Top Guide (In This Town)

Chapter Seventeen

"Huh?" Fair asked, twisting around. "Already? Wow."

Tifa agreed, a bit. Tseng must have been stationed somewhere a lot closer than Midgar, to get here even by air in less than half a day.

But then, Hojo had gotten people in in time to pick up the pieces of the Massacre before Cloud could bleed out. It made sense that there were Shinra people in range.

"Already," affirmed Sephiroth, and tossed the PHS underhand.

Fair snatched it out of the air, glanced at the screen, snorted, and pocketed it, even as Sephiroth advanced into the room. "Why didn't we just give Cloud my phone?" Zack asked.

Sephiroth's eyebrows said that he should know why, but Tifa was distracted from caring about the fact that Cloud was apparently off somewhere with Sephiroth's phone, as the man himself loomed at the foot of her bed.

When he stretched out both hands in her direction it was a struggle not to throw herself back to the limit of her bonds and bare her teeth. She curled one hand around the corner of the pillow, because a buffet around the head with that would give him less pause than a punch, but the pillow would extend her reach, which made it a little more likely to actually land.

But then he snapped the rope between her ankle and the bedpost between pinched fingers, as though it was a mere length of cotton string, and stood there for a second longer, looking down on her, expressionless.

Tifa scowled at him and drew her legs up, carefully, a palm flat on the bad one. He'd fixed almost all the damage to the actual knee, at least, so she should be able to walk. It would just hurt, especially on the hidden fractures running through the femur and shinbone. She rubbed at the loop of rope still around her ankle rather than the deep ache. That would be showing weakness. "Where are my things?"

Fair produced her knapsack and shoes, slinging the one over his own shoulder but passing the latter back to her. There was no sign of the Seal.

She hadn't expected to get her materia back, but she'd been hoping to get some actual benefit out of that belatedly packed bag.

But of course they didn't want to gear their prisoner up, and make it easier to run away. At least she got shoes.

Her first impulse was to fiercely not-limp down the stairs, presenting a strong front no matter what it took, the way she had every other time she'd been captured by Shinra. But they'd be less likely to be ready for her to sprint for freedom if she made a point of the broken leg. So she babied it, taking the stairs in a careful pattern of descent that put all the responsibility for work and tension on her good left leg, and required the right to hold her only long enough to bring the left down to join it.

This was less than half as fast as descending the stairs normally, and Zack Fair was already at the bottom, waiting with her bag over one bulging shoulder and visible impatience all over his face, before she got to the landing. But she wasn't the reason she had a broken leg, now was she.

"This will take all night at this rate," Sephiroth said from behind her, as she did reach the halfway point and paused a moment to take in the sight of the room below—the front wall patched up with a few strong timbers for structure but nothing to keep the wind out, and the debris swept up into a large untidy pile but not cleared away. Her blood was still staining the floor, though there seemed to have been some effort to mop up the puddle by the desk. There was nobody here.

She wondered where Mr. Hilgrim was staying, because she really doubted it was in the inn, which had clearly been taken over by Shinra. With his daughter, hopefully.

So busy was she evaluating the room and thinking about long-dead neighbors who were probably alive that she completely missed any signs leading up to the tree-sized man behind her stooping, wrapping an arm around the back of her skirt, lifting her off her feet, and sailing the rest of the way down the steps in three long strides.

It only took her a split second to realize what had happened, that she was being held in the crook of Sephiroth's arm like a toddler, pain shooting through her bad leg, one oversized hand pressed firmly over her wrists to keep her fists out of play, and in a truly magnificent display of mature self-control, Tifa let out a cry of outrage and attempted to bite him.

There was leather in the way, which after her first incandescent seconds of fury faded she was grateful for—successfully getting her teeth into Sephiroth and having him bleed into her mouth sounded like a crowning glory of terrible ideas. Jenova's cells were wildly opportunistic, and she doubted Sephiroth's version were much better, and she did not need to offer herself up as a new host for the virus that destroyed the Cetra, especially with no idea what the outcome would be without horrible Hojo and endless mako infusions.

The best case scenario was 'nothing,' but Tifa wasn't so opposed to science as to be careless about infection risk.

Everyone in Edge had gotten a thorough grounding in all major infection vectors, back right after Meteor, when Reeve was throwing everything he had into imposing basic hygiene and waste-management protocols on what had been trying to become a shantytown in the style of the old Midgar slums, only without a functioning city infrastructure to piggy-back off of.

They'd all gone over it again, more intensely, after Geostigma started to show up, before finally realizing it wasn't a contagion at all, but an attack of the body on itself.

