Top Guide (In This Town)

Chapter Thirteen

Step One was actually testing their new materia.

Tifa had managed to identify the Fire by feel, because she'd known what to look for, but all she could say about the other was it didn't feel like it did elemental damage, which left a range of possibilities. While she might have eventually pinned it down by concentrating hard enough, she'd still have wanted to then test it to be sure, so they flushed a vole out of hiding in the nearest patch of longer grass, and Tifa nailed it with the only spell that was available so far in their mystery Magic.

The rodent collapsed under the gentle sparkle of Sleep, so this was a Seal. Not very practical—it did no damage, only worked or didn't, and the more you needed it to work the less likely it was to do so—but on the other hand it could be incredibly practical, since Tifa didn't actually want to kill anyone. Toad and Stop were more fun, but Sleep was probably the subtlest way to get people out of your way non-lethally. Not that anyone Tifa knew was very subtle.

Too bad Silence wasn't unlocked yet; it would be so much fun to cast that on the SOLDIERs so they had to shut up and listen, and incidentally couldn't cast anything back.

Not, unfortunately, that that limited Sephiroth to melee range. Could Fair do any of those mid-range energy-beam sword attacks? She recalled it as a common technique in SOLDIERs she'd fought when raiding Shinra, but she didn't know if it was compulsory.

After some further discussion, in which Vincent actually made verbal contributions which was always nice to see, especially when he'd had a shock, she gave him the Fire materia, since of the two of them he was more likely to be able to carry out the mission alone and had actual pockets to keep it in, and they split up.

It was a sign of how competent she'd managed to pass herself off as being, in spite of everything, that Vincent didn't even try to argue that he was the more capable sneak in the party and thus he should go reassess the current threats while she hid out in the hills.

Or maybe he just wanted to be alone with the mountain monsters for a while, without a mission to focus on. Tifa didn't understand needing lots of alone time, but she had grudgingly learned to respect it.

It was maybe three in the afternoon when Tifa slipped back into Nibelheim to reconnoiter, and hit up her limited contacts.

She scaled the old-fashioned stone chimney on the Rockwing's house on the southeastern edge of town, and made her way toward the town center over the rooftops—luckily, unlike a lot of rural communities, Nibelheimers had always been inclined (by the cold, and the wildlife, and the narrow press of Nibel Pass) to build their homes in tight. Wall to wall, quite often.

There were a few places there was open space between buildings and she needed to jump, but nowhere there was gap enough to block her. Long jumps were important to the Zangan style, after all.

The tricky thing was landing softly enough nobody came out to see if a bird had died on their roof, or something. Several times, she had to throw herself flat while someone passed by below. She didn't look to see who, after the first time.

The chimney-pots and steam pipes helped a lot, with keeping hidden. Fortunately it was too early in the year for the boilers to be running, and the pipes were safe to touch. Tifa absently blessed the ancestors that had come up with the scheme of centralizing piped-steam heating to the whole town, even if they hadn't managed to figure out how to pipe water for any other reason.

The groundwater in Nibelheim always tended to have too much mako to be safe for extended bathing or drinking; it was why so many dragons liked the area, but it was also why the wolves were so much stronger and less sane than anywhere else, and meant the size of the human population had always been limited by how much rainwater and meltwater they could collect, and store in sterile conditions. The water tower was the central fixture of the community infrastructure for very good reason.

(This was also why everyone drank a lot of beer from a young age, and why it was so hard to get Cloud to shower regularly. For all the ways he'd shaken the dust and then the ash of Nibelheim off his boots, water hoarding seemed to be sunk into his bones.)

Sometimes, when they cleaned out the heating boilers every ten years, materia had formed, but usually it was just rough crystals. One of the town's few exports in the old days, when overland caravans had still been important to trade and the Nibel Pass saw a lot of use despite the narrow squeeze at the end, had been raw-mako-crystal jewelry, though it was out of fashion in the Shinra era of smooth synthetic everything. (And, on the other political wing, an era of increasing general suspicion of the health effects of anything involving mako.) The crystals formed a lot slower than they used to nowadays, anyway. Because of the reactor.

