The Conscience of the King Chapter Sixteen: Your Next Bold Move "And the mighty multinationals have monopolized the oxygen so it's as easy as breathing for us all to participate Yes they're buying and selling off shares of air and you know it's all around you but it's hard to point and say "there" so you just sit on your hands and quietly contemplate your next bold move the next thing you're gonna need to prove to yourself." -- Ani DiFranco Reeve woke with a start and with his heart pounding. Thunder, he told himself. Just thunder. It was April; Midgar got storms. He didn't know why the thunder always woke him up. Five seconds later, the building shook with the shock wave, and he was on his feet and out on the balcony before he knew what he was doing. The skyline was on fire, and the Sector One reactor -- He was sprinting for his cellphone half a second later, and his hands were trembling as he pushed the speed-dial button programmed with the number of Central Control. The college student who usually minded the dials and answered the phone in the middle of the night sounded hysterical when he picked up, and the phones were ringing off the hook. "Control room, please hold --" "Don't put me on hold!" Reeve yelled, and the kid paused just in time. "This is Reeve Brannon, what the /hell/ just happened?" The kid swallowed audibly. "Sir, I /don't know/. All I know is that the Reactor One onlines just went /offline/, we're down about twenty percent across the board, the grid just /spiked/, and the phones are off the damn hook. I need help; I can't do this by myself!" Adrenalin was an excellent substitute for coffee, even when it was three in the morning. "All right, I'm putting on my pants right now -- look, just /hang on/, I'm halfway across town and I'm going to have to call over and wake people up to come down and help you until I can get over there. /Don't panic/. You'll do something stupid if you panic. Just take a deep breath, do what you need to do, I'll have someone down there as soon as I can. Ignore the phone and get the power grid straightened out /first/. Take the damn thing off the hook if you have to. Call me if you find out anything or if you hit something you can't handle. I'll be /right over/." He hung up the phone without waiting for a response -- the kid had enough to handle, he didn't need to worry about a director breathing down his back -- and pulled on the first shirt that came to hand. His cellphone rang again just as he was reaching it to start making phone calls. He clicked it on and snapped out "Brannon," while trying to find his shoes. It was Tseng. "I've got about thirty seconds, so shut up and listen. We think it was a bomb and no one's answering the phones over there. Rude and I are on our way over; what do you need Reno to do?" Ramuh /bless/ the man. "Get down to Central Control, give the night duty guy another pair of hands so that the power doesn't go out, wake up the emergency duty manager, I'm on my way over to the building right now, and for the love of everything, get someone over there immediately to /turn off the Mako flow/ in that reactor before it overloads the regulators and takes out that entire side of Midgar." Visions of Gongaga streamed through his mind, and he tried to shut them off. He could think about that /later/. "Call me the minute you get there, don't touch /anything/ else, but make that your absolute first priority." "Got it. I'll call you. Keep your cell phone on." Tseng hung up and Reeve just blinked a few more times before moving again, looking for his keys. He hated driving in Midgar, but it was the only way he could get to the building fast enough. He was in Central Control within twenty minutes, breathing hard from running through the hallways. Three control stations were occupied; Taki, the emergency duty manager, was in the primary operator's station, with the overnight kid and Reno at two of the control stations. The room was silent except for the manager barking out rapidfire commands; Reeve noticed that the kid had taken his advice, and not only taken the phone off the hook but pulled the cord out of the wall. "Sector eight, minus thirty," snapped Taki, and Reno fumbled at the controls with the awkwardness of someone who's had the procedure explained to him once, at great haste. "Sector three, plus eighteen. Sector four, minus twenty-two." Reeve didn't even try to distract them. He glanced over the overhead readouts as he slid into the secondary operator's station, taking in the alarming amount of red and blinking telltales as he unlocked the workstation. He slid into the routine as smoothly as though he did it every day; he was, at heart, an engineer. "Secondary operator coming online," he announced. "Ready to monitor. Five through eight, mark. Reno, that means you listen to me and you do what I tell you to do. In three, two, one, go." "Dual operator mode confirmed." Taki sounded relieved. "Thank Alexander you're here, sir. Sector two, minus eleven. Cut down the flow, cut /down/ the damn /flow/. We've got just about everything under control but the boundary controls. Sector one's offline, but the system is still trying to pull power from it. We can't override the system automatically; we've been rerouting things manually, but the load balancer doesn't know what to /do/ with one of the generators down." "That's insane. Sector seven, plus nine, sector eight, minus eighty-three." Reeve flipped a few switches, and then frowned. "The load balancer doesn't think that sector one's offline. Lovely." "Sector three, minus eleven. We haven't heard anything from the guard team over there." Taki sounded worried. "Tseng'n Rude are on their way over there." Reno sounded wide awake, despite the fact that he looked like he'd been pulled out of bed. "Tseng knows what to do. He'll turn off the reactor flows." "Sector seven, plus twelve," Reeve interrupted, and frowned. "Correction. Sector seven, plus /eighteen/." He shook his head. "Taki, I don't know what's normal for this time of night. Are we pulling more power than usual?" Taki's hands were flying over the keyboard, and she frowned. "We've been running hot the last few nights, but not this hot. I don't know what's going on. Where's it all going?" "Upstairs, mostly," Reeve