Preamble:

As in earlier chapters, this chapter ended being chopped down in the interests of length. Still on the longer side, I hope it's worth the wait (since the chapter that follows will likely not be coming any time soon). I remain sincerely grateful and flattered by the promotion of this story on other websites, as before.

Fuhito. After waking, Yuffie Kisaragi experienced a few unpleasant seconds of confusion. Then she remembered where she was: Kalm. The Elm Tree Ward. The master bedroom on the third floor of the abandoned Heidzig House. It all came back to her.

The first thing she saw, aside from herself in the old mirror next to a woman's wardrobe of untold age, were the stack of her notebooks and notes, some of them scribbled in her own poor handwriting, others printed in the typeface used by W.R.O. computer word processors.

She wasn't supposed to leave them out like that. It was against procedure; it might even be illegal. Even if only one other person knew she had slept for the last four hours or so in a bed she imagined belonged to Frau Heidzig, whoever she was. She looked back at the mirror and inspected herself: a thin, lithe but muscular 20-year-old woman, almost twenty anyway, almost-shoulder length black-brown hair that would be straight if she hadn't mashed it against the pillows and headboard for the last few hours. Just barely short for her age, though tall by Wutai standards.

"Taller than mom was," she said aloud. Her late mother, Kasumi, wasn't much older when she was born.

The thing about not sleeping is that you look like you haven't been sleeping. She turned away from the mirror and reminded herself it'd be inappropriate to show up in front of the old man in her underwear, so she hastily dressed, pulling shorts on and straightening the sleeveless sweater she'd slept in, before leaving the room and descending the stairs. She could already hear the other occupant of the building down the hall, past the sheet-draped furniture arrayed in the sitting room under a layer of dust.

Unsurprisingly, Victor Io was noisily standing in the kitchen in faded wool overalls and his sleeves rolled up, in front the stove. Groceries had been laid out along the countertops and the small round table had been set for one, though it lacked any seating. She rolled her eyes and glanced at him.

"When did you wake up?"

He looked at her over her shoulder. "I'm not sure. The thing about not being employed is that you quickly lose your sense of time, at least in precise terms. Early morning." He turned to her, showing that he was wearing an apron, and reached for the groceries. "I hope you like eggs, because I have a lot of those. Do you like eggs? I could make you tamagoyaki, though I don't have any ketchup."

A Wutaian grilled omelet. "Scrambled is fine," she grumbled, stopping in front of the table setting. She hoped her voice conveyed her displeasure, since he was looking away again. "Gardening isn't work?" she asked, spotting a chair in the direction of the dining room. With a sigh, she removed the sheet and dragged it through a cloud of dust to the kitchen table.

"Groundskeeping. No, not really, not when I do it." After loudly cracking his fingers, he picked up the egg, cracked it into a skillet, and neatly tossed it into the sink in a single motion, which he repeated over and over. "During the war, the long one…on the march on Junon, we ate chocobo eggs every single day, unfertilized ones. It was probably our only source of protein. They weren't considered a delicacy back then, of course, but we were the lucky ones. I don't think I ate regular eggs until after the famines." By then, the pan was filled with six small eggs, which he was rigorously scrambling.

She stood next to the table, staring at him. "Why are you cooking for me?"

"Well, you do need to eat. And while this isn't my home, strictly speaking, you're sort of my guest."

"Not to sound rude, but shouldn't you hate Wutai?"

"Why would I hate Wutai?"

"The war," she pointed out, as though it was obvious. "The long one."

"Oh, that. Well, it was a long time ago, before you were born. And the war you were alive for really didn't matter that much for those who fought in the last one, if you'll forgive me for saying so." He was already garnishing the eggs with salt and pepper by that point. A mechanical timer with a single large dial, that Yuffie hadn't taken notice of, sounded its tone. "The toast is done," he declared aloud.

Lifting the skillet with him, he opened the large oven beneath the range and, with a little difficultly, knelt down with his free hand. "Would you believe this house doesn't have an electric toaster? A toaster. They must've sold tens of millions of those since the war ended."

"Yeah, it's…ironic," Yuffie concluded, eyebrow raised.

"Butter isn't fresh, but it's been refrigerated. You like butter, right?"

