This chapter ended up differently than I had intended. As opposed to tagging along after an AVALANCHE member, we have….. Rude. Who I have styled as a bit of a disaffected war vet. So, here he's observing, philosophizing, drawing parallels, and….. chatting with Nanaki. I don't really know if this one works with the flow of things. Plot will move along next chapter.

"No funeral."

He hovered by the doorway, stiffly, watching as Reeve sputtered and stumbled over his words trying to come up with a reply; any kind of reply to respond to that. His mouth curled down at the corner when the executive-turned-spy-turned-double-agent just gestured weakly towards her, mouth opening and closing a few times before finally mustering a weak, unconvincing

"Why not?"

She rolled slightly, more onto her back so she was actually looking at him now, albeit she had to crane her neck to glance over her shoulder. She had been laying with her back to the door when he had walked in, as she had been apt to do since she woke up two days before. He realized that she wanted to be left alone; didn't want to talk, but that hardly deterred the others from walking right in and trying to pull her into one conversation or another.

And, oh, she responded gamely, throwing out tiny, encouraging smiles when necessary, nodding, assuring them she was fine; they were all immediate, automatic responses running from memory. But it was all a show. As convincing and deceiving an actress as Tifa Lockhart was, he could see right through it. While Reeve talked at her for the better part of ten minutes detailing what had to be done about arrangements, and caskets, and tombstone inscriptions and all the distasteful realities of having to take care of their deceased, he had merely stood back, eyes tracking along the column of her spine, visible through the gap at the back of her paper-thin hospital gown. She had kicked the sheets off, and the gown had ridden up a bit, exposing the bottom edge of the bandages around her mid-section, and there were bandages over her thighs, her calves, almost like some old mummification burial right that had only been half-finished.

One eye, monstrous, the white blotted red from a nasty hyphema, regarded him almost angrily. First it was just that; the glare from over her shoulder. But then, she was moving, shifting, onto her back and sitting up, left hand gripping the rail that ran along the side of her bed. Her left side was still much of a problem, stitched up as it was, and her right arm had been rather badly burned, skin having peeled off along with her fighter's glove when they went to administer an IV as they were airlifting her to the hospital.

That arm, heavily swaddled in gauze, came up, scratching at one of the stitches above her left eye, the gauze patch no longer covering it. Since coming to, she had steadily picked at the bandaging there, and since the gauze had been taken off finally, she resorted to picking at the stitches, which often earned her a slap on the hand and a scolding by the one nurse she seemed to know, possibly an underground connection to AVALANCHE.

"No. No funeral, Reeve." She repeated, that disgusting red-blotched eye boring into him as her nail dug at one of the fine black lines keeping the patchwork of lacerations held shut. "The others said to leave it to my decision, and that is my decision."

"That still doesn't-"

"Fine," she sighed, annoyed "Then I'll explain it. People don't like us, Reeve. W-"

"We saved the world." Reeve interrupted, stumbling over the 'we' a little. Yes, he was Cait Sith, but at the same time, the others were as of yet unaccustomed to interacting with the mind behind the ally that had caused them some troubles in the past.

"Yes." She agreed, nodding a little "But at the same time, we're terrorists. Remember? Because everybody else sure does. People blame us for some of the things that happened. No matter what we did, the great, all-consuming Shinra media machine brought us out as monsters. People might desecrate their graves; their remains. They don't deserve that. That, and they already returned to the Planet. Their bodies are nothing anymore."

Reeve just swallowed, looking away from her as she explained it all. He obviously wasn't on the same page as Tifa. He wanted to think of them, of AVALANCHE, as the 'good guys'; the ones that had saved the world. Not the ones that had used bombs to disable reactors, killing hundreds in the process. Then again, Reeve had always been too much of an idealist for his own good.

Finally, he nodded, mollified, and looked at her, avoiding her gaze.

"Then what do you suggest? You seemed to know them better than any of the others, so-"

"Cremate them." She nodded, as if she had come up with that answer ages ago, and had just been waiting for somebody to ask the question. "Do that, and give me the ashes. I'll take care of it."

