…..

12. Tifa Makes a Deal

Yuffie reclined against a rock, kicking her feet up on another. She linked her hands behind her head and stared at the starry sky. After about twenty seconds she sat up, the soles of her feet pressed together so her knees pointed outward in different directions.

"Nope," she said to the empty air. "Can't do it."

You barely tried.

"Like this is my first time trying? I told you, me and meditation don't mix."

Well suck it up and try harder.

"Whyyyyy?" she whined. "It's sooooo boooriiing! And I don't even need it. I'm talking to you just fine, aren't I?"

Yeah, out freaking loud! Very subtle, Princess. The first pea-brained villagers who hear and see you will be all ready with a nice white straitjacket in just your size. You need to learn how to speak with your thoughts.

LIKE THIS?

Yow! Like I said, you need to practise speaking, not yelling. You think too loud.

"Well sor-ry." Yuffie rested her fist on her chin, pouting. "It's not like I had to worry about anyone else hearing them for the first fifteen years of my life."

Cheer up, sweet-cheeks. For the first fifteen years you didn't have my scintillating company, either. There's a silver lining to every cloud.

"Yeah, but every silver lining's gotta have a cloud attached, and clouds suck. They rain and block out the sun and when they get pissed at each other they cause thunder."

Not quite how it happens, but whatever. Now lie back, close your eyes and get with the meditating. We need to practise you thought-speaking without deafening me or letting every telepath in range know I'm around.

Though she was half-reclined again, Yuffie sat bolt upright. "Telepaths? They actually exist?"

Mmm-hmm.

"You didn't say anything about freaking telepaths!"

Really? Must've slipped my mind. Sure, the world is full of them.

"Really?"

Actually, no, they're pretty rare. Even rarer are the ones who know they're telepaths.

"You're doing it again. Tell me straight what you're talking about. I hate when you get all itsy-bitsy with the need-to-know info."

Look, basically, the sitch is this: you've got your basic magic users, which everybody used to call 'witches' before they decided witches don't exist and magic is a bunch of hokey explainable by THE MIRACLES OF SCIENCE!

"Ow!" Yuffie clapped a hand to her ear. Nobody had spoken out loud, but it seemed the right thing to do. "You're right, that does hurt."

Toldja. Now where was I? Oh yeah, well, 'witches' isn't a very accurate term. It's this umbrella word that everybody with a bit of magic in them got stuck with in the dim and distant past, but within it you've got all sorts of specialisations and interesting stuff. Telepaths are one of them – humans who can listen in to others' thoughts, and the really powerful ones can go into other people's head and switch memories, erase things mix things up and generally play around. You've also got your telekinetics, your firestarters, your spellcasters who use the different sound vibrations of certain words to invoke magic –

"Sounds complicated."

Yeah, but fun as all get out from my perspective. Most telepaths go stark raving mad early on. They don't know they're magic, because THE MIRACLES OF SCIENCE –"

"Ouch!"

Sorry. They go nuts because science says magic is a bunch of hokey and nobody ever questions the almighty SCIENCE. That was the last time I'll do that, I swear. Telepaths get labelled schizophrenic or something and locked away in institutions where they shout at the walls and listen to the other patients' nutty thoughts. Firestarters have this habit of setting themselves on fire and taking care of the problem before they learn proper control. What, you thought those stories about spontaneous combustion were real? Same with telekinetics – they get themselves squashed moving their bedrooms around while they sleep, or bash themselves in the head with random flying objects and turn into unsolved murder cases. Spellcasters survive most often, since if nobody teaches them the word-combinations and vocal inflections to cast their magic, their power just goes to waste. Some of the rarer magics can get pretty ugly and weirder than fish with fingers.

Yuffie's head spun. She rubbed her temples. "You're making my brain ache."

Like that's difficult?

"Hey!"

Face it, kiddo, you're not exactly high on the smart-o-meter. Exactly how long did it take you to learn your multiplication tables?

"How do you even know about that? You weren't around when I was that age!"

How do you know I wasn't right there watching you?