Tifa was now certain there had to be a way to get flush toilets to work on the groundwater without eventually filling the outflow pipe with crystals, backing up, and bursting disgustingly, but after that had been the result reaped by the first adopter decades ago, everyone had collectively agreed that trekking out to the outhouses was a completely acceptable and traditional way of addressing the problem and that putting shit through pipes was just asking for trouble.

Even her family wasn't well-off enough to waste drinking water on flushing toilets, though, or to pay someone to clean the crystals out of their effluent outflow, so there it was. Outhouses. Even the slums in Midgar had sewer access, although actual bathrooms were rare. Urban Planning had been a valuable Department with regard to sanitation, at least.

If Nibelheim still existed a few weeks from now, maybe she'd get the opportunity someday to put that engineering problem to someone who might be able to solve it. She thought Reeve would have fun trying, if he didn't consider toilets below his dignity. He'd probably propose and design a filtration system for the water, heading off the problem at the source, but maybe he'd do something fiendishly complicated that would never occur to Tifa or any sane person. You never knew, with Reeve.

Tifa couldn't make it to the roof of the inn without a long jump that would definitely end in too much noise even if she made it, with this body's abilities, but then she didn't entirely want to. If Sephiroth was in there, there were good odds he'd sense her lurking directly above him no matter how stealthy she managed to be. Not a risk she was willing to take.

Instead, she settled on the Balehardts' roof, that being the highest one overlooking the square, and settled in to wait for her moment.

There was one Shinra trooper guarding, apparently, the town square. It was the one who hadn't come up the mountain this morning—she knew because it wasn't Cloud, but there was none of the damage to the uniform done by Vincent's claws. Though it was conceivable that guy had had a spare, so she supposed all she knew was it wasn't Cloud.

Whoever the guard was, he was either near the end of a shift that had begun before Sephiroth's party left, some five or six hours ago, or at the beginning of a new one. She hoped the former, but either way, he was no use to her just now.

It took the better part of an hour for her wait to come to anything, but eventually Zack Fair emerged from the Mansion. He seemed healthy enough, from what she could tell at this distance.

She'd been sort of hoping for visible bruising, at least. But of course he wasn't stupid enough to have such a reckless fighting style and not carry healing items, even if neither he or his commander had equipped a Restore. And if he hadn't had enough on him, SOLDIERs were paid enough he could have bought out the shop's stock of Potions. Of course he was fine.

Fair stretched hugely, standing in the grass just beside the Manor path, and did about three dozen squats; spent a while evidently contemplating the sky, possibly for signs of flying SOLDIERs; and went back inside with the attitude of a man returning to a toilsome duty.

Since it was completely laughable to imagine Sephiroth had delegated sifting through the library to Fair, this meant he was back down there, researching. Ominous, but at least it got him out of the way for now. Hopefully he'd stay there all night.

Strength-building exercises weren't a bad idea, but squats were too full of motion that might attract someone's eye. Instead she balanced all her crouching weight on the ball of one foot.

Eventually she switched feet.

It was late summer, and even in the valley where Nibelheim nestled, sunset wasn't until after seven at night, and true dark not for nearly an hour after that. She still had hours ahead of her before her meetup with Vincent.

Watching the townspeople come and go was—nice, in some ways. Soothing, in its normality; bracing, with its reminder of what she was fighting for. Unsettling, when she failed to recognize a face that she knew she must have known at least in passing as a child, but had lost with the passage of ten years.

Creepy, sometimes, when she saw someone she did know. As though she was crouching in the midst of a single vast ghost.

But no. The other, false Nibelheim had been a shambling imitation. This was alive. This was real.

Those children were going to grow up.

The Balehardt's three-year-old, whose name Tifa was no longer entirely sure she knew—Melody, she thought, but it could be Melanie, toddled through the door directly beneath her feet to play with her blue rubber ball on the cobblestones, and Tifa had to fight down a sudden urge to vomit.

