Top Guide (In This Town)

Chapter Eighteen

A/N: Whoops I thought I posted this in October! Uhhhh next one should be sooner in consequence? Love you guys. Mwah.

Climbing aboard, Tifa found the helicopter Tseng had brought was fairly large, with four seats—one each for pilot and copilot, and two at the far rear for passengers. The belly of the thing between these two sets of seats was open, flat; adaptable for cargo or troop transport.

It could probably carry a dozen SOLDIERs, if they crammed in like canned fish.

She'd assumed that as navigator she would take the copilot's seat, and turned to do so once she'd gained the ramp, but Fair hurried up behind, caught her arm, and steered her back toward the rear set instead. Specifically to the place on the far side from the pilot.

Tseng had by now reinstalled himself in that place, apparently resolved to ignore her entirely. Nobody got into the copilot's seat, to Tifa's surprise—somehow she'd assumed Sephiroth would, once she was denied—so it wasn't that it had been reserved to the actual copilot, either.

They didn't want her near the controls, it would seem. Stupid. It wasn't like she could fly the thing; she'd picked up a few flight basics from Cid but none of it in a helicopter.

But they didn't know that, and she supposed they couldn't even be sure she wouldn't be willing to sabotage a vehicle she was in and die in a pile of flaming wreckage if it meant she could take Sephiroth down with her.

(Maybe that was why they had brought Cloud. They knew she wasn't willing to see him dead, though they probably weren't sure she wouldn't trade his life in exchange for taking out Sephiroth. Probably she ought to. But she wouldn't.)

No one took the other back seat, either. Sephiroth stood near the front of the open space between the two sets of seating intended to fit either cargo or a crowd of troops, looking oddly both taller and smaller than usual in a space that only gave him a couple of inches' clearance over his head.

He was watching her out of the corner of his eye. There wasn't much light, just what spilled in the front windscreen from the helicopter's external high beams and two dull strips over the doors on each side. These latter were dim enough that even though he stood directly beneath one, the gleam of mako in his eyes stood out, green glints against the gloom. But he had cat's pupils, so he could probably see her as well as she could see him, if not better. Annoying.

There was still no sign of the Masamune, suggesting he really could summon it to his side at will, even now as a living, primarily physical being. She had wondered. Or maybe he couldn't, and it was back in Nibelheim, and he was planning to get by without it. It wouldn't have fit inside the helicopter.

Maybe that was why he'd come all the way out here by truck, she thought, and had to swallow a laugh.

The other, friendlier SOLDIER First had dumped Tifa's knapsack in a corner behind Tseng's seat, well out of her reach, and was now dragging Cloud into a scheme to use a size-small Shinra Company hoodie, a plastic bag, and a big stack of paper napkins he'd pulled from somewhere to try to stabilize her sore leg against turbulence.

Zack Fair was making a noticeable, active effort to make her comfortable; she wasn't sure if it was to be ingratiating, in hopes of making her accommodating in return, or because he felt bad about the sabotage job Sephiroth had done on her healing. Or as a passive-aggressive way of letting Sephiroth know he disapproved of said sabotage job.

Or even just mostly to keep Cloud looking and feeling useful.

But the vibration of an operational helicopter was going to be hell on the damaged bones, and any cushioning would cut the pain a bit, and no one had proposed tying her down again. Tifa wasn't complaining.

She did point out that the fact that her feet couldn't touch the floor in a chair proportioned for big men was going to put a lot more strain on her knee than the helicopter's rattle, and Fair grabbed her bag from the corner again and wedged it under her foot, for support.

Sephiroth let him do this. Promising.

They were, however, both uncompromising on the subject of the safety harness, despite the fact that both of them and Cloud were standing up entirely unrestrained. Tifa tested the release mechanism, a button in the middle of her chest, and when it worked, submitted to the restriction without further argument. It wasn't worth it.

