Top Guide (In This Town)

Chapter Nine

A/N: So in the original game all the sprites are around the same size, so in the Nibelheim flashback Sephiroth just kinda hops up and plasters himself, koala-like, to the front of a monster pod to peer inside.

I understand why this effect was not recreated for Crisis Core, and yet.

Having an hour to kill, and the top of Mount Nibel being chill, they went inside.

Tifa wasn't pretending those were the only reasons, but they didn't hurt as additional incentive.

It was…strange to think as she swung her way down the chains that inexplicably constituted part of the route from the front entrance to the reactor core—maybe this was why an athletic type like Sephiroth had been sent to do repair work rather than a normal technician?—that this reactor had no flakes of her old dried blood mingling in some out-of-the-way corner with Cloud's and Sephiroth's and Zack Fair's. That that whole drama she'd incompetently gotten herself taken out of early had never happened. That Sephiroth had never plunged into the green glow below and reemerged inside the Northern Crater where his monster-mother first made her dramatic entrance to the surface of the Planet.

That was what defined this building, after all. That and the monster inside.

Oh, wait. Monsters, plural. She'd forgotten the small ones until she saw their pods. She slowed to a stop, and Vincent halted when he reached her, hovering just behind her shoulder in a way that would be creepy if she weren't so used to him.

She knew without looking his gun was in his hand. "What is it?" he asked.

Tifa shook her head. "Nothing that's going to attack us." Not on its own, at least. Possibly not ever.

She crossed the steel floor to the foot of the first row of pods, boosted herself up so she could look inside—as if it might have changed, somehow. Of course it hadn't. The thing inside still grinned, ice-blue mako-crystalline rictus. Tifa always changed her mind from moment to moment whether the expression looked like malice or agony, or nothing at all because it wasn't really a face anymore, just a death-mask. But she knew the thing would seize as if in pain as it died, so there were working nerves in there still, if not an actual mind.

Her stomach rolled and what had she hoped to learn? There was nothing to learn here.

She dropped down, and realized Vincent was giving her one of his pissed-off patient looks again. She gestured toward the pod. "Hojo made some monsters," she explained. "Have a look."

Vincent had an easier time seeing inside the pods, but even at his height some effort was involved, the sole of one ridiculous boot braced near the base and the rest of him levered up the additional necessary foot or so. Tifa always wondered why the windows had been included at all, when the size and positioning of the things meant no one could readily look inside while standing on the ground.

The obvious conclusion was that they were meant for looking out. Brr.

Which suggested the crystalized monsters had at some point in the process been conscious.

Where had Hojo gotten them from, she wondered. Vincent had been an opportunistic murder; Cloud and the Copies probably all salvage from Sephiroth's rampage, judging by what Master Zangan had overheard. These seemed mostly to have started out as big men—SOLDIERs, maybe? Or SOLDIER hopefuls who'd been quietly shuffled away onto this alternate career path as specimens and their families told they'd died in combat, or training, or something.

Or maybe they'd been the ones without families.

Tifa had woken from a nightmare once that Cloud had gone away to Midgar and come back home to Nibelheim in just that way, and that she had climbed the mountain and slipped illegally into the reactor, looked through the glass at his fixed mako-pickled blue-fanged monster grin and not known him, because she'd barely known him all the time they were children and anyway there was nothing left.

She shivered.

Vincent's head turned toward her. "Do they disturb you so?"

He wouldn't believe her if she said no. He'd just take it personally. Vincent was good at that, though he never really raised a fuss. "They aren't people anymore," she explained. "No one should be able to do that."

To turn a person into something that wasn't.

Vincent looked away from her back into the eyes of the monster. "In a way," he said, lowering himself back to the floor, "is that not what we do every time we kill? A corpse…is not a person any longer, either."

That observation put a new spin on his coffin siesta, among other things. "I…guess that's true," she said. "It seems different, though." The dead went back into the Lifestream and, without a strong will and a strong reason, dissolved again into streams of energy that gave rise to new life. They stopped being people when they let themselves go, but the echoes remained, and…it wasn't the same. Death was the natural emptying-out of a life back into all of life, like water evaporating from a cup.

This was the opposite of that, forced crystallization of mako in and on a living thing, energy not released into the cycle but collected and compacted into a solid thing, until it rent apart the single small self that had once called that flesh home—or trapped it deep inside itself to suffer, which was probably worse. Though at least then there was a chance. Like there had been for Cloud.

Not for these, though. If they were released from their pods, they would die.

"Let's let them out," she said abruptly. "Where are the release levers?"

