Not long after, Natalie and Barret had nearly made a path to the support pillar. Helicopter after helicopter had expelled waves of Public Security to defend the pillar.
It was Natalie and Barret that had to fight for those inches. With the rest of the Watch to back them up, which included Jessie, Biggs, and Wedge at the heads of their own squads.
After dispatching the PS at the base of the pillar, Barret turned on Natalie.
"What?" Natalie still her her sword out. She was ready for more. Tired as she was, she could go for far longer at need. The adrenalin pumping through her helped some.
"Marlene's alone at the bar. Make sure she's okay!"
"What about you?"
"You can get in and get outta anything. Go keep her away from this."
Natalie nodded without a second thought to the command and ran off back to Seventh Heaven without a word. She wanted to fight but orders from Barret were orders. Jumping from box to wall to shanty roof. She made a racket. The louder noises were coming from the the fighting as the Watch started the climb up the pillar.
Her hood blew in the wind as she went from rooftop to rooftop. Another helicopter was coming, this one didn't stop near the helipad near the train station. It headed straight for the pillar.
She had to jump carefully as one of the pieces of rooftop started groaning. Leaping down to the street, wraiths started appearing, slowing her down.
"NO!" she chopped down, removing one wraith from out of her way. People on the streets below her were rubber-necking the 'ruckus' at the pillar. Or running from Natalie's attacks. She must have looked like she was attacking the air and gone crazy. They were right on both counts.
The next roof panel creaked in a concerning way, so she abandoned the shorter route and moved down to street level. People gave her space as she chopped at the wraiths as more and more barred her path. Her insanity left her alone in the street except for the ghosts around her.
These wraiths weren't like before, they slowed her down, sent her down side streets, but in less numbers than earlier. The didn't stop her with an impenetrable wall.
More helicopters appeared, she could hear something crash into the ground somewhere nearby. Something large, like a helicopter.
"LET ME THROUGH!" she blasted a wraith with some fire.
She tried, she tried so hard to fight her way through the wraiths. She took other paths as a flaming helicopter blocked one of the perimeter gates. The wraiths slowed her down the whole way. The quicker ways were blocked by fallen buildings or crashed helicopters, blocking the way forward. The wraiths dogged Natalie the whole way.
The wraiths blew up and away, clearing the rest of the path forward. She put away her sword while she ran the rest of the way. Her goggles over her eyes and a scarf over her face while she ran past the burning remains of helicopters.
A helicopter lifted up from the ground in front of the bar as Natalie arrived.
Natalie stood in the middle of that clearing, searching the windows, she didn't see Marlene looking back at her. She didn't catch any faces in the helicopter windows as it lifted off.
As soon as the helicopter was clear of the roof line, it turned away from the support pillar. Leaving the sector as quickly as a helicopter could.
Natalie ran into the bar to be sure, shouting.
"Marlene!" Barret's adopted child wasn't behind the bar, she wasn't in her apartment. "MARLENE!"
There was no answer and no time. Marlene wasn't upstairs or in the bar and she even checked the hidden room under the floor, for AVALANCHE meetings.
Standing in front of the bar, Natalie could see the pillar, the flashes of the fights. Several helicopters blocked the full view. But she could still see the smoke lit by flames as the fighting raged on at the pillar. Barret didn't seem to be doing well.
Any street off of the bar was streaming with people trying to get away from the fighting. People weren't watching the chaos anymore. They were running away.
She had a choice to make, try to help or run away. The streams of people made the decision for her. They were a relentless tide of people, harder to fight than the wraiths. As using a weapon to clear her path wasn't a viable option.
'I'm sorry Barret. I tried.' Marlene was nowhere to be found, she had failed in her one job. Marlene would be at the bar, should be at the bar. She lived above the bar. But was nowhere to be found. Hopelessly Natalie followed the flow of the people.
Natalie followed the people to an exit, any exit from the area. She had to get out now. She passed her apartment on the way out. Natalie lived like she would never return to that room. Even as she had filled it with her stuff and cluttered the walls. She already had everything she needed in her bag.
She didn't stop for one last check in her rented room. It could get her killed. Even her last ocarina and music notes were in her small shoulder-bag. She carried her few precious items with her everywhere. The thing was practically her bug out bag, and here she was, leaving.