replied, distracted as he tried to trace the power flows. "In the building, at least. I --" His cellphone rang. "Damn. Back to single operator mode. Secondary operator going offline." Taki nodded. "I read you. Two through eight, mark. Single operator in three, two, one, go. Single operator mode confirmed. Sector eight, minus three." Reeve fished out his cellphone, stepping away from the control station to avoid disrupting the call and flow of energy requirements. "Brannon," he answered. "Sorry for the delay." In the background, he could hear sirens and shouting, but Tseng's voice was perfectly calm and composed. As usual, he didn't bother with preliminaries. "You've got problems. It was a bomb, and whoever did it knew precisely where to hit. Your emergency regulator valve is slag right now." "It's -- /fuck/." Reeve sat down heavily in a spare chair, blinking in disbelief. "Who the hell could have done that? Don't these people /know/ that if you take out the emergency regulators, the reactor's got a fifty-fifty chance of going critical?" "Considering that /I/ didn't know that until approximately three seconds ago, I would guess not." Tseng's voice was dry. "Tell me what to do to fix it. They've almost got the last of the fires out over here now. How much time do we have before this place is going to blow?" Reeve rubbed at his temples with the hand that wasn't holding the phone. "A few hours. More if Central Control is on the ball. Hold on." He covered the speaker of the phone with his hand and waited for a gap in the action. "Taki, One's out of it and the emergency regulators are busted. How long can you keep it in manual?" Taki frowned at her readouts. "I can keep it up for a few more hours. Maybe three, before we start to go critical, and then another forty-five in brownout to reduce the demand. Longer, with help." "You'll have it." Reeve switched his attention back to the phone. "I've got three hours. Longer if we brownout and keep the demand low. We've got to get this fixed before morning, though, or the shit's going to hit the fan." Tseng chuckled grimly. "The closest to 'fixed' this is going to get is shutting down this whole thing for a few months for repairs, Reeve. Your control room is slag. Whoever did this knew exactly where to hit." "/Shit/." Reeve caught his mind racing, and tried to drag it back to the task at hand. "All right, look. I'll be over there with the emergency team in about half an hour. We can probably at least shut the damn thing down, at the very least figure out why the load balancer thinks that One's not offline --" "Can you spare Reno over there?" Tseng interrupted. Reeve blinked. "I suppose so, if we wake up a few people and get them down here. Why?" "Because you're not leaving the building without someone else with you. We don't know who did this, and we don't know if they're still around. Get Reno, tell him to be on his closest guard, and get over here to deal with this as quickly as possible, before the old man has kittens." It was Tseng's turn to cover the speaker of the phone, shouting something to someone in the background; Reeve couldn't make it out. "All right. Don't touch anything and don't let anyone touch anything until I get down there." It was Reeve's turn to hang up on Tseng without saying goodbye -- which, he had to admit, felt good, in a small and immature fashion. He looked over at the other three in the room and again waited until a lull in the action before speaking. "Taki, I'm going to call in the cavalry. Reno, you're with me. We've got problems, and we haven't got much time to handle them." It wasn't until he was halfway across the city, smoking a cigarette down to the filter while Reno drove at breakneck speeds, that he realized that he hadn't yet asked if anyone had been hurt. -- * -- "Was anyone hurt, was /anyone hurt/ --" Tifa rested a hand on Jessie's shoulder. "Jessie, honey, you're yelling at the TV again." "I know I'm yelling at the /fucking/ television, I was the one who /calculated/ those fucking explosives, it should /not/ have taken out that much of the reactor -- was /anyone fucking hurt/?" Jessie slammed her hand down on the table and collapsed back in the chair. "I don't know what the hell happened. It shouldn't have been that big." "It's all right, Jessie." Tifa gave Jessie's shoulder a reassuring squeeze. "I don't think anyone was hurt. They would have said if anyone was hurt. It went fine." "Wouldn't matter if anyone was hurt," Barret grumbled, having switched his gun prosthesis for the one crafted to match his other arm, wedging the gun against his body and carefully cleaning it. "Instead of eight reactors rapin' the planet, now we only got seven. An' in another two days, we gonna have /six/." He narrowed his eyes at Cloud, who was leaning against the wall, and called out, "Hey, Shinra, we run into any of your SOLDIER buddies tonight?" Cloud just snorted, not even bothering to look up. "Hardly," he said. He and Barret didn't like each other; that much was plain. "Yeah, you so sure?" Barret looked back down and put more attention into cleaning his gun. "If we had, you'd all be dead." Cloud's voice was flat, detached; Tifa bit her lip, debating whether or not to step in, when Cloud solved the problem for her. "I'll be upstairs. I want to talk about my money." "Cloud. Wait." Tifa took a step forward and held out a hand. Barret snorted. "Let him go. Prettyboy still misses Shinra." Cloud whirled around in the closest to a show of temper Tifa had seen from him since meeting him again. "No. I don't miss Shinra. I don't work for Shinra. I don't give a damn about Shinra, either. But you know what? I don't care about Avalanche, or the planet, or your stupid 'cause', either. I'm in it for the /money/." He turned around and stepped onto the rickety elevator platform. "And I'm going to be upstairs waiting for my money, whenever you feel like getting off your asses and settling accounts." Tifa dashed across the room just quickly enough to worm her way onto the platform with him, just as it started to rise. "Don't let Barret get to you, Cloud," she pleaded. "Look, we're all under a whole bunch of stress. I -- please. We need you." ~I need you,~ she thought, but knew better than to say. Cloud had