The Western Road. Yuffie thought about the dead. She thought about Lieutenant Colonel Heidzig, dead for a since before εуλ 0001, the little evidence of his existence consisting of a box of cassette tapes and a particularly somber painting of him in his scarlet military uniform. She thought about President Shinra, the mononymous founder of wartime arsenal that became the Shinra Corporation, and whose surviving issue was still the richest man in the world. And she thought about Sephiroth, or "Sephiroth of Nibelheim" as the W.R.O.'s classified records called him, another mononymous actor of Shinra.
Among other things, the cassettes confirmed something she'd speculated about since Victor Io told his story: Simon Heidzig had known Sephiroth.
A shame he's not around, she thought. Well, according to Victor Io. Though one sickly old man probably wouldn't be such a danger today.
Really, everyone who'd known Sephiroth—in the old days, unlike Cloud Strife—was dead. The elite cohort of SOLDIER, 1st Class, in service to the Peace Preservation had been wiped out during and after the Wutai War. The younger SOLDIER, 2nd Class and 3rd Class, that replaced them, which included the first women inducted into SOLDIER and what would become the Deepground Army, were not as acquainted: most barely knew Sephiroth, and many never met him prior to his disappearance in September εуλ 0002, when Nibelheim was destroyed. If he were still around, Heidzig might be invaluable for that alone.
People who knew Sephiroth, even only in passing, tend to be dead. Eye witness accounts are accordingly rare.
The same, she suspected, was true about Victor Io.
The old man—it was hard to believe that Heidzig would've been twenty years his senior—was lying in an uncovered couch, his gardening boots removed, almost comically pale feet sticking out from underneath a blanket.
"Well, even if the occasional cigarette isn't bad for you, the fevers must be," Victor groaned, shaking. "You think I would've learned by now."
"This happen before?" she asked distantly, sitting backwards in a nearby chair, chin resting on her arms.
"At my age, everything has happened before." He visibly stifled a cough, emitting a soft grunt. "It comes and goes. Maybe it's the climate in Kalm."
Does the climate in Kalm cause you to lose feeling in your limbs? She scanned him head to feet. "I don't think it's contagious."
"Oh, I'm sure it isn't, Ms. Kisaragi," he assured her quickly.
"I'm saying this because when I leave, I don't want you to think it's because of that," she explained in monotone.
"I know." She felt like he was almost mocking her now. "All the young people are leaving Kalm, they always have been. You're in good company."
To her surprise, he leaned forward on the couch as if trying to stand up. "I remember when the Cassini Boys left down the street, a few weeks after Meteorfall. You see, they were both…"
"Hey!" she snapped, reaching out to hold him down. It took surprisingly little effort given his height. "I didn't ask you about your neighbors. I can't believe I'm saying this, but you need to get enough sleep," she told him stiffly. "You probably need to eat more protein, and you need to stop this until it at least your fever clears," she chided him, brandishing an open cigarette pack in one hand.
"Yes ma'am," he replied dryly, shifting under the sheets.
"I mean, I know you're old and all, but this," she pointed at him generally, "…isn't normal. You shouldn't even go outside for your stupid groundskeeping routine, much less be smoking." She doubted it was Geostigma. Some of the symptoms matched, as they manifested in the elderly like Reeve's mother, but others didn't. On top of that, there hadn't been any reported new cases of Geostigma in more than a year. Whatever's wrong with him, it's not that.
Victor cleared his throat with a dry cough. "That's going to complicate things," he pointed out.
"Yeah, so I want you to take this." Reaching for the nearby sitting table, she opened a cardboard box, flipped over the paper inserts over the protective plastic bag, and presented him with a PHS, the same model as hers, a P900iV. After she unwrapped it from the plastic, Victor's eyes filled with awareness and irritation.
"I don't really want a telephone," he complained softly.
"Too bad." She unfolded the clamshell plastic structure and held it in front of him. "It's new old stock, it even has a built-in camera."
"Great," he said, taking it from her finally and holding it in his wrinkled hands carefully.
"And I know you're not going to like this because it doesn't jive with this whole…hermit thing…you're doing, but I've also ordered W.R.O. hospice staff to provide you with in-home care. Just until the fever passes," she told him.