Natalie followed the wave of people evacuating the Sector. They were now moving through the streets in the direction of Sector Six. Natalie passed Marle, who was proceeding people into a service tunnel that connected the sectors.
Natalie tried to catch the woman's eye in the crowd, but there were too many people.
'Barret, Biggs, Jessie, Wedge. Aerith, Tifa, Cloud. Please please make it out. You have to. Make this worth it, make it all worth it.' She prayed that something would work out tonight.
Taking one last glance at the plate far over head. Natalie wondered if Lina or Jazz were at home on top of the plate directly overhead, they were SOLDIERs Natalie had left behind when she had run from the program.
She could only look above for a few moments before the crowd of people pushed her into the tunnel.
If Barret failed tonight, very soon, nothing above or below the Sector Seven plate would matter.
Natalie huddled in a service tunnel underground, somewhere between Sectors Seven and Six. She huddled with many other survivors. She only hoped that the ongoing collapse of Sector Seven's plate didn't bring the tunnel down on all of their heads. Hopefully the crowds were huddled close enough to the edge of the sector. That the tunnel would stay intact, and keep them all alive a little longer.
'I couldn't find Marlene to get her out. The wraiths wouldn't let me.'
She huddled with other evacuees, feeling a failure.
Natalie wanted to go home, back to the North Pole. She still didn't remember most of her time growing up at the North Pole, but with the plate coming down. It was the only home she had left. A bed on the second floor in a tiny hamlet near the top of the world. And far away from all of this.
The rumbling, booms, explosions, and tremors had no end. This was not the singular boom of the Reactor blowing. This was the sound of an 1/8th of the largest city of the world, collapsing and falling hundreds meters towards the ground above Natalie.
'I couldn't even save one person. Not even one person.'
Her side pressed against the wall, on her knees huddling with the other people crowded in the tunnel. She fretted over the events of the last night, wondering what she could have done differently to make things better.
After seeing Cloud and the others fall, possibly to their deaths. With Barret and the rest of AVALANCHE still out there, under all of that mess. There was no one left. She clutched her ears to try to block out the sounds of the booming echoes of the city falling.
Natalie had no one left. It wasn't long before her tears, streaking tracks through the dust on her face, left her with another headache. She could soldier on without sleep for even longer, but that would leave her worse off with her headache.
Glad to already be on her knees, she crouched lower, squeezing her head and trying to will the pain away.
She opened her eyes to the silent tunnel. The echoing booms had cut off like someone had pulled a plug on her hearing. Even the chatter and whimpering of the people around her had stopped.
The air was filled with a haze, staring at it, it took a few moments more of silence for her to realize that the dust and dirt shaken off the ceiling was suspended in the air.
She raised her head as it pounded. She held her temples against the pain as she stared. The tunnel was dead silent, she could only hear her own breathing. Eyes flicking around the crowd, no one was moving. It was too crowded for people to proceed through the service tunnels. But it clicked in her mind. No one was moving. There was a person cowering next to her, they weren't even breathing.
"What-?" Natalie looked around, struggling to puzzle out what was happening.
The silence, the lack of movement. It reminded her of something she had seen before. It gave her a sense of deja vu. Not that she had ever cowered in a service tunnel like this. But it tickled at her memory, but her brain betrayed her, not revealing what she had experienced before that reminded her of this.
Like so much of her that had been cut away after she had come out of the SOLDIER Mako shower, years before. Back when she had gone by another name, Marin Oakley.
Her head lanced pain, stabbing behind her eyes and all over her head. Curling into a ball on her knees, her eyes squeezed shut. As if closing them would lessen the pain in her head.
"AND WHERE ARE THEY?"
A voice filled her head, Natalie had no idea where it had come from. But it was the only sound in the tunnel, in fact it filled the space around her, pressing down on her. As She kept her eyes squeezed shut.
"Somewhere safe, from you." Another voice, a familiar voice Natalie recalled but could not place.
"SAFE? YOU CALL A LOST CHRYSALIS SAFE?"
'The fuck are they talking about?' Natalie thought. Both voices filled the silent tunnel, the louder on pressed down on her. But the quieter one filled the tunnel around her.
She opened her eyes, finally recognizing the quieter voice. "Ardyn?" She asked aloud.