Yuffie didn't answer, as he produced several piece of sliced bread skewered on a toasting fork, two of which he put on a waiting plate. The eggs, in a large, fluffy lump, joined them, and he was rooting through the bags of groceries. "Here's the butter. So, I have only one question to ask you, Ms. Yuffie Kisaragi."

He turned to her, holding the plate in one hand, his expression suddenly dour and cold. Yuffie felt her muscles tighten.

"Juice, tea, or coffee?"

I hate it when people do that. She sighed, louder this time. "Water is fine."

"Oh, I wouldn't drink the water here if I could avoid it," he informed her. "How about orange juice?"

Even without answering, she found herself sitting at the small round table with a large plate of scrambled eggs, buttered toast, and a narrow, antique glass of surprisingly cold juice. Io was still scurrying around, dropping the used skillet into the sink and packing up the groceries.

"What about you?" she asked, trying to hide any possible guilt in her voice while she stared at the meal in front of her.

"Oh, I ate when I arrived this morning," he assured her. "Though we're upwind of the power station, and the air is pleasant, so I might indulge myself."

She watched him take another dining chair out from underneath its sheet, drag it to the kitchen window, and set it down. Cracking the window open about ten centimeters, he began clumsily feeling around the numerous pockets in his overalls, a gradual look of confusion coming over his worn-out face, thin, long, coming to a point with his bony chin, and two dark eyes in the recesses of deep wrinkles. He found a cigarette—after a few more tries, he produced a lighter.

"You know that's bad for you," she repeated, recounting yesterday's conversation before she'd interviewed him.

"Do you drink at all, Ms. Kisaragi? Alcohol, I mean, not juice."

"Occasionally," she lied.

"But you do so sparingly," he concluded. "Picture of fitness and health that you are."

"You smoke one cigarette a day?" she asked, disbelieving.

He lit it finally. "Now, yes. When I was conscripted, the army gave us a cigarette ration, just like a water ration, a food ration, etc. Or they tried to, anyway. That was half-a-pack a day, so I smoked half-a-pack a day." As before, he held it passively in his hands while staring out the window at the disarray of the backyard. "I was your age, younger. It helped my nerves."

I doubt that. "I doubt that."

He grinned briefly. "After the war, you could buy cigarettes of course, but admittedly it is a particularly obnoxious habit among those who don't. The first sixty-eight floors of the Shinra Building are nonsmoking. After it was completed, it became necessary to deal with those sort of habits."

"So you quit?"

Leaning back in the chair, he turned to her and raised his right arm.

"You've been smoking one cigarette a day for…what? Thirty years?" She knew the construction of Midgar began in the 'Seventies.

He thought about it. "Not thirty years. And not every day. Some days I'd forget, or I'd be too busy to step out of the office," he laughed, the cigarette still burning towards his fingers. "I wasn't a salaryman, you know. I was captain of President Shinra's bodyguard. It wasn't a nine-to-five job."

Yuffie kept a look of appropriate loathing on her face as she ate. This is actually pretty good. Io remained at his chair, staring wistfully out the cracked window and blowing the occasional puff of smoke out. He hadn't moved by the time she cleared her plate, indeed, with him faced away she thought he might've fallen asleep in that chair.

She looked back in the direction of the dining room. The dining table, in contrast with the first floor's other furnishings, was uncovered: left there from yesterday was her reel-to-reel, its microphone on its stand, and its heavy leather carrying case. That's right, he told me I could leave it out if I wanted. No one just strolls into this place.

And even if she did, why did she care about keeping up Victor Io's strange charade? She crammed the remaining toast into her mouth, dropped her utensils noisily onto the plate, and went to inspect her equipment. The old man and his cigarette remained by his window.

Otherwise an official of the W.R.O. probably shouldn't be squatting in the home of a Shinra military family. "The groundskeeper said it was all right," probably won't hold up in front of a local magistrate. She surveyed her equipment to confirm it had sat undisturbed overnight, though hardly expected Victor Io to tamper with the recordings. The tape reels were where she remembered them.

She flipped the main power switch and watched the TC-5500's colored lights come back to life. "It's still unhealthy. Especially in Kalm," she repeated.

His response was delayed. "Even just one a day?"

She nodded, tightening and losing the thumbscrew on the microphone's metal stand idly. Obediently, he crushed the cigarette in his right palm before dropping it into the nearby bin and wiping his hand on his overalls.