"…I thought we were still planning to avoid provoking Sephiroth. If such a thing is possible."

Well, yes. Dammit. Tifa's fists clenched. She'd left these creatures to pickle in possibly-agony for a decade in her previous timeline and never come back to free them; there was no reason it needed to happen right now this moment, now that she'd realized her oversight. But it still chafed. Maybe she just wanted to be able to do something substantive.

"Later," she determined. "We'll come back."

They might die and never have the chance, but then the world would probably end anyway, so it wouldn't matter.

She turned and glared up the stairs at the door labeled Jenova. Who'd done that, anyway? Why? Stupid question. Probably Hojo, for inscrutable crazy person reasons. Trying to understand Hojo was a bad use of time, and also disgusting.

Vincent followed her look. "That's it, then. The nightmare."

"The Calamity," Tifa corrected. "Sephiroth…was everyone's nightmare." The Wutai had named him Demon long before he turned against humanity, and suddenly she was fiercely glad she was the one here, trying to solve the long nightmare. Not Cloud. She was tired of fighting but Cloud was tired to death with it, and yet it was the only thing he was always certain of.

She missed her Cloud like several ribs ripped out of her chest, but it just made her want to protect the innocence of the young Cloud on his way up the mountain more.

"You said it wants to use him," said Vincent. "That from beyond death it conspired with Hojo to threaten Lucrecia and to deceive her son."

She had said all that, hadn't she? She rubbed a hand across her eyes. "I don't…know for sure," she admitted. "How much influence Hojo has. How much intelligence Jenova has. How much independence Sephiroth had. I know he was lied to, I know he made a choice, and I know he was needlessly cruel. If he can make a different choice this time, so we don't have to fight him, so the Planet isn't in danger from him—that would be better. That's all."

Vincent nodded slowly. He'd wondered once, in the midst of Sephiroth's madness, whether killing the child of his precious person was yet another sin. If Sephiroth didn't force the issue this time, Vincent wouldn't either. But for now, he was sticking with her. He was still with her.

She turned her back on Jenova. If it could do anything without Sephiroth, it would have by now.

They came out of the reactor with plenty of time to spare. Tifa dug out her parcel of food—she hadn't eaten in about seventeen hours, and as she expected the smell of food settled the faint nausea from the inside of the reactor immediately as her stomach roared. The reactor steps served as table and chair.

She shared her bannocks and apples with Vincent. He didn't take much, but he seemed pleased that she'd offered. It probably wouldn't kill him not to eat—since Deepground it had been tacitly acknowledged amongst their group that it probably would not kill Vincent not to breathe—even outside of dormancy, but it wasn't good for him, either. She'd gotten in the habit over the years of pushing him and Cloud both into remembering to fuel themselves, when the occasion arose.

It took roughly the same methods as making sure Denzel didn't ignore his vegetables, really, though in the putative adults' case she suspected it had to do less with strategic obliviousness to a disliked experience than with detachment from their bodies, and a habit of screening out messages from them.

They'd really killed Hojo much too quickly the first time.

The heavy oat loaf was hard to chew through without water, but Tifa savoured the flavor. She'd never learned to make these. Her mother had died when she was just eight. She'd learned to cook from friends' mothers and her mom's recipe cards, and bannocks weren't the kind of thing you bothered to write down or show off. They weren't cool.

If she'd thought about it at all, she'd assumed she had plenty of time to learn such old-womanish things in the years it would take before she herself was old. But Nibelheim had burned, and little knowledges like the proper grilling of oat-cakes had gone with it.

The wind screamed over the knife-sharp edges of the Nibel peaks and through the spikes of the mountain king's crown, that curved up around the reactor like fingers around an upturned palm. The sun was bright but hardly warm at all, and the sky was only a shade bluer than steel. She was home.

Eventually, the crunch of steps came up the path that curved up the peak and reached Vincent, who looked up, which alerted Tifa to the approaching sound.

She ate her last apple slice and stood, brushing crumbs from her lap.

She wished she had a better idea. She wished she knew more about what had happened in the reactor the first time. If she didn't stop Sephiroth here, all she'd have done really was reversed the order in which he visited the two buildings that had set him off. There was no way that was enough.

If only she could just kill him and be done with it.

But that wasn't an option, so there was no point thinking about it.

Sephiroth came into sight first, although he was actually third in line, behind Cloud and Zeke, because he was tall enough for his head to rise into view over the slope of the path before anyone else's.

His attention must have been on the space around and above the party, watching for immediate danger, because it took him several seconds to notice Tifa and Vincent waiting on the steel stair-steps.