She was in a small vehicle with Sephiroth. That made her infinitely unwilling to be strapped down, but realistically as long as he was here it didn't make that much difference whether she was restrained or not. There wasn't much she could do against him unarmed, in a confined space, with a bad leg. This logic wasn't helpful, but it was persuasive.

"Okay," she said, once she was settled, as comfortable as she was likely to get. "Let's go."

A pause. "Don't you want to wait for your friend? Vincent?" asked Fair.

Tifa shrugged. She wasn't sure what Fair's game was, but she wasn't going to play into it. He wasn't suggesting they call out to Vincent, just wait for him; she didn't know if that meant Sephiroth had passed on her instructions to Fair about what Vincent should be told and they'd already been carried out, or that they weren't going to be, but asking would show weakness. "He'll come or he won't. Waiting now won't make a difference either way."

Dubiously, Fair told Tseng to take them up, and Sephiroth didn't countermand the instruction. The rotors spun up. Dust spread in a circle. The frame of the vehicle trembled.

The helicopter lurched slightly as its feet lost contact with the ground. Tifa could feel Fair fretting. She craned her head to look at Cloud, who gave her a faint smile. His eyes were clouded, but in this poor light Tifa couldn't begin to tell by what. It almost didn't feel strange that they didn't give their own light. She must be getting used to this new Cloud.

At the front, Tseng took one hand off the maneuvering yoke thing to pull a lever that evidently closed the door ramp.

The helicopter was eight feet up and the ear-splitting whirr had just changed pitch, which Tifa assumed to be a sign they were about to accelerate rather than explode, when a red streak detached itself from the nearby mountainside, ran down it like water, launched itself through the air, and somersaulted through the three square feet of space left open at the top of the closing door, to land neatly in the open patch of floor before Tifa's seat in a clink of golden sabatons.

Tifa beamed at him. He was adjusting to his body so well. "Hey, Vincent!"

She'd half shouted, to be heard over the rotors, and he raised his voice too, but kept his tone extremely bland, as if pretending very hard this was a normal speaking volume. "Hello." He swept his eyes over the entire population of the helicopter. "We're flying east?"

"Yes!"

He nodded, swept his eyes around the space. Zack Fair was recovering from the surprise, Sephiroth was looking stoic, and Cloud smiled awkwardly, only for the expression to fade when Vincent didn't reciprocate.

Tifa wondered if he knew about Cloud's role in the trap. It wasn't like he smiled pretty much ever, regardless.

Vincent took a step toward the cockpit, and Sephiroth blocked him. Very unambiguously, a shoulder with the elbow turned out shoved into his path, cutting him off from pilot and controls.

Vincent couldn't actually fly, either. He'd been shot and left in a coffin years before Shinra had amassed an entire private fleet of aircraft that they expected their security forces to be able to handle.

He was the second-tallest person here, if you didn't count Zack Fair's hair, but still had to tip his head back to look Sephiroth in the face from this distance.

He proceeded to do so for several seconds longer than could possibly be considered polite, until Sephiroth looked away first. Vincent's eyebrows crept up slightly at this, and then he turned aside and gave Sephiroth his space back.

That was unusually aggressive, for Vincent. Normally he didn't have much middle ground between non-interaction and homicide, unless he liked you or had a speech he especially wanted to make. Had Sephiroth managed to piss him off somehow? They hadn't really spoken, up on Mount Nibel.

"Everything okay?" Tifa asked loudly.

"No," said Vincent.

"…I'm glad you caught this flight," she said. She was. She would have felt guilty forever, taking other people to see Lucrecia before she brought him.

Strategically, it wasn't a great move hemming him in with Sephiroth, too. But she was the one who'd gotten herself captured, putting them in a poor strategic situation to begin with, so it would hardly be fair to make Vincent suffer for her mistake.

Half her tension had melted as soon as he arrived. That still didn't leave her terribly relaxed, but it was easier to think now. Vincent would have her back, at least against Shinra. Not that Cloud wouldn't, she didn't expect him to make the same mistake twice, but she'd had it violently brought home that he made a better hostage against her than a protector, right now.

