( 9. )

Tseng wakes already reaching for his sidearm, and the typical morning status update cascades through his consciousness as he arrests the motion: slightly groggy means he was woken out of cycle despite having set his subconscious alarms to wake him after he'd finished his second full sleep cycle, while the pistol in his hand means he'd registered a threat. In an unfamiliar location -- the Shinra mansion in Nibelheim, right -- with a bundle of blankets on the floor on the other side of the bed where Rufus is/was, and the blankets are empty, which means that --

The unfamiliar sound that woke him repeats, and he registers it a minute later as Valentine's voice, slightly raised, drifting through the house. From the kitchen, Tseng assumes, sitting up fully and running a hand through his hair mid-yawn. It's followed a second later by Rufus's familiar sharp snort of laughter, though, with the higher-pitched sound of Tifa saying something over top of it, so what woke him wasn't danger. Just unfamiliarity. He wouldn't have woken for Tifa or Rufus, but Valentine's voice was apparently enough.

By the time he's taken care of his morning ablutions and belted on the yukata he took from his suitcase, he's identified the voices of Rude and Reeve in addition to Valentine, Rufus, and Tifa, and smelled something cooking. He arrives in the kitchen to the sounds of industry, but what he finds there is ... not precisely what he'd expect; Rufus, wearing a plain t-shirt and a pair of BDU pants, is at the stovetop holding a spatula in one hand and a frying pan in the other, in the process of dishing up a truly outrageous amount of scrambled eggs onto a platter, while Tifa, wearing her workout clothes, is standing just beside him, lightly resting the fingertips of one hand on the small of his back. (Tseng has seen that movement before, the unthinking ghost-touch warning of those who spend significant time in the kitchen indicating the presence of someone bearing something hot behind whomever is being warned.) Her other hand, clutching an oven mitt, is in the process of fishing out a tray of something out of the oven. She deposits the baking sheet on a waiting cooling rack on the side of the counter Rufus isn't using, which reveals it to be a tray of biscuits, and slides around Rufus before going up on tiptoe to pick up a spoon and reach for whatever is in the large stockpot on the back of the stove.

Something certainly smells wonderful, although if they went down into town for supplies and didn't remember that there are only supposed to be four people here, Tseng's going to have to kill someone.

"Why the hell can't the world remember that some of us aren't six feet tall," Tifa is grumbling, not quite able to reach the pot -- the stove-top is both deep and tall, and the stockpot is taller still -- and Rufus laughs. Tseng bites his lip as Rufus hip-checks her out of the way and relieves her of the spoon. They're moving differently around each other this morning, and he's dearly afraid he's missed another one of their bonding moments.

He loses the chance to wait and see what else has changed, though, when Reno looks up from where he and Valentine and Rude are sitting around the table, Reeve standing behind them and frowning at something tacked to the wall. (There's places set for all seven of them, though three spots have a shipping crate to be used as a bench instead of chairs and the table's crowded enough they'll all have to watch their elbows.) "Hey, boss," Reno says. The circles under his eyes and the sunken look to his lips and cheekbones tells Tseng he's on at least one dose of Fury, but he seems awake enough.

"Coffee's over on the other counter," Tifa sings out. Both of her hands are wrapped around Rufus's arm and trying to tug the spoon down to her height to taste from it. Rufus evades her, easily, snickering at her attempts; she lets go of him to ball up both her hands and beat her fists lightly against his shoulder, and instead of striking back, Rufus laughs harder and ducks sideways. There's a flower tucked into her braid, Tseng realizes as she feints left, dives right, and wrestles Rufus's arm under one armpit, her back to him, her curves pressed snugly against his front. It's one of the local flowers they transplanted onto the gravesites, but Tseng can't tell if she knows what it is or not. (She almost certainly would be able to guess, but her mood is so good Tseng can't be sure.) "Cream's in the coldbox -- Dammit, Shinra!" She whoops as Rufus draws his (unpinned) hand up her right side, aiming straight for the ribs, where Tseng knows from long experience that Tifa is highly ticklish.

The scene dissolves into a flurry of elbows and knees. Tseng pinches the bridge of his nose, considers, very seriously, going back to bed, and steps around the two of them to make for the coffee pot. When he pours, he can tell by the smell that it's much better coffee than the utter shit that had been preserved in the pantry. "I don't suppose," he asks the kitchen at large, "that whoever picked up supplies was smart enough to remember that we're undercover here."

"I'm not an idiot!" Rufus calls, then, "Oof!" as Tifa pins him face-down on the floor. He taps the tile twice; she rolls off him, takes the spoon out of his hand where he'd miraculously kept it during their scuffle, and bounds over to kiss Tseng good morning.

"Reeve brought the coffee, because Rufus was bitching about the stuff here when he called," she informs him. "The eggs are from a Zuu nest Reno and I found on the way up to meet them; the stew's a Nifl mountain goat we took down on the way back. Relax."

Tseng closes his eyes. "Please tell me you didn't shoot it. Didn't you tell me the sound echoes?"

Tifa stands on her tiptoes and kisses him on the nose. "I said, relax." She lets him go and mimes throwing something like a pair of dice, her wrist snapping neatly. He notices that every single one of her fingernails is broken, and there are scrapes all over her hands; her fingertips look battered. "Fastest rock throw on Mt. Nibel five years running. Sit. I'll get the sugar and cream for you. The biscuits will be cool enough for breakfast in another few minutes."