She didn't actually know that Melody-or-Melanie Balehardt had been the child who survived the burning and the experimentation to appear swathed in black and chanting Sephiroth's name, but that half-sized Copy had existed, and appeared upstairs in the Balehardt house.

Tifa would regret for life having followed Cloud as he searched through every building fronting the square for clues, and having therefore been there to find two full-sized Copies and the tiny one inside the house on the opposite side of hers from Cloud's. And having been therefore unable to escape the suspicion that the Balehardts had come home.

At least, she had thought, finding her own home just as haunted by the shades of what had once been people, she knew her father hadn't survived.

Tifa kept the largest part of her attention on the Mansion as the afternoon slid by, only keeping half an eye on the square and the doors and windows she could see, in case her primary target showed his face.

Shortly before five, or maybe at five on the dot, the current guard's shift finally ended.

Cloud replaced him.

It was sort of nice to know she really could identify Cloud at a distance, with his face covered, even now, when he didn't move quite the same way as the Cloud she knew best—none of Fair's little movement tics that had still lingered even ten years from now, and none of that coiled power and stance like a mountain. But still Cloud, if she looked.

Once he was in his place and the other trooper had vanished into the inn, Tifa looped around the square, keeping low to the rooftops, until she reached the place where the road into town hit the square. Climbed down, and then dashed across the road into the cover of the inn.

There was no window on this side of the building at ground level, because of the ovens, and the spur of the mountainside gave her cover from downhill, so she was only visible from a very small number of angles.

One of these, unfortunately, was by leaning out the second-floor window in the room where the Shinra were staying and looking straight down, but Sephiroth and Fair were both underground at the Manor, so if she was seen, by the time their troops could fetch them she could be out of town, if she had to.

Cloud, however, could hardly have missed her running straight past him.

She waited a second, wondering whether a 'psst!' of encouragement would carry to the second floor, but then it didn't matter because Cloud took the six steps around the corner of the building, away from his guard post and into a moderate amount of cover with her.

"Tifa?"

She grinned, already feeling three times as powerful for hearing Cloud's voice. "Yes, of course it's me. I'm not the one hiding my face, honestly!"

"You…"

"I got away." Tifa raised both her hands to show how unbound they were. "It was quite a fight, but overall I think it was still a better bet than trying to fight Sephiroth.

"Hey," she continued after a second, feeling her way forward, when Cloud didn't say anything. "I saw Fair, earlier. Looks like he's okay."

"Yeah, he was fine." Cloud nodded. His face ended up tipped forward at the end of the nod, and Tifa craned her neck trying to see the little of it that showed under the helmet. His mouth made a line.

"You okay?" she asked, starting to worry. If the problem wasn't her beating up his other friend, what was it?

Cloud nodded again, but he wasn't looking right at her. The set of his shoulders was unhappy.

"Did you get in trouble?" she guessed.

Shrug. "Not really." He hesitated a second, then cleared his throat a little and went on, "Sephiroth had a lot of questions. So did Zack. A lot of them they already asked last night, but…" he trailed off.

Tifa huffed out a breath. But they were reexamining their trust in his answers, after she'd gotten him alone this afternoon. "Sorry about that."

Probably it would have been better to drop the bridge and make them go around—she wouldn't have had to sit and wait for them in that case, she could have made off with Jenova and figured out what to do with her on the run, while Zeke navigated the Shinra through the tunnel system to the reactor. It was an even longer trip if you started on the far side of the ravine, rather than at the bottom.

It really had just…never occurred to her. She'd never been good at—the proactive kind of terrorism. Forcing action out of inaction, rather than just sending a message about what was wrong. She knew she could be a violent person, but violent solutions to problems didn't tend to occur to her unless the problem was already violent.

Cloud's shoulders squared, and he reached up to pull the helmet off. "It's okay."

He looked at her, now, head-on, and there was something keen in his eyes that reminded her simultaneously that this was Cloud still, young and uncertain as he might be, with a spirit deeper than the sky, and yet also that this was a Cloud who had never been broken—the certainty in him wasn't fire-forged deep and strong out of pain one link at a time, but neither was his doubt a network of fissures, running through him everywhere that the mosaic of his self had been pieced together from fragments.