"You need anything more filled in?" she asked. It wasn't that the arrival of a helicopter was exactly subtle, even if he hadn't been scoping around for why she'd missed their rendezvous. But he wasn't treating this as a rescue mission, so he must have gotten some kind of update.

"Your little friend shouted about it."

"Uh," Cloud said, when he found himself most unwillingly the focus of everyone's attention. "Sephiroth texted what you said to say." A jolt of anxiety at the back of his eyes, the fear that he might have been played for a fool again, but Tifa smiled a little to let him know Sephiroth had, in fact, been passing on her instructions. Even if he hadn't been the one she'd given them to. Cloud relaxed a little.

Sephiroth really had been lurking in the upstairs hallway at the inn, listening to every word she and Zack Fair exchanged. Probably staring out the window at the square, monitoring her house and everyone's comings and goings.

She shot him a narrow look; he looked blandly back.

Awful man. Though she supposed it was Fair she was annoyed with, really, for drawing her out like that with faked intimacy. It was just easier to aim it all at Sephiroth, whom she owed nothing. Not even vengeance anymore, really, under the circumstances.

She adjusted her shoulders in the harness, feeling resentful and sore and miserable and thirsty and trapped, though overall still better than before Vincent showed up.

The Hyper was definitely wearing off. Tifa debated the wisdom of asking for another one.

Leaving aside the reactions her captors might have if she came across as a stimulant addict, though, Hypers helped with exhaustion but tended to have bad effects on the judgment, especially if you stacked them. She needed to keep her head on straight. She should probably just power through it.

"Anyone have any water?" she asked.

Cloud fumbled into a pocket immediately and held out a flat canteen stamped with the Shinra logo. Tifa reached for it.

Fair interposed a hand.

Tifa turned to look up at him. "Seriously?" she asked.

He smiled, charming and awkward, pushed Cloud's hand holding the water back toward his chest. "Hey, I mean, he did just point a weapon at a superior officer earlier tonight, let us be jumpy, huh?"

Tifa narrowed her eyes. What do you expect him to give me, she could have asked, except it was obvious, and having it said out loud wouldn't help anything. Especially not Cloud, who was looking sort of wilted as he stowed his water away again. Fair might not approve of what Sephiroth had done to her, but he would enforce it anyway.

With somewhat more rummaging than it had taken Cloud, Fair produced his own identical canteen, and held it up triumphantly.

"Here." He bent over her as he held it out, close enough she could have broken his nose with a well-placed headbutt.

Tifa looked across the canteen up at him. "They don't deserve it, you know," she told him. It came out almost gentle, barely audible over the noise of the helicopter. For his ears alone.

It wasn't fair—he was a grown man, blooded and more than capable of being cruel. She'd killed Shinra employees his age and probably younger just for being in her way; it wasn't fair that something about him kept telling her heart she was looking at a child, telling her to be kind. This version of him had never died for Cloud. She didn't owe him gratitude any more or less than she owed Sephiroth revenge. But that didn't change how she felt. The impulse to be kind in saying, "They'll never repay this loyalty."

His other hand came up to rub the back of his neck as the canteen sank a little, and he heaved a sigh, staring at the floor. "I know," he said finally.

It was a shock, to hear aloud, and it wasn't. What else could he have said, here in this space full of people stolen and created and betrayed by Shinra. Could he really have argued for Shinra's sake in the face of Tseng and Vincent's histories, of Sephiroth's origins, of what he himself had done to Cloud just this past day and what he suspected had been done to Tifa?

He meant it, though. That defeated edge told it. He really did know that. That they didn't deserve him.

"But—" He looked up, across the close, dim, shuddering space of the helicopter belly, toward the tall ribbon of black and silver lurking against the far bulkhead, pretending to be uninvolved. Tifa followed his look.

