Top Guide (In This Town)

Chapter Fifteen

A/N: Whoah, ask and ye shall receive, 'Guest!' I thought it was weird you were complaining about the cliffhanger, then checked and discovered I never crossposted the update to this site! Sorry everyone! Ffdotnet is just becoming slowly more user-hostile, so it seems I'm migrating away without realizing it.

[Warning: somewhat detailed description of physical injury that may trip some people's limits for graphic violence, though it's nowhere near mine.]

Tifa knew, without thinking or looking, or knowing how she knew it, that Sephiroth was behind her.

Whether he'd been lurking there all along with his hair covered, or had lain hidden in the storage shed and somehow swung open silently a door that normally creaked, or pulled some other trick, he was behind her now.

For a fraction of a second she was frozen in indecision, because she was between Cloud and Sephiroth and it went against the grain to abandon that position.

But Cloud...wasn't in danger from Sephiroth right now.

She dropped flat, under the keen slice of Masamune that passed two feet short of Cloud's belly, and then launched herself forward from a crouch, past Cloud and out of the alley between houses, through the narrow squeak out into the middle of town square, because keeping hidden was suddenly no longer an option.

Zack Fair was waiting for her there, of course, the other jaw of the trap.

He'd obviously been meant to block off the alley entirely but hadn't had time to make it into position from wherever he'd been waiting in hiding before she ran; had the Buster Sword out, raised to one side of him as though he meant to make a fence of it, and his face was set and grim, and only a little bit twisted with an emotion she could not name.

Tifa was strangely glad she'd given the Fire to Vincent. She wouldn't have been able to use it, here, in this place, and she could afford hesitation much less than she could afford to be unarmed. She gritted her teeth and kept running toward Fair as the Seal warmed against the side of her breast. Casting, casting…

She had to time it just right.

As soon as the Sleep came down and Fair's head dipped she was on him, a wild flying kick that sent the Buster Sword pinwheeling out of his hand and left him waking in startlement sprawled on the ground—she dropped a second Sleep over him as she ran by, counting on him to be too disoriented to dodge. Success. And since he was already flat on his back, he wouldn't hit the ground and wake up again from the impact.

That still only put him out of the fight until somebody shook him awake, but even the seconds it would take Cloud to get to his side could count for everything right now.

Tifa juked left as she approached the inn. South onto the plains gave her fewer hiding places than up into the hills, but it would get her out of town faster and she could loop around and climb from the south, which would keep her from being in line of sight from the village.

Though by the time she got that high, the night would be dark enough it probably wouldn't matter.

A shining crescent of energy screaming across the square forced her to throw herself back sharply, momentum lost, or lose half her torso, even though slowing down cost her her sole advantage over Sephiroth, which was her lead time.

More than a little to Tifa's surprise, he didn't run Masamune through her like a pin through a beetle. Maybe he still wanted her alive after all, because he sent another ranged attack from the end of his sword, herding her to his right, trying to box her into the town square, and then made the ground leap up under her feet like knives with a curt gesture.

She leapt over the worst of it, but her ankle stung worryingly. Tifa couldn't afford to look down and assess the damage. She could still feel her toes, it couldn't be too bad.

Fuck, he was a dual-fighter. Normally when someone relied on both melee and magic you could carve out an opening in the moment of transition, but of course Sephiroth had to have ridiculous weapon range and smoothly cast with his off hand—

Light gathered again around his fingers. Earth wasn't a well-regarded attack element, because it affected nothing that flew, and could be jumped over even by some humans, but it also did not advertise its own path through the air the way most casting did, so it was good for surprise attacks.

Long experience told Tifa where he was aiming instants before he let the spell loose. She dodged, back along the front of the inn toward its entrance, thinking maybe she could still make it around behind the general store, up the rockface, and behind the cover of the stand of fir trees without being caught.

And though it had probably been too late for her already, that choice of dodge was her fatal mistake.

Sephiroth's spell had never been aimed at her. It had been aimed behind her, at one of the giant stone jugs where Mr. Hilgrid collected rainwater. At the base of the mostly-empty half-ton cistern near the front corner of the inn. Which had been launched into the air by the abrupt upthrust of stone from beneath it, and.

Right.

Into.

Her.

Leg.

Tifa understood what had happened from a slight distance, as though she had a hundred years to understand before she had the chance to do anything again, or even to hurt. The stone jug had struck the inside of her trailing right leg as she leapt, and crushed the whole thing—all the way from just above the knee down to the knob of the ankle—around its curve, against the wall, which gave as easily as her bones under the mighty force of the blow.

