Top Guide (In This Town)

Chapter Fourteen

A/N: Okay so here's the issue: There is one place in (my version of) the game where Barret says Corel fell six years ago. This is presumably a typo, since everywhere else it really does seem to be four, but this was the figure I for some reason memorized, and noted down in my notes.

Possibly because it matched up better with my read on the kids in AC? They look the same age, and while Marlene is believable (though not entirely probable) as six at that point, Denzel is not.

Anyway, I'm interested in audience feedback on this. Do you think I should go back and fix my error of chronology, allowing for the possibility of a saving-Corel arc? Or should we just continue forward in this flawed world I have created?

Tifa braced the splayed fingertips of her right hand against the dirt, more for grounding than for physical balance.

Heading up the mountain right now in broad daylight would be stupid, but all her muscles hummed with urgency anyway, to go go go. Would even burning really shut Jenova's voice away entirely, though? Could anything.

Death was only a path into the Lifestream, and lacking a body had limited but not stopped the Calamity. She was all through SOLDIER. Especially its General. Even killing them all might just start up the Geostigma with their contaminated life energy.

There was nothing Tifa could do about Jenova's power in the Lifestream. That was Aerith's problem to resolve. Break it down. Do what's before you. Breathe.

"Have we fixed it?" Cloud whispered. It was a good sort of hope she could hear in the question, one that ached a little but had a sharp edge you could use to climb a cliff, not something frail that had to be held within cupped hands. "Is he…."

"I don't know," Tifa said, honestly. "It might be better. He's been warned, at least. That…" If he were a reasonable, decent person that should make all the difference, but Tifa had no faith at all that he ever been either of those things.

"We've helped his odds, anyway. By letting him know." She found a smile. "I noticed you didn't tell him everything I said."

Cloud shrugged, almost his old jaunty refusal of concern, from their early days with AVALANCHE. "He wouldn't have believed me."

Tifa muffled a laugh with her hand. "Good call."

Even if Sephiroth did for some reason accept that she was a time traveler, the news that she was claiming to be a time-traveling terrorist here to stop him from destroying the world wouldn't exactly encourage him to trust her judgment. And most likely, he'd just dismiss the whole thing as playing on Cloud's credulousness, and be twice as suspicious that she represented some convoluted Shinra scheme.

Or was it just Fair who thought the Company was rotten?

No. There was no way Sephiroth actually trusted Shinra. He'd have been an easier archenemy to have if he'd been that stupid.

"So," said Cloud. "What's next?"

Tifa turned the question in her mind like a stone. "Technically, I think your mission here is over." Cloud's copy of Fair's memory of the reactor visit suggested Sephiroth had pretty much just opened (or possibly closed) a valve and declared the problem solved. (Why was there no resident technician. Seriously.)

"But if my past is any clue, the mission leader isn't going to want to leave tomorrow. Do you know what either of them is planning?"

"They've just been in the creepy book lab all day." Cloud shrugged. "I've been asleep for the last few hours. They want a 24 hour watch kept, and with only three of us that means staggering rack time. I kind of don't expect Sephiroth to come out tonight at all, but I guess we'll see."

"I guess," said Tifa. That was…not promising overall, but hopeful for her plans of burning Jenova under cover of dark. Genesis was a problem, but if he and the wildlife could be her only problems, this might work out.

Cloud shifted, and she realized he was still uncomfortable.

"Worried?" she asked. Anyone would be. It was Sephiroth.

"No," said Cloud, with perfect teenage absurdity.

Not that he was much better as an adult, when it came to talking about his feelings before they brought him to his breaking point, but at least he'd lost the unconvincing bravado at some point. While operating under the delusion he was Zack, possibly. Or maybe somewhere in the four and a half years of continual trauma under Hojo, which had probably made embarrassment seem like a much less serious problem in comparison.

Tifa tried another smile. "It's fine to be worried. This is a crazy situation."

"I know. And I'm okay."

Hm. This…was more than just embarrassment about nerves.

She reached up and cupped his face with the hand that didn't have fresh dirt on it. "Cloud," she said. "Are you really okay?"