"Oh," she said. Her heart broke a little. He'd known, even the first time, that Shinra wasn't good, even if he hadn't felt it was bad enough to stop fighting for. But he thought Sephiroth deserved not to be betrayed.

It was after Sephiroth betrayed him that Shinra followed suit, and everything fell down for him, until he died within sight of his goal, surrounded by the bodies of his peers. Shinra was like that.

She wondered for the first time if any of the SOLDIERs who had come to take him down had been his friends. If he'd died because he couldn't bring himself to kill them. Or if he'd killed them, and then died anyway.

But this wasn't that man. The one shaped by five years in hell. With Cloud. This was who he'd been right before it all shattered. And that, probably, was why she kept looking at him and seeing a child. Or maybe it was the way the corners of his eyes had crinkled when her words hit home, pain flitting out into the open from behind his slipshod but persistent defenses. The way the canteen kept sinking, slowly, out of the air between them.

Probably it was just that Cloud and Aerith had loved him, in another time, and she knew his death, as the story of a hero's tragedy, and that made him one of hers. It would be so hard to kill him, if she had to.

She reached out and took the water. "Thanks," she said, and drank.

She could almost hate Zack Fair for making it hard to hate him. In the end, if he chose the wrong side…she'd have to try to anyway. She'd never learned the comfort with murder it took, to approach it dispassionately.

They rode in silence except for the pounding of the helicopter's blades against the sky, for another thirty or forty minutes, after Tifa returned Fair's canteen half empty. Cloud shifted from one foot to another a few times, going in and out of parade rest, then leaned his back against the wall.

That wall was also a door that unfolded down into a ramp, so this was daring of him. Maybe he was too busy fighting nausea to worry about falling to his death.

Fair took the sword off his back, a little after that, and started doing squats. There was just enough space in the helicopter's belly for this to be only a mildly insane course of action, rather than an appallingly rude one.

Sephiroth and Vincent held their positions just behind the pilot and copilot's seats, doing a great deal of pretending not to be watching each other. It would have been funny under other circumstances.

Tseng broke the silence twice, not raising his voice to be heard but using his headset to speak through the helicopter's intercom system. Both times it was tonelessly to check his bearing with Tifa, who had to yell back. She didn't normally navigate by the sort of mathematical formulae used by aircraft, but thanks again to Cid and his constant training of new pilots she understood them, at least well enough for this. It wasn't exactly a small target.

The caldera always felt as though it stretched over nearly a quarter of the continent, when you were right over it. It wasn't that big, not really—probably only about the size of Midgar, which was large enough to see from space but only as a blot of black, like a scorched thumbprint, in the middle of the brown wastes that were its hinterland.

Even under no light but the crescent moon, the great valley stretched unmistakeable below them, a deeper, softer print from the same great hand. The mountains crumpled up around it, wrinkles of stone tracing the dark circle of the lake in less perfect iterations of the same circle.

When Tseng folded down the door Cloud wasn't leaning against, to give them all a view, even Sephiroth seemed impressed. Vincent didn't, but it was Vincent. Cloud came halfway across the 'copter for a better look. "Here?" Tseng asked.

"That's it!" Tifa confirmed.

Fair whistled. "I see why you wanted the helicopter." Fearless, he looped one hand casually around one of the handles over the door, and leaned out a little to get a better look at the ground. "Looks like about the only way to get in."

"A sure-footed enough chocobo can get right over," Tifa said absently, stretching and squinting from her strapped-down position to get a look at the valley below. She'd only come here twice, and it had been years ago. Even if that was actually much more recently than she'd visited most of the trails over Nibelheim, she didn't know this place nearly as well. It had never been home. "A human could manage the climb too, with the right equipment, but it would take a long while."

"Is that how you got in?" Fair asked cheerfully, neatly ignoring the hypothetical way she'd phrased that.

"Take us down on the northwest side," Tifa told Tseng, ignoring the question. "Up near the waterfall." She was sure he raised an eyebrow, but he complied without comment, hovering them along the curve of the lake to make up for having gone a bit too far south, then carefully downward toward the smooth green sward.

