"You've had this for how long?"

"Oh, a good five years or so."

"Did you ever clean it?"

When Veld had come here upon learning about a Mideelese original shotgun, he had expected that the person that owned it would show it the proper respect. But instead, he found an incompetent idiot that didn't realize the worth of something precious.

He was running into a lot of those lately.

"Well, I shined it a bit."

"You... nevermind. You have asked a fair price, I will take it off your hands now."

There was something in the back of his mind that knew leaving Tifa on her own for the couple of days he had might unsettle her. Not that he always assumed people were restless.

"People eventually move on, Veld. That's human."

"But they don't have... Ifalna, why do you always have to get so serious on my days off?"

"Maybe you're rubbing off on me a little. To think that you would call me serious is kind of funny, don't you think?"

Maybe he was the one feeling restless, seeing this almost ruined piece of history and maybe his own... well, fixation was a hard word. He liked things to be familiar, but not the same. Maybe that was it.

"You want the shot with this?"

"No thank you."

ooo

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

She shouldn't have been in his office, she shouldn't have crossed the line. So what if he didn't say everything he meant and only half of what he felt, it wasn't her business. Tifa was his assistant not his wife or his girlfriend or whatever.

Shera would say there was always a fine line there, but her and Cid were strange. Half between abusing and whatever else they did. Tifa didn't want that, no matter the stability.

Well, she wanted stability, but not that kind.

She'd never properly learned how to pick a lock, but maybe the fact that she was nervous made her hand less steady, and the lock gave. It was just a filing cabinet, not anything special or sacred and for all she knew he was paranoid about taxes or other financial papers.

But Tifa saw names. Lots of them, organized just so. Not alphabetically, but in strange clumps that must have made sense to him.

His own name was on a file. 'Dragoon, Verdot Michael'. Had to be his. She didn't know of any other 'Dragoon's out there. Though, she'd always assumed it was spelled 'Veld'. Or maybe it was a shortening. 'Verdot' didn't sound right.

Veld's middle name seemed so normal. She couldn't help but like it.

Next to his name were a couple names she knew and a couple she didn't, and a couple that she could extrapolate from. 'Valentine, Vincent Vickalor'. Vickalor? 'Gast, Ifalna' No middle name there. But then, Aeris's mom had seemed a little different. 'Dragoon, Lora Marie' That must have been his wife. 'Dragoon, Felicia "Elfe" Eileen'. Daughter. Somehow she expected him to have had a son. 'Tally, Michelle Anise' Someone she had never heard of.

Better to start with what she didn't know and work her way up to what she did know.

Michelle Tally seemed the type of woman that Tifa would have liked. She was a cop before becoming a Turk, and had the types of honor that suggested she was tough, but not wholly ambitious. Maybe an old teammate or something. Maybe an old leader. Veld's age was a hard thing to guess because no one in their generations aged right, so it was hard to figure out when Veld might have known Michelle.

But then, there was a handwritten recommendation. Michelle Tally had recruited him. Obviously not unwillingly, considering some of her comments. She died in action, the file said, quite coldly.

Tifa knew quite well that teachers didn't always stick around.

Lora's file didn't really say much, as far as Shinra went, besides when Veld got married to her and a few divorce papers. Their marriage hadn't been short, but it hadn't been long either. While Michelle's file had no photo, Lora's did. She wasn't quite as pretty as Tifa would have imagined her, but she wasn't ugly either. Orangey red hair kept in a braid and a shy smile. Her death was also recorded. Some kind of accident.

Felicia, however, had quite a record. Tifa had known there had been an AVALANCHE before her and Barret's, but that was more of a taking on a name than an actual legacy. Small world that the previous figurehead for it was Veld's daughter.

Which meant she was a few years older than Tifa. It was kind of surprising. Veld didn't look like he was in his seventies. Hardly at all, really. No wonder he kept making comments about her age.

She didn't want to dwell on it.

Felicia had her father's serious expression, hair, and eyes. She was a little pale, but considering her mother, that made sense. It was really the only bit from her mother she seemed to inherit. There was no death date.

So they weren't speaking.

Ifalna's file was the most bare, but it had, oddly enough, a pressed and dried flower. Also a picture, which was the kind you could get off of a security camera. When Tifa had pictured Lora, she had pictured someone more like this. Only looking less like Aeris. She couldn't look at that picture long. Another death date, but she knew that already.

And Vincent's. It was strange to think that she'd fought with this man, walked halfway around the world with him, but barely even knew him. Not that she was afraid, really, he just never really talked. Of course, she'd wanted to ask him things. Just like there were some things she wanted to ask Cid, and now, things she was digging into Veld's filing cabinet for.

Vincent's file was detailed to a level that was almost unsettling. Test scores, medical records, probably everything that Veld could find about the experimentation, and a failed psyche exam.

His picture gave her the willies. Strange how his younger face was scarier than the one she'd become familiar with.