been recovering physically, had been acting perfectly normally -- but had turned away her every single attempt to talk about anything more meaningful than the weather. Something in his expression seemed to soften as he looked at her. But maybe she was imagining it. "I'm sorry, Tifa." She paced in the close confines of the bar's main room, dark and silent for the mid-day break. "Look, Cloud, the planet is /dying/. We're killing it. /They're/ killing it. They're killing us, and they're /getting away with it/. We can't just let them." She turned around to look at him, saw that he wasn't even looking at her, and pulled out the last weapon in her arsenal. "We can't let Nibelheim happen ever again." His shoulders tensed, and he stopped in his tracks. For half a second, she thought that she'd managed to get through to him, and then he shrugged again. "So, let Barret handle it for you. It's not my problem." She had the horrible sense that something was slipping between her fingers, like the way snow melts against warm skin in the springtime. It made her voice shrill as he turned to leave. "So you'll just turn your back on me, right? Just gonna walk away? I thought we were friends." Briefly, as he stopped, she thought with absolute clarity: ~No, we weren't. We were never friends at all.~ The thought skipped around her brain a few times, and was forgotten. "I'm sorry, Tifa," was all that he said, without turning around. The words slipped out without a conscious choice, as though something was spilling up from inside her and doing the talking for her. "You forgot your promise." And as she said it, it all came flooding back, and the sudden rush of memory had her blinking away tears. Cloud turned around to face her, and his expression was blank. "What promise?" The words came to her lips without her having to stop to think about them. "It was right before you left. That winter. You called me out to the well -- I didn't know what you wanted, but you said that you were leaving in the spring, that you were going to Midgar and wanted to be part of SOLDIER." As she spoke, the details filled themselves in in her memory, and she looked down at her hands, twisting her fingers together. "I -- I didn't want you to go. So I made you make a promise. That if I were ever in trouble, and I called for you, you'd come and save me. Once you got to be a big famous hero. You promised." She couldn't tell if he remembered or not. "I'm not a hero, Tifa," he said, not meeting her eyes. "I'm not anybody. I can't keep a promise that some kid made seven years ago." The phrasing made her frown, but she shook her head. "A promise is a promise, Cloud. It doesn't matter if it was made seven years ago or seven days ago. You said that you'd help me -- that you'd help us. You have to help us." Any further conversation was cut off as the elevator platform kicked into life again, Barret appearing after a moment. "A promise is a promise, Shinra," he said, unknowingly echoing Tifa's words. "Not like your people'd know it. Here." He pitched a small bag at Cloud; Cloud untied the money-pouch's strings, tipped a handful of coins out into his hands, and snorted derisively. "This is what you're going to pay?" he said scornfully. "You've got to be kidding me." A crazy hope dawned in Tifa's eyes and she stepped forward. "You mean -- you'll do it?" Cloud glanced back at her as he poured the coins back into their pouch. "Not for this. You got the next target? I'll do it for 3000." "That's nuts." Barret slammed a hand down on a nearby table. "You ain't worth that much even if you was a SOLDIER! We ain't --" Tifa cut him off, quickly putting a hand on his arm. "No, it's all right. We'll pay." ~Old friends are supposed to help you without money,~ the thought came whispering, and ~but he's not an old friend after all, so why should he?~ answered it. "It's all right, Barret. We'll pay." Barret looked at her and hissed, in what passed for a whisper from that barrel chest, "We don't /got/ that kind of money! And what we do is for Marlene!" She gave him a Look, and he scowled further. "All right. Two thousand. And not a gil more." Cloud smiled pleasantly, and the expression seemed odd on his face. "Then it's a deal." He turned around, and strode towards the door. "I'll be back later." Tifa watched him go, biting her lip. Barret waited until the door had shut again before turning on her. "What are you thinkin'? We don't need any kind of fancy Shinra help! We're doin' fine on our own!" She could feel the headache starting already. "Stop /shouting/ ... we're hurting for help, and you know it. And you told me he was good, last night. He really helped." Barret just glared. "We don't need that kinda help. We don't need the kinda help we gotta pay through the nose for. We're doin' fine on our own, and if people are gonna help us it should be because they believe. Not 'cause they gettin' paid for it." He turned away and stalked over to the bar, pouring himself a cup of coffee. "That ain't right. You just want him to stick around 'cause you used to be friends." "Maybe I do." She sank into a nearby chair and rubbed at her forehead. "I -- he's in trouble, Barret. There's something wrong with him. And he isn't going to tell us about it, and he isn't going to do anything about it, and if we let him go then he's just going to go marching off somewhere like Cosmo Canyon and there won't be anyone there who can even tell that there's something wrong with him, much less want to fix it. If he stays with us --" ~I might be able to help him,~ were the next words that were going to escape her lips, and she bit them back. She didn't think that she'd be able to help at all. She didn't even know what was wrong. But there had to be something she could do. "Can't save everyone," Barret muttered, but didn't press the issue. "Not when you're tryin' to save the world." She let it go. There was work to be done. Somehow, no matter how hard she worked, there was always more work that needed to be done. -- * -- Reeve was tired, dusty, sweaty, living on coffee, and desperately craving a cigarette. He'd only gotten a few hours' sleep before the disaster had struck, and by noon the next day, he was beginning to regret even those; if he'd simply /been/ up, rather