"Jump?" Fair asked Sephiroth when they were still a few hundred feet up, outrageously and with complete calm. Sephiroth shook his head, so she didn't get to see what had apparently been a standard use of the SOLDIER resilience, back in the day. Which was now.

Flatness was apparently the most important criterion for landing a helicopter, just as it was an airship, only the space needed was smaller, and so they wound up low beside the shore where the slope was gentlest, looking up at the bowl from inside. Very like how Tifa first remembered seeing it, when they'd surfaced in their stolen submarine and gaped out at this hidden valley, with no idea it held anything important.

"And you didn't even crash a little bit!" Fair congratulated Tseng once the rotors began to spin down again. "See, Cloud? Nothing to worry about."

"Hah," Cloud muttered. "Yeah."

Sephiroth and Tseng were both pretty obviously prepared for an ambush. Which only made sense. Cloud looked about ready to jump out of his skin, but she wasn't sure if that was the same thing or just a reaction to the excruciating social situation.

Vincent looked like he was dying of emotions, but only if you knew him well. He still managed to continue contributing to the general tension with his silence.

"Looks like a nice place!" enthused Fair, apparently mood-blind, bending over Tifa to unfasten the safety webbing, as the ramp-door unfolded to her right.

"Quiet," said Sephiroth tonelessly.

It took Tifa a moment to recognize this as commentary on the hidden valley, and not a command to his excessively exuberant subordinate. There was the sound of the waterfall, surprisingly soft for how much water it was, but noisy enough at this end of the valley, so strictly speaking it was not true, but she knew what he meant.

"I've never seen a monster here." She'd rarely seen any kind of animal, even, though there were fish in the lagoon. Even those might all have swum up from the ocean through the hidden tunnel, rather than living in the lake. Though the lake was freshwater, and she wasn't sure which species could handle both. "It's…peaceful."

That comforted Vincent, a little. Peaceful was better than most things you could say about someone having locked themselves up in a cave for over twenty years.

Peaceful, but sad, too, of course. Tifa couldn't be sure, but she thought it had been a sad place even before Lucrecia Crescent came here in her sorrow. It had been a holy place of the Ancients, and they were so long gone. The remote altar didn't scream its emptiness the way the abandoned city in the North did, but the loss was still there. Still loud.

"So perhaps there is some peace to be sought for," Vincent murmured, just loud enough to hear even with ears still mildly deafened by prolonged exposure to the sound of helicopter rotors, and over the noise of falling water. "Even at the end, in the dark, after all is lost."

This remark further disconcerted the Shinra contingent, including Cloud. Sephiroth in particular looked annoyed, which in turn annoyed Tifa. Yes, Vincent took some getting used to, and she'd been embarrassed by his intensity a time or two herself, but Sephiroth had no business censuring others for melodrama.

"Is the party we're meeting another rogue element?" he asked sourly.

Tifa shrugged her way fully free of the safety webbing, chivying Fair back out of her personal space both because she didn't need his help and to give her some space to stand into. He took her bag with him, dammit, and she was glowering half-heartedly after him when she answered, "Not really."

"But they do have a history with Shinra," Sephiroth said, as if this conclusion were an admission on her part, as though having left Shinra, under any circumstances, was as fully a condemnation in his eyes as having ever been Shinra at all had once been in Barret's.

If he was judging all deserters by Genesis the Clone Army that made a little sense, but Tifa still felt her lips wanting to draw back, not into a smile but into the menacing expression just short of a snarl that usually only burst out of her when she was battered half to death, with her Limit gauge almost full and one healing potion left. But without the edge of exultation that usually came with that sort of combat high.

She suppressed it into just the shadow of a sneer, and then sent that away too, and sighed, and leaned back a little in the seat she had yet to leave, and asked: "Don't you ever wonder what it would take for Shinra to throw you away, too?"