Tseng goes along with her as she puts her hands on his shoulders, turns him in place, and nudges him towards the table. He takes the spot next to Reno, noticing as he gets closer that what Reeve is looking at is a set of blueprints pinned into the wall behind the table. (The top two corners are held by two of Rufus's ceramic knives. The bottom two corners are held by a pair of forks driven into the plaster of the walls.) Reeve, standing in front of the sheet and muttering, has a pencil in his left hand and is sketching a series of corrections to the reactor cross-section, occasionally swapping the pencil for the highlighter in his right hand and highlighting a spot.

"Tell me they haven't been like this all morning," Tseng mutters to Reno after Tifa sets the cream and sugar on the table and turns back to start transfering biscuits off the baking tray and onto another platter, slapping Rufus on the back of the hand as he reaches out for one.

"Tell you later," Reno mutters into his coffee. (His hands are, if anything, even more banged up than Tifa's.) Tseng raises an eyebrow. A little louder, Reno continues, "Tif' and I went up to pick up Rude and Reeve. The path up to the parking spot circles around the mountain enough to be noticed from the town in a few places if somebody's looking, so we did some climbing up the switchback's cliff faces."

"I got to climb again," Tifa singsongs, bringing over the platter of biscuits in one hand and the scrambled eggs in the other; Rufus is right behind her with the pot of stew held in both hands, potholders wrapped around the stockpot's handles. (Rufus whistles once between his teeth, and Tifa slides deftly to the side Rufus isn't approaching on.) "And Reno didn't suck."

"Toldja," Reno says. "Climbing the plate pillars was some of the best exercise we'd get as kids." He rests his hands against the table, starting to push himself up (to go get plates and forks, probably; setting the table is usually Reno's job when they all eat together, since he certainly can't cook to save his life). Rude puts a hand on his arm and pushes him back down, going to do it himself instead.

Rufus drops a potholder on the table and rests the stockpot on top of it. (It smells fabulous. In addition to the meat, there's some of the potatoes and carrots rescued from the Stop stasis, but there's also some herbs and leaves Tseng can't identify, presumably harvested along with the eggs and meat.) "And before you yell at me," he tells Tseng, "yes, the lady and I were careful about the shopping trip. She wrote the list; I picked it up. Nobody followed me too obviously, although I did have a nice conversation about the Department of Engineering with the clerk at the general store."

"Won't pass," Reeve says, absently. "The President's still too pissy at Palmer over that fuckup with the space program." Then he seems to play back the last few minutes of conversation, and his cheeks begin to color. (Reeve's blushing is not the only reason Tseng could never make an operative out of him, but it's one of the biggest.) "Which you know. Sorry, I forgot that was the story you told."

Rufus dismisses the apology with a wave of his hand. "Any luck?" he asks instead.

Reeve caps the highlighter and tosses it on the table, then sticks the pencil behind his ear. "Not until I get up there for sure, but I may have an idea. Maybe." He looks over at Valentine, who's been quiet since Tseng walked into the kitchen, watching the byplay with wary interest from behind his unnaturally blood-red eyes. "You're sure he installed the shunt and isn't just getting someone to carry down the Mako for the tanks?"

"I am certain," Valentine says. "Whenever Hojo was ... inspecting his experiments in person, he found it amusing to wake me, administer a paralytic, and prop me in the corner to ... watch." The slight flaring of his nostrils is the only sign he hasn't turned into a statue. "As he was fond of reminding me, I was not considered worthy enough of the full treatment; I was his amusement. He liked to narrate."

An awkward silence follows Valentine's pronouncement, until Reeve shakes his head. "I can't make it work out, then. There shouldn't be enough supply to power the shunt and still have enough pressure to drive a primary burn, even with this reactor being one of the old model that doesn't flare. Not unless he's done something up there that's even more fucked up than anybody would even credit him with. And although I think this table is collectively capable of crediting Dr. Hojo with a great deal of fucked up, he's a molecular biologist, not an engineer. I couldn't make this work, not without browning out half this continent, and I know the reactor system better than anyone in Midgar."

It's not a boast, Tseng knows; Reeve had all but built the second generation of reactors, the ones now powering Midgar, single-handedly. But Valentine is frowning. Or at least, giving the impression of frowning; for all that Tseng spent most of the night working side-by-side with the man to clear out the basement lab, he still can't quite get used to the strange expressionless plastic quality of his face, as though half the nerves have been cut. "He built the equipment for the Project," Valentine says. "He built the tanks our two unfortunates were housed in. Lu -- Someone once told me he had considered a career in engineering before deciding upon biology."

Reeve throws up his hands. "Then I've really got nothing. If he has even the remotest idea what he's doing, he could've done anything up there. I won't know for sure until I can get into the guts of the system."

There's a light touch between Tseng's shoulderblades. His body obeys the slight pressure automatically, leaning to one side. Tifa slips in next to him, sets a dish of what looks like fresh butter on the table next to the biscuits, and settles herself down on the shipping crate next to him. "New house rule," she says. "No creepy horror movie talk at the table." She surveys them all, her gaze skipping lightly across each face. "Someone tell me embarrassing stories about the boy prince instead."

Tseng nearly chokes on his coffee -- both to hear her refer to Rufus as the 'boy prince' and at the command and the self-assured way she delivers it. He expects Rufus to shoot her down with a chilly rejoinder, but all he does is laugh. "Budge over," Rufus orders, whacking the side of her hip with the back of his hand. "And watch the elbows, my ribs are already bitching from you wiping the floor with me twelve times before breakfast."

Tifa laughs, too, and slides across the top of the crate, winding up pressed against Tseng's side. She smells like fresh air, like dirt and rock, like something sweet he can't identify. Rufus wedges himself in on Tifa's other side. Tseng can't say what it is that makes his throat hurt at the sight, but something does.