Tifa hit the ground just barely not under the weight of the ballistic vessel, time rushing past her again at twice its speed as though to catch up with itself, and used both arms and her left leg to throw her body forward, out of the way of the jug rolling back for a second crushing.

She made it. Her stomach was rebelling furiously as she crashed gracelessly chest-first, just managing not to bark her chin so badly it was a threat to her teeth, but she turned her head and gagged and brought nothing up, because she hadn't eaten recently.

The door to the inn was a few feet away, the left panel gaping beside the bashed-in wall, which looked like it was threatening to crumble, and maybe bring the whole place down. Structural instability was the least of her worries. Tifa belly-crawled her way toward it, using the dust of the broken wall and ground as cover. Maybe Sephiroth would think she'd made her escape into the hills again after all, if she was gone when the dust settled. Maybe someone in Nibelheim would believe in her enough to feed her potions and hide her until she could move again. This was her town, after all.

She couldn't be stopped here.

She had too much left to do.

Tifa hitched herself successfully over the doorsill into the inn before her cover of dust failed, without being bisected. Mr. Hilgrid wasn't at his desk. The room didn't seem to be actively collapsing, but she wouldn't be shocked if the ceiling came down. Doggedly, she put her right elbow forward, and kept going.

It was a little easier on the smooth floor, only a little broken up by rubble; her leg was a little easier to ignore when it wasn't being dragged over the edges of cobblestones. The bulging knapsack on her back seemed to weigh ten times what Cloud's bulkiest swords ever had, but she couldn't afford the time or motion to stop and struggle free of it.

Odds were, Sephiroth would know there was nowhere she could have gone but into the inn. She was bleeding heavily, so there was probably a trail forming behind her. It would be obvious.

Even if he looked for her inside, though, if she could just get across the foyer and through the door to the kitchen in time, she might be overlooked. The blood trail might camouflage with the carpet. There was dust everywhere from the buckling front wall, that would confuse things.

The front of the building might still collapse; if she was in the kitchen by then maybe….

Level with the check-in desk and still over a meter short of the kitchen entrance, Tifa heard the double door swing open again behind her. Felt breath gust out of her in a sigh. Almost flopped boneless on her face, but something—pride—held her up.

It had been a long shot, she knew, hiding at all, but now she'd been caught out in the open so, that was that.

She hoisted herself around, with her arms, ignoring the heightened screaming agony at the splintered ruin of her bones being rotated, until she could put the back of her shoulders to the registration desk, and let it prop her up enough to keep her face turned toward the door. She could at least look him in the eye and try casting Sleep, she thought as she made it happen; it was better than nothing….

And then.

It wasn't who she expected, framed in the doorway amid the old gold of the settling dust, with the last warm rays of day behind him.

Sephiroth, she knew, was coming after her.

But apparently Cloud was coming first.

He'd picked up Fair's sword at some point, just like last time. But unlike last time, Tifa was the one who'd sent it flying. And it was Tifa he was walking toward, with sword in hand.

She almost gave up, right there. There was a moment she could feel it coming, a collapse inside her heart to which the spoken surrender that would inevitably follow, when Cloud pointed his borrowed weapon at her face and demanded it, would be just an afterthought.

It didn't matter that he had good reasons, or that really expecting someone to throw their entire future away on the strength of a childhood crush and a fairytale had been stupid all along. It was Cloud. She and Cloud relied on one another to know how to go on. If Cloud wanted her to stop, then….

Then.

But.

But there were more important things than how much pain she was in. Believing that had kept Tifa on her feet a dozen times when her world fell down around her. It didn't mean she could always function through the pain, or that her feelings didn't matter. But they weren't the most important thing.

She focused her will, and felt the Seal materia warming up again. Putting Cloud to Sleep probably wouldn't matter, wouldn't help her any, when she knew Sephiroth was right behind him, but it was the task in front of her, and so she—

Cloud turned his back on her.

And lifted the sword that wasn't his.

And stared up at along its length at Sephiroth as the Silver General appeared in the entryway, Masamune trailing out behind him in a tail guard. Shoulders under sturdy blue uniform canvas set in that familiar square. That stubborn, uncompromising stance that had looked up toward dragons and Weapons and Shinra's pieced-together monsters, and Jenova and all the Sephiroths, and his own fears.

No further.

Sephiroth could have killed him, of course. Easily. But he paused, taken aback at being met by the unexpected sight of a blade leveled at his face, where he had expected no opposition.