Reeve opened his mouth to say more, but Tifa was already turning, rolling back onto her right side, away from him; ending the conversation as she saw fit. He floundered for a moment longer, before he nodded, forcing out a downhearted goodbye to Tifa, before turning toward the door, shooting him a forlorn look.

He stepped back after Reeve, pulling the door partway shut behind them.

"She hates me, Rude. I know it." He sighed morosely, thumb and forefinger sliding slowly over his goatee in a nervous gesture. "She's not like that to the others."

"She's lying to the others" He replied evenly, dropping his voice a little as they passed Yuffie's room, noticing the young ninja sitting in a wheelchair, legs jutting straight out in front of her, bound in casts from just above her knees to her feet. She was thumbing through some magazine that Elena had run out and gotten for her at a little Wutaian import store a few blocks from the hospital. The blonde was surprisingly eager to run errands and help the AVALANCHE members with requests. The ninja's eyes were red, skin blotchy, and it looked like she'd been crying again. She always seemed to be crying about one thing or another now. The girl had always seemed so exuberant, like their fight was all just one big game. She'd led a privileged life, so to be slapped in the face with such devestation….. "She doesn't pull her routine with that nurse either."

"That nurse thinks she's stealing morphine." Reeve replied doubtfully, aware of the suspicions against the martial artist; the way that the nurse in question's glance would inevitably track toward Tifa's temporary lodging whenever the count came up short. He apparently assumed her attitude toward the nurse in question was based on that.

"That has nothing to do with it." He explained, shaking his head. Granted, it might have had something to do with Tifa's general bad spirits, especially toward that particular nurse, who, despite her nametag, was referred to as 'Marx' by Tifa and Barret. But he knew there was more to it than just crankiness and Soldier's Disease gnawing at her. "You never saw active duty, did you?"

"Hm?" The smaller man asked, a bit thrown by the question. Sometimes following Rude's train of thought could be a bit trying, if you weren't paying close enough attention to the conversation.

"Wartime." He elaborated, offering a quick nod towards Barret's open door. The rebel leader gave a quick hail in return, distractedly, his attention fully on the little girl chatting away at his bedside. He had actually figured Barret would have ended up much in the same frame of mind as Tifa. And the first few days, it seemed likely. He was taking it all very hard. He had lost a few more inches off of his right arm. The arm ended in a stump just above where his elbow had been. The crash had messed his artificial arm up bad; jammed some of the mechanisms up into the living tissue. And the loss of Cloud had gouged at him rather deeply as well. The man may never have admitted it to anyone, not even himself, but he had respected the swordsman. He'd cared about him in some fashion, despite all their disagreements.

But then, Elmyra had come in. Reeve had given her word about what had happened to her daughter's associates, and not an hour after the call, she had come in, a far too shy little girl trailing along after her. Laying eyes on her was all it took to keep every ugly thought in Barret's head at bay. They knew how much Marlene meant to him. Hell, it had been one of the main reasons they had taken her as a hostage those few months back. For Barret, that little girl seemed to be the only thing that kept him sane.

Kept him human.

"Ah, no. I was high in the ranks of the Urban Development department when the last war broke out." Reeve explained, not sure what the other man was getting at.

It didn't much surprise him. Had Reeve ever seen the cold realities of war, he might have understood. Rude certainly did. He'd spent a year and a half in a POW camp, he and the other prisoners mistreated and sometimes tortured by their Wutaian captors. After being liberated, he'd been transferred to a hospital on the upper plate, along with other camp prisoners, and people that had been wounded gravely enough to be laid up far away from the front lines. What he'd seen there, what he'd heard there…..

On a larger scale, it was all very much the same as he was seeing now. Reeve wouldn't, couldn't, understand it, since he'd never had to experience it.

"This was a war for them. And the fighting's ended suddenly. Couple that with everything else, and you can't expect them to be happy."

"Everything else?"

God, just how dense could the man actually be?

