A/N: Gosh, it has been a while, hasn't it? Dang ponies claiming my soul ...

54. Cissnei: Autumnal

Autumn. Cissnei was too tired to push away the imagery. Change had hit her, and hit her hard. After seeing Zack for the first time in years, and meeting his parents in Gongaga, she feared whatever next blow fate delivered would strip her of the last of her carefully constructed defences.

She hadn't taken them in; Zack or the comatose blond man with him. Her orders had been clear, and she'd wilfully gone against them. She hadn't recovered the two missing specimens.

But she'd tried. She had even attacked Zack by throwing Rekka at him. Not with enough force or accuracy that he couldn't easily deflect the giant shuriken, but in that instant on the shoreline she had wavered more in the following of her orders than during the entire rest of her career. Everything that had happened had ganged up at once in her brain – all the deaths of her fellow Turks; the culture shock of returning to her old responsibilities after being on the run with Aerith; Aerith herself, plus what the situation with her meant for Zack now … Cissnei's hand had faltered, and not just because she was staring at a dead man, or because her heart was throwing itself against her ribcage in an effort to break free.

Autumn used to be a beautiful time. In her travels with Aerith, Cissnei had gotten to see it in its former glory, in those places where mako reactors hadn't yet poisoned the soil so nothing could grow.

'Poisoning the soil'? Damn, she was beginning to sound like one of those psychotic eco-terrorist groups. She'd have to watch out for that.

But looking out during the journey back to Midgar to make her report, she felt too weary to resist the depression of encroaching wasteland the nearer they got to the city. Grass gave way to bare earth, as if they were in the middle of a drought, despite the rain yesterday. Trees became shrivelled husks and then disappeared entirely. Even the sky seemed to get greyer. She found herself longing for six months ago, and the life she'd left behind.

Except that it hadn't been a real life. She shook loose the dangerous thoughts. Her time on the run had been part of an assignment, not a buffet of alternative lives for her to pick from now she was questioning her own.

Was she questioning her life? Her job? Being a Turk?

No. She couldn't. She couldn't afford to.

But was the fear curling in her gut actually about change threatening to take away a façade she was wedded to out of familiarity, leaving the bare bones of her life exposed? Despite whatever problems Shinra ran into, things had always been okay for Cissnei the Turk. She had cash in the bank and an accomplished record of service. She had a succession of bosses who respected and trusted her, two things that didn't come easily for Veld or Tseng. She was still alive, still sane, and knew her own worth. Not many people could say they were intimate with their own value.

Yet as she looked at Zack on that beach, sneaking up behind him like a sniper or a thief, she'd seen something in herself that made her acutely aware of how each breath rasped in her throat: the cobbled together, freelance quality of her existence. She had a job she'd been thrown back into, which no longer felt such a good fit as it used to. She had colleagues who seemed subtly changed into harsher versions of themselves, and she couldn't tell if they really had changed or if they'd always been that way and she'd just grown softer. She worked for a company that took its own people and performed horrific experiments on them like they weren't even human. She had nobody to come home to when she clocked off, if she clocked off and if she came home at all. She had a fading echo of childish laughter for company, and an urge to take off her suit and wear something less restrictive.

Basically, she had a screwed up head, an even more screwed up heart, and nobody to talk to about any of it.

Not that she would have talked to Aerith anyway, but just having someone there, available if you wanted to unburden yourself, was better than nothing. It had been a comfort, actually. Guilt and self-doubt were nasty bedfellows who stole the sheets and left you shivering all night long, and never brought you tea of a morning – not even tea that tasted like bitumen dissolved in sugary gerbil pee and milk.

I can't believe I miss Aerith's terrible tea.

Tabitha Fair's tea had been lovely. She'd served it in a chipped mug that didn't match anything else in her cupboard, and sat across from Cissnei with her husband holding onto her shoulder, her gnarled hand over his. She'd asked about Zack, making pleasant small-talk even as Cissnei tried to evacuate them from their home.