She lowered the arms that had been covering her ears and head, a sound and vibration filled the tunnel. The vibrations of the platefall above moved through her. The dust continued to fall down to the floor and settle on everything.
The noises of so many people in the tunnel, talking, crying out, sobbing, their noises filled the tunnel like it had never stopped.
Moments passed and the pain in her head subsided, fading to the dull ache of an after-crying headache. The stabbing pain passed and she opened her eyes again. Looking around at the dust shaking off the ceiling. She could see the people shaking or flinching or sobbing along side the chaos that rained down on the sector behind them.
When the tunnel stopped booming and echoing, it was a relative silence. Blessedly, the lights only flickered, staying on and not trapping them in darkness. Small aftershocks and distant rumbling started, but the noise was no longer constant. The vibrations no longer shook Natalie's bones.
"I told you, you couldn't save any of them." Jamie taunted Natalie.
Natalie patently avoided the voice and visage of Jamie.
"Is it over?" someone behind Natalie said.
A trickle of people started moving on, through the tunnels.
"Little help here." Someone called from up a ladder.
For the chance for something to do, she stepped around the people in the tunnel and moved to below the stranger. While Jamie's ghost watched from further down the tunnel.
Natalie switched places with the one up the ladder. Above it was a manhole cover, made of solid steel and too heavy for him to move. With her SOLDIER strength she easily lifted the overhead manhole cover with one arm. "I'll make sure it's safe." She told the man below her.
Evergreen Park. Natalie had ended up exactly between Sector Seven and Six.
After checking the playground for any danger, she told those below they could proceed outside. Then she settled on top of the slide, keeping watch for danger. She brought her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around her legs while people trickled out from the tunnel below the playground. There were now steel i-beams impaled in the slide around her. Everyone was walking around, numb to what had just happened.
Natalie felt the loss as well. She also knew that the people below would be the most vulnerable to monsters that might take advantage of the chaos. Or monsters that 'walked on two legs' as well.
She had lost her entire found family in one night, again. She had failed Barret. Hope was dangerous. As well as attachment. Life had seemed so easy before, scraping a living in Sector Seven. Helping AVALANCHE screw with ShinRa.
She kept to herself and kept an eye out for dangerous movement. As more people trickled out from the tunnel below. Marin wiped more tears as they mixed with the dust on her face, smearing the dirt around even more.
She heard a familiar sound. And couldn't believe it.
She heard a familiar voice! "Wymer!" It was Barret.
Sliding between beams of steel, she moved across the ground. Her eyes countered her heart, showing her what she didn't even consider was possible a moment ago.
Natalie watched Barret, Cloud and Tifa had come into the playground. They were alive. All of them were alive!
She stopped mid-step. Realizing what she was going to have to tell Barret.
"Who else made it out?" Barret asked Wymer.
Wymer only shook his head.
Natalie approached the group, still having to convince herself that what she was seeing was real.
"Natalie!" Barret held out his remaining hand.
"I couldn't find her Barret. I-"
Barret pulled Natalie up and gathered her into a hug. She was too tired to react to the invasion of her personal space.
"It's ok, Natalie, it's ok. My little girl's ok." Natalie could hear the tears in his voice, while his frame towered above her, squeezing her into a bear hug.
Natalie got out one word. "Marlene..."
"Aerith got her out, Lee." Tifa told them. "Marlene's safe in Sector Five."
Natalie pulled herself free after a few moments. She could feel her mask stiffen her face as she respond to Tifa. Not to hide her feelings, but to prevent herself from breaking down at the knowledge that she hadn't failed. As well the knowledge that these three were alive. "Aerith's okay…?"
Tifa had trepidation on her face. "It's complicated."
Cloud stepped forward. "You never did say how you know Aerith."
Natalie wanted to touch Tifa and Cloud, to know that they were as alive and well as Barret. She kept her hands to her sides while responding to Cloud "She's the first friend I made in Midgar." Her heart soared. 'She's alive.' Despite the trap Corneo had set for them.
Barret patted Natalie on the back while she continued. "She has that effect on people. I just…" Natalie searched for words. "I had a hard time settling in the area. Then Biggs convinced me to join the watch in Sector Seven."
"We just talked to her mom, Elmyra" Tifa said.