He nodded furiously and dropped her gaze, hard. The cheek under her palm was pinking up—blushing. Cloud was blushing. Even leaving aside everything that had changed over the years, she knew he wasn't the type. He was—oh no. Belatedly, she pulled her hand away. He had a crush on her. Still.

Shit.

Tifa's feelings about Cloud were very very complicated, but she'd more or less resigned herself to her Cloud not being interested in that way, even though he did love her as much as he could, and this one was…

Was closer to Denzel's age than hers. Ugh. He'd be so insulted by the comparison if he knew who Denzel was.

The pink was lasting, but it was going sort of humiliated. He'd noticed her noticing, then. Crap.

"Cloud," she said. Moved the hand to his shoulder instead. "I wasn't lying when I said I can't do this without you."

"I don't see why."

Tifa bit her lip. How could she make him believe how much he mattered? Cloud wanted to matter, more than anything, but he wasn't like her, wasn't afraid that people would never love him for himself. He didn't expect them to. He didn't entirely think they should.

He thought he had to earn it, by doing or being something worth appreciating.

It wouldn't be enough to say, I need you to be Cloud for me, I need you like a sailor needs the stars. Either he wouldn't believe her, or he'd think it was…even if she made it clear they weren't together in the future, it wasn't fair to…she couldn't….

"We help each other remember who we are."

She squeezed his shoulder a little—careful, though she didn't have to be, though there wasn't strength enough in her hands now to create a need for care. And let go. "I know it isn't the same, in this time." Knew he didn't need her the same way, even if he did need someone to believe in him and had not too long ago wanted it to be a version of her. "But…I need you to help me save everyone. Just me and Vincent isn't a full party."

"Hah," Cloud said, as if that had been a joke.

"You should've seen the three of us tearing across the world," Tifa told him, folding her arms over her knees. She'd always liked that party composition; it was good to have someone along with range to their physical attacks, and she, Vincent, and Cloud could split casting duties fairly evenly without depriving anyone of their favored spells. They balanced.

Also Vincent required minimal managing and didn't constantly demand attention, so when he was their third she and Cloud had gotten to hang out together properly. Barret and Yuffie tended to dominate conversation, it would be positively criminal to ignore Nanaki, Cid was Cid, Cait Sith was Reeve and also an enormous clown, and Aerith had been. Well. Aerith.

She'd liked that party composition too, because she adored Aerith, but it had cut into her Cloud time. Vincent was much simpler company. And of course he'd…been around longer, in the end. To the end, and past it. "We were unstoppable."

She shook her head to get it out of the clouds, but let the smile stay. "But we're not there yet, so right now, we need to be sneaky, and work around the edges. Which means having a man on the inside is great. You'll…be the first one on our team that knows if conditions change."

"And then what?" He wasn't exactly happy, wasn't the clean-eyed blade-edge Cloud she liked to see, but that was understandable. This wasn't a clean situation. He seemed to be over the embarrassment, at least.

"Come let me know. Or Vincent."

"And if that doesn't work?"

There were plenty of reasons it might not. If she was dead, or he didn't know where to find her, or Vincent. If there was no way to slip away unnoticed.

She rubbed the back of her neck, thinking about it. "I don't know. Tell Fair some of what I told you, I guess, if you think it will motivate him. He's SOLDIER but I don't think he's bad...you know him better than I do. You should make that call."

Cloud sighed. "Why won't you talk to them?"

"I was talking to them. Pinky interrupted."

"Yeah," Cloud said. "That's true."

Not that she'd been entirely straightforward, but she couldn't afford to be.

She rubbed the hard bone of her knee with the fingertips that had braced her in the dirt, the acutely real texture of sand grains grating and softer earth smearing over her skin comforting. Grounding. "I've been avoiding telling them too much because I don't think they'll believe me, and they're more likely to listen to advice from some mystery source than from someone they've decided for sure is mad or a liar."

"So if you thought they'd listen..."

