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11. Cissnei – Tutor

Cissnei didn't request guard-duty over Zack's girlfriend. Given the choice, she probably wouldn't have chosen to do it. She'd done surveillance of the Cetra girl before, but that was a long time ago, before Zack even made the SOLDIER programme. Back then Aerith Gainsborough had been just another of Shinra's background research projects, albeit one with more baggage and a different setting than the usual laboratory. Cissnei remembered Aerith as a gangly pre-teen, all knees and elbows, who shook her head when Tseng asked her to give herself up willingly, and then took shelter in a dilapidated church like it could protect her.

When Cissnei saw her next, however, Aerith was quite different. She'd grown up, and Zack had been there in the church with her. Technically, as Shinra employees, neither he nor Cissnei were supposed to be there. Zack, at least, could claim ignorance about Aerith's Cetra heritage. Cissnei, on the other hand, had no such excuse.

It was frowned upon to track Shinra's own unless you'd been ordered to. She could give no good reason for trailing Zack below the Plate, except ...

Except nothing. Zack was a case worth keeping an eye on after the business with Project G. At the time Cissnei had refused to acknowledge the why of her own behaviour, especially when she observed the pair going into Sector Five to sell flowers, of all things.

A SOLDIER First Class selling flowers in the bowels of Midgar? The idea was so surreal it went beyond laughable. Could Cetra manipulate minds or something? Cissnei knew only what she'd been told about that project, and she'd never wanted to know more. Wanting to know more than you were supposed to was deadly in Shinra.

Sometimes she thought the same could be said of being too human in the Turks.

She'd actually been wistful as she watched Aerith and Zack hug, talk, and do the kinds of things normal couples did, despite being anything but normal. Then she'd caught herself and stowed the wistfulness where it couldn't impede her judgement. A Turk had no business being wistful about anything, especially not relationships that weren't purely functional or too strained to ever work.

The life of a Turk was defined by its approach to hope. Turks were the product of Midgar as much as the sludge on the streets and the smoke that belched from Shinra's stacks. To Midgar and to a Turk, false hope was worse than no hope at all, and the kind of life bred here offered only the falsest. Once you accepted hope was an elaborate hoax, and that life really wasn't much more than this, you were a Midgarder. Once you crystallised your mind enough to see the bigger picture beyond mere hope, you were on your way to being a Turk. Once you were able to use false hopes as just another means of getting the job done, that was when you were a true Turk, not just a schmuck in a suit.

Cissnei had been a Turk almost as long as she could remember. She not only had no business being wistful, she had no right.

And yet …

Zack Fair. SOLDIER First Class. Formerly of Gongaga. Mentee of Angeal Hewley. Terminated the fugitive Hewley and now carried his sword. Second in Command to General Sephiroth. Cissnei's brain ticked over with his vital stats and pertinent bits of information. The problem was, these didn't make up the whole. The Zack Fair on paper was not the Zack Fair of real life.

Actually, the real problem was that she'd begun to see a difference between the two, and that was dangerous.

They both worked for Shinra. They'd both killed people in its name. Zack, however, still managed to retain that strange sense of honour that meant the blood on his hands wasn't as visible as the stains on her own.

Maybe it was his commitment to this honour. Maybe it was the fact he refused to become just a killing machine. Maybe it was that damnable way he had of making you forget he'd been trained to slice people up with that sword – including his own mentor. It happened in different settings – him in war-torn Wutai, her in Midgar back alleys – but Zack Fair was as much a murderer as Cissnei, yet he wore it so you'd never know. Cissnei could put on a fancy dress to go incognito at a formal Shinra event, and still feel blood caked under her nails and drying in her hair from arterial spray she'd washed off weeks, months, even years ago. Zack Fair could walk through Sector Five in a SOLDIER uniform, fully armed, and look innocent as a newborn baby. He still trusted. He'd been betrayed multiple times, seen and done terrible things, and yet he still trusted. He still believed in people's basic goodness; that someone could be redeemed long past the point Cissnei would have buried Rekka in their heart.

She'd wanted that. Not the foolish trust – that was just an easy way of getting yourself killed – but the underlying part. She'd refused to acknowledge it, even as she lurked in the shadows like a freaking stalker, but she'd wanted that ability of his: to fit in without giving up who he really was.

She still wanted it years later, after he vanished and the void where he used to be gave rise to unwelcome thoughts about why she missed him when they'd hardly been close friends. A Turk didn't have friends who weren't Turks, because only another Turk could understand what the job asked of you. What it demanded you become.

Zack was a SOLDIER, but that wasn't all of him. Somehow, despite everything, he'd managed to remain an optimist. He hadn't allowed the job to eat him alive, the way you had to let it take over when you were a Turk – at least if you wanted to survive.

As the years passed, she started to wonder where Cissnei the Turk ended and her true self began. Compartmentalising only worked when you didn't allow the segments of your life to spill over into each other. She used to be able to take off Cissnei when she took off the suit and thought of herself by her real name, but it was getting harder and harder.