Victor Io seemed to immediately become more alert, even jolting upright and pushing aside his blanket. "I must really object to that…"
"Hey, what did I just say? Get back down!" she barked, immediately causing the old man to shrink back into the couch. "You want that fever to get better or what?"
Victor only responded with a grunt, and she continued. "I'll set up regular wellness visits. If you're so paranoid that the Kalmish will come and lynch you or something, we can schedule them at night. Happy?"
He shook his head before easing further down below his blanket. "So where you will go? Junon?"
"Eventually. It's not exactly a bus ride down the highway from Edge." She crossed her long legs the dining room chair she'd pulled up to the couch, and her arms over her chest. "You were born in Junon, weren't you?"
"Not the fortress, but yes," he muttered more quietly. "Those who couldn't make it into the city before Wutai came had to flee the Junon Marches. My village was relocated to the Midgar Basin when I was a boy."
"So you don't have any family in Junon now?"
"No one who would remember me, I'm sure. Back then, no one really came from anywhere." Yuffie watched his breathing slow in pace as he sank down into the old couch. "But that's ancient history. They called it the Hundred Years War for a reason. You should go to Junon, there are…records, tapes, not like the miniscule collection I have here. More than a lifetime in the Midgar ruins could hope to salvage."
He opened his dark, almost pit-like eyes again, wide as he could manage, replacing his usual squint. "History lives in Junon, and Junon alone."
"Shinra's history at least," she muttered back as his eyes closed again. Which is the kind of history I'm interested in, after all.
"Shinra's history," he muttered. "That skinny, blonde-haired grease jockey in his blue boiler suit who hitched his wagon to the Grand Army of Midgar. Back then, no one knew he'd be making history."
Yuffie stared at him. "Dead now. Or you could ask him, I suppose. Heidzig would've known," he muttered sleepily. "He knew Shinra. Knew him when he was a boy."
He almost rolled over and out of the couch, before Yuffie reached out and propped him with an arm. "He's even in that old photo with Shinra."
"What photo?" she asked.
"The photo of the founders. He's there. Back row, in the uniform, couldn't miss him." Victor sighed deeply. "He didn't work for the company back then, of course. He was an outsider like the rest of us. But he was there, keeping an eye on them. He had orders. If you wanted to know about Shinra, you should ask…him," he told her as he dozed off.
She stared at him, the skinny, bony geriatric, his gaunt face with its angular brow and wrinkled eyelids under a thinning mop of straight, ash-colored hair. No matter how long she studied him, she couldn't picture him as a young man, even the age of the soldiers and officers at Healen.
You're useless, you know that? Reaching down, she took one right hand that had slid over the edge of the couch, replacing it under the sheets. She did the same to right leg, feeling a fragile femur through what scraps of flesh were still there. Delicately, she brushed grey-white hair off his wrinkled forehead so he might look half-presentable.
What good is an old soldier like you? She resisted the urge to laugh at him, and wondered if he was asleep. He must've been by now. Somehow, twelve or more hours of sleep were inadequate for the old man.
With a smirk, she tested her assumption, bent down and kissed his dry, pale forehead. If he was awake, he made no response, his breathing unchanged. I thought so. "We'll speak again when you're better." She gave him a sad smile. "You probably never even heard of Jenova anyway."
Rather than deal with the hassle of one of Kalm's public phones and their inadequate protection from the coal smog, Yuffie chose the basement of the Kalm Library, in sight of the ever-helpful August, to make the call to another former member of AVALANCHE, one that was long overdue. She half-considered recording it—she wouldn't even need her own tape recorder to do it, the Kalm Directory had more than sufficient technology for that.
"Hey Yuffie! How's the world's greatest ninja?" Barret Wallace asked with way too much enthusiasm. She decided against it; Barret hadn't been an employee of Shinra since before he lost his right arm, what interview him?
"Hi Barret, listen, I'll try and be quick…" she began, headset propped on her shoulder.
"Where you at, anyway?" he asked, ignoring her.
"Oh. Kalm, Kalm City."
"Oh, geeze. Sorry about, kiddo. Don't forget to wear your mask." He almost chuckled there.