And then, for an endless moment, nobody moved.

It might have been only the delirium of pain and steady bleeding, but Tifa could almost see the string drawn between them. Taut from Cloud's spine along his arms, out through the blade and straight between Sephiroth's narrow reptilian eyes. Even now, before the advent of that hideous bond she had watched Sephiroth manipulate to bring her hero to his knees, before there was anything in Cloud drawing him ever after the Nightmare. Something in him yearned already toward Sephiroth.

He wanted to be near Sephiroth. He wanted to be approved of by Sephiroth. He wanted to be Sephiroth.

That was the dream he'd walked away towards, when he left this place.

It was sort of amazing he had resisted the self-erasing drag of Reunion as well as he had.

But then, by the time that had gotten its hooks into him, he'd had a far more powerful reason to resist and reject and refuse.

That was what he'd held onto, after all, wasn't it? When he might not have remembered even his own name, if she hadn't called him by it in the train station; when he had forgotten his place in the story and the pattern of his life and Tifa herself, until reminded, and every moment of the past five years: he had remembered the fall of Nibelheim. He had remembered Sephiroth's betrayal. He had remembered his hate.

He must have been clinging to that one small truth with all his might.

Maybe that was what had made the difference for him, compared to Hojo's other victims. That part of him that still remembered looking up to a silver hero had probably leapt to answer the Calamity's call, the way he had once crossed a continent and an ocean to become SOLDIER, even as all the rest of him writhed away in rejection.

Probably most of the Copies they'd met had never seen Sephiroth, in the few minutes it had taken him to obliterate Nibelheim; had no idea they had any reason to hate him particularly. Or weren't very good at hate. Or didn't know that the thing consuming their wills was one and the same with the figure that had brought the fire, not soon enough at least to put up a resistance.

Or even they just…weren't very stubborn.

(Tifa did not want to say, weak, the way Cloud did when talking about himself; did not want to cast blame where it could not possibly belong. One of them had been a child.)

The ones who'd been stubborn enough not to crack at all, if there were any, had probably died.

And then there was Cloud, with a single crack betraying him, caught halfway between being erased and being destroyed.

There was Zack Fair, too, who had broken them both out and run. Neither dead, nor swallowed up.

She wondered if Zack Fair had really been trying to get back to Midgar for Aerith, or if he had been following the pull of Reunion without knowing it. Unless he broke after all in this new time, and proved he was not immune, she supposed she never would know.

Even if he broke this time around, she probably wouldn't know. She'd played her hand out. And Cloud's remaining cards weren't strong enough to turn the game again.

The situation assessed to his satisfaction, Sephiroth commanded: "Put that down. And stand aside."

Muscles in Cloud's back and shoulders flexed, but he didn't move. "No."

"Corporal."

"General." Cloud bit the title off, aggravated more than flatly menacing. It made him sound as young as he was, the open grievance of one who could still find outrage in his chest rather than a flare of old low-burning hate. "I did what you wanted. You said you just wanted to talk to her."

Oh, Cloud.

The long thin blade couldn't be brought around in front of Sephiroth without slicing through the entire front wall, at which point it really would collapse on his head. Sephiroth's hand worked very gently on the hilt, but he showed no other sign of feeling vulnerable. Cloud probably wasn't fast enough to hit him yet, not from the front. "If she would answer questions and stop running away like startled chocobo, none of this would be necessary."

Tifa wasn't used to being the one compared to a chocobo, but she guessed it wasn't the worst thing to be called. When you pissed off a chocobo they had a pretty nasty kick, after all.

Cloud's arms refused to sag at all. He was speaking through his teeth. "I was told you might not be in your right mind, but I listened to you anyway. I trusted you. I…I can't let you hurt Tifa any more."

"You. Let me."

"Yes, sir."

Sephiroth loomed. Cloud had only grown a little more after this, really, in size, but the trooper uniform made him look smaller than he was, and the sword pulled heavy at his arms in a way Tifa knew it shouldn't.

Except of course it should. Because he was only a boy, a normal if never really ordinary boy, and he had enough will to cut through a mountain when he let go of doubt, but he did not have a SOLDIER's monstrous power.

Sephiroth, absurdly, sounded mildly exasperated. It was a tone out of place like a flat note in the middle of a familiar song, against the bright ring of Cloud's determination, the roaring red background of Tifa's pain.