"I've met her." Natalie told Tifa.
"Did you know that Aerith is an Ancient?" Tifa told her.
"No. I didn't." Something about Ancients and Cetra tickled the back of her mind. She was convinced that she had met one of the last living Ancients. But the thought formed like she knew of other Ancients. Yet her lack of knowledge on any other Ancients was clear. Roceler had been an old man, maybe he was or wasn't an Ancient. Natalie could not recall how she knew, but she did. As well as that he had died years ago.
Natalie didn't know what to say about that strange feeling or a lack of memory. She she listened while the others kept talking.
"Yeah," Barret told her. He started to go into a whole thing. About Aerith and her birth mother being found nearby, by Elmyra. About taking Aerith in.
It was like Barret was filling in the missing pieces for Natalie. As unbelievable as the story was, Aerith and her birth-mother escaping from ShinRa. Ancients. Listening to the dead. It made sense to Natalie in a strange way and she couldn't explain why.
Like Barret had jogged her memory on something she couldn't remember on her own. Again, she kept that thought to herself.
Natalie asked the three of them "Is that where you three just came from? Elmyra's?"
Cloud was still watching Natalie. He hadn't said a thing yet.
"Yeah," Tifa started. "We found out Marlene was there and wanted to check on her."
Cloud went right into asking questions into Natalie's business, very unlike the people Natalie was used to around the slums. Finishing with something even Barret knew, but never brought up with Natalie.
"You're a SOLDIER? Aren't you."
"Cloud!" Tifa told him.
Natalie's goggles hung around her neck, they were useless in the tunnels. She was covered with dust. Her eyes must have stood out in a halo of dirt on the rest of her face. "Yeah. I was. And now I'm not."
Cloud peered at her eyes, clearly he could see it in the street lamps of the playground, "You are a SOLDIER."
"Was." she corrected him. "I'm like you. An Ex-SOLDIER."
Cloud had an unreadable look for Natalie as he searched her face. Her eyes were half-green, half-blue. Natalie remembered a long time ago when the green had been gray. Anyone knowing what to look for would be able to see it. The goggles were part of her disguise. Just enough to cover her identity from people who might know what to look for. So far the wrong people hadn't gotten close enough to catch her, or her SOLDIER eyes.
"I left that part of my life behind me, Cloud." There were parts she wished she hadn't had to let go. But those roads had been burned away, there was no going back. "I thought you had lived around here long enough to know better than to ask about people's pasts." she looked down to the ground.
"What class are you?"
"Oh for-" Natalie started. She cut the curse off. She was so tired she didn't care anymore.
"Cloud!" Tifa grabbed Cloud by the arm.
Natalie shook her head. "I was Second Class, I left years and years ago. As I can tell that's the next question on your face."
Cloud closed his mouth, pulling his arm out of Tifa's hand.
Marin pulled her goggles back on. Her Mako-infused eyes hidden behind the lens made her feel safer, despite the darkness of the late night in the park.
"You two don't sound surprised by this." Cloud told Tifa and Barret.
"They already knew." Natalie told him.
"We don't talk about people's past around here." Barret told him.
"Got any more surprises like that in that coat of yours, Lee?" Barret asked with hope in his voice.
"Hmm, not so many now." Natalie said. 'A few, actually,' she thought. She had no intention of getting into it at that moment. Natalie deflected, "I'm just glad that Marlene's okay."
"Yeah." Barret said. "But, if you got out, maybe the others..." Barret said.
"I was already in the tunnels before the noises started." Natalie told him. "I haven't seen anyone else. Except Wymer just now."
The crushed look on Barret's face told Natalie all she needed to know, about Biggs, Wedge and Jessie. She didn't say it. She didn't ask. They stood in silence a few moments. Some of her found family had survived after all. But not all of them.
After a couple of minutes Barret broke the silence. "You OK to keep going?" He asked Natalie.
"It's just dirt. Why?"
"We're gonna take the tunnel back to Seven to look for survivors."
"I'll come with."
"All right, let's see what's on the other side." Barret led the way through the tunnel.
People were sitting in place or walking around in shock and devastation.