A hand rests on his other shoulder, and when he twists to look up, Rude leans over him and refills his coffee. His lips against Tseng's ear, he mutters, just loudly enough for Tseng to hear, "They're burning off some of the worry before we get going. Don't fuck with it."

Well, Rude is their psychologist.

Reno's happy to accede to Tifa's orders -- Tseng could only wish he responded to Tseng's orders with such alacrity -- and the meal (which is fabulous, if not anything Tseng would usually choose to eat) is finished before anyone runs out of tales; Rufus takes the mockery, all good-natured, far better than Tseng would imagine. Reno's just finishing up the last bits of the story of the first time he served as Rufus's bodyguard (with details Tseng doubts the veracity of, even though he does remember that half-starved, half-feral young Turk quite well and he has to admit the story is at least plausible; Rufus had been possessed of more sense than most sixteen-year-olds, but Rufus and Reno together were a deadly combination for the first few years) when Valentine, who's been as quiet as a temple guard the entire meal, clears his throat and Reno shuts up fast. Valentine's looking at Rufus, and it's the most human expression Tseng's seen on his face yet. "How old were you when your mother died?" he asks.

The question would only be a non sequitur to a non-Turk; Turks are trained to intuit detail from scraps and pieces, necessary training for a world where one must learn to see danger to one's charge in a passing gaze held an instant too long, a fractional tightening of an observer's mouth, the faintest tensing of a hand moving towards a pocket or poised to loose a blade from a spring-release sheath. The presence of absence of Rufus's mother is writ as large in every story of his childhood as the absent presence of his father. Tseng can't see Rufus's face from where he's sitting -- Tifa is in the way -- but he can feel Tifa's shoulders tense, feel the way she immediately puts her hand on Rufus's thigh. Rufus's answer is polite enough, but Tseng knows that sound in his voice from years of observation: it's the sound of Rufus exercising his self-control. "She died four days before my first birthday."

Valentine's eyes close, for a fraction of a second longer than a blink. "I thought so," he says, slowly. "Sarah Shinra would not have tolerated her son being raised thus, not unless --"

Rufus interrupts before Valentine can finish, which itself is a sign that Valentine's words have struck home; Rufus has better manners than that. He's leaning forward enough that Tseng can see his face now, and even in profile it is hunger and fury blended. "You knew my mother?"

"I was a Turk," Valentine says, simply. "Before I was assigned to this accursed project, I served protection detail, just as we all did." He tilts his head to one side, studying Rufus carefully. "You resemble your father in the physical, but I still see much of her in you. She would be proud of you, I think," he says.

There's a long minute of silence; Tseng can see Rufus close his eyes, see the way his chest rises and falls beneath the plain grey t-shirt he's wearing. "Excuse me," he says, his voice scrupulously neutral. Without waiting for a response, before anyone can say anything, Rufus has slid out from under the table and let himself out the back door of the mansion.

The sound of the door closing -- not slamming, but closing with a distinct finality -- echoes through the kitchen longer than it should. "Dammit," Tifa mutters, under her breath, next to Tseng. She puts her hands on the table, pushing herself up, clearly intending to follow; Tseng rests a hand on her arm.

He doesn't bother saying anything out loud; she won't need it, and it would give too much away to the rest of the table. (To Valentine, clearly as well-trained as they all have been, who seems to be terminally incapable of anything resembling tact. No, no, he won't blame the man, not after what he's gone through, but still: inconvenient timing.) Tifa looks back up at him. Whatever she sees in his face makes her worried and faintly annoyed expression fade to understanding: right, you take care of it, he can read in her eyes; I'll stay in here and make sure nobody kills anybody. (As he follows in Rufus's footsteps out the back door, he can hear Valentine's low murmur of a query, Tifa's responding ascerbic "you'd have to ask him that, but honestly, did you really think the man would want to hear about how he looks like his shithead father -- he so doesn't, by the way -- or stories about his dead mother in the middle of all the rest of this? I'm sure he'll want to hear what you knew about his mother. Later.")

Outside, Rufus is pacing back and forth on the grass, just finishing the process of lighting a cigarette, looking flustered and unhappy and tight-lipped. "Sorry," he bursts out, as Tseng comes close enough that he can speak without his voice carrying too far on the morning wind. "I didn't mean to -- I just couldn't --"

"I wasn't going to say anything," Tseng says, mildly. He holds out a hand. Rufus looks at it blankly for half a second, then catches up: he hands over the lit cigarette and fishes his pack and his lighter back out of his BDUs to light another. "Your reaction was far more understated than I would've guessed. I'm proud of you, actually. Six months ago you would've punched him."

Rufus snorts, the cloud of smoke from the freshly-lit cigarette streaming from his nostrils like a dragon's displeasure. "I was about three seconds away from punching him. Which is why I'm out here, since no matter what else happens, we still need to know what he knows and punching someone in the face is not the way to convince someone you're trustworthy. It's just been a hell of a day already, and it's only going to get worse. Coming on the tail end of how many days of nowhere near enough sleep. Plus, oh, let's not even go into the emotional wringer the lady and I went through together this morning."

Tseng's ears prick to hear that; he does his best not to show. Rufus does not respond well to anything even remotely resembling prying. There are times when Tseng can ask and times when he can't; he would stake his life this is one of the times when he can't. "The two of you seemed quite ... friendly over breakfast preparation," he says, instead; Rufus knows him too well to take it as anything other than the gentle prompting it is, but that much can't be helped. "She was hard on your heels before I intercepted her. I caught the nose end of her tearing a stripe out of Valentine's hide as I came out to meet you."