"What do you imagine I am going to do once I'm past you, Corporal? She can't answer questions if she's dead." A great inspiration to tell him what he wanted to know, truly. "Torture?" Sephiroth asked, and Cloud's expression must have shifted in a confirmatory sort of way, because Sephiroth's glare sharpened and he let out a sniff of disdain. "I'm not even trained in interrogation techniques," he said, dismissively.

Cloud didn't move. Tifa wondered if he already knew as well as she did that you didn't need to be, if you had a Restore and a decent magic pool. As long as you could stop short of killing them outright, it was possible to hurt someone endlessly for days, without the damage stacking until they expired, or even ceased to feel the new pain through the old.

Tifa was…fairly confident of her ability to hold up under torture. But if it got to that point, she didn't think she could expect to accomplish anything further, and the world was still far too close to lost.

She had to believe she'd told Vincent enough that he'd be able to make a difference. That he'd hold firm and keep fighting without her there to guide him. That Cloud would survive, and find him, and help.

Sephiroth was still talking. Masamune had vanished while her eyes were out of focus. That only made him more dangerous, in this narrow space. "Your friend has trespassed on company property, attempted major acts of vandalism, assaulted company personnel, and conspired with a wanted murderer. You have assisted in our efforts to take hr into custody. It is much too late for you to be loyal to her." His eyes narrowed, and had death in them. "Stand aside."

"I can't."

That decision was tormenting him, even someone who knew Cloud less well than Tifa could easily have known that. Sephiroth could probably see that.

The air was choking-thick with dust, and Cloud was terrified both that he was doing and that he had done the wrong thing, but his shoulders were straight and his chin was high. Her chest was full of warmth even though everything else was growing cold.

"Way to go, Cloud," Tifa said. She should probably be alarmed by the way her words tried to slur themselves. "But…don't."

This Cloud had fought this Sephiroth before, her kind of before, and won. But then he'd gotten his first blow in from behind, when the Nightmare had no attention to spare for anything but Calamity, and delivered the killing strike through a feat of self-sacrifice so astonishing the addled Sephiroth had again failed to do anything to defend himself.

This wasn't that situation.

This Sephiroth was in full command of himself and his awareness.

And Tifa might burn a small town herself, before she let Cloud die for her. (She wouldn't really. Unless everyone had evacuated. Or almost everyone. She'd burn down an otherwise empty town full of Turks for Cloud without a blink.)

She managed to sit all the way up, almost blacked out from the spike of pain that brought, and once she got her first clear look at her leg she saw why. Ugh, no wonder the shock was hitting harder than usual, her leg had three right angles in it. And bone splinters sticking out in several gory directions.

Tifa raised her head and looked Sephiroth in the eye over Cloud's shoulder. "I'll tell you what you want to know. In return, you stop terrorizing my hometown."

She didn't say anything about Cloud. He was already in enough trouble.

Sephiroth was six and a half feet of finely-smithed disdain. "Am I the terrorist here?"

"You're the one who smashed up the inn." And burned everything, burned it all, left me dreaming of fire for five years and then dragged Cloud and I into your memory of the burning, and made us watch it happen all over again.

But this one hadn't, yet, and wouldn't understand it if she accused him.

Sephiroth's nostrils flared slightly, which was…a new look? She was pretty sure? She wasn't really used to seeing him look angry; he spent most of his time in her experience gloating. He'd pinched his mouth like that yesterday and probably ten years ago too, and at the top of the mountain. Was pissing him off an ideal survival strategy?

Well, no. But surviving had never had an easy time remaining her top priority. Even before Nibelheim burned.

"Corporal," he said, without looking away from Tifa. "We have an accord. Stand down."

Cloud's whole body had sagged. He lowered the Buster Sword to the floor. Bent, to set it down without a bang. "Yes sir," he said quietly.

The defeat in him hurt to watch. Tifa had done this. He'd found his courage for her sake and she had taken it away.

But…it was better than letting him die.

Almost anything would be.

And she'd bought Nibelheim's parole with her promise. She didn't imagine it would hold if Sephiroth slid off the rails again, but for now…for at least a little while…it should keep him in check.

A pair of boots, crunching hastily over the mess of the front wall and up to the doorway; Tifa wasn't surprised when they turned out to belong to Fair, whose Sleep had probably broken when she admitted aloud the fight was over. She wasn't nearly centered enough right now to filter out distractions enough to feel whether a given spell was still active; Aerith might be good enough to manage that kind of thing in the middle of battle while injured, but Tifa would always be a knucklehead.

Fair had come bursting through the door onto the messy scene, taking in Tifa's semi-prone position and Cloud's dejection and the presence of his missing sword with slightly wild eyes.