Natalie's heart hurt, but she kept moving. Taking a sip of water from the canteen in her bag. She kept the two new voices to herself in the tunnel, along with the dust stopping in mid-air, to herself. The last thing she needed was to hallucinate two more voices. Keeping her growing insanities to herself she followed the others and watched their backs.
The ground rumbled very close to them. There would be aftershocks as debris moved or settled. It would be a while before there were no noise at all. She could feel the vibration in her chest of the latest, brief, rumble.
'Could I have stopped this if I had stayed at the pillar? Would the wraiths have let me?' Her heart hurt from a combination of lack of sleep and crying. As they made their way to the edge of the ruin that was Sector Seven.
'Lina and Jazz said they got apartments in Sector Seven, topside.' Her few surviving friends in SOLDIER. Natalie had no idea if they had even survived to tonight. 'If they had been home tonight…' Natalie let the thought go, it would only hurt more.
Coming outside to the wreckage on the other side. Natalie felt like she had stepped into another world. There was too much debris and smoke. And above her was too much night sky.
It didn't feel like Sector Seven at all. Natalie knew it was, she had been standing here not that long ago, when everything was still intact.
"Helooooo!" Barret started yelling at the wreckage.
The air smelled like dust and ash. 'My training never prepared me for this,' she thought.
There would be so many dead people in that wreckage. She couldn't even see most of it for the piles in front of them. Her heart cried out for the deaths she had not been able to save, she had only tried to survive. She was no savior.
Natalie followed behind the others as they picked through the ruins for survivors. She watched their back for anyone or anything picking through the rubble, anything that might try to make trouble.
They found Marle at the edge of the service tunnel, getting people out of the rubble. Barret and Cloud made quick work to get them out.
Marle was glad the four of them had survived. She then suggested they try to take a look at the ruins of Seventh Heaven. Apparently the bar being on the edge of the Sector, and the way the plate fell. It had left Seventh Heaven in a bad state, but not buried deep under the fallen city.
When the four of them got there, they found it by the sign. It was in ruin, the building was partially buried.
Natalie couldn't help but notice the sky above again. After living here close two years. She felt on another planet. This wasn't her home, there was still too much sky.
A cat meowed nearby.
"Hear that?" Tifa asked. "That's one of Wedge's cats."
They followed the cat to a sink hole further into the ruins.
Tifa pointed out the hole was next to Wedge's home. "Is this all that's left of Wedge's place?"
The cat hopped down into the hole.
Cloud hopped into the hole after it.
Natalie stared at it. 'Wedge's cat. Could Biggs? Could Jessie be alive? Could any of them?' She hopped after as Barret yelled after her and Cloud. Natalie kept her heart still, she did not dare to hope that others had made it out as well. It would hurt too much if they hadn't.
The rocks and dirt of the hole, turned into a cave. The cave gave way to straight lines and constructed walls.
Barret and Tifa caught up to Natalie and Cloud.
They were in some sort of underground facility. They all stood on a metal floor, near the opening to another room underground.
Natalie could see Wedge, laying on the floor just inside that other room. She heard Barret call his name.
'If Wedge is-' Her thought cut out as the grating underneath all four of them collapsed and they fell deeper into the underground facility.
Natalie dangled from a rail. She pulled herself up and over, looking down. The lights were still on in this underground facility. She didn't hear anything at first.
"Lee!" Someone shouted from below.
"Cloud!" She shouted down.
"Do you see any others up there?" He yelled up at her.
"No."
The chamber echoed, the sound of gunfire came from every direction but above Natalie.
"Barret." they said together.
"Wait for me to come to you." Cloud told her.
"It's faster if I hop down to you. We should stay together."
"I think the others fell further down." He shouted at her.
"I'll climb down to you and we can look together. I can't tell which direction Barret is, but it's not above us."
"Fine. All right."
Natalie followed up with, "This city is full of secrets." She said as she landed next to Cloud.
"Hmm."
They found another open doorway, this time they made it into the room before the flooring collapsed under them again.
"What the hell is this place?" Cloud asked.
Any response Natalie could have given was cut off by the other occupants in the room.
Buzzing and flying around the room was the largest swarm of buggaboos Natalie had ever seen.
She swept her sword back and forth to keep the bug's stingers back "Got fire Cloud?"
"On it." Cloud cast fire spell after fire spell at the swarm. The heat of which made the bugs shy back.