"You know about that?" She was surprised.
"Yuffie, I lived in Corel for thirty years. I was born and raised in a coal town. I think I fu-…freaking know something about what it does to the air quality. And Kalm's powerplant was built in the worse possible place, not that there were many options." Barret was clearly on a roll. "I mean, sure, there's been improvements to the technology since before Shinra's time, but the W.R.O.'s trying to cut costs where they can and…"
"Okay, Mr. Coal Town, if you're such an expert—how the heck is the air in Kalm after three years worse than Midgar's after twenty?" Yuffie snapped. "Or is that just 'cost-cutting'?"
Barret took on a scholarly tone. "Oh, that. Well, it's just how coal works. It's always been dirtier than mako, that's how Shinra sold it in the first place. Oil too. Technically, the exhaust from a mako reactor's way cleaner than any coal-fire chimney, it's only dangerous in ridiculously high concentrations. That's why you can stand in the actual reaction chamber inside a mako reactor and not get sick, and it only dissipates further in the open air. Mako's toxic in its pure, liquid form. Coal dust, on the other hand, just tears apart your lungs, and even if you burn it, sulfur dioxide is acidic in any kind of moisture," he explained, as if it were common knowledge.
"And this is the bright, shiny future of hope you're promising?" she accused him. She knew the basics: as Fuhito's insane ramblings had outlined in his manifesto, coal presented a climatological problem in the long term, but mining and burning every ounce of it in the world would mean nothing to the Planet's Lifestream—it would just mean no more coal, among other things.
"Well, I think of myself as more of an oil and natural gas man presently," he said, a hint of defensiveness in his voice. "Just so happens that Junon's got a stranglehold on the offshore drilling in the middle sea, and their half of the Midgar Mountains, and the Zapada Peninsula, and Costa del Sol, and…"
"Yeah, I get the picture, thanks." She sighed. "I was calling you about that, actually. Do you have any reliable contacts in Junon? In energy production or anything?"
Barret audibly hummed to himself. "Wow. I gotta' tell you, Yuffie, they're all pricks. And not like the pricks I work with in the oil and gas department at the W.R.O., I mean real a-holes." She heard him sigh. "Well, there is one: Aske."
"I am asking, Barret."
"No, Aske, that's his name. Some dude in Junon's Ministry of Petrochemical Industry or something, but he's always been helpful. Especially considering I've never met him in person, which is why I think he's in the government, or maybe the military."
"Barret, that sounds incredibly shady," she muttered distastefully.
"Weren't you a material thief before we met you?" he reminded her skeptically.
"This isn't about me, Barret, it's about your weird friend."
"I know, I know! But he's always come through for me, one-hundred-percent of the time. Real stand-up dude, even if he sounds weird. You're Reeve's spymaster, you can probably figure out who the hell he really is."
Don't count on that. The New State of Junon was uniquely impenetrable to the W.R.O., and had been since its declaration around the time the W.R.O. was founded. What the world knew about Junon, Junon let it know. It was such a problem that, at some point, most in the W.R.O. had just given up and started pretending Junon, on the whole, didn't exist. Cloud and Tifa acted like it didn't to be sure. I've been saying for years, we need to get to the migrants, tourists, and expats. Before Junon realizes that free travel across the border is where they're vulnerable and shuts it down. She hated foreign policy, but Reeve wasn't particularly masterful at it either.
"Well, it's better than what we're working with over here," she muttered, giving August Fitzroy a glance—the young man looked offended by the remark. "How'd you normally reach him?"
"Through a phone number in the ministry. I'll text you the number I use. They'll see you coming though," Barret pointed out.
Yuffie smirked. "Oh, they'll see me coming a mile away. There's no point hiding it, didn't Tifa and Cloud tell you? I've already spoken to Rufus."
"Yeah, about that." There was an uncomfortable pause. This is where Yuffie expected the old Barret, bellowing and full of bluster, to come barreling back, but he didn't.
She grew suspicious. "What did Rufus tell you?" she asked accusingly.
"Nothing! Rufus doesn't tell me sh-…his accountants, on the other hand," he stumbled before trying again. "His Excellency the President Doofus Shinra is of the opinion that our negotiations with Junon are a waste of time for everyone. That all the gil he's giving us for exploratory drilling ought to be going to the Knowlespole expedition."
