As always, love to my beta and all who reviewed!

•••

"Shouldn't you be in the infirmary?" Rufus asked, but he didn't have any polite undertones of worry. If Tseng should be in the infirmary, he should be in the infirmary, and Rufus was going to be peeved if he got himself put out of commission longer because he was standing in front of the president's desk at three in the morning, blue suit freshly pressed and all.

"Hojo is gone," Tseng said, staring at a point somewhere in the window behind Rufus. All of the Turks did that.

Rufus's hand stuttered in the movement of reaching for his stapler, efficient smoothness failing him for one telling moment. "…excuse me?"

"Professor Zohan Hojo is AWOL from Shinra Headquarters," Tseng recited briskly, because Tseng knew nothing if he didn't know protocol. "Somehow, large measures of his living experiments have disappeared with him, though no other staff members are missing."

Rufus took a long moment to damn everything he could think of, starting the list at his dead father (just for the hell of it), running down through Hojo and all his staff, and ending with Cloud Strife for reasons he couldn't currently explain. Wrenches in his plans were not appreciated, and this wasn't just a wrench – this was the whole set of power tools. Hojo was important, if only because he had some idea of what the hell was going on; Rufus knew he was bound to drop dead or just disappear eventually, but he'd thought the man would have the grace to leave some research behind.

"His journals?" He asked Tseng, once his mental litany of cursing was concluded.

Tseng's shrug was almost apologetic. "Gone as well."

He'd figured as much, but every little possibility had to be checked. Damn it, this was the last thing he'd needed, with so much already on his plate. Bad enough that they hadn't quite figured out why Sephiroth was pulling a walking dead – though Hojo, the bastard, had probably known and just didn't feel up to telling anyone – and weren't sure what direction to take with that; now they were left almost completely in the dark. All he needed was for Avalanche to blow up a reactor and he could call it a day, so it was a good thing they were otherwise occupied.

"Get Reno and Rude on it," Rufus ordered, gathering up his thoughts. "And then go back to bed."

Tseng looked for a moment like he wanted to object, but saluted crisply and left the room without a word.

Rufus dropped his head to the heel of his palm. "I need a scotch," he murmured to the buzzing of the fluorescent lights.

•••

There wasn't a living monster left between the City of the Ancients and their chosen campsite. The outlet for anger and pain couldn't have been ignored, and they were all trying to exhaust themselves. Tired people didn't think well, didn't dwell on what had just happened. Zombies had perkier campsites.

Barret stroked Tifa's hair gently, trying to offer some comfort to her. She looked so little and torn up, like he'd never seen her, like he'd never wanted to see her. Tifa was a strong girl, through and through, and deserved better from life than what it had given her. It made him feel like throttling someone, make no mistake.

They were all sort of sharing first watch, milling around and staring at nothing with blank and tired eyes, conversation sparse and taut. Barret could feel it like a fuse being lit, the deceptive, tiny crackle of flame right before the big bomb went 'boom'; he'd felt it before, in Corel, in Sector Seven. Maybe the shit had already hit the fan, but it was also preparing to go south in a huge fucking way.

He'd liked Cloud – they all had – and that was what made it worse. Or, maybe, the most horrible part of it was they'd all liked Aeris just as damn much, and her affection for Cloud had been plain as day, and visa versa. Cloud had been an asshole in the beginning, sure, but he'd also given Marlene a flower and sometimes his arrogant veneer would accidentally chip off a little, and he'd smile like a dork and his step would bounce just a little and he'd act like a kid. Aeris had always been smiling, even if she was being a complete ass to someone - girl had a mischievous streak a mile wide, didn't even try to hide it. Too young, both of them, and sometimes it felt like Cloud was even younger than 'too young'.

"I…" Tifa started; fluttered off.

"S'alright, girl," Barret said, because there was nothing else he could say. He'd learned a long, long time ago that there were no magical words that were going to make it better.

Right now, he just wanted to find Sephiroth or Cloud or who the hell ever and rip their throats out for what they'd done. It might not fix the situation, but it would make him feel a sight more pleasant.

"We need to figure out what we're doing," Nanaki said, staring at them with old-young cat eyes. "Aeris's soul has joined with the planet now and…"

Whatever well of preternatural calm Nanaki usually drew from was obviously failing him, his words more his grandfather's than his own. He was saying those things because he thought Bugenhagen would approve of them, not because he honestly 'knew' that they should move on. In any case, his own idea or not, Red was right – shit had to be done, even in the worst of times.