(On the seeds of Jenova inherited through the contaminated Lifestream, and Jenova in turn trying to kill the sufferer off just as their pain and despair crescendoed, and gave her the greatest opportunity to infect their hearts, and return more tainted life energy to the Planet than had come out.)

That it wasn't catching, except in the way despair could be.

Not that everyone had accepted that. The rate at which stigma-bearers had been thrown out of their homes or murdered out of fear of contagion had only made the plague worse day by day. There was no surviving, after all, until the appearance of Aerith's magic fountain. Only enduring a little longer, in a world that sometimes seemed to have run out of hope.

"Put me down," she demanded coldly as they emerged into the town square.

"No."

She gritted her teeth and didn't struggle, because she knew how that would turn out in this sixteen-year-old injured body, and wanted to keep a little dignity.

Most of her weight was on her hips, in the bend of his right elbow, but the broken right leg was deriving absolutely no benefit from being dangled like this, one of the fractures halfway up the femur under constant strain as it was near the pivot point, where the support of Sephiroth's forearm ran out and the full weight of the lower limb became suspended.

The fragile barely-mended fractures in her knee were also taking more weight than they could afford. The least he could have done was picked her up from the other side, where the damaged bone would get some support from his body. From his stomach covered in its stupid high-waisted pants, and this huge ugly belt buckle.

But that would have tied up his dominant arm with carrying her, and of course he wanted that free for his sword. Ugh.

If anything attacked them, Tifa resolved to punch him somewhere vulnerable the second the weight of his left hand vanished from her wrists and gave her the chance.

The chin was the obvious target, perfectly placed above her for a single uppercut to stagger him, but there was some temptation to go for the diaphragm sitting naked about five inches above her lap.

(She respected the need for his continued cooperation enough, at least, to discard the possibility of going for the throat. She couldn't kill him that way even if she got extraordinarily lucky, after all. Not in one shot.

Even if his body couldn't take that hit without breaking, which was actually possible since he was supposed to be mostly human at this point and the human windpipe was extraordinarily fragile, there was at least one Restore in the party, and Fair who was pacing beside them would undoubtedly be able to patch up a simple tube of cartilage before the man could suffocate. SOLDIERs were tough.)

In the meantime, with several false starts, she managed to get the heel of her right leg hooked into his pants pocket, which relieved the strain a bit even if it put more torque on her knee. Bastard.

At least he hadn't pressed her directly against any of that bare skin. The idea of going through this without an insulating layer of coat made her flesh crawl. Was that an instinctive revulsion against what he was, or just her personal hatred? Did it matter?

There were lights burning in a surprising number of windows, considering the smell of the air and the position of the stars told her it was definitely well past midnight by now. Every visible window in Tifa's house except her own was lit up with steady Shinra Electric light, and Cloud's house didn't have a window but the flicker of an oil lamp danced from under the door, so Mrs. Strife was awake too, and might have company.

Tifa wondered which side she was on, if she was involved in whatever plotting was ongoing. Cloud couldn't be making it easy for her.

No one came charging out of any doors to rescue her from this latest, supremely undignified round of kidnapping, mostly to her relief and only slightly to her disappointment, and Sephiroth carried her down the path and out of town without any complications arising. The sound of Fair's boots behind them crunching gravel gave way to the softer sound of boots on turf, and then Sephiroth turned a sharp left and Tifa saw their destination, the spiky form of the vehicle like a waiting monster, in a circle of grass garishly lit up by great fluorescent floodlights affixed to the frame.

Tseng had brought his helicopter down a decent distance outside town, where the valley finished opening up and the plain grew level. It wouldn't have fit in the town square, of course, because of the water tower, but he could have managed nearer.

She wondered if he hadn't bothered to do that because the SOLDIERs had warned him the natives were restless, or just because he preferred a safer, flatter landing zone over attending to other people's convenience.

"Put me down," Tifa said again, as they drew close enough to see Cloud's silhouette at the near edge of the pool of light, waiting for them. His helmet was gone, so his hair showed. There was tension in his lightly armored shoulders, but not fear or hostility, and not so much shame that it was killing him. That was good, at least, though she knew now that she didn't know him as well as she'd thought she did. Couldn't make any assumptions about what he'd decided, since pointing the Buster Sword at Sephiroth.

Without responding, Sephiroth tipped her obligingly out of his grasp and onto the ground. Tifa managed to get her heel unhooked from his pocket and her good leg under her in time to jolt onto the turf without turning any of the greenstick breaks into open ones, and crouched there for a second, right leg outstretched and left doubled up under her. Sephiroth stepped over her ankle and kept walking.