That news actually puts a smile on Rufus's face -- or as close as Rufus is going to get right now, Tseng imagines; it's the little quirk of Rufus's lips that is the only reaction he allows himself when he's controlling his reactions this tightly, but Tseng knows it for a smile anyway. "Did she now." It's practically a purr, dark and thick with satisfaction and not a hint of surprise.

Tseng can't help it: he knows his eyebrows are rising, unbidden, and he looks away under cover of taking a drag off the cigarette, trying to disguise the creeping unease he can't help but feel. Rufus's life has not been full of people rising to defend him; he has never learned how to accept championing with good grace. In the cage-fight environment Rufus grew up in, having someone come to your defense means they are trying to score points with you, or points against the person against whom the defense is needed. It took years before Rufus was willing to believe him when he acted in Rufus's defense to a third party, and he has had to curb the impulse to avenge countless slights upon Rufus's honor over the years when that vengeance would not be understood by one of Midgar's children. That Rufus is willing to accept Tseng's defense the scant handful of times he has is a marvel.

For Rufus to expect that defense from Tifa -- because that's what his reaction means -- in less than a week is unheard of, and Tseng can't help wondering whether Rufus is playing some sort of deeper game. Tifa trusts easily. Too easily, and for all she's as brilliant at reading the secret motivations of a man as Rufus is, and for all she's perfectly capable of taking care of herself, Tseng can't help but fear for her well-being. It isn't even that he thinks Rufus will hurt her deliberately; Tseng knows she's become real to him, and once you are real to Rufus he will treat you with as much empathy as he is capable of. Tseng can't even say why it is he's so disquieted. He just is.

Something of his thoughts must show on his face despite how hard he's trying to control his reaction, but then again, Rufus has always been capable of reading him, even when -- especially when -- he least wants to be read; the warmth of Rufus's hand settles on his shoulder (it really is too chilly out here for just the yukata he's wearing, but he hadn't wanted to leave Rufus alone for long enough to find a jacket to throw on over it) and squeezes. "Relax," Rufus says. "I can hear you worrying. Believe it or not, I'm actually not playing a game here. I like your lady. She's formidable."

'Formidable' is a good word for Tifa, yes, but Rufus is still disturbing him. This isn't the time to resolve the issue, though, or to delve too deeply into the tiny whisper of unease he can't help but feel. He knows himself. He knows Rufus. Prying will get him nowhere. He will wait, and watch, and see what else transpires, and sooner or later his mind will quietly inform him of whatever it is his subconscious has observed that's making him this uneasy. "She's not my lady," is all he says. "She belongs to none but herself."

"Mmm," Rufus says. It's the I don't agree with you, but it's not worth arguing tone.

Tseng risks a look back at him, and his breath suddenly catches in his throat. Rufus is squinting against the daylight, looking sober and thoughtful. The sun is haloing around his hair, his shoulders. He's wearing a plain grey t-shirt and a pair of BDUs. His hair is curling wildly at the edges, forming tiny wisps the way it always does when he hasn't bothered with product. He hasn't shaved in at least 36 hours by now, and his stubble is coming in faintly auburn along the hollows of his cheeks, the way it always does. He looks tired, and ever-so-slightly annoyed, and like he is dreading the rest of what today will bring. He's the image of a thousand conversations over a thousand mornings; Tseng could summon a picture from any of a thousand points along his personal continuity of memory, and it would look much like this.

And yet.

Even before Tseng set his feet on the path of fate that would bring him to Rufus's side, Tseng had fought to quiet the spirit-sense the gods had seen fit to curse him with, and after years in Midgar, where he can go months without his feet touching honest earth, he's learned a thousand tricks for subduing it. The past week seems to have brought the talent back in earnest, and apparently twice as strong for having been so long denied. Right now, with no provocation Tseng can think of, Rufus is blazing across the sight-that-is-not-sight Tseng has tried so hard to lose. He could probably close his eyes right now and still see Rufus there, glowing golden with far more than sunlight reflected. To that sight, Rufus looks like a young god-prince, the weight of the world held in his cupped hands, his head bowed over them, his neck bared to the oaths of all those he owns and their hands slipped between his palms in fealty.

Tseng blinks, then blinks again, but the image refuses to dissipate. Rufus is larger than he should be, the shape of his skin more broad than that of the man he is alone. For the first time in years, Tseng can see the shade of Rufus's destiny wrapped around his shoulders, the shining hand of the gods marked upon his brow. Proclaiming him ruler, and lord, and liege.

It's glorious. It always has been. Rufus always has been, and Tseng has devoted nearly a decade and a half of his life to raising Rufus to fit into the full space the universe has built for him, but in all that time he's managed to forget why. (Managed to make himself forget. The attention of the gods is not such a comfortable thing after all.)

The backs of his knees are trembling, he realizes. Is it any wonder? The question is not why he would wish to kneel to Rufus; the question is, suddenly and without any foreshadowing, how he could not wish to.

Rufus is still talking, but Tseng can't hear a word over the sound of the blood rushing in his ears. Rufus has no idea, Tseng realizes: he has never been able to sense the world's other currents, never been able to feel the destiny wrapped around his shoulders, never realized Someone or Something had anointed him -- as far back as at his birth? The gods Rufus has never believed in and Tseng has tried to renounce hundreds of times have touched them both, steered Tseng to Rufus's side and shaped Rufus's life at a thousand tiny points of decision, but while Tseng has always felt each breath of the gods' will exerted upon his own and resented it, Rufus simply doesn't feel it at all. He has no idea. If he thinks he was born to rule the world -- and he does -- he thinks it only due to the family into which he was born, not the forces of destiny acting upon him.