"We'll keep on going," Tifa choked out. "We'll stop Shinra and Sephiroth and that bitch Jenova. Cloud would have wanted it that way."

"He ain't dead," Barret pointed out, trying to keep the heavily implied 'yet' out of his tone; no use upsetting Tifa further.

Vincent looked up from a dismantled sidearm. "If Jenova has him, he's as good as." A long pause. "Or worse."

Barret glared at him. "Why the hell can't you just try actin' a little sensitive, for once?"

"Because acting like everything is coming up fucking roses is going to do a hell of a lot of good," Cid snapped, fumbling at the battered pack tucked away in his goggles for another cigarette.

"Watch your mouth," Barret growled.

Tifa he trusted because she was Tifa and damned if he didn't love her like a part of his own family. Nanaki he accepted and believed in because he'd been wronged by Shinra, deeply. Yuffie was just a silly, stupid, misguided kid, and Barret knew where he stood with Cait Sith and his controller. Cid Highwind, however, he didn't trust and couldn't read, and it was ten times worse with Vincent Valentine. They both had Shinra stamped all over them, though at least with Cid he knew why.

Those two just worked into his temper like splinters and lodged there. They were supposed to be allies, through and through, but Barret always felt like they weren't on the same page. Sure, Highwind was pissed at Shinra, but it wasn't the soul deep rage that came with the wrongs Barret and Tifa had gone through; it was personal, plain and simple. Vincent was just a lunatic Cloud had taken a shine to, which was becoming less and less a reason to trust him.

"Yup, we'll just sit here and have a damn picnic. The world is fucking shiny." Cid made an irritated hand gesture that ended with a finger jab toward Tifa. "The girl can shape up, 'cause Red's right – we've got shit to do."

"Screw you," Tifa hissed.

Despite being a top notch martial artist, she didn't generally get confrontational, but Barret didn't blame her for finding the end of her temper. Hell, he was holding himself back from encouraging her.

•••

The so-called adults were acting like, well, adults, and Yuffie just found that endlessly depressing. They'd had an awful day, but they'd all managed to keep it sort of together until they'd made camp, and normalcy sent things straight to hell. Adults were like that, including stupid Godo, and it seemed Cid shared her father's trait of being absolutely calm in a crisis, but freaking out as soon as the little things settled in. Or maybe he'd just been in too much shock to really lay into the screaming until now.

In any case, she wished they'd shut up. She was tired and hungry and her head felt all heavy from the crying and her heart felt all heavy because Aeris and Cloud were gone. She might have been the youngest, but at least she could see when being bitchy wasn't going to help anybody. Ripping each other limb from limb really wouldn't help anybody, but Barret and Cid seemed about ready to go at it. Battle lines had been drawn, and it was like being in a group of teenage girls again – everybody suspicious of everybody and the whole lot of them ready to burst into tears or bitch fighting at the drop of a hat.

From the way Vincent was quickly reassembling his gun, somebody might get their kneecaps shattered instead of their hair pulled. Vincent just seemed like a kneecap shattering sort of person.

Somebody said something about someone and the shouting voices reached one pissed off crescendo; Barret leapt to his feet and Cid grabbed his spear, both of them growling either like animals or like really irritated old dudes. Well, there was a reason Yuffie had been unchallenged princess of her peers, and it wasn't just heritage. She was damn good at hair pulling.

Her shuriken whistled through the air between the two men, and they startled out of their attack stances to stare at her. She caught it on its return path, glaring at them and stomping her foot.

"Act like grown-ups!" She waved the weapon for emphasis. "Because nothing you are doing is helping and I have a headache and you're driving me nuts!"

Okay, so her voice kept cracking and she was constantly about five seconds away from crying, but damn it, they got her point. She hoped they did, anyway. She liked Cid and was developing some sort of buddy-buddy thing with Barret, and didn't want to see them blow each other up. Enough people had killed each other today, honestly.

"Kisaragi has a point," Vincent said, looking and sounding for all the world like he was agreeing with her on a lunch choice. "Arguing is counterproductive."