Tifa shrugged. "They're not Vincent, or you. I don't know them." Except she did know Sephiroth. But not this one, not enough to predict him reliably outside what it would look like when he went mad. "But I was trying to talk, in the Manor and up the mountain. I want to get through to them. I have to stop Sephiroth, and I can't kill him, as things are. Vincent and I have something we have to get done at the reactor tonight, but I don't know how Sephiroth will react, and he's the most dangerous thing right now."

"So...you just want me to be your eyes, for now."

"Yeah. It's really important." She hesitated, studied Cloud's face. They couldn't afford to take much more time. Someone was going to notice Cloud was away from his post. There was a shadow there still, and she didn't know what to do about it. "Okay?" she asked.

Cloud nodded. His eyes remained troubled, but she guessed that was to be expected. He no longer seemed like he was holding back words he didn't know how to shape. That was something.

"I like having an inside source, but the invitation to desert and join up with us is always open, okay? You're more important. If they suspect you, get out. I don't want you taking risks without backup."

Cloud nodded again.

"Be safe," she told him, because a hug would be too forward, because I can't lose you would be presumptuous in the extreme, and he didn't know any of their inside jokes.

"You too," he said, and slipped back around the corner, to be seen keeping Shinra's eyes on Nibelheim.

Tifa dashed back across the road and scrambled up onto the roofs again. That was the most important part of her to-do list taken care of. She still had a few hours until dark, and there was no way she'd be able to slip off and take a nap with all this tension running through her, so she'd hold out here a while longer.

She took up a place that let her see in the direction Cloud wasn't looking, west from the flat roof of the Himrings' house that faced the inn. Sat down in the cover of the Himrings' two boiler heads, the storage chest they kept up there, and the low retaining wall. Splayed her legs out as much as the narrow space would allow, and bent forward to stretch out her hamstrings.

Every other second she glanced up to check on the Manor, but it remained lifeless. Occasionally she made out what might have been the shadow of a monster through a window, but she never saw any sign of Sephiroth. Fair didn't come out again, either. The sun dwindled on toward the mountains and got more and more into her eyes, as shadow stretched its fingers over the square.

Eventually, Master Zangan came strolling out of the inn, passed Cloud without either of them really acknowledging one another, and headed across the square and east through town—hm, to the butcher, maybe? Master Zangan liked to do most of his own cooking, but he didn't insist on hunting his own meat if there was tender beef or chocobo to buy. Monsters were rarely very good eating.

She'd kind of thought he'd have left Nibelheim already, ahead of schedule. There was no way the Shinra hadn't found out he was the one who'd taught her to fight, if they'd asked around about her at all, and this was exactly the kind of mess he liked to avoid getting roped into.

And yet here he was. Staying in the same inn as the SOLDIERs, no less.

Maybe Sephiroth had warned him not to try skipping town.

She waited a while, following her teacher along the narrow Nibel streets at roof-height, to make sure he wasn't being tailed by anyone else who might be using him as bait in a Tifa-trap. Then, as he approached one of the few actual alleys in town, a spot where the houses weren't built wall to wall even though they ran nearly parallel, she knelt, gripped the edge of the roof, and dangled.

It was only about four meters to the ground. She dropped.

Landed much better than she really would have at sixteen; some of what she'd learned from Yuffie had stuck, even without the muscle memory. "Master Zangan."

He turned, not terribly startled, but not necessarily like he'd known she was there before she spoke. He smiled. His pale eyes were warm over the bristle of his faded moustache. "Tifa," he said. Walked up to the mouth of the alley, not that this meant going far on the narrow Nibel street. "There you are, my favorite student."

It had always made her feel so warm when he called her that. Master Zangan had always been so free with affection, so full of encouragement, when all she ever seemed to hear from her father was lists of things she shouldn't or couldn't do, or risk, or trust, or be. The few weeks Zangan came to town to teach her had been the highlight of every year, and she had practiced ferociously to please him.

She nodded a greeting. "I'm glad you're still in town."

He was her master. She owed him her life—he'd carried her out of the reactor just in time to save her from sharing Cloud's fate under Hojo, or worse; he'd kept her alive long enough to get her to a doctor; he'd taught her the skills that she'd used ever since to make her way through this dangerous world. He'd hidden a letter and the Final Heaven in the false Nibelheim, for her to find and unlock her final Limit. Loving him, and owing him, that would never change.