Something must have happened this morning. Something about the task they've accepted, or the plans they've already made, or something someone said or did to him. Something to wake the destiny Rufus has always held marked in potential across his brow, has always had sleeping in the tiniest corner of his heart, because that destiny is suddenly blazing across the heavens so loudly Tseng would not be surprised if the old masters in Leviathan's temple, back upon Wutai's shores, woke from unquiet dreams with headaches that would not respond to any treatment at all. The only reason Tseng's head isn't throbbing right now is that he's crossed the liminal borders of Rufus's shade enough times when his control has slipped (tired, drunk, spread out and getting fucked) that he already knows its feel.

"--told me that -- Tseng? Are you all right?" Rufus breaks off whatever he's saying -- whatever he's been saying, and Tseng desperately hopes there wasn't anything crucial in Rufus's words, because he didn't hear a single one of them -- and frowns. "You haven't heard a word I said, have you."

"Sorry," Tseng manages. He closes his eyes and breathes deeply. That helps. A little. He can still see Rufus, shining across the landscape of his inner sight, a beacon against the velvet blackness of his eyelids, but shutting his eyes has at least eliminated the contrast between Rufus's outer seeming and the fierce burning brand Rufus is to his other sight.

The forgotten cigarette finally consumes itself the last bit necessary to heat the filter enough to scorch his fingertips; he swears and drops it. Rufus finally takes his hand off Tseng's shoulder. Tseng can feel him moving, and realizes he must have crouched down to stub out the butt enough that it would not ignite the grass, since they are both barefoot and neither can tread it out. With Rufus no longer touching him, the sense of him ebbs, enough for Tseng's usual methods for shutting down those senses to click into place, until Tseng feels confident enough in his control to open his eyes again. Rufus is on one knee in the grass, taking the chance for one last drag before putting out his own cigarette. He's looking up at Tseng through his lashes, watching Tseng warily for any signs of further reverie; the minute Tseng opens his eyes, Rufus averts his, looking down at the ground.

He can see the nape of Rufus's neck from here, bared by the haircut that would be obscene were he as Wutaian as Tseng is, and the part of him that will always and forever be the man his upbringing forged him into is horrified at the sight. Rufus should never kneel to him. To anyone, but particularly not to him, the man whom the gods have sent to serve him, blood, bone, and breath. "Get up," he hears himself saying, voice rough. "Leviathan's scales, get up."

Rufus frowns, but obeys, balancing lightly on the balls of his feet as he rises. Above them, a passing cloud sends the yard into shadow. Tseng blinks, again and again, but Rufus's skin still holds the golden glow of sunlight, leaving him looking overexposed. Tseng closes his eyes again, pinching the bridge of his nose and thinking, as hard as he can, stop. Enough. I see it; You can stop rubbing my nose in it now. He doesn't believe in You anyway, and if I have to explain, he's going to think me mad.

The back of his mouth tastes of salt and ocean, and he can hear the sussuration of scales against scales.

"Tseng." Rufus is starting to sound more irate now, and Tseng forces himself to open his eyes again, lest Rufus decide further action is necessary. Leviathan's mercy, Rufus is back to being only Rufus, irritation layered over his concern, looking at Tseng with the impatience of a man who knows they don't have time for a breakdown. Tseng breathes, in and out, and waits to see if the sight will stutter back into being. When it doesn't after three full breaths, he's tentatively willing to call the moment over. "Seriously, are you all right? You look like you're about to pitch over any second."

How could he explain? Rufus would think him to have lost the last of his wits. In the dozen years and more he's been Rufus's tutor in all things, he's never so much as hinted at matters of the world that lies beyond the science and rationality and logic so prized by Midgar's children. Leviathan help him, he'd thought he could leave those things in Wutai, set down abandoned alongside his familial name and his imperial obligations. "I'm just a little light-headed all of a sudden," he says.

"Uh-huh." And damn it all, but that is the sound of Rufus knowing him for a liar. "Do you need to lie down? If whatever it is is going to interfere with the trip up to the reactor --"

"No," Tseng says. He makes himself turn away, no matter that his very soul cries out to bask in Rufus's reflected glory, no matter that every inch of his being is telling him to kneel before his lord. The motion feels precisely like passing out of the rays of the sun, and the chill that strikes him is more than physical; he chafes his hands along his arms, feeling the birdskin of a thousand tiny hairs rising along each inch of his flesh. "It's nothing. I'll tell you later." (Not if he can help it. Not until all of this is over, and with luck, not even then.)

Whatever Rufus might say in return is disrupted by the sound of the door to the mansion opening. They both turn, Tseng in relief, Rufus in irritation; it's Rude, and Tseng doesn't need to be able to see behind the sunglasses the man always wears to know he's studying them both carefully. (And, likely, drawing a dozen conclusions and more. The only thing to make Rude's insight bearable is the fact he keeps his own counsel until he thinks it absolutely necessary to speak.) "Tifa wants to get moving soon," Rude says. "Says it gets dark early enough that if we don't leave in the next twenty, we'll run out of daylight on the other end."

Next to Tseng, Rufus breathes out, sharp and annoyed. "Right," he says. "I'll be in in a second." Rude nods and shuts the door. Rufus turns back to Tseng. "I will hold you to that 'later'," he says, neat and precise, the same sort of casual order Tseng has heard him deliver more times than he could count the telling of.

This time, though, something about his tone -- something about the push Rufus puts behind it, and oh, Leviathan, Rufus has always been able to summon that cloak of command at will and set it aside when he no longer needs its weave, but never quite like this -- slices straight through a part of him Tseng thought long since armored away. Yes, my liege, leaps to his lips. He swallows the words down with great difficulty, and only nods instead.