"Didn't that used to be your opinion?" Oh, gawd, I'm actually paying attention to Barret, she thought.
"Well, yeah, it was. But none of that's gonna' matter until Icicle Township agrees to sign over the rights."
"Yeah, I can kind of understand why Icicle Lodge might object to their backyard becoming the world's biggest oil field," she speculated.
"Well, I don't concern myself with that political sh-…stuff."
She rolled her eyes at the handset. "That must be nice."
"You know what your problem is, Yuffie? You don't let things go. Me? I'm a good soldier in this war for fuel—I'll go where the W.R.O. sends me, and so will the rest of my boys. And if the W.R.O. couldn't find their own ass with both hands and a map, well, nobody's perfect, right?"
She began to disbelieve she was actually having this conversation with Barret Wallace, the survivor of Shinra's razing of Corel in the wake of the alleged sabotaging of the township's reactor. "Listen, Barret, it's been real nice, but I gotta'…"
"Yeah, yeah, I know." Barret sounded like he'd belatedly heard himself and was embarrassed. "Hey, if you do get hold of Aske—ask him about Junon's Clean Air Development Plan."
"What's that?"
"I dunno, that's why I said ask him. I know it's been around for a year or two, but not what it's about. If I had to guess, I'd say liquefied natural gas, seeing how it's Junon and all." A pause."You see, Yuffie, when you take fossil gas—ethane and methane mostly—and liquefy it, the process removes certain harmful substances and pollutants. When burned, that means we get lower carbon-dioxide emissions by heat produced, not just lower than coal but diesel fuel and…" he explained.
"Oh, gawd, Barret! Spare me, would you?" she snapped into the handset.
"Fine, fine. Just thought you might wanna' educate yourself or something. Not like you ever went to school," he grumbled. "Some interviewer you're gonna' be."
A thought entered her mind, and annoyance was replaced by anxiety. "Actually, Barret, I wanted to ask…"
"What is it?"
Fuhito, she almost asked him. The original Avalanche Insurgency, the sabotage of the Corel Reactor and Shinra's punitive destruction of the town in response, everything else. "Uh…Tell Marlene I miss her, okay? I didn't get to see her when I was in Edge."
"Oh." Barret sounded surprised. "Uh, sure. I'll let her know, I'm sure she misses her Aunt Yuffie too."
"And thanks for your help," she forced herself to say. In the corner of her eye, she could see August holding back laughter. "I guess I don't say that enough."
Barret almost sounded taken aback. "Sure, Yuffie, any time. You know we all got your back."
Please, god, let this conversation end finally. She was about to hang up when he started shouting "Wait, wait! One last thing, Yuffie…uh, did he do it?"
She thought of Fuhito again before shaking her head. "Who?"
"Hart! Did he do it?"
She scowled at August and turned away. "Come on, Barret, you know I can't talk about an ongoing investigation!"
"Okay, okay, just curious," he replied innocently.
"Goodbye, Barret!"
"Oh, and if you see your dad, can you thank him for…" Barret's tinny voice terminated when she slammed the handset down and turned back to August.
"Wipe that smile off your face," she ordered him.
"Mr. Wallace is always quite a character. And very knowledgeable too."
"Why don't you shut up and call our ambassador to Junon?" she snapped, practically waving her hands over her head in exasperation. If I wanted to work with a bunch of jerks, I'd go work for Rufus Shinra.
Author's Notes:
After some delay, and some turbulent events in my own life (ugh), a somewhat shorter chapter (what I think is a good length, given my problem with running on too long in my other stories), along with the first appearance of none other then Barret Wallace. Truth be told, I was never terribly fond of AVALANCHE's leader, possibly because he was just that? Barret Wallace, working-class oil and coal expeditionary, on the other hand is a joy to write (though possibly comes off as irreverently comical, which I have to hope is offset by Yuffie's general unpleasant attitude). All things remaining the same, I have something different, and interesting, planned for the next chapter, which is mostly completed (I think I'm saying that every chapter at this point), so as always please let me know if you're reading, your thoughts and other feedback.