"Despite my impressively advanced age, you should know, I haven't lived a health life," he explained, walking across the kitchen. "I've seen terrible things…the days during the war. The days after the war. Bread riots, witch hunts, pogroms. Things that would make the demonstrations in Wutai City look tame."

Yuffie played back a few seconds of audio over the TC-5500's speakers before using the noisy rewind feature, the distorted squeal of audio playing in reverse drowning out the spin of the motors, until she released the switch.

Victor Io looked taken aback. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to offend."

"What's to offend? They're…they were messed up." She paused. "I'm surprised you'd heard about them. They don't get much coverage in the press, compared to Junon or Corel or anywhere else."

"They do not," he conceded apologetically.

His suddenly remorse made her a little uncomfortable. "So, terrible things, just like you were saying yesterday," she began, eager to shift the subject.

"They were called that. Though I shouldn't claim to be so special." He looked around the dark, vaulted ceilings above him. "The man who Shinra gave this home too, he probably saw worse things than I."

He paused again. For a few seconds, his eyes seemed to glaze over. Out of the corner of her eyes, Yuffie wondered if this was how someone his age collected their thoughts. "Heidzig," he said finally.

Yuffie looked up at him. "Gesundheit," she joked.

He didn't seem to understand. "Heidzig. Heidzig was his name," he repeated.

"Right, the house's name?"

"My predecessor. Lieutenant Colonel Heidzig. He came from the Junon government-in-exile, he was commander of the military bodyguard assigned to Shinra during the war. After the war, Shinra liked him so much he offered him a post doing the same thing in the new army." He paused. "I think he might've known Shinra better than any man alive."

He was silent for a moment. "The man, not the corporation."

Blinking, Yuffie eagerly reached for the tape recorder's navigation controls again. "Is he still around?"

He shook his head. "No. He was twenty years older than me, at least. Furthermore, the fighting destroyed his health, he didn't live to see the end of the Materia War." He eased back in the dining room chair. "It's a shame he's not around. For what you want? Heidzig's the man you should talk to, not me."

Yuffie snapped her finger off the reversal switch and the spools came to an audibly satisfying halt. "And what is it that I want?" she asked, drawing her arms back to her and narrowing her eyes.

Io's eyes widened by comparison, and she kept her stare on him unflinchingly. She knew her suspicion was self-evident; somehow, she wasn't afraid of scaring him off. But in fact, if Victor Io decided to stand up and leave, there was nothing she could do to stop him that wouldn't involve physical force, or the threat of it, against an old man.

"You're not interested in the story of one old man living in obscurity in Kalm. No one is. You want to conquer evil and defend the innocent. And to do that, you've concluded you must understand the defining event of the Mako Age, the rise and fall of the Shinra Corporation." He put a hand admiringly on the molded plastic shield in its opened position. "I think your conclusion is correct."

When did I get so patient? She kept quiet.

"You know, this antique is quite the technological masterpiece," he declared cheerfully. "Look at the craftsmanship behind it, these perfectly machined metal parts, a brushed aluminum shell fitted perfectly at the seams, the perfectly balanced gears, belts and axis."

He glanced back up at her. When she proved unresponsive, he leaned forward and turned the device a quarter of the way towards him without upsetting the microphone. "A genuine Shinra TC-5500 tape recorder. Automatic tension arms to maintain to ensure uniform tape tension. Tape speed selection, reel size selection. Accurate VU—that's volume unit, by the way—meter, gold-plated low-impendence microphone and headphone jacks, shock-resistant casing, internal battery pack, multi-voltage support, and a circuit board that doesn't have a hundredth the computer power of the PHS in your pocket." He looked back at her, smiling ear to ear. She stared at him blankly, eyebrow raised. "I read the instructional manual while you were still sleeping. It's actually quite informative."

"Oh," she managed. She hadn't read it for more than the few minutes it took to figure out how to load and operate it.

"They stopped making these before you were born, probably. And why wouldn't they? A cassette tape recorder does the same job, more or less. It's much small, much lighter, probably more durable, and if it's not, they probably made a million more of the same model to replace them. Nowadays, I'm sure the W.R.O. uses digital audio recorders with solid state storage that can interface with a computer. But this thing, this museum piece from a bygone age…there could only be a handful of these still in private ownership. It might be the most valuable thing still left in this house, given the right consideration."