"She's surrendered," Sephiroth informed Fair, who didn't look very happy at this news. "And the Corporal has thought better of his insubordination." He shot Cloud a poisonous look at this which struck Tifa as oddly nostalgic. The tendons in Cloud's neck stood out but he glowered at the floor instead of Sephiroth. He didn't look exactly ashamed, though. That was good.

"Surrendered, huh." Fair looked her leg up and down in all its shattered leaking glory. Looked mildly disgusted. Probably by the ugly wound, but potentially by Tifa. "So you're gonna come clean?"

"I have nothing to confess," Tifa corrected. The pain in her voice came through as anger, which she didn't care enough to soften. She was pretty angry. "But yes. Fine. You win." They weren't going to like her answers. But at least after going through so much to get them, they'd be more likely to believe her than if she'd volunteered the information.

That might not be enough.

She didn't care to be tortured or see Cloud held hostage again to get the real truth after she told them, so what…aha. Why had that been so hard to think of. She let all her weight slump back against the base of Old Man Hilgrid's desk.

"Get a helicopter," she told Sephiroth. "Get someone to fly a helicopter here. So I can show you." Her blink felt heavy and slow in a way she was pretty sure it shouldn't. "Can you get a helicopter without Hojo knowing about it?"

The uncertain way Sephiroth squinted at this question told her a lot more about him than she'd ever really wanted to know. "Perhaps." His tone filled nobody with confidence.

Fair spoke up. "I've got a way that might work." He fiddled with his phone, which had at some point left his pocket. "Would you say the Turks like Hojo?"

"Nn? No, they hate him." Had that question been meant for Sephiroth? Oh well. She'd stopped trying to hold up her head so most of her range of vision was now ceiling. "Why…?"

"I'm gonna call a friend of mine," Zack explained. "Yes, that friend. Cloud, don't look like that, he crashed the one time."

"A Turk?" That was Sephiroth. Bastard.

"Mm," Tifa agreed. Blackness was feathering in from the corners of her vision, like Genesis had come up behind her and started sticking his wing in her face from both directions at once. Never a good sign. "Good idea. Tseng's good at that. Keeping cards close and. Plaus'ble deniability. Thing. Jus' gotta give 'im a reason. To bother."

Fair's oversized arm was behind her head for some reason. The heat of his wrist on her shoulder was kind of nice. "Okay, two questions," his voice said from right above her. She made her eyes squint open. This gave her a great view of the scar on his jaw. It was a pretty cool scar. "One, are you dying right now?"

"Don't think so?" It felt mostly like just passing out, but who knew how much blood she was losing internally. She might be heading for a mild case of death, the kind you could fix if you got there in a hurry. "Got Phoenix Down?"

"No, which is why I'm asking. I'd rather not have to break your leg again but I can heal you now if I have to, to keep you alive."

"Ugh no," said Tifa. Not just because having your bones systematically rebroken after careless or rushed healing was the worst, but because sometimes you never could get it to heal quite right again; your body just sort of forgot what the actual healthy limb was like.

"Okay, second question. You think I should mention Aerith when I'm calling Tseng? To motivate him?"

"Nngh, no. Not by name." Why was he asking her to have opinions at a time like this. She had no opinions. She had a shitty fucked-up right leg. "Jus' in case." What would she do, if she wanted Tseng to meet her somewhere and not tell Rufus? "Be m'sterious."

"Tifa." It was Sephiroth's voice, dark and cold, and she bared her teeth reflexively at him before remembering she was supposed to be trying to get along.

"Tifa," And this time it was Cloud, crouching on the opposite side of her from Fair. He swallowed, and Tifa forced her eyes open for a second again. He looked so young and so scared. She wanted to reach up and brush his hair back from his forehead, rub her thumb over his cheek, but her hand didn't really care to move.

"What is the helicopter for," demanded Sephiroth, from somewhere out of sight.

She snorted. "So I can introduce you to the expert."

"Expert in what?"

Tifa snorted again. Kept asking dumb questions. "You," she managed to retort, before the black reached up and took her.

It wasn't her favorite way to get out of a conversation, but she'd take it.

A/N: I now have a Discord server at the suggestion of one reader where you can come yell at me about the fic or chat about ffvii or whatever. FFdotnet won't let me link, but if you find the AO3 version of the story it's there? That's a lot of trouble I know but you're welcome anytime. ^^ Sorry again about the extra couple weeks on that cliffhanger!