than having been awoken, he wouldn't feel so damn groggy. He wasn't usually called in to work directly in the reactors. They had people for that, engineers specializing in reactor safety and reactor maintenance -- but none of them had been available at four in the morning, and by the time they came in, it had been clear that the problem was so bad that they needed all hands available. And so Reeve had grabbed a spare toolbelt, buckled it on, and hurried down to the slag that had once been the main control room. He was hanging from a catwalk, roped in via safety harness but still holding on with one hand, when his cell phone rang. He ignored it the first time -- heights were not really his thing, and phone conversations while 200 feet off the ground sounded like even less of a good idea -- until his pager went off, a few minutes later. He nearly dropped the wrench that he had been using to re-tighten the Mako conduits, before reaching for the pager to see the message. With typical terse style, it simply read "What happened? -R" Reeve sighed and started reeling in the safety harness. He should have realized. There was little in the way of privacy in the ruins of the reactor; he finally climbed out one of the holes in the side of the reactor and just ducked outside to stand on the slag. Rufus answered the phone immediately. "Shinra." "It's me." Reeve bit his lip and fished through his pockets; as long as he was out here, he might as well light a cigarette. There was a sound as though of papers shuffling, or it could have just been the static of a cell phone connection over the mountains. "What happened out there?" Filling Rufus in on what had happened took all of about five minutes, and when Reeve was done, Rufus was quiet for a long moment. "What's the old man doing about it?" he finally asked. "I don't know," Reeve had to admit. "I've been too busy trying to get this reactor back online. I don't like it. It's going to take us a very long time to get it working again, if ever." He could imagine the look on Rufus's face, the taut concentration of a man with too many things in the air at any one moment and the knowledge that sooner or later, one of them would drop. "Has he said anything to you so far?" "No." Reeve took another drag on his cigarette, pacing back and forth on the heap of rubble. "Just that it's important to get this reactor back online as soon as possible. He says he'll take care of the terrorists." "Fuck." Rufus's soft word pretty much summed up Reeve's reaction as well. "/Fuck/. I don't think I like what he's gonna come up with. I'll have to talk to Tseng -- look, keep your head down, all right? Get that reactor working as quickly as you can, handle everything that you can handle -- oh, look, I know you know what you're doing by now." Rufus sighed, deeply, and Reeve tried to hide how much that offhanded compliment meant to him. "I don't like this. I really don't like this." "I don't like it either." Reeve looked out over the city view with eyes that didn't see the buildings as much as the people behind them. "Who the hell could have done something like this? Who would want to hurt us so badly that they didn't care who else they hurt?" Rufus's voice was flat. "Crazy people." The words hung between them for a long moment, and then Rufus shifted again. "Look, I have to go. I have to go talk to the old man, and see what I can get done from all the way out here. You gonna be okay?" "Yeah." Reeve tossed his cigarette butt over the edge of the reactor slag. He hesitated for a moment, thinking of all the things he kept meaning to say to Rufus -- all the things he kept wanting to let Rufus know, all the things that he kept trying to distill from his fragmented mind into an email, something that could be safely sent and dealt with from a distance, without having to worry about that sheer overwhelming sense of /Rufus/. But the moment passed before he could even really begin to be aware of it. "Miss you," Rufus said, softly. "Miss you too," Reeve managed, feeling suddenly fourteen and awkward again. "I'll call you tonight," Rufus said, and hung up the phone. -- * -- When Reeve heard the explosion two nights later, wrenched out of the first sleep he'd really gotten in two days by the cat tearing across his bed and the night sky roaring, he knew that however bad he'd thought the situation was, it had just only gotten worse. -- * -- Tifa paced back and forth in front of the door to the Seventh Heaven, resisting the urge to look outside for the fifth time in fifteen minutes. "Still no sign of him?" Wedge bit his lip. "No sign at all, Miss Tifa. I think -- you might want to start considering that he --" Tifa whirled around and glared at Wedge, who shrank back. "That's not even an option, all right? He's fine. I don't know where he is, but he's fine. And he'd get back here to us if he could, so obviously, he's stuck /somewhere/." She sank down into a chair, rubbing a hand over her face. "I can't believe they blew up their own reactor," she said in an undertone. "I wonder if that's what happened to the last one, too? Do you think --" Wedge rocked back and forth on his feet, still uncertain. They'd all agreed that no one was to leave Tifa alone for the next few days; she was starting to worry them all, how fragile she had been getting. "Jessie thinks that all of the reactors are wired to blow," he said. "And our first bomb must have tripped their explosives. This one blew before our timer was going to go off, though." He shook his head. "They blew their own reactor. I don't ... I just don't get it." Tifa shook her head. "I thought that they --" The door flew open, and Tifa's head whipped around automatically; her shoulders slumped when she saw it was Barret, then firmed again. "You find out anything?" Barret shook his head and headed over for the bar. "Not a whole lot. Th' guy didn't have a lot of information. Threw out a name, though. Don Corneo." Wedge and Tifa exchanged glances. "Well," Tifa sighed, "I knew he'd come up sooner or later. He's got his hands in nearly every bit of dirty business down here. Looks like I'm going to have to go and see if I can get in." Barret glanced back and forth between the two. "Oh, no you ain't," he growled. "I ain't lettin' you