Zack Fair stopped, instead, and offered her a hand up. Tifa took it, because he wasn't a monster, and that mattered. She didn't thank him. She let the hand go, once she was standing. Her leg throbbed. The worst break remaining was near the bottom of the femur, just above the knob of the joint, where her leg had turned its sharpest curve around the shape of the stone vessel.

Sephiroth reached Cloud, held his hand out, and received what had to be his own PHS. Cloud's body language was closed, but not openly hostile. It was still weird to see. Sephiroth turned and spoke a few words to the other trooper, who'd hung back closer to the chopper.

The man saluted, glanced at the approaching Tifa and Fair in a way she couldn't read under the helmet, and then jogged off past them, back toward Nibelheim.

That left only one member of the Shinra party unaccounted-for.

She dropped the useless question of where the final trooper was as the helicopter's passenger-side cockpit door swung open, and Tseng of the Turks appeared, bleached almost as pale as Sephiroth by proximity to the floodlights. There was no one else with him—he'd come alone, or else his partner was hiding.

Tifa found herself staring, a bit, because she was feeling the unraveling of time all over again, more sharply than she would have expected. Tseng was the first person since Cloud she'd seen in the past whom she'd known looking older, since Vincent hadn't noticeably aged and everyone else she'd run into so far had been dead.

He was already a grown man in this time, unlike Cloud, so the difference was slighter, but his thirties had seen his face assume much flatter planes than he had now, in his twenties. Even with the flat glare reducing him to patches of brightness and shadow.

And the ghosts in his eyes weren't nearly as pronounced, yet.

"First of all." Sephiroth interposed himself slightly between them as she approached, incidentally providing Tifa with some relief from the brightness of the fluorescent floodlamps. The fierce backlight made the edges of his long pale hair look like they were made of lightning, which would have been unsettling if Tifa weren't much too far past unsettled to care about such details. "Tseng. Do you recognize this woman?"

Tseng's eyes tracked over her rapidly, totaling up traits.

Tifa was fairly ordinary-looking, so perhaps he was allowing for the possibility that he had at some point met and forgotten her when he said, "Not at all. Why?"

"She speaks as if familiar with you."

Tseng blinked. "Ah. What exactly did she say?"

What had she said? She remembered Tseng had come up before she passed out, hadn't been surprised when Zack said he was coming, but the details were gone. She'd mentioned him earlier, too, in the underground lab-library.

Zack had said he'd promised to protect Aerith for him, before he left Midgar for what would have been the final time. And might still be yet.

"That you have a knack for plausible deniability," Sephiroth reported, "when properly motivated. And you are not a friend of the Science Department."

Tseng blinked again, and looked at Tifa past the SOLDIER General. "Hm."

"Can you confirm or deny either of these points?"

"I would say those are both requisite traits for succeeding in Administrative Research," replied Tseng blandly. A pause just a second too long. "Favoritism toward any department would prejudice our results, after all."

Tifa didn't really care about whatever Shinra dance of departmental politics was going on here, but she was not happy to see the considering and, in Fair's case, suspicious looks she was getting now, as though the idea that she might have successfully faked them out was settling in, as the most likely case for her Tseng-related data.

And, thus, for anything else she'd said.

That wouldn't do. That was absolutely the opposite of a good outcome. What did she have that she could use to disarm Tseng? Not a lot. He wasn't a friend, and technically he wasn't an enemy anymore, and she'd never cared about him when he was. He was just around, and…he'd known Aerith.

She didn't want to bring Aerith up in front of Sephiroth, any more than she already had. Certainly not as explicitly as she would need to, to make an impression on Tseng.

Which left her with only one tack to take. Straight into the wind.

"When you were six years old," she announced, a little too loud, speaking up across the inadequate barrier of Sephiroth's shoulders. "You became the only known survivor of the bombardment of Gua Do."

Tseng didn't move. Neither did Sephiroth. Fair's mouth had dropped very slightly open and he seemed to be groping for something to say, looking back and forth from her to his Turk friend, and back.

Cloud was squinting; she didn't think he knew what that meant, any more than she would have at his age. It was sort of surprising Fair did, but then SOLDIER had higher clearance, and he'd almost definitely joined up before the war was over, so he'd have had more reason to recognize the place-name, even if the battle would have been long before his time.