"Okay, smarty-pants, so if you could break your seal so easily and had nothing better to do than laugh at me fail my math tests, why didn't you show up back then, huh?"

Because I didn't break the seal. I was stuck in that freaking statue the whole time, dead to the world. I know about your crappy tutor reports because you talk in your sleep. By the way, you had a crush on a guy called 'Mr. Chiffchaff'? Are you kidding?

Yuffie blushed. Then she got mad at herself for blushing. Mr. Chiffchaff had been around for exactly six months when she was eleven. At the time, he was the only tutor less than a hundred years old and with fewer wrinkles than a pre-botoxed elephant. He wasn't handsome or debonair, he didn't wear a cape and he didn't sword-fight or go to sea to steal treasure like the heroes in her favourite trashy romance novels. Yet when the alternatives were pimply sons of clan elders, offspring of families looking to improve their social standing, or aged ninjas who could no longer see a shuriken to throw it, but dreamed of someday becoming king, Mr. Chiffchaff stood head and slightly-stooping shoulders above the rest.

"A chiffchaff is a type of bird," she replied starchily. "And by the way? Fuck off."

Ghostly laughter swirled around her. She tasted unnamed spices on the back of her tongue.

Touchy-touchy-touchy – but back to business. Now, just because I'm teaching you something, and so could technically be called your tutor, don't you go getting a crush on me, okay?

"As if! Don't flatter yourself, bucko."

Bucko? More ghostly laughter. It stopped abruptly, leaving a silence that was even louder.

Yuffie's spine straightened. "Kit?"

No answer.

She scrambled to her feet, though she knew it would do no good. "Kit? Where are you?"

Right here. The energies of the Planet shifted for a second there.

"Huh? What does that mean?"

Nothing good.

"Be more specific! I totally get what my dad was talking about when he said prevaricating was annoying." She half expected a snarky comment that she knew what 'prevaricating' meant, but the voice in her head remained serious.

The energies of the Planet are supposed to remain constant. Everything in the world exists in balance, and if things flux it means the balance is going wrong, which is on the upper end of the 'Oh Shit' meter. Our main priority from here on in is to get things balanced again, or else we're all up a certain creek without a certain rowing instrument. Basically, sweet-cheeks, it means that the crisis I told you was coming? It's coming even faster, and I'd bet my sweet hiney that a couple of key players are moving around on the board already. We gotta be ready to tell them apart, sweetie-pie – not every spirit out there is your friend like me. It's better you keep me as your secret weapon, which means not showing our hand and talking out loud to me when they're standing in front of us. So get with the meditating and let's get you proficient in thought-speech.

Grudgingly acquiescent, Yuffie sat down, crossed her legs and rested her hands on her knees. She tipped both palms upward and pressed her thumbs and middle fingers together. After a moment she unsqueezed one eye and managed to make "Ommmmm…" sound sarcastic.

Nobody likes a smart-ass.

That must be why you have no friends apart from me, she thought softly.

Ghostly laughter rang silently through the canyon.

"Tifa!" Zangan struggled through the snow, his snowshoes making running impossible. This was freshly-fallen stuff, which crumbled the moment a mouse tried to take a step on it, much less a grown man like him. Wilderness living had shaved off any excess fat on him, but he was still a big man, and muscle weighed more.

She was somewhere ahead of him. He couldn't understand how he hadn't heard her leave. Grunting and puffing, he kept calling her name.

Eventually he reached the edge of the bluff. Just as he was about to look over, a blast of flame shot into the sky from the ravine below. Zangan wobbled and fell back, cursing himself. He was a master martial artist. Master martial artists did not fall on their butts in surprise. He scrambled to the edge, fumbling for purchase beneath the fine snow. He couldn't afford to miss it and go plummeting over the side like a damn fool.

"Tifa!"

She was in the bottom of the ravine, standing like she had been struck by lightning; spine arched, arms and head thrown back. Zangan watched as she spasmed for a moment, mouth working silently, and then collapsed. She fell like a marionette with all its strings cut and lay unmoving.