I know I say Tifa's all muscle and boobs, but she really should've known better. "It was a gift," she told him preemptively. Despite herself, she found herself wishing she was recording him.

"It belongs in a museum," he declared, unable to finish without chortling. "Have you ever been to an actual museum? I don't expect Edge has one of those yet, but there're quite a few in Junon. You should visit them one day, while you still can."

"They have museums in Wutai," Yuffie muttered back, as conceitedly as she could.

He nodded. "Now that Shinra is gone, I expect they would. Much of the last two centuries' history is owed to Wutai after all."

She let her body language betray her growing impatience. "Tell me about Fuhito." There was a little edge in her voice now.

"Fuhito," he repeated, as her finger struck the switch to record.

[START]

Io: Fuhito. I called him the most dangerous man no one has ever heard of, didn't I?

Kisaragi: Yes you did. Was he from Wutai, or do you even know?

I: Ah. The correct question. We never discovered his actual name, if it wasn't Fuhito. He may've been from Wutai, part of that diaspora or otherwise part of that cultural legacy. In fact, much of what we know came from the man himself. [PAUSE] An unfortunate reflection of the work we did back in those days.

K: Yeah, kind of sloppy.

I: I'm relieved to see you in good humor. We did confirm that he came from the Cosmo Canyon collective, like many other members of AVALANCHE. The same as that group's last leader Barret Wallace. [PAUSE] Are you surprised? You shouldn't be. The eco-terrorist organization AVALANCHE is intrinsically linked to Cosmo Canyon, and Fuhito was part of that movement. Maybe the most important part.

K: Do you know how Shinra knew this?

I: Because the company's intelligence-gathering office was put to the task. In the old days, that was the Department of Administrative Research. Though by your time, they were dissolved into a section within the General Affairs Department.

K: The Turks. [PAUSE] I always wanted to know, how closely related related were the Turks and the military?

I: Not very at the time. [PAUSE] It would've happened sometime around twenty years ago, in the wave of corporate restricting at the end of the war. President Shinra, at the time, actually opposed it. He always had this sense of prewar nostalgia, hating change, but it was the only was the companies, they were still relatively separate entities at the time, some of them foreign acquisitions, were going to secure power in wake of the government's collapse. There were two men close to the president, Karl Martin Heidegger and Cyrus Veldt. When the war ended, Heidegger resigned from the Midgar Army as a colonel, and went to become the head of the new Public Safety Department. Veldt, or Veld as most people called him, stayed on as head of Administrative Research, the department he'd founded for Shinra during the war.

K: So the Turks were around before Heidegger's department?

I: Oh yes. During the war, there was no need for an official channel between Shinra and the military. The military said something, or asked for something, and Shinra did it or otherwise produced it. That's how it worked since Shinra came onto the scene. Where was I? [PAUSE] Yes, Veld and Heidegger. Obviously by doing this, Shinra intended a rivalry to form between this two men crucial to his future plans, but actually they were still quite close. Veld was a civilian, and were it not for his influence, I imagine Heidegger would've stayed in the military.

K: Veld?

I: During the war, Veld, who was your age at the time or even younger, was bankrolled by Shinra to set up a department to shore up the military's own counterintelligence operation. It would be civilian, of course, and officially subordinate to the military, but the company would foot the bill. Mostly they looked at Wutaian saboteurs or spies, that sort of thing, but after the war Veld made sure to keep busy. During the war, Wutai made a lot of enemies among local religious and conservationist groups for hording materia, that's what got it called the Materia War in the first place. After Wutai was stripped of them, and Shinra secured a monopoly on the use of Mako energy, they turned on them. Remember, materia has been around for centuries and we've had Mako energy for more than four decades, but Shinra only started using it to generate electricity on a meaningful scale more than a decade after that, with the Nibelheim Reactor.

K: So, sometime after that…AVALANCHE came on the scene.

I: Much of this was never confirmed to me personally, but yes. From the perspective of those of us in the military, Veld's department was only going to be around so long as he could demonstrate its actual worth. But Veld was very good finding threats to the company and the military during those years. Cosmo Canyon was one of those places. Enter Fuhito and his accomplices.