Assessing, sort of amazed, he said: "You aren't angry."

"Why would I be angry?" Cloud hadn't done anything wrong.

He shook his head. Disbelief. "Why did you tell me anything, if you don't want my help? Or is it more like, there isn't anything you think I can do to help you?"

"That's—" Not completely wrong, but. "I just didn't want to ask you to do anything you felt was wrong." Not unless she had to. Or more realistically, until she had to. "Or get you killed," she admitted after a second. If she had to watch Sephiroth kill Cloud like an insect because she'd thought she was smart enough to change the course of history, she would…probably not cope very well. At all. Ever again.

Cloud was exasperated. "So what do you want?"

"Information, for now." Tifa settled back into herself. She hunkered down into a crouch again, to get more of the benefit of the cover from the low ridge and make a less obvious human figure against the inn wall. It took only a small beckoning gesture to get Cloud to come a little closer and join her, though he didn't squat down as far. His helmet he settled under one knee. They'd look more suspicious, now, if anyone noticed them. Conspiratorial. But they were a little harder to notice, or overhear.

"Sephiroth and Fair have been in the Manor most of the afternoon, as far as I can tell," she said quietly. "They're going through the library some more?"

"Yeah. Zack was complaining about it…." Cloud trailed off, that conflicted look at the back of his eyes again.

"Only if you don't think it's wrong," said Tifa, over her own mental urging to push him, to demand everything he could give her right now, to scrape out any advantage she could get because the enemy was so strong and she was so alone and if she got this wrong everyone was going to die again.

Raising children really had taught her a lot of self-control.

His eyes caught hers. "He really died for me?"

"…that's what you said," Tifa hedged.

Regretting now having told him. His attachment to Fair in this time hadn't been nearly as strong as she'd expected. "I wasn't there," she qualified. "I never saw him again, after Nibelheim burned. The paperwork we found later just said he was 'shot for resisting.' But apparently he hid you first, and the Turks said it took an infantry regiment, a SOLDIER battalion, and two helicopters to put him down."

No helicopters and maybe we coulda snuck him out from under the Army's nose, Reno had said one night in the new Seventh Heaven, and Tifa had never been sure whether he'd been referring to a rescue or to returning Fair to Hojo's custody—she was inclined to think the latter, but then why the sneaking? Then again, why a rescue?

But, she realized, she had an answer now: Zack Fair had, in life, counted as a friend one Tseng of the Turks.

It was probably irony that she now found herself wishing she'd been a little less determined to focus on the future, back home in her own time, and had asked more questions about everyone's pasts. But then, how much would someone like Tseng realistically have shared?

Maybe a lot, if it had been Cloud asking, about Zack and about Aerith. But of course he'd never known to ask Tseng about Zack, and it would have felt invasive to all of them, to ask Tseng to tell them more than Aerith had decided to share with them in life, now that she was dead.

Also, no one expected to get good news from Tseng. It had been bad enough when Yuffie provoked him into talking about himself.

"That guy," Cloud said. "The…ex-Turk."

"Vincent?"

"Yeah. What's he doing for you?"

"Right now, he's staying out of sight." Tifa shrugged. "He's stronger than either of us at this point, so I'm glad I could get him to listen. What do Sephiroth and Fair think I'm doing?"

Cloud shrugged. "They aren't sure. Sephiroth keeps trying to say Genesis was behind everything but Zack's pretty sure you really didn't know who he was."

"I really didn't. He's a dick, by the way."

That familiar twitch-grin, not as wide as it had been starting to grow before Aerith died, but wider than she'd ever seen it since. "I could have told you that."

"Too bad I didn't know to ask."

"I mean, I did shoot at him."

"That was a hint," Tifa admitted. One she probably should have taken more seriously, at that. "But I really didn't want to surrender to Sephiroth, or die.

"And I was hoping Pinky and I could make terms, which…well, we couldn't. Vincent and I had a task and a half fighting our way out of his hideout—by the way, how did he make that many Copies? It took Hojo four years to make about twenty of Sephiroth, and they weren't nearly that, uh…coherent."