Rufus gives him one last look, tense and unhappy -- if he were a cat, his ears would be pressed against his skull -- before turning away and striding back into the mansion. Left alone, Tseng breathes out, breathes in, and gives serious consideration to the thought of how far he could get if he started running now. (Not far enough. He's been running from this for almost longer than he can remember.)

He has not burned an offering in longer than he cares to think about, has not poured out wine to share with the spirits, has hung neither cloth nor paper streamers from his balcony nor picked up any of the hundred tiny charms strewn around Little Wutai like fallen leaves. He has long since chosen to bury away the words of the formal prayers, the invocations drilled into him again and again until his speaking of them was note-perfect; his sword has not drawn the door between the worlds in so long he would have to cudgel his memory to produce the sigils. He left the weight of his priesthood on Wutai's shores, piled in a heap in his quarters in the Palace along with his family name and the burden of his loyalties. And yet he purifies himself after each death that can be laid at his feet, keeps his tiny shrine in his private apartment -- well-disguised, but unmistakable to those who have eyes to see -- and has kept Leviathan's Vigil without fail each year, even when it falls in the midst of a mission, no matter where he is and what he will be called to do once sun rises.

He's never been able to say why he keeps those particular devotional habits when so many others have been banished into the mists of his own personal history, why he has kept that tiny fraction of the complicated mass of everything he was taught and every vow he was made to swear, until this very moment: he has kept those habits so he might not forget the process of speaking for the gods' ears, and so They will be forced to hear his voice when he does.

For over half his life, he has been trying to disavow his belief in Them, cursing and spitting and raging the whole way, and the whole time he has known (in his deepest heart, where he keeps his secrets and his loves) the day was coming when he would be forced to stand again before Them and bargain for that which he holds dear.

So he grits his teeth and kneels, bows his head and sweeps his hair to the side, places his hand over his heart and his chin against his chest, and summons the last fractional remnants of the mantle of Leviathan's priesthood that was thrust upon him all unwilling by so many: his family, his masters, his people. The gods Themselves, who decreed in the days before there were recorded days that those who would rule Wutai should keep her deepest secrets, and those who would defend her should be consecrated to her rulers and protectors. Tseng has long since called that sacred bargain broken at the instant They failed to uphold Their end of the deal, but his heritage and his training gives him this right, for all he'd thought he'd never take up this mantle again. He has shattered each of the oaths he took to the gods' mysteries one by one in service to his honor, down nearly to the last, the one that has been the core of everything he is and the one he had been running towards for years before he even knew it existed. It is that oath he is seeking to uphold now. (Always.)

"I know You are listening to me," he snarls, the same shocking mode and inflection that had earned him such superstitious awe among his year-mates and such aghast disbelief from the old priest-masters: imperial humility layered so thickly it sings coldness and precision and distance to any listener, mixed with pronouns and inflections resurrected from the archaic depths of linguistic history, brutal and worshipful in equal measure. "I know You have not ceased, not through a single one of the years You have used me. Know this, for I make this vow with all I am and all I have made myself without Your help: You may do whatever You wish with me. You have since the moment I quickened in my mother's womb. But if You wish for me to cooperate with You in the least, if You have even the faintest hope of grudging acceptance instead of outright defiance, You will stop treating him as a gamepiece. He is not Yours. He never will be. And this is not negotiable. If You wanted me at his side so much You were willing to nearly destroy me to get me here, You will by earth's blood stop manipulating him lest we both tell You to go get fucked."

The sound in his ears is recognizable as nothing less than laughter. The salt-ocean taste in the back of his mouth grows sharper, more pronounced, and his rational mind whispers facts about the human body's salinity and the human mind's ability to perceive that which it expects. The part of him born an Imperial youngest son, raised to serve -- his family, his father, his brother, his country, the gods -- is telling him yes, this, this is how it ought to be. This is familiar, this is correct; even in the womb he was marked to become an emperor's rightmost and most loyal hand, to defend his lord against all who would threaten him even when those threats are from the very gods themselves, and the minute he'd laid eyes on Rufus Shinra he'd realized everything he'd done up until that point, every decision he'd agonized over and every oath he'd broken, had all been done in service of setting him before his true and rightful lord, the voice of the gods endlessly whispering in the back of his mind go forth until he thought he had gone mad with the charge --

But the noise he's heard behind him isn't a reflection of the wind against the building, or the hissing amusement of the gods he will not let himself start listening to again. It's the sound of a sharp inhaled breath, and he's on his feet and whirling around before he can stop himself, and of course, of course it's Tifa standing there, her hand pressed against her mouth, eyes wide as she stares at him.

Anger slices through him at the look she is giving him, the suddenly-wary edge she hasn't shown him with such naked honesty since the very first night they met. Tifa is fluent enough in Wutaian to have understood at least some of his words, enough to glean their meaning even if she does not, cannot, understand their nuance. It isn't enough, apparently, that he has managed to infuriate Rufus this morning; the gods have clearly decided he is to likewise plague his -- his whatever-it-is Tifa-is-to-him -- with fears for his sanity as well. He wonders how much she did understand. He wonders how much of the fear in her eyes is for his words, and how much is for whatever expression must be scrawled nakedly across his face.