For a second he paused, and then his body language grew more focused and he pushed his way to the front of the line. His sword was in his hand, but the line of it extended behind him the way it often did when he was mid-monologue, in a backhand grip rather than the ready position. Not that he couldn't bring it around and cut her in a second if he wanted, but he would lose a little speed and maneuverability.

(It looked even stupider, when he was standing on the ground and she was looking down at it.)

Zeke had let himself be shuffled back to the middle rear of the group now that they were in sight of the reactor, and Tifa didn't like how he was looking at her. She couldn't quite read it. He wasn't betrayed exactly, or afraid, but it wasn't a good expression. Cloud's face was hidden under his helmet again.

Fair was watching her with narrow, careful Nibel-wolf eyes. He was at Sephiroth's right shoulder, Vincent was at Tifa's left. They were outnumbered, even if you counted Cloud as hers, but it wasn't the numbers that concerned her.

Shinra's greatest weapon led his party forward, only to stop far enough away that he had to raise his voice slightly to say, "Tifa Lockhart."

"Sephiroth."

He glared at her. Idly Tifa wondered how people standing up to him normally addressed him, if she was doing it so offensively wrongly. Probably it was defying him at all. She knew he hated that. "I confess I expected you to keep running."

Tifa spread her hands. "Yet here I am."

"Were you the one who sabotaged the reactor?"

Tifa was, to her surprise, actually surprised. "What? No. Even if I knew how to break one without it blowing up, why would I? It brought you here. I don't want you here."

Fair snorted half a laugh, a little of the wolf in him retreating. "Lady makes a strong argument."

"I do!" Tifa agreed. "What would give you that idea? I've been trying to get you to leave since you arrived." Really, what. She'd told Cloud she'd been a terrorist in the future, but if that conversation had been overheard, or passed on, Sephiroth would be asking very different questions. Or brushing her off as insane.

His fingers worked on the hilt of Masamune, very slightly. Unconscious gesture or subtle threat? She'd never seen it before. "You just tried to kill us."

"I did not." Tifa rolled her eyes, tried to relax her shoulders. Was that all? "Like a fall that distance would kill SOLDIERs anyway."

A brief pause that suggested Sephiroth had not expected her to know that. "Then what was the point?"

"There was no point. I didn't do it." Had they not believed Cloud, or just not asked him? "I knew the bridge was run-down, and putting that many people on it at once was a risk." Make it sound like it was part of her guide knowledge, like Zeke should have known better even though she'd done the same thing herself the first time. "It wasn't like you'd listen to me after our little talk in the Manor. You'd have thought it was a weak gambit to slow you down. The troopers were in the most danger, so Vincent and me saved them. Everybody lived, right?"

Sephiroth's eyes were narrow. So were Fair's. "You're lying about something," he said.

Tifa sighed. "I'm really not."

Well, she had made it sound like she cared a lot more about the unknown trooper's life than she really did, but she did like having saved somebody, even if it was kind of inconvenient that he was here.

"All I'm asking," she said, watching Sephiroth much more carefully than Fair—both of them were watching her more than Vincent, she noticed, even though they had to know that he was still the most dangerous—"is if you still insist on going in there, you take us along. We already went in, so there's no point worrying about Shinra's industrial secrets, even if I cared about those."

Fair pulled a face. "You just like making our job harder, don't you?"

"I guess it's a side benefit." There had been a time when the only thing she could do to carry out her vendetta against the company that had cost her everything was making their operations harder, more expensive, less orderly. That was all her AVALANCHE had had the tools to be, really, a speed bump in Shinra's path, a voice crying out to the people in a language of blood and fire that resistance could, even now, exist.

Inflicting petty annoyance on Shinra operatives was a lesser version of the same thing, and if she hadn't had larger goals she might have enjoyed it more.

She met the green specks that were Sephiroth's eyes across the dusty expanse of the summit. "The thing inside," she said. "It wants to use you. It'll tell you you have a marvelous destiny, but all it wants is for you to be a monster that helps it devour the world." Her lips twitched sideways a little, and she added, "It's a lot like Shinra, really."

They didn't like that. Cloud she'd given a brief run-down of all the major problems with Shinra including the end of the world, and the other trooper's face was hidden, but Zeke's eyes looked like they were about to pop out of his head, and the SOLDIERs looked offended.

She let her breath run out over her tongue. "Tell me," she asked Sephiroth, "what in the world do you cherish most?"

(Not give me the pleasure of taking it away because she might hate him forever but that was not her kind of vengeance, the kind that struck at the heart alone, for cruelty's sole sake, and did nothing to protect anybody living.)