Tseng looked like he'd been born in a suit. His hair got longer and he stopped tying it into an efficient little ponytail, but you still couldn't mistake him for anything but a Turk. Was she getting that way too? On the Costa del Sol she'd worn a bikini, but still answered to Cissnei. Had it already been too late back then, when Zack was still around?

Now Zack was MIA and Cissnei wasn't sure what to think anymore. Figuring it out was made all the more difficult when Tseng gave her this detail and refused to listen when she protested. She was to watch the Cetra girl. Moreover she was to watch out for her. End of story.

Maybe it was the promise Tseng had given to Zack, to watch over Aerith for him. Or maybe Tseng's own feelings for Aerith were what had motivated the order. He had to know about Cissnei's attachment to Zack, and he certainly knew about Zack's relationship with Aerith. Tseng was a canny bastard and ruthless about how he used that – something he fully acknowledged. There was very little he didn't know, and even less he said about it. If he'd set Cissnei to watch Aerith, he probably knew it would eventually become watching over something precious of Zack's, and that getting close to Aerith was like getting close to someone who'd left an imprint on your psyche like a handprint in dough. The Zack Fair on paper wasn't the Zack Fair of real life, and the Zack Fair of Cissnei's memories wasn't the same one Aerith had known. What better way to ensure the girl was protected as well as watched, than to tail her with someone who had a personal stake in her wellbeing? Albeit an extremely screwed-up one.

Cissnei had a vested interest in keeping Aerith alive. Wherever Zack was, he would come back to this girl. Cissnei didn't fool herself that she meant more to Zack than any of his other friends, but her profiler training told her he'd move mountains to return to Aerith if he was still alive.

Likewise, Cissnei knew Aerith's intuition was more accurate than any of the drivel reports Shinra passed down about not knowing where those of the Nibelheim mission had gone. Those reports were falser than a trophy wife's breasts. A clandestine Turk report, unbeknownst to the higher-ups, said Sephiroth had gone crazy, attacked his own people, and been taken out by a lowly infantryman with a lot of guts and even more luck. At the General's time of death, Zack had been alive, but afterwards been transported to parts unknown, and even the Turk information network had failed to locate him since then. In the absence of any concrete evidence to the contrary, Aerith believed Zack was still alive, so Cissnei believed it too.

She watched Aerith from wherever the shadows were deepest – the cage-like lattice roof beams, the top of a nearby building, somewhere people couldn't see and so wouldn't recognise the suit. It was difficult, so she tried watching her in civvies, which gave her more freedom to hide in crowds, but left a nasty taste in her mouth and eroded the boundaries of those internal compartments a little more. She went back to the suit the very next shift, and kept wearing it for each after that.

And then, just over a month after Zack was officially listed as missing, Aerith vanished as well.

Cissnei was angry enough to spit acid. It had happened while she wasn't on duty – the surveillance was shared between three of them – but for some reason she still felt responsible, as if she was the one who'd screwed up.

"There's no way she could just disappear." She was firm. "We find her. Immediately."

"She could've left the city," said Juu.

"Without us noticing?" demanded Tama.

Juu turned her calm grey eyes on him. "Without you noticing."

Tama's jaw tightened. He'd been on duty when it happened. If anything really had happened to Aerith, his head was the one that would roll. Or so he thought in his little greenhorn mind.

Actually, Cissnei knew it was all their heads on the chopping block. Both Tseng and the Shinra higher-ups wanted to keep hold of Aerith – or keep Aerith on hold until she was profitable enough to be interesting again.

"We find her," she said again. "We canvass the area. We don't stop until we know her current location."

"Possibly in some alley with a knife between her ribs," Juu said under her breath.

Cissnei put no inflection in her voice. "For all our sakes, you'd better hope not."

"Her mother's still in Midgar," Tama said hopefully. He was a new recruit – they both were. He and Juu made Cissnei feel old when the smooth skin in the mirror told her otherwise.

"Would she leave her mother behind if she left the city?" Juu mused.

"Depends," said Cissnei. "If she thought taking her along would endanger her, then maybe. Or maybe she didn't get a choice in the matter. Start with the mother, Juu. Stake out the house and report anything significant or suspicious. It's possible we're talking kidnap, not voluntary departure. Tama, check security footage of the city boundaries."

"What, all of it?"

Cissnei didn't bother to reply, just levelled a look at him that Reno once called Mother Hen Gone Bad.

Tama backed off. "Yes, Cissnei."

Cissnei.

Cissnei, Cissnei, Cissnei …

Was there anyone alive except herself and Tseng who knew her real name anymore?

I want him to know. The thought arrived in her mind without warning and fully formed, as if someone else had placed it there. She was shocked – and again when she realised it wasn't a lie. Of all the people in the world, she wanted Zack Fair to know the truth of the woman behind the Turk. She wanted to hear him call her by her real name. She wanted someone like him, someone genuinely good, to understand her.

Or maybe not. Maybe what she actually wanted was redemption, and there were few enough people in Midgar capable of giving it as it was, now Zack was gone. Aerith was a good person, too.

She realised Juu and Tama were still watching and mentally shook herself. Sentimental twaddle. Aerith was part of the job, nothing more, and Cissnei was nothing if not good at her job. "Fine. Move out."