I have had enough of Your shit for one lifetime, much less one week, Tseng thinks, as viciously as he can, because he knows he can't rid himself of the anger and it's better to direct it at the true cause than to continue to frighten those around him. (To frighten Tifa, who has always seemed to him fearless beyond the point most others would deem it madness, until suddenly she isn't fearless at all anymore.) And I still refuse to believe in You. (As well to disbelieve gravity. But all delusions are self-delusion at the core, and whether it's his knowledge of Leviathan's attention that is the self-delusion or the thought he could somehow decree the gods nothing more than a monster story told to frighten children into obedience, he could not say.)

The only answer he receives is one brief surge of the sight coming over him again, Tifa flaring to life before his eyes just as boldly as Rufus had, cool moon-silver to Rufus's sunlit gold. Where the touch of the gods is marked across Rufus's brow, with Tifa it sleeps in her chest, over her heart, soft and steady: not an emperor's blaze but a warrior's armor, faint but bedrock-solid nonetheless. The sight shocks him into silence. Tseng has known for years Rufus was marked by destiny's hand long before Tseng met him, that his own life has been intertwined with Rufus's by the will of the heavens most likely since the moment of Rufus's birth, but he never expected this. Not Tifa. He wonders how many others of his regular companions are wearing signs of the gods' favor (the gods' curse) hidden beneath their exterior seemings. This is why he sometimes feels as though he would willingly reach into his mind and cauterize whatever pathways bear responsibility for these gifts the gods have cursed him with, the gifts he cannot fucking shut away completely no matter how assiduously he tries. There are things he should not be forced to know, and he has no idea why this morning, of all days, his usual iron control over this unwanted sight is failing him utterly.

But the vision fades just as quickly as it came to life, as Tifa takes a single step back. Away from whatever he must be showing, what he must be giving away. Her chin comes up, her jaw firming, and he can see the moment where she decides to take refuge in formality, in duty. "We're leaving in fifteen minutes," she says. "If you're coming with us, you need to get dressed."

That she should think to dictate to him infuriates him further, even as he knows his reaction to be unfounded: she is the native here, and after all the horror stories Tseng has heard of these mountains he would not wish to brave them without her guidance. (They lost seven of the reconstruction party to the mountain's dangers, and Tseng suddenly finds himself wondering whether their deaths had been natural or whether they had stumbled across something they shouldn't have.) He, too, reaches for formality, lest he say something unconscionable: he bows to her, reaching with the unthinking precision of long habit for the response he uses when confronted with a situation in which he does not know what to say. He only realizes after he's straightened back up that she, unlike the others of Midgar he is surrounded with, may very well be able to divine the implied insult of arrogance and disdain encoded in depth and duration.

The chill in her eyes tells him she can read it, and doesn't like it. Too late to convince her it was only an accident, that he's used his body for years to communicate the things he cannot let himself say, because he knows those around him will not be able to read those motions, until the motions have become second nature and not honest sentiment. (At least the anger has replaced the fear he could see there moments ago.) He can see her chest rise as she inhales to say something else, something sharply cutting or unbearably insightful. He can see the minute she changes her mind and turns to go back inside instead.

Then she turns back, and the motion is swift and graceful, balanced on one heel, her body rotating compactly around her center of gravity, shoulders drawing back as though she's trying to keep herself from launching for him with fists and feet and fury. "Actually, no," she says, calm and neat and precise. He has no idea what she is denying. "I'm not going to let you do this. You don't get to do this. I don't care who you were talking to and I don't care what's been eating you all morning, but whatever it is, get the fuck over it. Or you're staying here, because I am not bringing you up that mountain with a chip on your shoulder the size of the one you're nursing. I will not be a party to you committing suicide-by-distraction and I will not let you make me any more into a supporting character in your story than you already have."

So. Sharply cutting and unbearably insightful. The rage Tseng keeps penned up deeply behind his hard-won cloak of control slips free for half an instant, and he can feel himself snarling at her. "You will not speak to me thus, woman," he growls, realizing only after the fact that the words have come out in the language, the mode, of his birth. (How easily he loses so many years of Midgar's habits.) He knows it's the wrong thing to say even as he hears himself say it. He can't stop himself anyway.

Sure enough, his rage kindles a fury across her face he has only seen hints of, once or twice, lingering beneath the sweet gentility she usually wears. "You are lucky I care for you or you would already bleed," she snarls right back at him, and oh. Oh. She has been listening to him. Because she has answered in the same manner in which he addressed her, and her vowels are as blurry around the edges as they always are and she swallows half the endings like she doesn't know what they truly signify, but she's answering him mode for mode and register for register, the arrogance of command in her every syllable. He's never heard her attempt any mode other than her usual, that linguistic travesty that never fails to leave him secretly amused. To hear those imperial inflections now, in these circumstances, makes a part of his chest ache and his knees itch to bend, and it makes him homesick for a place that was never home and a role that was never his to keep in the first place.

It only infuriates him further. He is not that man anymore, no matter that this morning seems to be trying to force him back into being, and he will not let her and Rufus with their new and terrifying alliance press-gang him back into the skin he spent so long learning to shed, whether Leviathan's priest or emperor's sword. Tifa has no claim over him, none he cannot renounce at any moment. He has been scrupulously careful not to let her have. She has no right to give him orders, even if she doesn't know that's what she's doing. And he isn't at all certain she doesn't know what she's doing.

They stare at each other, eyes locked on each others' faces, and Tseng can see her hands curling into fists at her sides. Then her anger passes, like a cloud passing over the sun, and the towering projection of presence she almost always wears fades away, leaving behind nothing more than a small, exhausted, unhappy woman. "I'm not doing this today," she says. "If we're going to fight, we're going to do it after I finish visiting the place I died in, and we're not going to do it while I'm standing over the graves of everyone I ever knew and loved. Put some fucking clothes on. Or I'm leaving you here."