"Two of their friends just died. There's going to be depression. Survivor's guilt, rehabilitation for their injuries, possible post-traumatic issues. They're going to have to part ways and try and readjust to a 'normal' life, and as Tifa pointed out, public opinion of them isn't exactly stellar. They've had no time to recover, and they're just going to be shoved back into the world and expected to get back with the swing of things. There's far more to it, but those are some of the more basic problems."

He had faced some of those problems himself, but hadn't had long to dwell on them. Two days out of the camp, and he had been approached by the President himself. He'd been expecting to be the target of some soulless PR scheme; raise public opinion by going in and tossing a medal and some cheap showy words to a wounded veteran, and oh! What a kind, caring man that President of ours is. But Shinra had given him an offer. They'd repair his shattered, shot-out kneecap, as long as he agreed to take a position within the company.

Not so much to ask, right? The pay was good, and the war hadn't been any kinder to the rest of his family. So somebody had to take care of what was left of them, since his father and brothers had all died in the failed campaign to storm Wutai's eastern shoreline.

After everything that had happened, he'd changed. And maybe not for the better. How would the members of AVALANCHE fare? There'd be regrets; bitterness, anger, remorse…..

And it looked like Reeve wanted to herd them all up, scoop them into his arms and try and make everything okay, even though such a feat seemed far beyond the man's grasp. Too many ideals and good intentions. It never quite held up in the real world.

But the executive still fretted and fussed, trying to keep everyone placated, doing everything and anything in his power to see that his friends were taken care of. Since pulling them from the wreckage, he had conversed with each of them at least once a day; moreso with Yuffie, Cid and Nanaki. Barret hadn't been very coherent for the first few days, and Tifa, since regaining consciousness, had been rather reticent to speak with him. He was trying to come up with something, and Rude wasn't sure he liked it.

Certainly, Reeve meant well, but if he was trying to keep them all together as a group, to try and find a way to minimize their problems, he was probably going to end up sorely disappointed.

A door to their left opened, and they paused mid-stride, seeing Cid standing there, cigarette dangling from his lips. He was dressed rather shabbily, in nothing but a pair of hospital-green scrub pants and a pair of slippers that Elena had all-too-willingly gotten for him at the market across town. Same with the cigarettes. Usually Cid had to track one of their 'babysitters' down if he wanted a smoke. His arms were bound from elbow to wrist in heavy plaster casts, the left one doodled on by Yuffie, and most of his fingers had been taped into thick metal splints. He had lost his right thumb at the second knuckle, and had morosely joked that he only talked to Reno because the redhead would light his smokes for him.

"Smoke break?" Reeve inquired lightly, and Cid just nodded in return. The executive stopped and fished a lighter from his pocket, nodding toward the stairwell. Cid had to leave the building to smoke, and that entailed having to head down two flights of stairs and go halfway around the building to get out the back entrance. It seemed less likely that somebody would spot him. Would recognize him as Cid Highwind.

Rude made no move to follow, sparing a nod to the other men as they departed, striking up a conversation almost immediately. By the way their heads were bowed close together, he figured it had to do with Tifa's decision about Cloud and Vincent. Or with Tifa in general. In the days before Tifa had woken up, Cid had hovered around the martial artist's off-limits room, asking so many questions, demanding to see her. It had begun to annoy them. When they had spoken over Cait Sith's comm. link, one of the things he had mentioned specifically was his concerns over the martial artist's condition.

Chivalry. Tifa and Yuffie could hold their own. The men on the team all knew that, but at the same time, they were very protective of those two.

There was a jingling sound, a clicking, nails across the smooth tile floor. Rude glanced up, seeing Nanaki padding along slowly, still heavily favoring his left hind leg. His once matted and bloodied fur had been washed, giving off a warm, orangey sheen in the harsh hospital lights. All of the trinkets had been removed from his mane, cleaned and then replaced, the baubles on his headdress clinking and jangling as he limped along.

The beast's blazing tail was some cause for concern among the staff. They feared that if he came too close to a room where oxygen tanks were in use…..

Respecting that fear, Nanaki had stayed away from the ward for the most part, limping down the hall only if he was given an okay from one of the nurses. Given that, he had seen Reeve and the Turks far more than he had seen his friends, though he did not seem to hold any distaste in talking with them, as some of the others did.