The swarm started thinning enough Natalie could pick out more details in this room. Including the hive that was expelling a few more bugs.
Lee and Cloud, ended up back to back. Her keeping the bugs back while Cloud cast more fire magic.
"The hive Cloud" she told him after passing him one of her precious ethers. "The hive is above us."
"I see it. Keep the bugs off me."
Natalie circled Cloud, sweeping her sword back and forth to keep the bugs from latching onto either of them, especially Cloud.
Who was currently in the long cast of a Firaga spell.
"Ahh!" Two bugs had latched onto Natalie's arm and started stinging her over and over again. A few more landed on her back and made attempts to tap their stingers through the armor in her coat. No doubt they were poking holes in the fabric. She noticed Cloud's gaze move to Natalie in trouble. "Eye on the hive, I'll be fine."
She was not fine as the bugs smelled weakness, or the stings of the first two bugs. She slammed down on one of them with a gloved hand, grabbing it and ripping it off her sleeve. She growling loudly in pain as the bug was ripped free, stinger and all from her arm.
"Turn around!" Cloud shouted at her.
Natalie turned her back to the other ex-SOLDIER as he scraped the bugs off her back.
She gritted her teeth as she ripped at the other bugaboo on her arm. The ceiling above them was engulfed in fire as the hive burned. One of the thing's wings ripped away in her gloved fingers. The thing kept stinging her arm over and over again.
Cloud swiped and swatted at the remains of the swarm around Natalie, freeing up the space as the ones latched onto her became just the one on her left arm, still holding her sword.
"Dammit, it hurts. RAAAAARGH!" this time she slammed the bug between her hand and her arm. Pushing with her SOLDIER strength to kill the thing and smash it.
The bug was big enough that she could only mash the thorax between her palm and arm. Leaving just part of the body and the stinger embedded in her still.
"Erg," she ripped out the stinger and tossed it to the floor.
Cloud cast a couple more fire spells to keep the swarm back from them.
"You gonna be all right?" Cloud asked her.
"Nothing a potion or Cura spell won't fix." She lied. Her arms throbbed where she had been stung. Magic would help but would it be enough?
Cloud nodded, applying the magic himself.
"I got it-" She stopped as Cloud fixed her up. "Thanks." The throbbing of the stings faded nearly to nothing under Cloud's ministrations.
"Nothing to it."
They both looked around, the hive was still burning even as the fires started to dim. The swarm was keeping back from the source of the fire. There was little left to do here other than move on.
"What do we do now?" Natalie asked Cloud.
"Let's go this way first."
Natalie followed Cloud's lead with only a nod.
They made their way deeper down, it wasn't long before they started seeing bullet holes everywhere. Trails of dead things not yet reclaimed by the Planet. Devastation everywhere.
"This way." Cloud said.
"Ok." Natalie followed behind.
She expected monsters to come out from behind every corner and door.
They climbed through a disabled industrial fan system, signs of shooting everywhere. They had found a hallway from one chamber to another. By the sounds, now ahead and distant, they had a bearing for following Barret's trail.
Cloud picked up a line of questions from much earlier.
"So is that's what you've been hiding" He pointed at her goggles, "behind those?"
"I'd be happy leave those days behind me, to be honest." Especially what she had lost while he had become a SOLDIER. "Forget I even was a SOLDIER."
"You don't fight like you forgot how to be a SOLDIER." Cloud didn't accuse, but he wasn't letting it go.
Natalie forced a chuckled, "Those years might be behind me, but there's no forgetting training like that."
Cloud kept going, "Then what about before that?"
Natalie looked away to glare at the wall. "I was a waitress." When she looked back at Cloud, her face was as stiff and blank as always. The question was innocent enough, but Cloud didn't deserve that anger that covered all the complicated feelings the question had poked.
"A waitress?" He didn't seem to believe it.
"That's what I said." It had been the least painful wording she could use. Before becoming a SOLDIER, she could remember being a waitress, but little else.
Some guard hounds had slipped lose of their cages. Cloud and Natalie easily sliced through them as they kept moving forward.
"How does a waitress become a SOLDIER?"
"I'm not just- I wasn't just a waitress." She jumped ahead of any more questions. "It's complicated. It's a long story. I don't want to talk about it."