get anywhere near that creep." Tifa picked up her near-forgotten mug of coffee and sipped from it, then made a face; it was cold. "Unless you particularly feel like dressing in drag, I'm the only one of us who can do it. We need Jessie here working on the data mining. And you know that there's only one real way to get close to Corneo." Wedge cast a pleading look at Barret; Barret sighed. "I ain't gonna be able to talk you out of this, am I." Tifa smiled a bit. "Probably not." She put down her coffee mug, stood up, and squared her shoulders. "I'm going to go upstairs and see if I can find something to wear." Wedge waited until Tifa was upstairs before turning back to Barret. "Any word on --" Barret shook his head. "Still no sign of him." He picked up Tifa's coffee mug and took it over to the bar's sink. "I think we gotta start considerin' that he's dead. Or back with Shinra." "She's not going to like that." Barret scowled. "She don't have to like it. She's just gotta live with it." Wedge glanced over to the door, as though with Tifa gone it was his responsibility to watch the outside. "This is a bad plan, Barret." Barret slammed the mug back into the sink and glared back at Wedge. "Shit, don't I know it? This whole thing is gettin' away from us. I don't like it." He stilled for a moment, and then began running the water to finish up the afternoon's dishes. "But we gotta keep going. Gotta finish what we started. No matter where it takes us." -- * -- "Excuse me, sir?" Reeve couldn't believe his ears. No, he belived his ears. He just couldn't believe the sheer, monumental /idiocy/... "You heard me, Mr. Brannon." Jonathan Shinra smiled coldly and glanced back across his desk at Heidegger. "Are we ready?" Heidegger chuckled and nodded. "The plans are in place. I've assigned the Turks to the operation. They argued too, but they know where their paychecks come from." It was a subtle jab at Reeve, which Reeve ignored. "Excuse me, sir," Reeve repeated. "I can't believe that you actually plan to -- to murder thousands of people and destroy billions of gil worth of property for -- for what? To prove that you've got some sort of control over things? To show that you're the more powerful man in this case? Sir, we don't even know that the people we're looking for are /down/ there! Not to mention the thousands of people on /top/ of the plate -- you're not even going to evacuate them, are you?" "Oh, we know," Shinra said, grimly. "We know more than you think. Are you saying that you want out of this, Reeve?" For half a second he thought that the President was talking about wanting out of the plan to drop the plate, and he almost said yes, before he realized that what the President /really/ meant was "do you want out of this job, this company, and possibly this lifetime." "Sir, all I'm saying is -- look, sir, I'm the head of Urban Development, and I'm telling you that a disaster of that magnitude could take years to recover from. We're already having enough trouble getting back on our feet after the two reactor explosions, why would we make it even worse by dropping one of the sets of emergency plate locks?" He couldn't even believe that he was having this argument. "Sir, it's /insane/!" "Sounds like a personal problem to me, Reeve," Heidegger snickered, then turned to the president and sketched a salute. "Sir, if you'll excuse me, I'll go and make sure that everything's ready for you to say the word." Shinra nodded absently, and Heidegger departed; the president turned his gaze to Reeve. "You look tired, son," Shinra said, his voice almost kindly. "You should take some time off. Relax a bit. You work too hard. I'm sure that it's the stress talking, and not you. Right? Go and take some time off, and when you come back, we'll discuss things." Reeve frowned. "I'm fine, sir. I really think that we need to discuss things /now/ --" "That was an order, Mr. Brannon. Perhaps you didn't recognize it." The president's eyes turned cold. "Go back to your apartment, pack your bags, and take a nice week-long trip to Costa del Sol. You can use the company villa. If you're not on the morning ship out, you'll be looking for a new job and I'll be looking for a new head of urban dev." Reeve almost argued. At the last second, he swallowed his words and nodded, just a sharp jerk of the head, then turned around to stalk out. It wasn't until he was almost out of the door that he found the courage to turn back around. "Sir?" The president's kindly, avuncular face was back; he smiled at Reeve. "Yes, son?" The repetition of the half-affectionate nickname was what finally decided him. He could feel the terror rising in his stomach, but he swallowed it and looked back at the president, his eyes glistening with the closest to malice he'd ever managed to produce. "I'm not your son. Your /son/ is twice the man you've ever been, and if you could see past the end of your own nose, you'd have realized that years ago." Not bad as parting shots went, he thought, as he stumbled out of the room, feeling sick and racking his brain for the names of the few people he knew in Sector 7. He had to at least warn them. He had to warn /someone/. And to hell with what it cost him. Left alone in the office behind him, Jonathan Shinra's face had gone slack. A long moment went by, as though he was listening to something. Then, in a conversational tone -- though he was, of course, quite alone in the office -- he said, "Of course. Destroy sector 7, and claim that Avalanche did it. You always have the best ideas." -- * -- They hit the ground running. Tifa felt as though they'd been running for days. "God /damn/ it," she said, feeling the tears scalding the back of her throat, as they stopped for half a minute to catch their breath after destroying one of Corneo's guard dogs. "This is our fault -- all those people --" "It's not too late." The girl who had rescued Cloud was a strange one; her eyes seemed to hold secrets that Tifa could only begin to guess at. "Don't give up hope. You can't ever give up hope. There's time, right? They can't just drop the plate. There's all sorts of things they have to do first. We've still got time to get back there and get everyone safe." Tifa swallowed her first response -- /what do you know, you're