She almost missed it, tucked in between some gun scores. The paper was still crisp and white in the envelop, which simply had 'Veld' on it. Tifa would recognize a letter anywhere.

She considered not opening it. But she did.

The letter explained everything. It was the kind of letter someone wrote when they knew something for a long long time and just never had the words until some strange night when everything made sense and they scratched it all into being like a crazed painter. Inspiration spilled out onto a sheet that seemed too flimsy to hold it. It answered her fleeting curiosity as to what had happened to Vincent, as well as what Veld was trying so hard to move on from.

Tifa had never really expected to find something like this. It was strange to find out what Vincent had really been trying to preserve.

For the love of that god you seem to believe in--just live for a while for yourself. When I go and see her, she would say the same thing. There are people that want to see you live for once, even if they have to look through a one way glass to see it. Don't let us down.

Her hand that held the page shook.

Maybe she didn't want to think about it. She wasn't, no, she wasn't jealous, or hurt really, it was surreal. She'd barely known Vincent and she'd always assumed, because of Lucrecia... well some people were deceiving.

Maybe because she'd looked away, looked for anything other than Vincent's scrawl to stare at she noticed the files hidden towards the back of the drawer. She pulled the first one out, curious as to what else he was hiding. Hell, maybe he'd married a flamenco dancer some wild night in Costa.

'Lockheart, Tifa Rae'

That bastard.

ooo

When Veld got home, the last thing he expected was a furious woman waiting at the door for him, a handful of files that he'd taken a long time to gather and store away laid out on the counter.

Crap.

"Why didn't you TELL me?! What is this, all of this? Are you a stalker? Did you plan this? Are you crazy obsessed with me or--"

"No, I'm not. I have a file on you because I have a file on all of your teammates."

"Right, over Vincent. I found the letter he wrote you. Was he that guy you were talking about? People don't write letters like that to just anyone."

He had to think, but he couldn't think. Why did he want to hide so badly, and what was there to hide anymore? Why did the anger in her voice not make him angry, but make him...

"We were close."

"Well, that's an understatement! God I'm such an idiot... What else are you hiding? You still married? A mob boss?"

"Tifa, what is it you want--"

If there was something he learned, it was that martial artists were really dangerous people. He backed up when she advanced, because despite the fact he wasn't feeble, she could quite possibly injure him good. And he still had a sense of survival. But she was fast.

Quite fast. He cringed when she grabbed his collar, but she wasn't hitting him.

No, she wasn't hitting him at all.

"Tifa... I'm more than twice your age and I don't think that was appropriate considering our working relationship."

He was quite surprised he could still spin the euphemisms like he used to. Veld was always a bit of a smooth talker, or so some people had said.

She pushed, and he almost tripped on some stupid box on the floor. "Why are you hiding, Veld? Do you really hate the world that much?"

He wasn't--alright he was. What was it with these types of people that invaded the little holes he'd dug for himself? Maybe he'd tried just a little too hard to move on to something, anything, that he found himself in precisely the position he didn't want to be in.

"Y-No. I don't know. I'm just tired of people leaving, I suppose."

"Well, so am I!"

And they were quiet for a few moments. His hand wasn't shaking, thank God he'd gotten over that problem, but he felt like it should have been. She'd just... no, he hadn't imagined it. When he wet his lips he tasted something waxy. She was too practical for anything other than chapstick, really.

When he stopped to think he was more annoyed that she'd beat him to it. But that was the same kind of wrong thinking he always fell to. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

He cleared his throat. "I suppose you'll want to go for a while."

"No."

Well, he certainly was taken aback.

"Excuse me?"

"We're both tired of the same thing. Maybe... maybe we should just not hide."

"There are some places I'm not entirely sure we should go."

"Aren't you angry?" She whispered it, which had more of an impact than any of the shouting she'd done. Angry? What about? What goddamn right did he ever have to be angry?

"About?" His tone of voice wasn't nearly the diplomatic one he'd been using.

"That'd he'd just go off and die like that?! I barely even knew him and I'm mad! At least he told you! Or, or how about all that other stuff you're hiding? What happened to your family? What happened to you?!"

Really, he'd had enough right about there.

"OF COURSE I'M ANGRY. WHAT THE HELL CAN I DO ABOUT IT?! YOU CAN'T TELL PEOPLE NOT TO DO THINGS WHEN THEY'VE ALREADY DONE IT! YOU CAN'T UNDO ANYTHING! NOTHING HAPPENED TO ME BECAUSE I DIDN'T LET ANYTHING HAPPEN TO ME!"

"Just to everybody else. Because when you were standing back, they weren't."

"Why do some people just have to—"

"Run headfirst into things?"

"YES. WHY?"

It was then that he realized she'd stopped arguing and accusing him and accosting him and whatever other 'a' word he could think of. Alexander, he was angry and at any other time, he would have found some way to hide it. But he wanted to go just... use it for something. Anything.

"...Do you know how to use a gun?"

"No."

"Would you like to learn?"

"Yes."