Gua Do had been the first location the Shinra managed to conquer in their war on Wutai—had become their staging ground at the far southern tip of the long crescent island, from which the rest of their campaign had been based. They had taken it after a week of stalemate, by resolving that they did not require the buildings intact to make use of the town, and wiping it out almost entirely with a combination of shipboard cannon and airborne artillery.

It had set the tone for the rest of the war.

Tseng had volunteered this fact about his origins tonelessly, without expression, one evening not quite two years ago—eight years, now, into the future. After he had most unwisely entered the Seventh Heaven on the anniversary of Aerith's death and Yuffie, more than half drunk, had called him a traitor to his nation.

(Tifa had never assumed Tseng was Wutaian at all—his name was, along with his looks, but he could easily have been born in Midgar to emigrant parents, or even grandparents—the metropolitan region was fairly old, even if the Plate had been newer. She wondered later if there was something in his voice or the way he moved that marked him as Wutai-born, if you knew what to look for, but had never asked.

Probably there was no difference, and the ethnicity was enough to claim him by and condemn him for, in the White Rose's eyes.)

Yuffie's face had twisted in uncertainty and rage at this reply before she'd thrown a drink to one side of his head—even very tipsy there was no question she'd missed on purpose, glass shattering behind his left ear—and stormed upstairs to sulk with Cloud on the roof.

(Tifa had gotten what Tseng's answer meant off Reeve, at the cost of a few questions, a double scotch, and enduring his discomfort at having the explanation. Reeve had had nothing to do with the war, personally, had taken over his entirely domestic department when it was halfway done with, but he had always made a habit of hoarding information in himself, and was therefore her best source for Shinra history.

It wasn't like there were any Shinra archives left, after Meteor, to look that kind of thing up. It wasn't like Shinra would have been wholly honest about the battle of Gua Do even if there had been.)

Tifa had only Tseng's word in the face of a drunken princess to go on, and just had to hope it was true.

Even if it was true, she couldn't be sure what had happened, back then, after Tseng survived the bombing and Shinra moved in.

Part of her imagined that he had been spotted trying to flee the wreckage of his home, seized roughly, accused of spying, handed over to the Turks like an object and forcibly made over into something Shinra could use. The way they had tried to do to Cloud. (To Nanaki and to Aerith and—)

But the rest of her knew this was unlikely. That was Hojo's way of doing things, and briefly it might have been Rufus', before his power was broken, before Weapon and Meteor taught him his hubris. That was Hojo's way of doing things, and it didn't very much work.

More likely was this: the Shinra forces had landed to take control of the strategically situated ruins. Someone had found a child huddled in the remains of a cellar. Poor little thing, someone had said, some perfectly decent Midgar citizen who thought this war was a necessary and heroic endeavor with unfortunate side effects. Let's get him warmed up.

Probably the regiment that killed his family had made a pet of him. Probably he had been noticed by the Turks, taken back to Midgar, trained. Given the suit and tie eventually as a reward. A paycheck. Sent up against any threat to Shinra that wasn't Wutai, rewarded in small ways for his loyalty, until…a Turk was all he was, and all he ever would be.

Tifa liked Tseng best, of the Turks that remained after Meteor. She would never forgive him for his role in dropping the Plate, but Tifa could tolerate many things without accepting them.

He would have to have been no more than sixteen, when he first tracked Aerith down, and chose to accept her bald-faced lie about who and what she was, and not dragged her back to Shinra. Tifa had felt that single sentence he'd shared of his origin had told her all she needed to know, to finally understand why.

Tseng was loyal to Shinra. Or at least, incapable of betraying them. But he knew very well that belonging to them was no kind of life, if you had a chance at anything better.

His expression was still utterly bland, but in the several strained seconds since she repeated what he'd claimed eight years from now, he'd gone a ghastly white that had nothing to do with lighting.

"You're a loyal Turk," Tifa said. Maybe loyal to the Turks, the way Fair had said Sephiroth was loyal to SOLDIER? She had never understood the relationship between the Turks and Rufus, so she couldn't guess whether it went this far back. "But Shinra stole you, and you know it."

Without expression or comment, Tseng turned around and climbed back into the helicopter, shutting the door behind him.

Sephiroth, Zack, and Cloud were all staring at her. Well, so what if she wasn't a cunning person? She had slapped Tseng in the face with his own personal information like a live trout. This was where her skills lay. This was what she had. She'd certainly gotten his attention, that was the important thing, right?

"He's not going to think I just tricked you by being mysterious now, is he?" she said, and walked forward, onto the ramp that led up into the belly of the vehicle with confident assurance, as if she was absolutely not the prisoner of her worst enemy.

She only limped a little bit.