Sephiroth had. That was interesting, and promising. He mastered his face after only about a second. Looked bored and faintly pissy, which Tifa vaguely recalled as his neutral expression the first time she'd lived through this week. "I am an employee in good standing."

"Don't be more stupid than you can help," Tifa said wearily, levering herself up out of the seat and absorbing the very slight drop to the floor on her good leg. Wishing intensely for more healing and sleep and food and time. Why was there never enough time. Time ought to be what she had the most of, now. "There's no way you don't know Shinra sees you more as a product than a person."

She stepped out onto the helicopter ramp, leaning the bulk of her weight on the hand grasping the door frame for as long as she could, and only gingerly transferring it to the bad leg. Definitely worse now. Dammit. "And in some ways, I bet that's better. They value people less than things they own. But nothing's irreplaceable."

She thought of the Tsviets, shaped in the dark around (as best she could tell) the frankly idiotic idea that the problem with Sephiroth had been that he was too normal and sane.

None of the men following her out of the helicopter replied to what she could admit was an incendiary statement, and she glanced back. Fair looked pained, like he had earlier when admitting Shinra didn't deserve him. Sephiroth's face was forbiddingly closed.

Cloud's was an absolute study in complicated microexpressions; if she didn't know him as well as she did she'd have no idea what he was thinking at all.

As it was, she could pick up worried (probably that Sephiroth would react badly), astounded (likely by her lack of delicacy), embarrassed (on whose behalf?), and vaguely sick—the last one might be because he was still adjusting to having a bleak view of Shinra, though maybe it was lingering motion sickness, or about something more specific, like the idea that it was safer to be property than an employee.

(Tifa wasn't making that up, either—it wasn't just that the executive summary of the consequences of dropping the Plate had been given in gil of property damage, as she lurked in the ceiling and seethed. Reeve had confirmed that it was actual policy.

Employees were an ongoing expense, needing paying as they did, so the most replacing one cost the company was a little lost productivity in training time. But a thing owned outright and destroyed was a loss of its whole value; thus a battalion of troops or unit of workers were always a preferable loss over combat materiel like helicopters, or the equipment on a factory floor. They could be replaced at only the additional cost needed to train them. Lives could not be measured by a bank balance and thus, to Shinra, they did not exist in any way that mattered.

And that was why, if they were not stopped, they would end the world.)

Vincent, at least, was well past being shocked or offended at the idea that Shinra was a shithole working environment, with a shithole sense of loyalty. He looked the kind of bland that might be at everyone else's expense.

She sighed. There were still Shinra loyalists in her future, of course—people who remembered the flow of gil and the shine of lights as prosperity and ached to have it back; people who had trickled back to work for Rufus, and how could you complain when the things he was investing in rebuilding were all things people needed?

(Profiteer. Trading in dependency and the power of human need. No matter what anyone said, he was no different from or better than his father, though as long as his power was kept in check at least he'd never be worse.)

"Look," she said, when the awkwardness had drawn on for several seconds, enough that she had to conclude Fair and Sephiroth weren't going to get past her latest fit of bluntness on their own. "I don't have the energy to be nice about Shinra right now. It's a disaster. You know that. I know you know that. But I can try to avoid talking politics if it's making you guys this uncomfortable."

'Try' being the important word, though. Sephiroth was a strategic asset, his existence was political. Even without the secondary existential threat of Jenova.

And politics were the worst thing ever and Tifa didn't want to think about them, let alone be responsible for solving them, but here she was. Nowhere to go but forward. If she let herself pause, doubt, hesitate, she might never move again.

Sephiroth said, "I am aware of the level of emphasis the company places on retaining the services of certain individuals." Which was a sort of impressive feat of heavily weighted neutrality, as sentences went, had he gone to the same school of diplomacy as Tseng?

…actually that seemed pretty likely. Hm.

"Now," Sephiroth continued, his voice sharpening into an almost physical force to push them on from the subject, "why are we here?"

Tifa nodded to the towering waterfall, uphill and east of them. "This way."