If that was the right word. It actually wasn't the right word, but considering what she'd already told Cloud about his averted future as a test subject, she didn't really want to be more accurate, and it was close enough.

"…I don't know the details?" said Cloud. "But uh, around the time I joined up, it sounds like a whole chunk of SOLDIER disappeared along with that guy. There's a rogue scientist from the Science Department involved too, called Hollander. I was on a mission to capture him about a year ago. I heard a rumor he escaped again though."

Tifa laced her fingers together and stretched them thoughtfully up over her head. Her Cloud…hadn't retained this, she was pretty sure. "Huh. How many SOLDIERs?"

"I'm not sure, but more than a couple hundred. They decided not to replace them all, because the war was winding down anyway and a lot of the deserters were new recruits and a huge financial loss, so only the very top guys in my class got in."

Tifa blinked. And there it was, laid out all casually by Cloud's own past self—a perfectly understandable reason he hadn't made SOLDIER. Oh, he clearly felt disgusted with himself already for not making the cut, but it was still…a surprise, and not a surprise at all, to learn that SOLDIER had changed its recruitment practices around the time he applied. Tifa had always assumed they'd rejected him on the basis of his height, or his unreliable ability to follow orders, or just because Shinra couldn't tell shit from gold when it came to people.

And they probably had passed him over in favor of someone else for one of those reasons, but still. When he'd decided to join SOLDIER, he'd actually had a shot. "You're lucky," she said.

She could almost thank Genesis for this effect he'd had on history without her knowledge, if it hadn't been clear he'd done it by abusing the trust of people Shinra had already taken advantage of. Except maybe Cloud joining SOLDIER would have led to a better future after all, what did she know?

Cloud looked at the ground. "Zack said that too."

Huh. And him so proud of being SOLDIER. "Do you know what happened at the reactor after we, uh, left? Zack got healed up, obviously."

Cloud shrugged again. "Yeah. They made me and Baener stand guard outside, with Zeke after he came back up the trail. Normally we have the clearance for reactors, but…."

"Yeah, there's extra-evil science in this one. Did they stay inside long?"

"No."

And obviously Sephiroth hadn't gone on a murderous rampage so far. "What did they look like coming out?"

Cloud's eyes went distant and slightly narrow as he thought. "Tense? Sephiroth didn't really talk on the way down the mountain, even though Zack kept trying. He gave up and talked to me and Baener eventually."

"Not Zeke?"

"Sephiroth yelled at him for distracting our guide."

It was true Zeke's job of getting them back to town would have been a lot more complicated with the bridge out, but not that much. So, Sephiroth was in a bad mood. But not so much as to forbid his soldiers from talking to one another as they walked. That would be…more useful knowledge if she had a better idea of what his sense of proportion had been like before he declared himself the destined ruler of the Planet and tried to kill and eat it, but it wasn't nothing.

She'd made that downhill trip with him once before, right? It hadn't been a particularly intense experience, to make the details survive ten years, but she must know something. He'd been…quiet, she thought. She didn't remember him saying anything much, at least, and she would have done. Sephiroth was hard to ignore, and his melodrama on the way up the mountain had been fairly unforgettable.

He hadn't yelled at anyone, that she recalled. Definitely hadn't forbidden anyone from talking to her, though she didn't recall much conversation either.

Did that mean…she'd made it worse?

"Thanks," she said, and chewed her tongue thoughtfully. Did she still have days before he snapped? She'd utterly disrupted the process of his assimilating information about his origins, she definitely shouldn't assume she had days; look what she'd done by assuming the bridge falling with people on it had to happen.

It had taken everything she had to put Zack Fair down for what sounded like it hadn't been more than a matter of minutes. Of course that was definitely with the benefit of healing magic, which a rampaging Sephiroth might very well not bother with, but then again he might—his three-faced monster form had hit itself with Curaga with frustrating regularity.

Either way, though. She'd known all along she couldn't do this alone, but this trial threw that fact into sharp relief.

If she wanted to save Nibelheim, she still needed to find a way to change something.