K: You know, you've told me a lot about history, but not very much about Fuhito. [PAUSE] Is it because, unlike the Turks, the military didn't know much about him either?

I: [LAUGHTER] I suppose that's the case! I owe you an apology.

K: Don't worry, I'm not angry. Not yet. But you said the military eventually dealt with him?

I: I did, didn't I? All right, no more…fancy words, here's what I know: Fuhito was killed by the Turks in year zero-seven, after a seven year insurgency.

K: The AVALANCE Insurgency. Sorry, continue.

I: Yes, the First AVALANCHE Insurgency. What began as another anti-Midgar campaign from the war holdouts was given some environmentalist credence when new leaders, including Fuhito, arrived on the scene. So in that sense, a group of these insurgents that included Fuhito founded the modern incarnation of AVALANCHE. Fuhito's clique changed the game: more effort was put in coordinating with not just anti-Shinra people, but anti-Midgar and anti-Junon rebels all around the world. In Wutai. Corel. Mideel. Even here in Kalm, or what was left of it after Old Kalm was destroyed. AVALANCHE was an insurgency, but AVALANCHE was also a leadership clique. [PAUSE] From about the new calendar year to zero-seven, the situation got substantial worse, as much as Shinra tried to conceal that fact.

K: That was right after the Wutai War, the last one, ended. I remember that…

I: That it wasn't that bad?

K: Actually, yeah. [PAUSE] I remember that after almost nine years of war, my entire life up 'til then, everyone just gave up. It didn't make any sense to me. But you're saying there was fighting everywhere else?

I: Would you like to know the military answer to that question? [PAUSE] After the end of the Second Wutai War, the nine-year-long Materia War and the not hundred-year-long Continental War, Shinra made sure the military completed the process of disarming it had left unfinished since the previous war. Ships, aircraft, weapons, materia, everything that could meant a Third Wutai War, even though most of it actually went unused. So there was no Third Wutai War. Your father, Godo Kisaragi, remained 'mikado', or that's what we called him in Midgar anyway, in return for keeping his side of the bargain. But the military, or at least the old Midgar and Junon Armies, had been organized along lines of fighting another total war for decades. We really had no plan to fight an insurgency that wouldn't simultaneously harm Shinra's interest in the process. [PAUSE] I learned of Fuhito at Fortress Junon, where the Eastern Continent planned to fight an entire Wutaian Navy indefinitely. AVALANCHE wanted to destroy it and use its ammunition magazines and power source for a series of bombings on Midgar. They had more men and resources than we ever predicted, but they failed because of the Junon Army, and Sephiroth, who led the SOLDIER battalion at Junon. I don't mind admitting that we were completely blindsided by the situation, by then the Junon Army had transitioned to peacekeeping duties, policing and maintaining orders, with the navy and air force at higher states of readiness, but that might not even make much sense to you.

K: And Fuhito?

I: We captured Fuhito. No, that's not right. By then I was at Midgar at the Shinra Building. The Junon Army's military police captured a man who identified himself as Fuhito, only to have him escape when an insurgent with a suicide vest blew up himself and most of a troop company underneath the Sister Ray. If I was Junon instead of Migar, well…

K: Sephiroth. Sephiroth was at Junon?

I: Yes, as I said earlier. The last report from Sephiroth said he made contact with the insurgent. Regardless of what happened, there was an explosion and Fuhito escaped. I never encountered him alive again.

K: So that's what made Fuhito so dangerous. Because he almost turned Junon's weapon of mass destruction against Midgar. But Shinra still beat the First AVALANCHE Insurgency. [PAUSE] I remember when the Sister Ray killed the Weapons and brought down the Northern Crater's barrier. I heard it was the single greatest release of energy generated by humans.

I: It probably was, but that wasn't what I meant. In the end, the key to victory was to fight AVALANCHE the way we intended to fight Wutai: attrition. By calendar year seven, the Turks had pursued AVALANCHE for several years, as had the military. The year before, the Midgar Army actually managed to ambush what was probably the largest surviving force of insurgents, after many defeats and defections, thanks to the work of the Turks. It happened outside Midgar, on the highway to Junon. AVALANCHE had to fight like guerillas, because if they wanted armored vehicles or helicopters, they had to take them from us.

K: And Fuhito was there. That's where you killed him.