not the one who's been fighting this battle for the past three years/ -- and nodded grimly. "Yes. You're right. Come on, we have to hurry -- we've got to get the word to them --" Cloud was watching Aerith. "Aerith, I'm sorry that --" Aerith scowled. "Don't you dare apologize for getting me involved in this. Don't you dare tell me to go home. I'm here and I'm part of this now and I'm not giving up." She looked back over at Tifa. "Come on. We won't have much time." They used up precious minutes fighting their way out of the sewers and back to the trainyards, but by the time they got to the edges of sector 7, they could tell that someone had already sounded the alarm. People were streaming out of the sector, a noisy, disorderly exodus full of refugees carrying whatever they could hold. In the distance, they could hear the sounds of battle. Tifa drew up short. "Someone already got the word out. Let's get to the plate support -- maybe we can stop this before it goes too far --" She was terrified that it had already passed "too far", but neither Cloud nor Aerith argued; they both nodded and put on another burst of speed. As they neared the plate support, the sounds became more clear; Tifa squinted upwards, and could see the flashes of gunfire far above them. "Someone's up there. We've got to get up there and help them. I --" She broke off, stifling a short scream as something tumbled over the edge of the platform, landing with a sickening wet thud on the ground several feet away. Not something. Someone. She couldn't move; Cloud was the one to break away from her side and dash over to kneel beside him. "Wedge. Wedge, are you all right?" "Dumb ... question." Tifa could barely hear Wedge's reedy voice from where she stood. "But hey ... remembered m'name ..." Cloud reached out a hand and touched it to Wedge's neck, searching for his pulse. Wedge scowled at the waste of time, and coughed; it was raspy and dark, and Tifa knew from the sound of it that there was nothing they could do for him. "Barret ... up top. Go help him. Marlene's still back... the bar." Another cough, and this time blood dotted his pale lips. "Sorry I wasn't ... any help..." They stood frozen for a minute, and then Cloud reached out with a surprisingly gentle touch and closed Wedge's eyes before standing. "I'm going up," he said, firmly. "Aerith, get out of here. Get somewhere safe." He looked at Tifa, and for a minute, seemed like he was going to say something; the moment passed, and then he turned to the stairs. His footsteps clanked in staccato beats up the steps as he ran. Tifa grabbed Aerith's hands and squeezed them, quickly. "Aerith," she said, urgently. "I'm going too. You need to get out of here. Look -- I have a bar. The Seventh Heaven. Four blocks that way, just past the train station. There's a little girl there. Her name is Marlene. Tell her that the phoenix needs to fly, and she'll trust you enough to let you get her out of there. Take her somewhere safe. Quickly. I don't know how long this will take -- I don't even know if you'll be able to make it out, I shouldn't ask you --" Aerith shook her head, quickly. "No. I'll do it. I'll put her somewhere safe. Don't worry. Hurry." Tifa studied her face, wondering if she could trust her, and then nodded. They understood each other, woman to woman; that much, she could tell. "/Quickly/," she repeated, and Aerith turned, bunching up her dress to her knees and running like the hounds of Hades were after her. Tifa didn't bother watching for more than a few seconds. She turned around and bellowed in her best "last call" voice, "EVERYONE OUT! Move it, quickly! It's dangerous! Everyone out of sector seven! Get clear, /now/!" Cloud barely spared a glance over for her when she caught up to him on the third set of steps. "She safe?" "She's heading there," Tifa panted, grimly, and then looked ahead. This time she was the one to run ahead, kneeling down by Biggs's side; he was shot, the blood dark and spreading across his front. "Tif'," Biggs whispered. "Guess ... they caught us ... go. Barret's up top ... help him, can't hold them off.." His eyes focused over her shoulder, to where Cloud was standing uncertainly. "Cloud ... still don't care ... about the Planet?" "You're wounded," Cloud said, quietly, not breathing hard but recognizing Tifa's need for a break. "Just rest there. We'll come back for you as quickly as we can." Kneeling next to Biggs, Tifa could feel the old nightmare coming back to her. "Just -- you'll be fine, just --" "Tif'." Biggs's voice was fading. "Gotta go through ... this again ... sorry ... don' worry 'bout me ..." She choked back tears. The scar between her breasts throbbed in time to the sounds of gunfire from above; she rocked back on her heels and shot to her feet. Biggs was right. There was no time. She could mourn later. "Come on," she said, her voice thick, and didn't wait for Cloud before she ran up the next flight of stairs. She had her head down, watching where she was putting her feet, and not watching in front of her. Dumb, perhaps, in the middle of the firefight raging above, but all she could think of was Nibelheim, of the blood and the ache. Her breath rasped in her ears; she remembered the rain. Cloud was the one to find Jessie. "Hey Cloud..." she said, struggling to sit up and falling back when her wounds kept her from doing so. "Good to see you ... one last time..." "Don't say last," he told her, grimly, his blue eyes roving over her to see where she was hurt. "'Sokay ... knew this was gonna happen someday ... knew it when I left Shinra... so many people dead 'cause of me..." She looked up at Tifa. "Tif' ... take care of ..." "Come on," Tifa said, on an indrawn sob. "Cloud, come on, we don't have any time. We'll come back --" She knew that they wouldn't have the time, and cursed herself. (In the back of her mind, Nibelheim was burning, burning, and her father was dead.) Cloud nodded. Together, they headed up the last sets of stairs, and ran right into the middle of a nightmare. Barret was ducked down beside the central plate support, reloading his gun-arm as quickly as he could, as a helicopter swooped and dodged, the occasional bout of gunfire coming from it. He didn't look up as Tifa and Cloud dashed across