That took the wind out right out of Cid's sails, and he sat back down on his log of choice, lighting a cigarette and grumbling. Barret stayed standing and kept glaring, but one more petulant foot stomp from Yuffie and he went back to making sure Tifa kept her temper. Who ever said tantrums didn't solve anything?

Yuffie managed a smile, though it was probably a little cracked. "Hey, Vinny, thanks for backing me up."

He shrugged, the motion minimal. "Wisdom from the mouths of children."

"I'm sixteen," she shrieked, just because rehashing old arguments kept her grounded.

"Children," Vincent repeated.

"Young woman."

They all exchanged a Look, one that was far too amused for Yuffie's taste, even if it did dispel a bit more of the tension in the atmosphere.

She'd just stopped them from killing each other and they called her a kid! Stupid adults.

…but things were starting to function just a little better.

•••

Reno liked to break bones in two-four time; it provided a nice back beat to the song he was trying very hard to annoy Rude with. Unfortunately, the scientist's screaming rather got in the way of his brilliant musical symphony, and Reno found himself hoping the bastard would either admit he knew something or just die already. There were five more of Hojo's staff members to go through, and he knew this delightful little number in six-eight…

This wasn't really in his job description. Okay, it was, but usually it was understood that Tseng and Elena took the torture department. They were better at it than Reno and Rude, more patient than one and subtler than both. Really, who was Reno to deny Elena the little delights of her day? She'd wanted to try out how well those expensive new leather shoes of hers went with office work.

But Tseng was all laid up with a bad case of the maimed, and Elena couldn't yet be trusted to do this on her own; brain splatter all over the ceiling was a bitch of a thing to explain to the janitors.

Hojo's flunkey stopped screaming, and Reno shifted his grip on the aluminum baseball bat to rest it on his shoulder (he liked using the more traditional tools – crude, yet effective).

"You get all that, buddy?" He asked Rude, grinning cheekily at him.

"Yup," Rude said, and decided not to elaborate.

They'd taken turns with the clipboard and the pen that kept running out of ink, one leaning against the wall and writing down whatever screamed confession the other got out of cowering little nerds with ego trips. So far, Rude was winning on the Implicating Information scale, mostly because he'd gotten Hojo's chief assistant to admit that he liked to wear women's clothing.

Rude had an admirable talent for intimidation.

"Don't know why the boss can't do this by himself," Reno whined. "You know he'd enjoy it."

"He has an image," Rude reminded him.

"He just doesn't want to get blood all over his sissy suit."

"Really now, Reno?"

Neither of them turned toward the doorway, as they'd both known Rufus had been hovering there since before the scientist had kicked it. They were, after all, Turks, and Rufus would have been disappointed in them otherwise.

"Really, boss, it just doesn't scream 'Lord of the World', you know?" Reno pivoted on one foot to face Rufus, his free hand fisted on his hip. "You should look for something a little more gangster."

Rufus raised an eyebrow in a perfectly calculated and attractive expression of polite disbelief. "…you want me to wear bling, Reno?"

Reno flipped him a thumbs up. "It'd be fabulous, boss!"

"None of the staff we've questioned so far knows where Hojo's gone," Rude interrupted them, before the conversation could veer off into parts unknown.

"But!" Reno chimed in. "All of the experiments he took were related to the Jenova project, even if he didn't officially admit it."

Rude flipped back through a few sheets of paper on the clipboard, pointedly ignoring any bullets that addressed women's clothing or tic-tac-toe games. "We think he may have left behind data-based back up journals…"

"Nobody's giving up a password, though." Reno shook his head sadly. "They don't know what's good for them."

"Could someone hack into the system for them?" Rufus asked, stepping gingerly around a puddle of blood to appropriate the clipboard from Rude.

"'Lena might be able to. She's getting pretty good with the shiny electronic things."

Reno strongly suspected Elena was developing as many indispensable talents as possible, so they couldn't 'retire' her for her habit of running off at the mouth; he'd long been employing that tactic himself.

Rufus stared down at the clipboard. "Do I even want to know what you two do in your spare time?"

"No sir," Rude said.

Reno bounded over, unconcerned the mess he stepped in. "Is that the page with the stick figures?"

"Drawn in blood," Rufus confirmed, tilting the clipboard sideways. "Having sex?"