"What do you dream?" she pressed, when she got no response. "What is it you want to become? Do you want to save this world, or rule it, or tear it apart?"

A pair of wrinkles had appeared between Sephiroth's eyebrows. "You assign me a very specific class of ambitions."

Tifa shrugged. "It's the scale you were built to operate on. Don't tell me you don't know that, Mr. 'most things in peacetime are beneath me.'"

Zack Fair's mouth pulled up at the corners at her joke even as his eyes became even more anxious. "What do you want, Tifa?" he asked, and for a second they could almost have been friends. "Why are you here? If you wanted to stop us getting this far, you could have dropped the bridge before we got to it."

That would still only have slowed them down, but Tifa had to clench her jaw to stop it dropping open as she realized she'd never even considered that. She was so bad at this.

"You'd have gotten here eventually," she said, hopefully not too obviously bluffing. "I'm not here to stop you." What do you want? the SOLDIER asked, as though it was that easy, as though she hadn't already told them. "I'm here to supervise."

Monitor Sephiroth for signs of incipient breakdown. Set straight any stupid ideas at their root, if she was lucky. Die, if she failed spectacularly, but Cloud and Fair had stopped him at the reactor once before; if he broke now it would be the two of them and Vincent even if Tifa went down in the first engagement again, and a three-hour trip to town with the bridge out. He might very well not bother with Nibelheim, even if he survived. It would be an improvement.

She'd spent this visit the first time standing around on the mountainside failing to draw Cloud into conversation, or recognize him behind the uniform he wore. She refused to be that useless again.

"That is impossible." Sephiroth's sword swung around to the front, menacing. "This is the second classified facility you've trespassed in within twenty-four hours. Company policy does not make allowances for it being 'too late to prevent a security breach anyway'."

"Because it's against the rules, that means you can't do it?" Tifa remembered that sort of thinking, remembered going to the very outer edges of what was permissible and stopping there. Because breaking the rules had a cost, a cost she hadn't been willing to pay—and she'd also thought, somehow, as a child, that as long as she stayed within her bounds then she would not have to pay, anything, ever, that being good was a protection in itself somehow.

As though social backlash and random catastrophe were equally automatic consequences of transgression. As though she could bargain with the universe like a child with an indulgent parent.

That delusion had died with Nibelheim, and for all the desolation that had come after, she was freer for it. It was harder to know what the right thing to do was, when you couldn't trust the rules, when there was no path laid out for you but what you forged yourself. But the freedom was almost certainly worth the uncertainty, at least. That much she had gained, in exchange for all her losses: a little bit of wisdom.

It was impossible, though, that Sephiroth was that naïve.

"Company policy is an excuse, not a reason. So it's not a reason to listen to you." She put her hands on her hips, broadening her stance blocking the reactor a little further. "Are you going to work with us? Because otherwise you're going to have to make us move."

"Tifa, come on," Fair said, before Sephiroth could do anything to react to her challenge besides maybe quirk an eyebrow—he was a little too far away for her to be sure, with hair that pale. "We can't just bring you inside the reactor. Maybe we can work something out where you don't get arrested if you'll just calm down?"

"Did you go back to the library last night?" The lack of denial was a confirmation, the way Fair did it. She tipped her head toward Sephiroth. "Do you know what he decided?"

Not to kill all humans, evidently, but it had taken him more than a few hours' reading to decide that the first time.

"Uh…"

The tip of the Masamune rose, and Sephiroth's body was tensing. He didn't like her curiosity on that front. "Give up your sources," he commanded. "And stand down, and you will not be harmed."

Stand down, to be taken prisoner? Stand down for execution, for experimentation, for Shinra? Oh, she'd surrender still if she had no other choice but death, but she wanted Sephiroth to blink first. He was powerful, but she knew better than anyone living what a damaged wretch he was. She felt her mouth pull into a scornful shape that was almost a smile, but her voice came out almost gentle on the response,

"We both know you can't promise that."

Sephiroth's fingers worked on the hilt again, and Fair's face was wholly given over to anxious squint. Even the wind seemed to drop, as though the mountain was listening for the deciding of this confrontation. As though the Ice King knew this SOLDIER's moment of indecision could control the Planet's fate.

The crack of feathers overhead brought Tifa's eyes jerking up. She expected a Zuu—not nearly as dangerous as what was right in front of her, but marginally more likely to attack at this exact moment, and therefore worth taking a second to evaluate.

The shape she saw against the sun made her blood run cold.

A man in a long coat, descending on one black wing.