"Hello Rude." He nodded, coming to a stop near him, cocking his head up to look at him. He merely nodded in greeting at the beast, still unnerved by the fact that something like him could be so….. human.

He remembered the years that Nanaki had been kept as a specimen in Hojo's lab. Nanaki had never spoken, never showed any signs of his true intelligence. At most he had paced and keened, like a kicked dog, staring out at passersby on the other side of his tank, knowing that most of them wouldn't even spare him a second glance.

Times they had been called up to the lab, Valley Crawford would often sneak bits of food up with her, tucking anything from a few bits of candy to a half of a grilled pita with tomato into the inside pocket of her blazer. She would mill around the tank, waiting for a moment when Hojo would leave the room, and then hurriedly pull the napkin-wrapped parcel out of her coat and slide it through the food slot, smiling a little as he gulped it down, tail wagging. She would also talk to him, never for long, usually just a few words as she watched him eat what she had brought for him.

They had all thought Valley was being nice, bringing 'Red XIII' snacks, because she viewed him as some kind of pet; like a friend's dog that she always had to pat on the head when she saw it. But maybe she knew what Nanaki was capable of. Hell, maybe she had known Nanaki personally. After all, she had grown up in the Canyon. Maybe she had seen the guardian around, before Shinra had taken him away.

Certainly, when Valley stopped coming up to the lab, Nanaki had seemed agitated, pacing the tank and looking around with his nose pressed to the glass. When Reno had mentioned her having 'blown her brains out', there had been a low whine from the tank. But he hadn't thought anything of it, figuring that the animal didn't understand.

But looking back on it, Nanaki had understood about Valley's death, and was most likely hurt; upset by hearing of it. And not just because nobody else would bring him scraps of food. He held far more respect for human life than most humans did.

He would be okay. He had a more esoteric view on the world. He seemed to understand things about life, death, and the Planet that was beyond the grasp of the others. Maybe because he wasn't human. He had above-human intelligence, human emotion, but at the same time, he'd been raised a warrior. His species had a different perspective. He had a different perspective.

"What's the decision?" He asked finally, causing Rude to nod back down the hall, lips in a thin line.

"She wants them cremated. Says she'll take care of it after that. Doubt everyone will be thrilled with the decision."

But Nanaki just shook his head, mouth twisting in what probably passed for a smile.

"Perhaps not to the others. Warriors in the Canyon were customarily honored without burial rights. They were cremated using a pyre kindled from the eternal flame, and their ashes were later scattered in the canyon. It is considered….. distasteful in my culture to be interred in the ground like so many of you are fond of doing. Their spirits have returned to the Planet. The body is rather inconsequential."

Creepy.

"That's what she said, basically. About their bodies."

Thousands of years ago, people of the Canyon were buried, but our enemies of the Gi clan, they would disturb the graves. Very disrespectful to our people to be defaced after death. We were….. are a proud people, even if the Canyon has fallen to the wayside of non-violence and reliance on a guardian."

Rude didn't make any outward acknowledgement of Nanaki's explanation, but inwardly, he was surprised. A little unsettled. He'd cremated bodies himself, hauled them into incinerators; all in a day's work. It was to get rid of the bodies, make them just disappear. If there was no body, there was no proof. Their reasoning bothered him. He remembered the letter he'd gotten while running classified documents for the Shinra-Allied forces during the war. It had been handed to him while he pored over encrypted documents, a seal from the Ninety-Second division emblazoned on the flap.

It had been about his older brother, Aman, regretfully informing him that on the second of January, he had been killed in a battle on the Eastern Coast of Wutai. They couldn't give him any more information about the nature of the incident. But he remembered how sick he felt at the fact that there was nothing of his brother to bury.

For a while, he'd hoped that the lack of a body meant that they were wrong, that Aman was still out there, possibly in a prison camp, or having defected….. anything. But as he later found out, there wasn't any body because there was hardly anything left in tact after tank treads had passed over it.