"I'm an artist, boss!"

"Of course." Rufus handed the clipboard back with unruffled aplomb. "Tell Elena to get working on the science department's computer system, but go through the rest of Hojo's assistants and see if there isn't anything else they're hiding."

"Man, when is Tseng gonna be up?"

"Evidently, when he stops listening to me telling him to go back to bed. Get back to work, gentlemen."

Reno and Rude gave identical, crisp salutes and set to work on cleaning up the room a little before they dragged in the next whimpering ball of scientist.

•••

Elena clutched her sixth cup of coffee to her chest and peered over her reading glasses at a computer screen that was rapidly becoming blessedly more coherent. When all else failed, she always knew she could turn to caffeine and three in the morning to be her answer to all of life's problems. The encryptions and false files and passwords had all been finicky, but Hojo hadn't been a computer genius; a few of the tricks she'd learned from Reeve and the whole thing had tumbled like a house of cards.

Well, if a house of cards took five hours to tumble, but Reeve had also said that computers were delicate and took time. She wandered distractedly what he'd think of her use of his lessons – Reeve was, unfortunately, a very nice man. Otherwise, she might have taken him out to dinner already.

(He had lovely hair, after all, but there was just something unutterably attractive about Tseng's ability to break people's necks with perfect precision - but she digressed. A lot.)

"Bingo," she whispered triumphantly. It was a simple text document, completely unassuming in every way except its contents. The abbreviations and personal codes might take a while to sort through, but the main thing was she'd gotten it.

Elena saved it to an outside drive, printed it out for good measure, and then wiped any trace of Hojo's files off the system; if she could get in, so could other people. Folding up her reading glasses, she tucked them in the breast pocket of her suit and allowed herself to stretch like a contented cat. Reno owed her lunch every time she did something 'Really Turkish!', and she had the feeling she'd want steak tomorrow.

For now, though, she was hopped up on about seven gallons of caffeine and Reeve deserved a thank you. If she couldn't have Tseng take her out for a romantic night of lobster and the shooting range, the least she could have was a look at a far too nice man.

"Secretary?" She called, knocking briskly on his door. Receiving no answer, she frowned – Reeve practically lived here, why wasn't he in his office? Unless he was, and…

The door was locked, but Turk Rule Number Fifty Two was that locks never stopped them. A bobby pin and a few muffled curse words later, Elena swung Reeve's door open. Maybe he'd snapped, gone on a bender, and passed out.

Reeve was at his desk. He did not, however, appear to be quite all in his head. He had his face dropped into his hands, and his posture looked even more pathetically limp than usual. What looked like the parts to a remote controlled toy lay scattered across his desk, along with a tiny television monitor and a headset.

"Secretary?" She tried again, honestly worried now. "Reeve, are you okay?"

He snapped his attention back to the land of the living, yanking his head up to stare at her with hazel eyes that were disconcertingly glazed. Okay, if he'd gone on a bender, it had been a drug one.

"Elena?"

"Yes." She walked over to his desk to peer down at him. "Do I need to call the med staff?"

"No." He shook his head vehemently. "No! I just…"

"What?"

Reeve seemed to crumple a little. "You know the work I was doing with Cait Sith? And Avalance?"

"That project was terminated after the failure at the Temple of the Ancients," Elena said, her hand inching toward her shoulder holster. Something was very, very wrong here; she could sense it.

"It was." He ran a hand through his hair. "It was supposed to be. They're good people, though, Elena, I couldn't –"

Oh, great, now she was going to have to execute Reeve in his messy corner office because he hadn't been lucid enough at three in the morning to figure out that there were things you just didn't mention to a member of the Turks.

"Reeve," she said warningly, drawing her pistol. "I'm sorry, but…"

He held up a hand. "Don't. Elena, you have to listen to me," he pleaded. "Something has gone terribly wrong. It's about Hojo, and Sephiroth."

Lowering her gun, she cocked her head to the side curiously. "Sephiroth?"

Reeve took a great, trembling breath. "Sephiroth has taken Strife. He's so much stronger now…"

The startled little 'eep' noise Elena made was so beyond dignified she didn't even try to justify it to herself. Reaching across the desk, she yanked Reeve up out of his seat.

"We have to talk to the President!"

It looked like she wasn't getting her steak tomorrow after all.