Cissnei knew it was wrong for her not to have corrected the woman when she mistook Cissnei's friendship with their son as a relationship. She should have told them Zack was irrevocably bound to – for – someone else, and that there was far more between those two than between Zack and herself. She should have. She wouldn't have had to give any details that required authorisation, and it would have been the right thing to do. It may even have made the evacuation smoother if they hadn't become so suddenly attached to her. She'd almost been able to see the pair of pleading green eyes in her peripheral vision, begging her to let them know, but instead she'd given in to her own selfishness and allowed Tabitha Fair to press her free hand to her mouth with a squeak of joy.

"You're such a lovely girl, dear," she'd said, taking Cissnei's fingers in her own. Once upon a time Cissnei would have snatched them away, but she'd left them there and let Tabitha squeeze them tight. She couldn't feel it much. The injuries from her early training with Rekka had also left her with extensive nerve damage and scars that necessitated she wore gloves at all times. She could throw projectiles with deadly accuracy, but she couldn't tell they'd bitten into her own flesh until she noticed the bleeding.

Aerith had been shocked when Cissnei first took off the ever-present fingerless gloves. The collection of livid red knots and shimmery purple lines were stomach-churning on a first viewing. Cissnei used to sit on the edge of her bunk, staring at them and wondering how much more Veld would expect her to give in the field if that was what she had to give during training. The proof of her early failures was almost as closely guarded as her real name – she was ashamed of the marks for more reasons than one. They'd been made by a different girl than Cissnei the Turk, and the sight of them made her sullen and embarrassed at their ugliness.

Showing them had been to add to a disguise to keep herself and Aerith unnoticed, since anyone who looked at the scars inevitably looked away again. It had been one of many sacrifices Cissnei had made in the last four years. Yet Aerith hadn't asked, and had actually laid her hand over Cissnei's as they passed a checkpoint on a major highway. Cissnei had been bizarrely grateful for that. Aerith's hand had been cool and dry where she could feel it against the segments of undamaged skin. Acceptance was one of the things Aerith did best.

There wasn't any reassurance in Tabitha Fair's grip, but there was acceptance, and also love and relief. It had to be hard, holding on to love for a son who'd left you and the life you'd built before he'd even finished puberty. The Fairs weren't a wealthy family. They'd scrabbled for what they had, only to find their only child wanted more than a life dug from the ashes of past tragedy.

Yeah, he went off and dug one from fresh tragedies of his own. Cissnei had shut her eyes against the unhelpful thought, and so missed what Tabitha said next.

"Huh?"

"I'm so glad he found such a nice girl to settle down with."

"I'm not so nice," Cissnei had tried to protest, meaning to go on about them not settling down together either, but Zack's mother had waved away her words.

"We always worried about him. He never really … fit in around here, but Midgar's so far away, and you hear such stories." She'd shaken her head and beamed. Not just smiled, but beamed with all the motherly love Cissnei had missed out on at the orphanage, but never actually missed until that moment. "I'm sure you're very good for him. You seem the type."

"Type?" Cissnei had said hoarsely.

"Trustworthy. Genuine. I'm an excellent judge of character, dear, and you're definitely a sincere soul. I can tell these things, you know. You seem very … real. Like our Zack. True to yourself and those around you. He wouldn't have picked you, otherwise."

In the present, Midgar loomed huge and terrible. Thoughts, memories, doubts, fears, misplaced affections and other emotions swirled inside Cissnei like the world's least drinkable cocktail. And what rose to the top, like scum, was an aching loneliness she'd never felt before – or at least never allowed herself to acknowledge. Not when she returned from Mideel to learn Sandan had been killed and that, with Youhei uncontactable, she was effectively the only female Turk left. Not when she perused the papers in Aerith's box. Not when she heard the hostility in Zack's voice. Not when the admissions she should have made to him clogged in her throat like bile – one about herself and one not.

Tell him, the green eyes had seemed to beg. You have to tell him about what he missed over the last four years. You have to tell him about me. You have to tell him –

Cissnei had felt guilt, especially when she thought of Aerith's unbreakable belief that he was still alive, but she'd never let herself feel lonely and cut off like the whiny, angsty teenager she'd never been while Veld was around to prevent it.

Turks didn't cling and didn't linger over death.

If she died, would anyone grieve for her? Would she be remembered? Would there be a hole where she used to be, or would she be like Naifu, or Sandan, or Helena – one more name to be swept under the carpet by the Shinra corporate machine?

Dangerous ideas indeed.