But he'd left her. After everything, she'd woken up alone in the clinic he'd found for her, bills fully paid and bandages thick around her chest where the cruel wound of the Masamune resisted healing. With nothing but a note goodbye.

When Nibelheim burned, all he'd done was search for survivors.

Fighting Sephiroth was impossible, so he hadn't tried. Fighting Shinra was impossible, so he hadn't tried.

He had one hundred and twenty-seven students aside from her, and he didn't have the right kind of courage to be a hero. Tifa had no illusions about her master, not anymore—he cared for her, but she couldn't expect him to put himself on the line for her sake.

He stroked his beard, eyebrows high. Amusement, and no real signs of surprise. "Oho? What do you need from an old man?"

"I need some gloves," she said. "My punches aren't strong enough."

"Strong enough…to fight Shinra? Hoho! I think that would take more than any gloves I have."

Tifa's fists clenched and unclenched again. "I need any edge I can get. I took the younger SOLDIER down with a Limit Break earlier, but that just means they won't go easy on me again."

Master Zangan's eyebrows went up. "Took him down, hm?" He squinted, suddenly not laughing anymore, which was very rare. "What's going on? Really?"

Tifa shook her hair back, left her chin up when she was done. Shoulders back. She was missing every millimeter of height she'd lost. "There's a threat to the town." It wasn't his town, not really, but he claimed to be fond of it, and of her.

And he was the one who'd taught her that a martial artist's duty was to use her strength for her community.

"Okay," Master Zangan said, after a long pause. He ran a thumb over the metal knuckles of the basic gauntlets he had on, which she knew weren't the best he had, just the sort of thing you could wear inside a town, to train a kid, without scaring or hurting anyone. "Okay, Tifa. You've always had your feet on the ground. I'll see what I can do."

Once Master Zangan had gone, on to whatever errand he had in town, Tifa waited again until the street was clear, and climbed back up amongst the chimneypots and boiler-pipes. She had to stop several times as she worked her way back to the square, lying flat and waiting for people to pass. It wasn't that her neighbors were the enemy, but they didn't have any reason not to ask at a shout what she was doing up there, and ruin her cover entirely.

When she got back to her perch overlooking the square, it was busier than it had been all afternoon, full of people getting home from the fields and quarries and building sites, or running last-minute errands before dark. Nibelheim wasn't the kind of community that had street lights, and the moon wouldn't be up for hours, and would be a bare waxing crescent even then.

Good for stealth. Bad for going three doors down for a cup of sugar. Fortunately Tifa was living the former kind of life, now.

Okay. Last order of business, saved because it was the least important, and if she'd been caught doing this and needed to run, or abandoned vigilance because of it, and missed her contact opportunities, that would have been a problem: Tifa used gaps in sightlines to work her way carefully around the square, and then when no one was below but Cloud, in his Shinra uniform, standing perfectly still at attention, she swung herself down over the edge of the roof, and climbed in her own bedroom window.

Once again the accuracy smacked into her—Shinra had done creepily well at reproducing the space, but this was a step further. Because this was either real, or her own memory. And she was banking very hard on real.

No time to downgather. She grabbed the rucksack from the floor under her dresser and started filling it.

Canteen first of all—it had been incredibly disabling not to have that. The crackers that she kept in her desk, which it was a struggle not to eat a few of on the spot, damn the attention she might draw with the sound of crunching. Her small stash of gil. Pocket knife.

Clean socks and underwear. She'd done without those before, for weeks at a time if necessary, but she'd long since resolved not to do it again if she didn't have to.

No sounds of anyone downstairs. It seemed like she was fine. Tifa hesitated a few seconds, then started digging through her wardrobe.

This outfit had been chosen to make a statement—to herself, mostly. The statement was now obsolete; she had made too many choices to be at risk of being swallowed up by a past self. That girl was gone.