It seemed wrong, the tombstone with no body under it. And cremation? He saw it as a way to just….. sweep something under the rug.

But maybe that's what they wanted now. To slink away into obscurity. To hide. To have people forget about the terrible things AVALANCHE had done, no matter how good their intentions had been. Did they want people to forget?

Did Strife and Valentine have any family members that would remember them anyway? Doubtful. All of the AVALANCHE members had lost something to Shinra. Yuffie's country had lost power, Highwind had lost his dream. The others had lost family, friends, practically their entire lives.

They hadn't found any living relatives in either Cloud or Vincent's files during numerous data checks against the rebels. Maybe there was nobody left to remember them. Nobody outside of AVALANCHE; aside from himself and the other Turks. But that had been a relationship of grudging respect, and a gnawing desire to get the rebels under their heels even once.

Ugh. Trying to rationalize it was giving him a headache.

"Speaking of the Canyon," Nanaki began as they slowly walked back the way Rude had come, his good eye focused on the Turk as they moved "I will have to be leaving soon."

"Leaving? Do the others know?"

He sighed, shaking his head.

"We will all have to separate at some time. I gave my word I would aid them until the end of their quest, but then I was to return to my duties within the Canyon. They need me."

"And your friends don't?" He mused, noticing the way Nanaki paused, inclining his head. He slowed his steps as well, glancing back down at the beast, almost challenging him to make a remark about the statement. It almost seemed foolish for him to pose such a question. It didn't matter to him what Nanaki chose to do.

But it probably mattered to the other rebels.

Nanaki's lip curled in an odd sneer again, an attempt at what he could guess was a small, understanding smile. The gold eye focused on him softened.

"You've faced a situation similar to this, then?" He guessed, and Rude merely nodded stiffly in reply, not having much of a mind to discuss it. The beast nodded, before resuming his swaying limp down the hall. "I'm sorry."

Sorry? Nanaki felt sorry because he understood their situation? He couldn't remember the last time anyone had felt sorry for him. He couldn't remember the last time he had felt sorry for anyone.

Ugh. He needed a smoke something awful. Hanging around this ward was starting to chew on his last nerves. Up ahead, Nanaki slipped into Yuffie's open doorway, tail flicking side to side. He didn't spare a look into the room as he passed, it, concentrating on digging his lighter out of his pocket.

Stepping past another open door, he stopped, hearing a low, tired voice call for him. Looking to his left, he saw Tifa sitting up, bandaged arm lying heavily in her lap, like some dead thing. She was picking at her stitches again, hand thankfully blocking her left eye from his sight.

"Yeah?" He asked dryly, ducking into the room.

"Can you help me to the bathroom?" She asked tiredly, looking a bit pale and sickly. The irritation that she had displayed with Reeve was gone, replaced with a humble need, reminding him how young she actually was. Much like Cid and his cigarette breaks, Tifa would ask one of the Turks to help her up if she needed to go to the bathroom. It seemed the least they could do, afford her to keep a shred of dignity rather than have to use a bedpan.

Though, he wasn't sure how much of this was an act. He figured she might be able to get up on her own, especially given that one nurse's suspicions about the Morphine. There was also nothing wrong with her legs, unlike Yuffie's situation.

But, he still agreed to help her, helping her climb out of the hospital bed, pointedly looking away as her gown rode up to her waist from her careful shifting around to try and get up without putting any pressure on her arm or side.

He also chose to pretend not to notice when a half-emptied plastic blister pack, the kind that kept doses of pills encased, fell onto the floor from beneath her pillow as she sat up. One dose was gone, but he knew what those pills were. He'd had enough of them tossed down his throat in the war hospital.

Morphine, of course.

Tifa pointedly kept from looking at them as well, stiffly holding to his jacket sleeve as they moved across the room.

As much as he didn't want to, he was sure he was going to end up feeling sorry for her. For all of them. Because they understood now. They witnessed all the sick horror of war. And, scary as that was, the aftermath could be infinitely scarier.

…..He really needed that smoke now.

Aw, Nanaki's planning to leave, and everybody's sad.