the platform and slid down next to him. "'Bout time you got here," he snarled. "They got Biggs and Wedge and Jessie." "We know." Tifa was gasping for breath; she'd never quite gotten her lung capacity back after that injury, and her throat was stinging. "No spare guns?" Barret shook his head. "We ran as soon as we got the call. Couldn't pick anything up." His eyes were sick. "Tif', we left Marlene --" "She's okay," Tifa broke in. "I sent someone to get her." The relief spread over Barret's face, and his fingers worked more quickly to reload. "Can we hold this?" Cloud's eyes were sweeping over the platform. "Not if they drop people," he said. "Who's up in the helicopter?" "Who do you think?" Barret's voice was full of hatred. "They sent the goddamn Turks. Who else would they send?" His gun reloaded, he ducked around the pillar for long enough to let off a few shots. "You gonna be able to do this, Tif'?" "Fuck yes," she snarled, and began adjusting the bindings around her wrists. Barret didn't even blink at the profanity. "Well, you'd better get ready, 'cause they dropping." It was Reno. In the back of her mind, Tifa was grateful that it hadn't been Tseng; she knew that they wouldn't have had a chance against Tseng. She knew that they barely had a chance against Reno. She let slip a low growl, and shifted her weight as though to charge; Cloud's hand shot out and grabbed her wrist in an iron grip, and she turned that growl on him. He gestured with his chin towards the helicopter, where a few last desultory gunshots laid down cover fire for Reno before swooping off. Reno didn't move, though; he just stood there, his weight balanced for a fight, and watched. "I don't wanna have to fight you, Tifa," he called. Tifa laughed; it was a choked sound. "You don't have to fight me, Reno," she yelled back. "Give up and go home, and let us bury our dead." Reno shook his head. She'd never seen this Reno before, cool and deadly. She didn't like it. "You know I can't do that. I go where they order me to go. You know that." His eyes were dark and watchful, full of regret. "Tif', I don't want to have to hurt you. Just turn around, go back down the stairs, and get the hell out of Seven. It's a twenty-minute timer. You'll have plenty of time to get the hell out of here. Go." "Like /hell/ I will," she called, and shifted her weight to charge even as Cloud let go of her arm. She moved fast. Reno moved faster. He'd sprinted across the platform and punched in the code seconds before his head snapped back as her fist made contact with his jaw. It didn't seem to affect him much as he stepped back, except to make him lift one hand and rub it. "I'm sorry, Tif'," he said, and backed up two steps. "You've got twenty minutes. There's no way to disarm it. Get out of here before you go up with it." Tifa stared him down for a long minute, and then looked over at the arming mechanism. "Cloud! I don't know how to disarm these!" /Jesse knew that kind of stuff,/ she thought, and had to fight back the fresh wave of grief. Cloud was already working on it. "Neither do I," he said, voice flat, but he started punching buttons anyway. "There's no way to disarm it," Reno repeated. "And I can't let you try. If you hit the wrong buttons, it'll blow early. And I got no intention of going up with this place." He barely moved, but his electrified nightstick was in his hand anyway. "Step away from there, SOLDIER, if you know what's good for you." "How could you do such a thing? Do you have /any idea/ how many people you're going to kill?" Tifa whispered, her heart sick. Reno whipped his gaze back to glare at her. "Y'think I enjoy this? You think any of us do? Yeah, I know exactly how many people I'm gonna kill, and if you don't step back and get the hell off of this tower in the next eighteen minutes and twenty-one seconds it's going to be three more, all right?" He was yelling now, the professional demeanor completely gone. "Get your scrawny ass down those steps and out of this fucking sector, you stupid bitch!" The bullet hit him in the upper chest, and he jerked backwards; behind Tifa, Barret cursed at his aim and ducked sideways to try again. Reno sighed. "That was really dumb," he said. "Tseng made me wear the Kevlar this time." He brought up his nightstick, and dropped back into a guard position. "You wanna dance? Let's dance." The battle seemed to take forever. Three against one would have been fantastic odds in any other battle, but it was three against one of the Turks, and the three of them had weapons that didn't play nicely together in close-quarters fighting. Barret took a blow square to the back of his head that had him dropping back, seeing stars and shaking his head before he fell; Tifa took a hit of electricity across one of her knees as Reno parried a kick, which left her half-limping and off-balance, her leg blazing with pins and needles. It was Cloud who did the most damage, drawing first blood with a deep gash across Reno's shoulder and upper back when his back was turned; Reno growled and turned around to block the next strike, but Tifa fell in to the other side to close in the escape, her good leg snapping out for two quick strikes to the back of Reno's knees. As Reno went off-balance, she ducked sideways and aimed a third at his kneecap, feeling the satisfying crunch of broken bone as it connected. Cloud lept backwards, bringing his sword around in a sweep; as Reno stumbled, he blocked part of the blow, but Cloud's sword slid down Reno's nightstick to slice into his arm. "Idealistic little idiots," Reno snarled, and made a quick adjustment to the nightstick; he pointed it at Cloud, pressed a button, and some sort of force-field lept from the tip of Reno's weapon to encase Cloud. That done, he turned his attention back to Tifa and shook his head again, blocking her next punch with the arm whose shoulder Cloud had sliced open and wincing. "I said, /leave/," he repeated, his good humor completely gone. Tifa stared him down. "Never. We've got another what, eight minutes to figure out how to disarm that thing?" She feinted to one side, which he didn't fall for, and then let fly with another string of kicks and punches designed to drive him back further towards the railing of the platform. She