The black boots were fine, but the brown ones got better traction, and fit better. This body was weak; she grabbed the brown skirt and then a grey shirt with long sleeves, in case they needed to improvise bandages. Planet, not having Restore magic on-hand was terrible. Her other good vest, a dull olive green that should vanish in low light.

Hurriedly, she skinned out of the rich blue and green outfit that had been adequate camouflage down on the plains but made her stand out up on the barren mountainside. Clean underpants on first. What the hell, she swapped the bra too—that was the most comfortable one, she thought she remembered. She transferred the Seal materia to the new bra; the vest had pockets but it would be easier to lose the orb by accident out of them, and besides, without any gear where you could properly equip materia the next best way to cast was by direct touch. Usually with your hands, but she could hardly spare those.

Pulled on the brown skirt because it had been her favorite for a reason, and she was making new memories now; she refused to fear the old ones. New socks; boots, shirt, vest, great.

She kicked the dirty clothes under the bed. If Sephiroth came and searched her room and figured out from that that she'd been back, whatever. If he brought the proof of her presence up later, she could mock him for pawing through a teenage girl's dirty underwear.

He'd probably make a subordinate do it, of course.

She grabbed her smallest blanket, one really meant to throw decoratively over the foot of the bed and maybe provide some extra insulation for the toes, rolled it up and crammed it in the bag. There, perfect. Heist complete.

Tifa hesitated just short of the window, scanned the room in the fading daylight in case something she had forgotten she might need should leap out at her, and froze, her hand coming up to cover her mouth, as though she didn't trust herself not to make a noise.

She'd been so focused on her task she hadn't even noticed something sitting here in her room in plain sight, entirely out of place.

On top of the piano, one of the good willow-patterned plates had been carefully balanced. It held a small pile of packages wrapped carefully in waxed paper, tied with cotton string. If Tifa wasn't mistaken, it looked to be every small item of nonperishable food in the house.

Toward the front was a neat cylinder that was obviously all the remaining cookies from—Planet. From yesterday morning. It had been a busy couple of days.

There was a piece of card propped between two of the packages, when she went over to look. She tugged it free. In her dad's cramped, angular writing—he always held the pen too tight and pressed down too hard—it read, You promised you'd be careful around the soldiers, sweetheart.

Tifa caught her breath, and then let it in and out very deliberately several times, pressing the thick square of paper over her lower face, until she no longer had to work at steadiness.

Her dad. Had left food for her. Her dad. Who was alive, and a person, capable of…of making decisions, of surprising her, of—her papa was alive. She'd eaten dinner with him a day ago, and somehow failed to really take that truth on board.

He was alive. He cared. And she would not let him die again.

Bursting back into motion, she slid the note into her bag and pressed the packages one by one in on top of the rolled fabric, slightly concerned she might have to discard the blanket to make room, but though the knapsack bulged a little by the end, and she wiggled the cookies into place with the certainty they'd be rather badly crushed inside their wrappings by the time she got back to them, it all fit.

The smell of the cookies leaking through the waxed paper made her mouth water, but she'd eaten the snack from Cloud's mother only about six hours ago, she could wait until she was somewhere secure to dig into this. Her childhood bedroom hadn't been a safe place in a long time, and the fact that Dad had anticipated she might slip back in made it hard to forget that Sephiroth might be lying in wait for the same thing.

She doubted it. Even with as much melodrama as she'd stirred, she wasn't that interesting. He had a whole library about himself to consult, after all, and he'd been down there all day. He shouldn't have any way to know she was even in town instead of off conspiring with Genesis Rhapsodos.

But he could.

She swung the bag over her shoulders and crossed back to the open window.

And did a double take, because Cloud was crossing the otherwise empty town square.

This was noteworthy because the guard posted beside the inn didn't seem to have moved, and she had thought that it was still Cloud. Couldn't tell it wasn't even now, except for the fact that the one crossing the square had his helmet off, and was most definitely her blondest friend.

Apparently she couldn't tell him from a distance if he didn't move. When had the switch happened? Just now, while she was inside? Earlier, while she was gone tailing Master Zangan?

He could have been off-duty for over an hour by now, which was different from the schedule she thought he'd outlined. Why?

