't the same tone exactly as he'd said her name in seven years from now while dying, when she was trying to get him to break past his self-hatred and go help Marlene, but it reminded her of that moment anyway, of I'm not fit to save anyone. "Did you…?" She squinted, not sure what he was asking. His shoulders drew back, though he was still kneeling. "Did you drop the bridge?"

"What? No!" Her stomach lurched. Oh, Gaia. She'd told him she was a terrorist, and then obviously known the bridge would go down, what did she expect him to think? "It snapped last time. If it broke again, I didn't want to risk you not surviving this time."

"But you let Zack fall." His tone and eyes were solemn, measuring—maybe somewhat judgmental, but not accusing. "And Mr. Cooper."

Now, Tifa knew, because she had seen it on a journey to the center of Cloud's mind, that Zeke Cooper had been one of the people to find her and Cloud lying unconscious in this ravine, after Cloud failed to stop her from tripping and falling like an idiot. Had been the one to carry her away for medical treatment, while her father lingered to pin the blame on Cloud for the whole misadventure. Of course Cloud had somehow come out of that conversation believing it really was his fault, so maybe he didn't hold a grudge.

At least Cloud hadn't complained about her not trying to save Sephiroth.

She shrugged. "Only one person died last time. The SOLDIERs can take it, and Zeke's probably fine. I just couldn't risk you."

Cloud heaved a breath in, let out a sigh through his teeth. Rubbed the back of his neck and let his weigh roll off his knees so he was sitting on the stone instead of his inflexible trooper boots before he looked up at her. "I believe you," he said. "But everybody else won't."

Tifa sank down to sit on her heels, since Cloud clearly wasn't standing any time soon. "I guess it looks pretty bad," she admitted. "I'm not saying I wouldn't drop a bridge under Sephiroth if I thought it would work, but I don't think it really would, and I'm not quite at the point where I'm willing to rack up collateral casualties like that."

She'd never been entirely comfortable with collateral casualties, not really. It was why she'd personally gone on so few AVALANCHE bombing missions. Supply runs? Stealing bomb construction materials from Shinra depots? Sure. But she'd been all too willing to stay home with Marlene when they went out on an actual bombing. Like not placing the charges or pushing the button kept her hands clean.

Now there was too much on her shoulders to afford that kind of cowardice, but she still held back. Weakness? Or something worth fighting to protect?

"Well," said Cloud uncomfortably, and she remembered again that he was currently a Shinra soldier, and probably thought of it as his duty to protect the public from people like her, "that's good. Uh, your dad stormed into the inn this morning in a fit. Somebody told him about me coming over to visit you yesterday, so when you weren't there this morning he figured I'd done something."

Anybody could have seen a trooper going into or leaving her house, but if he'd known the trooper was Cloud the informant must have been Greg, who'd been close enough to hear her use his name. Damn it, Greg. Damn it, Dad. "I'm sorry," she groaned. "Why does he always do this?" She glanced at Cloud's complicated expression and fumbled. "I uh. I don't remember about the time we fell here when we were kids, because I hit my head, but you told me about it, in the future. I know Dad blamed you."

She leaned in a little. "It was already more than you owed me trying to help, you know. It wasn't your fault I hurt myself. If anything it was my fault you scraped your knees."

Cloud's face was a study. He looked down; aside; finally, in self-defense, up at the sky. "It was fine, anyway," he told it, with a forced sort of conversational nonchalance that made Tifa sort of want to ruffle his hair even though his embarrassment was catching. "Well, sort of fine. Zack kind of pointed his sword at your dad when he burst in, and Sephiroth told him you'd been caught trespassing on Shinra property and were wanted on suspicion of terrorism, so it was a pretty fun morning."

Tifa chuckled. "Sounds like it." She stood up again, dusting her skirt off. "Okay, I should probably go. Vincent and I have a rendezvous set up, you want to come with or go back to the Shinras?"

"Um." Cloud struggled visibly for a second. "If I don't go back, Zack is going to be sure I was in on your plan to drop the bridge."

"But even if you do," Tifa followed the thought to the end, "they're still going to be suspicious." That sounded pretty uncomfortable. She knew Cloud hated being the outsider. "If it helps, Vincent also saved the other guy. I'm sure he's going back." Unless he attacked Vincent and got himself shot to death, but since they'd gone this long without hearing shots fired, it was probably safe.

"Mm. Yeah." Cloud looked up at her, then his jaw firmed. "I'm going back," he said firmly. "I can do more good there."

"Can't argue." Tifa held out her hand. "Meet you at the reactor, I guess." Cloud didn't need her help to stand up, of course, but he let her help him anyway. She let his hand go. "Zeke will probably take you past the mako fountain on the way up, take a minute to enjoy it for me?"

Cloud's lips twitched sideways. "Okay. Oh, but first." He dug into one of the pouches on his belt, which were mostly intended for the troopers to haul ammunition. Came out with a small, very lumpy plastic bag, folded over on itself around its contents, which he pressed on her. It was nearly heavy enough to be bullets, but not that hard. "Just…uh, technically it's from Mom. She has no idea what's going on, though," Cloud assured her, and then ducked around the rock formation to go rejoin the Shinra team.

Tifa peeled the bag open and found it contained two of the dense oaty rolls that traditional Nibelheimers called bannocks. Cloud's mother cooked on an electric stove so it must have been grilled in a frying pan, and in around the bread were packed dried apple slices. It was solid, old-fashioned trail food, and Tifa hadn't had a Nibel bannock in ten years. She stood clutching the little packet and very determinedly did not cry.

Be assaulted by emotions later. She wrapped the food up again and, lacking pockets, stuffed it down her shirt where it wedged looking like a small, lumpy third boob, before making for her exit plan.

It was probably just as well Cloud hadn't come with her. She wasn't sure about his physical strength at this age, but she knew she couldn't have carried him the whole way.

They'd placed the rope so it wasn't visible from the ground under where the bridge had been, but she needed to hurry to be out of sight before Sephiroth started up the path. She tied the end of the rope to her belt, to avoid leaving it behind her and encouraging pursuit, and then went up hand over hand, the heels of her boots only making the climb slightly more difficult. Her sixteen-year-old arms felt the climb, but even with the ache from catching Cloud this was something she could do.

Vincent was waiting for her at the top. Didn't, of course, offer her a hand getting over the lip of the cliff—he'd probably have caught her if she'd managed to fall backward over it, but help that wasn't obviously needed wasn't his style. "All good?" Tifa asked, shaking her left arm like she could shake the trembling out of it.

Minimal shrug. "The man was alternately outraged and…terrified. I tore his uniform." His left hand opened and closed like an insect's pincers.

"Yes, well, you saved his life, you're the hero." Tifa peered over the edge of the cliff she'd just climbed; she could make out a flame-orange dot moving somewhere below, showing Zeke had survived, and the stripe of off-white that was Sephiroth. It was harder to be sure about Fair but SOLDIERs could take a lot of punishment, he was probably fine. "Looks like they're on the move. We have about an hour."

A/N: Btw Zuu is a big toothy bird you fight on top of Mount Nibel. I like them but they never seem to come up in fic, always it's dragons. Dragons are stronger than Zuu but less abrupt. I made up the shrike/vulture behavior but it fits their aesthetic and they do exclusively inhabit a mountain made of spikes. :D