[STOP]

Yuffie had been staring at Victor so intently that she didn't seem him reach for the tape recorder's navigation controls and very deliberately press a switch, the reels stopping immediately. Her eyes went back and forth between him and the player.

"Why'd you stop it?"

He stared at her passively before slowly rising from his chair. Leaving the table, he stood by one of the two densely packed bookcases that flanked the largest window that faced out to the street, its curtains drawn closed. Staring at the shelves, with some effort he reached up for the highest one, took out a thick book, part of a color-coded set, and tossed underhand at the table. Yuffie reached out with her left arm and caught it; he'd been taking care not to throw it in the direction of the reel-to-reel.

"Hey!"

He was already in the process of throwing another book in the set at her. "When Heidzig told me I could come to Kalm, one day, if he and his family and everyone else were long gone, he told me where to find the house, and where to look for the key. He didn't tell me what the combination was to the safe, of course," he said with an almost manic grin. He then turned, and exerting himself, pulled out another book, producing a cloud of dust. Yuffie caught it as well.

"What the heck even are these?" she demanded, glancing at the titles. "Volumes six and seven 'Economic Reports: Anti-Shinra Activities'?"

"One of the things about reaching my age is when you hide things, you run a genuine risk of losing them," he explained, before reaching into the space behind the remaining books on the shelf and drawing his arm back out. In his hand he held a thick envelope made of ridged brownish-green paper. The top was secured shut with a length of red string, which he began undoing. Opening it, he took out a thick pamphlet of printer paper.

God, more printer paper. She caught the pamphlet when he tossed it at her, and immediately noticed a faded red stamp on the cover of a red diamond emblem with words next to it in three lines: STRICT SECRECY PUBLIC SAFETY DEPARTMENT SHIN-RA COMPANY LIMITED.

"That," he began, slightly out of breath from the effort, "…is a surviving copy of the manifesto of the man called Fuhito. It was surrendered to the Public Safety Department by the Turks after they killed him in the Sector 5 Slums. In it, he described his apprenticeship with the Cosmo Canyon sage named Bugenhagen, his philosophy for political change, and his appraisal of the state of the world and lifeforms occupying it."

He paused, waiting for her response. "I assumed they gunned him down in some alley in the slums. That's usually how these things work out, isn't it?" he asked her, as if she'd know better.

Wide-eyed, Yuffie stared at the faded papers, then back at Victor Io. "And?" was all she managed.

"And I think you should be the one to decide whether or not you actually want the philosophy of Fuhito, the philosophy of AVALANCHE, on the record."

With exaggerated care, she placed it down on the dining table in front of her. "In these interviews…is there a reason you've been acting like I wasn't in AVALANCHE?"

"Well, I assumed you didn't want these interviews to be about you." Looking back at him in surprise, there as a sly grin on the old man's face. She felt herself turn red. "I've said what I needed to—now you'll need to find out for yourself."

Author's Notes:

With the shuffling of scenes, I decided I'd double-down on references to the Japan-only Before Crisis -Final Fantasy VII- cellphone game, which is surprisingly still necessary to fill in quite few gaps left from Zack Fair's adventures in his respective game (which almost exclusively involve other members of SOLDIER, appropriately enough) and the events immediately prior to the actual Final Fantasy VII story. The dates should, in fact, correspond with that timeline (if anything seems incorrect, don't hesitate to point it out, since I deferred to Before Crisis before implementing original dates in that particular regard). Yuffie, like Shalua's younger sister Shelke, was apparently born in in November, 1991. In ten years, the (Second) Wutai War has begun and concluded, and AVALANCHE has begun their insurgency in earnest (at least, the Turks seem to think so). Fuhito's apprenticeship under Bugenhagen is not my invention (one can assume an ancient sage like him had quiet a few students in his time). Chickens, and oranges, presumably exist on Planet (Gaia). But it's not all doom and gloom. Hopefully you can see the gradual setup for other characters (I don't think it's a spoiler to say that this story will not begin and end with interviews on Victor Io, or at least that's not the plan). Remember that, as noted in the first preamble, all characters in this story are (occasionally) unreliable witnesses.

Anyway, as always please let me know you're reading, what you liked, what you didn't like (and if I should continue!) with a review. As noted, I ended up falling behind on my other writings to put this out, so a longer wait until the next chapter might be expected.