"Tifa!" he yelled.

He knew this area, despite the fresh snow casting different angles and curves all over it. It didn't take him long to find passage down to her. He knelt, gathering her gingerly into his arms. She was breathing. He let out his own sigh of relief, and another as he checked her and found her completely unhurt. A frown creased his forehead when he had finished. She wasn't injured and there was nobody else around. What had happened to her in the time between him waking to find her gone from the cabin and now? He glanced around at the circle of baked earth. It was only in this spot, with Tifa at its centre. It looked like a blast radius after high explosives had detonated. The snow had not only melted, it had evaporated and the ground beneath looked scorched.

"Tifa," Zangan said more gently. He pulled off one fur mitten with his teeth and touched her face. Her skin was clammy, as if she had a fever. "Tifa, wake up."

Her eyelids fluttered. "Mas … ter …?"

"C'mon, now, wake up for me. What happened? Why did you run off?"

"Call … ing …" she mumbled. Talking seemed an immense effort. Her eyes closed again. "Had to … go … calling me … sorry …"

"Who was calling you?" Zangan's frown deepened. He hadn't heard anything.

"Not who," she replied softly. She was fading back into unconsciousness, though this time it seemed from exhaustion rather than pain or shock. "What …"

"Stay awake!" Zangan snapped. He put enough authority into his voice that the student part of her listened and forced the rest of her to respond – or at least that was what he thought until she looked at him.

Tifa opened her eyes and fixed them on her tutor. Zangan tried not to gasp. Instead of soft brown, her irises were fiery orange. Her pupil thinned to a slit that glared balefully at him.

"Let her sleep," she ordered in a harsh, raspy voice he had never heard from her before. "She's exhausted. Make yourself useful and take her back to that moth-eaten cabin you call home. When she wakes she'll be hungry."

"She?" Zangan's scalp prickled with alarm. "Tifa?"

She blinked those fiery eyes. "No."

"Who are you?"

"That's for her to tell you. I didn't make any deal with you so I don't owe you an explanation. Just be warned that if you don't take care of her while she's weakened, I'll come after you, and you won't like that." The corner of Tifa's lip curled in a smile. Like the voice, it wasn't any kind of smile he had seen from Tifa before. She hadn't smiled much at all in the year since they fled Nibelheim and took refuge in these mountains, but before that her smiles had always been kind and warm. This one was more like a sneer.

"If you won't tell me who you are, at least tell me what you've done to her."

"Given her a chance at payback," the voice said. "Something you never did. She stayed in this place because you asked her to, but her heart has always burned for revenge. She has fire in her belly." The smile grew wider and more fearsome. "Literally, now." Tifa gave a long blink. When she reopened her eyes they were back to brown with a round, human pupil. She gazed up at Zangan uncertainly and a little fearfully. "I asked her to go back for a while," she said in her normal voice. "She wasn't happy, but she agreed."

Zangan stared down at the girl he had trained from a gangly pre-teen and barely recognised her. Her face was still the same, her hair and skin identical to yesterday, but suddenly he felt like he didn't know her at all.

"Tifa," he said slowly, "what have you done?"

She looked away. "I'm sorry. I had to. She spoke to me in my dreams, and I just … I couldn't say no."

"What did you do?" he asked again.

"You said the hurting would stop, Master. It hasn't; not for one single second of one single day. I thought I could do what you ordered, and stay out here where it's safe, doing nothing except wait for Shinra to stop looking for us so we could go back down the mountain someday, but I can't! I needed to do something. I needed to …" She trailed off.

"What," Zangan said softly, "did you do?"

"I made a deal," she replied. "I'm going to avenge Nibelheim, and Cloud, and Zack, and everyone else Shinra has ever hurt."

"I told you –"

"I know what you told me! But Master, you don't understand; the pain NEVER stops. I always feel like my chest is about to explode, or I'm going to throw up, or I want to cry, or hit something, or hit someone. I can't go on living like this. I just … I just can't."

To Be Continued …

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