didn't know how he was still on his feet with a broken kneecap. "Tell me how to stop it, Reno." The nightstick's electrical current apparently needed time to recharge; Reno blocked the last of her punches and drove the end of the nightstick into her side, knocking the breath out of her. He didn't strike again as she was bent double and wheezing. "You /can't/ stop it! Only a Shinra executive can disarm that detonation mechanism once it's armed. Not even /we/ can. I told you that already, and you didn't listen, and /man/ is the boss gonna be pissed when he finds out that you went down with the sector. I /told/ you to get out of here." The minute she caught her breath, she got a good grip on the arm that was bleeding and squeezed; his face went ashen, and he snarled. "Man, you just /don't quit/, do you?" Lightning-quick, he switched the nightstick into his other hand and clubbed her on the back of the head; the wound in that shoulder prevented it from being a strike with full force, and she ducked just in time so that she took it on the shoulder. "Would /you/?" she panted. Her fingers slippery with his blood, she lost her grip and let go before she was jerked off balance, going for a punch to the nose at the very last minute. The sound of gunfire and helicopter blades registered at the same minute she broke Reno's nose, and she lept backwards just as the warning shots hit the platform plating in front of her. She came down hard, stumbled, and fell backwards against Cloud, still in the force-field; her skin tingled, but her weight broke it. He stumbled too, his arms going up automatically to catch her before they both went down. They both looked back in just enough time to see Reno headed over the side of the platform; Tifa made a motion as though to go after him, then thought better of it, instead dropping to her knees next to Barret. "Barret?" She shook him. "Barret, wake up, we've got to get out of here. This place is about to blow." Cloud shoved her out of the way, and she looked up, about to protest; before she could, he popped a small green orb out of his sword hilt and held it in his left hand, holding his right hand over Barret's forehead. "Cure," he muttered, and Barret's eyes opened. "Shit! What th' hell hit me?" "Reno did." Tifa held out a hand to help him to his feet. "Come on, we've only got a few minutes. We've got to either turn that damn bomb off or get out of here --" She knew it was too late for escape, and bit her lip. She /should/ have listened to Reno in the first place, but-- Cloud was already back at the panel, having put the materia back into its slot in his sword. He hit a few buttons and frowned at the whooping alarm that replaced the steady beeping. "I think he might have been telling you the truth, Tifa," Cloud said, quietly. "I don't think there's a way." "Of course there isn't, you idiot," came a voice from above. All three of them looked up quickly to see Tseng, standing at the side door of the helicopter that was hovering next to the platform. Reno was barely visible behind him, swearing up a blue streak and holding a wad of cloth against his bloodsoaked upper shoulder. "Get away from there. It'll blow the minute some idiot hits the wrong button." Tifa could tell from long experience that Tseng was furious; the icy chill of his anger was worse than if he had shouted. He turned to her and spat out, "Proud of yourselves? None of this would have happened if you'd just kept from meddling in things that weren't your affair." "They're /everyone's/ affair," Tifa growled back, and brought her chin up. "It's the /honorable/ thing to do, after all, you fucking babykiller." Deliberately, she did not use the Wutaian word for "honor", but she knew that he would understand full well what she was trying to say. She hadn't thought it possible, but Tseng's expression grew colder. "You'll die for your honor," he said, and motioned with his chin towards the plate support. "In three minutes and forty-five seconds." Barret growled something and opened fire on the helicopter; with Rude at the pilot's controls, it danced lightly out of the way. "Bad idea," Tseng called, sharply. "You wouldn't want to injure our guest, now would you?" He reached down and took a hold of a long braid of brown hair, yanking Aerith into view. "Aerith!" Tifa yelled. Cloud took a step forward. "You played a good game." Tseng's eyes were like bullets. "But you /lost/." "What do you want with Aerith?" Cloud called. Tseng shrugged. "I hardly know. Just obeying orders like the good little butchers we are, after all. Hojo wants the last Ancient. I hear and obey." Aerith leaned further out of the helicopter. "Tifa! Don't worry! She's all right!" Tseng looked down, and calmly backhanded her; Aerith fell backwards onto the helicopter's deck, disappearing from view. "You /motherfucker/," Tifa spat. Tseng leaned forward and knocked on the divider between the helicopter's crew compartment and cockpit. "No, actually, that's one crime I'm not guilty of. Maybe the only one. You've got two minutes and twelve seconds to get out of here. Think you can do it?" Tifa lost precious seconds to the rage that crossed her vision. By the time she could think again, the helicopter was gone, and the preliminary charges were going off. "/Fuck/," she said, and it was more of a moan. "Those were the magnetic locks blowing -- we have to get out of here before the plate drops --" "Over here," Barret called. He had lept up and grabbed a bunch of wires that were dangling from the Sector Six side of the plate support; as she watched, he wrapped them around his wrist three times, his palm once, and climbed up on the side of the railing. They swung out just as the first set of primary charges started to detonate. Tifa buried her head in Barret's shoulder. She wanted to keep herself from looking, but she couldn't turn away. Someone had to witness what she'd done. -- * -- In Rufus's bedroom -- he'd needed somewhere to make his frantic phone calls, somewhere that wasn't his office, knowing full well his office was bugged -- Reeve leaned his forehead against the windows, palms splayed across the glass and leaving smudgy fingerprints, and watched as Midgar fell. It hurt too much to cry. He had one phone call left to make.