He wasn't headed for his mom's. Probably going out to pick up food, then—Old Man Hilgrid at the inn did good stew and good bread and good beer (bread and beer were his main income when there weren't visitors in town, which there usually weren't) and good morning porridge and that was, more or less, his whole repertoire.

His wife used to use the nice ovens in the inn to bake less essential things than bread, such as really adorable tiny cakes Tifa vaguely remembered loving as a small child, but old Mrs. Hilgrid was nine years in the ground, and while the granddaughter could come around to cook for the SOLDIERs, along with the other things she helped her grandfather with day to day, that didn't mean she would—the woman was six years older than Tifa so they weren't well acquainted, but she recalled her as well-off by Nibel standards, and never particularly fond of Shinra.

Cloud would know who to go to with the offer of gil for home cooking, so it would make sense to send him out to get dinner. City people, Tifa knew from experience, rapidly got bored eating the same two meals repeatedly with only minor variations. (Well, so did small-town people, but not nearly as fast.)

There were lots of houses Cloud could confidently visit to trade gil in the quantities Plate-dweller Sephiroth would consider a reasonable dinner budget in exchange for a fresh pie, or some vegetables, or something grilled or steamed or pot-roasted.

But he was heading straight across the square, not toward the street leading east the way Zangan had done, which was a bit odd. And then, as he reached the houses opposite the inn, he stopped. Turned, scanned the rooftops for her. It took him a second to spot her lower down, in her window, watching, but he did. She was failing to hide herself in the slightest.

Cloud waited a second to make sure she'd noticed him noticing her noticing him, then jerked his head in the direction he was going.

And disappeared into the gap between the Himring and the Breezebalm family homes.

Tifa stood framed in her window another second, entirely obvious to anyone who might come outside or glance out a window of their own and see her, she was so puzzled.

The notable things about that space were, firstly that it existed at all—space between houses that wasn't an intentional throughfare wasn't much in keeping with Nibel building tradition, especially this close to the town center—and secondly, that it was very nearly a dead end.

The back of the Yeager family storage shed cut it off, which had apparently threatened to start an actual feud about fifteen years before Tifa was born. There was a door leading into the shed from inside the alleyway, now, as part of a peace agreement that had been hashed out with the input of half the town, in a way that had given her father a slight grudge against Cloud's father, one whose details she had never inquired into. She should do that, when she got a chance, now that Dad was alive again to ask.

Occasionally fistfights still broke out between the Himrings and the Yeagars over accusations of making a mess of the shed while passing through, or of leaving the shed such a mess no one could pass through.

It was the only truly blind alley in all of Nibelheim; even the dead end she'd used to talk to Zangan had one window looking into it. What did Cloud need to tell her that required that much privacy, but wasn't big or urgent enough to go fully AWOL and meet up more safely outside of town? Did it have something to do with how he'd apparently gotten off duty early? Tifa climbed out her window, onto the roof, and took the necessary leap up onto the Balehardt's spindly tall place, and worked her way around onto the Breezebalms' shingles.

The twilight had grown too deep for her to see properly into the gap, and she squinted, trying to evaluate her footing. The bright yellow smudge of Cloud's hair and the slightly duller one of his upturned face showed in the gloom.

"Do I have a clear landing in front of you?" she whispered down.

It took him a second, even though he didn't lower his head to look. "…yeah."

Tifa dropped. The packed earth was clear, and she landed without trouble at Cloud's feet, but her sense of foreboding was still only growing. She straightened up, peering at Cloud through the dimness, backlit against the slightly brighter square. It was still so odd that his eyes didn't carry their own light to read his expression by.

"Tifa…" Cloud's shadowed eyes were huge and miserable in a way they hadn't been when they spoke earlier. He bit his lip. His voice was barely above a whisper. "Tifa, there's…."

She bent close, thinking maybe he was afraid to be overheard. He flinched back.

Tifa's heart felt like it was punching her from the inside. "Cloud?"

He closed his big blue eyes. "I'm so sorry."

A cool draft hit the back of Tifa's neck.