"Sorry I asked then."
Natalie ground her foot on the floor, "Are you though? I thought you had lived in the Slums long enough to know not to ask into other people's business."
Cloud's brow worked, it started to wrinkle at her tone.
Natalie took a slow breath, she could hear the anger in her voice, now that the words had been said. "Look," She double-checked that sher wasn't angry, "Maybe one day we can have a story-time. About the lives we all lived before coming to Midgar. Before you or me became SOLDIERs. But it's both not a good time, and been a long night." She artfully talked around the black hole that was her memories before she had joined SOLDIER.
"One day later, we can swap stories," Cloud promised.
"Over drinks or something, not dead bugs," Natalie said.
"Yeah, not in this place," Cloud agreed.
She took a few more breaths, she could feel the resistance against her chest-binder. Situations like this were made a touch harder by the tight material around her torso, flattening her profile.
But having the chance in the Slums to stretch out and be herself, from within the binder.
Something she had denied herself in her years working for ShinRa. Out of fear to how the staff and her co-workers would react to someone like her.
But wearing the tight material now was liberating in a way. Not knowing what tomorrow would bring made her want to wear it more intensely. Not knowing if it would get damaged, or just worn out.
But in the last ten years she had worn the two she had day after day. She hardly went without one now. Her other binder was buried in the rubble above, but it was something replaceable.
Her gender expression was something she never denied herself anymore.
Natalie's mind drifted back and forth from wearing her current binder, and not wearing any for years. While she adjusted her messenger bag, her sword remained in her hand while they continued following Barret's trail.
They were ambushed by another person standing in the hallway with them. Natalie stopped in her tracks.
Cloud stepped past Jamie, not reacting to her presence.
It would have been easier to see Jamie as not real if Cloud had walked through the image of her. As the hallucination spoke.
"What do you have to be afraid of?"
Coming from Jamie, it sounded less a comfort and more a threat.
Natalie lagged behind Cloud and closed her eyes, trying not to listen to the sound of her dead ex-girlfriend's voice.
"Aren't you too strong to ever be afraid again?" Jamie asked.
Her eyes were closed to where Cloud was going next. And wasn't listening to whatever he just said.
Natalie's head pounded more in that familiar stabbing pain. Spreading from her temples and across her forehead. She tried to listen through the pain, to what Cloud was saying, but her head was too full.
She tried to focus on through the pain.
Cloud was ahead somewhere. Natalie pulled through the pain. Convincing herself of what couldn't be. To get back to helping Cloud find the others.
"Protect him," Jamie's voice continued. "From himself."
'It's not real, it's not real.' Natalie remind herself. 'It's all in my head.' She opened her eyes as the pain subsided, becoming a dull ache behind her eyes.
Looking up she saw Cloud doubled over in pain, clutching his own head.
"Cloud? Cloud! Snap out of it!"
He straightened quickly, rubbing his temple.
"Hey, Cloud. You okay?" she asked him. Natalie was wondering what brought that on in him. 'It's all in my head. But what happened to Cloud?'
He shook his head, still rubbing his temples. "I'm fine, let's go find the others." Cloud stalked off, still heading towards the sounds of gunfire.
Natalie wanted to ask anything about another SOLDIER clutching his own head. Did he hear anything? See anything? But his response had been as final as her response was earlier.
Even if his 'I'm fine.' Sounded like a damn lie.
Natalie would have to find another way to ask about it, but later.
But she wondered, 'He had been holding his head too. But...' Natalie had seen too much unstable mental health, and suicides in SOLDIER. She started wondering how much she really had in common with Cloud. But it wasn't something that was easy to ask about.
"Come on!" Cloud called from around the corner of the industrial building.
Natalie jogged to catch up. Finding Wedge's cat, Barret, and Tifa was a today problem. Whatever garbage was going on in Natalie and Cloud's heads were a tomorrow problem. So Natalie focused on the now and caught up to Cloud.
A stone settled in Natalie's gut anyway. With the wraiths about, she wasn't sure what they would permit her to do, or if they would suddenly appear to block her path again. But seeing that something was happening to Cloud, was another tomorrow problem.
Natalie focused back on the right now. As Cloud and Natalie fought there way through more monsters, heading towards the sound of a machine gun.
'Forward and through.'