This time, when she turns her back on him, she doesn't look back. The sound of the door slamming behind her is too loud, echoing across the yard.

Tseng closes his eyes and breathes, deeply. Breathes, and forces himself to gather the reins of his spirit into balance at his center, and tries to earth the dregs of his anger out through the bare soles of his feet, and when none of it works he stalks back into the mansion and ignores everyone's eyes on his shoulders as he crosses the kitchen and heads upstairs to dress.

His mood must have rubbed off on everyone else -- or maybe Tifa's did. When he comes back down (dressed in last night's coveralls; they're the only thing he has with him with sufficient pocket space to allow him to arm himself well enough to feel secure save for BDUs, and although Rufus could wear them and be thought the role he's pretending -- half of Midgar's young toughs dress in BDUs and play at SOLDIERs -- he is not Rufus, and cannot sell the same story), Reno and Rude are having a vicious argument over which one of them will be accompanying the expedition and which will be staying behind to guard the mansion, and their patients, against outside incursions. Tseng walks in just as Reeve finishes saying something well-meaning but clueless in an attempt to defuse the situation and Reno actually growls at him. "Shut up, all of you," Tseng snaps, before Reno can respond. Rude gives him a look that, behind the sunglasses, is no doubt too piercing. Reno and Reeve both stiffen, Reno because he always comes to heel when Tseng uses that tone on him, and Reeve out of injured pride.

Tseng's head hurts. Rufus is looking at him, eyes narrowed thoughtfully, looking as though he's about to say something. At the table, Valentine's trying to fade away into the shadows, but there's something in the set of his jaw practically screaming that he is judging them all and finding them wanting.

"Enough," Tifa says from the far side of the room, drawn and weary, before anyone else can chime in. "It's a moot point. I'm not taking all of you up there anyway, and if you try to go without me, you'll just wind up dead." She turns from the pantry, arms loaded with bottled water; her eyes sweep the room and land on Valentine. "You. You said last night and this morning that you know what really happened here. I know you haven't decided yet whether or not we can be trusted with that knowledge, and I'm sure you're watching this morning's shitshow and thinking we're all hopeless, but correct me if I'm wrong: you are able to sort through everything downstairs and say what holds necessary information and what is a distraction, yes?"

Valentine nods, slowly, his eyes steady on hers. "I am, yes."

"Good." Tifa crosses the kitchen on bare and quiet feet and sets the bottles of water down on the table. "Reno, Rude, you're with him, then. Everything you and Tseng weren't able to find last night, go find now. Reno, whatever you can do to get Cloud and Zack well enough to travel, do it. We'll probably be running on borrowed time by the time we come back. Tseng, Reeve, Rufus, you three are with me. You said last night there's Restore materia in the first-aid kit?" She doesn't wait for Reno's confirming nod. "One of you equip it. I don't care who. It's mating season for half the mountain predators and if you wind up in the wrong place at the wrong time you can get half-dead before you even notice. I'll be in the hallway finishing the packs. I've got a bad feeling about this, and we're not leaving until I check everyone's gear one last time."

Tseng flicks a quick look at Rufus, waiting for him to countermand any of Tifa's orders, waiting for him to reassume control of the situation, but Rufus is smirking, lips half-curved, eyes far too amused. "Won't let me do it alone, hm?" Rufus says to her, and Tseng has no idea what he means, but it must, must be part of whatever transpired between them this morning that appears to have changed everything. "Silly me; I didn't realize that meant I was acquiring a new general for my campaigns." He sounds wry and amused, Rufus's true amusement, the subtle self-mockery so many people mistake for mockery of them.

Tseng really fucking hates not knowing what's going on, and he has no idea what he expected would happen when he put Rufus and Tifa in the same room, but it wasn't this. It should have been. It really, really should have been.

"Oh, fuck you backwards with Ifrit's flaming dick," Tifa says (Reno chokes to hear it), but the edges of her lips are finally starting to twitch with suppressed amusement instead of with suppressed rage. "Make yourself useful for once in your life and help me grab that water. And somebody had better have the dishes done when we get back."

With both Rufus and Tifa out of the room, the air feels cooler, or emptier, or something.

For lack of something better to do, Tseng finds himself gathering the plates that are still strewn across the table, stacking them neatly into piles and bringing them over to the sink. When he turns away to go back for the second round, he nearly runs into Reno. Reno's got four glasses pinned together with his fingers splayed around them, and he sidesteps Tseng neatly enough to tell Tseng the near-collision hadn't been an accident. "You okay, boss?" he asks, voice low enough for them to be the only ones who can hear.

"I am fine," Tseng says. He's really beginning to get tired of people asking him that.

Usually when he uses that tone of voice, Reno backs down. This time he doesn't. "I been keeping my mouth shut because I know none of you wanna hear me running it, and I have no idea what's going on here beyond the obvious, but boss, I can tell you're trying to hold the whole plate on your shoulders again. And if anybody could do it, it's probably you, but I don't think anybody can. Toss some of that shit at me, yeah? You gotta let me carry some of your crap, 'cause I don't wanna know what'll happen if you drop it."

Looking at Reno (at his second-in-command, at his own loyal right hand) staring at him, eyes wide and open and guileless, makes the last of his annoyance run out of him like water spilling from between cupped fingers. "Later," Tseng says, but it's less annoyed than it could be, and he knows Reno will be able to hear the difference. "We're on a time crunch."

"Yeah, okay," Reno agrees. "But I'm gonna hold you to that 'later'."

Too many people are telling him that this morning.

Whatever he could say in response is cut off by Tifa returning, Rufus trailing along behind her. They're carrying two backpacks each, one in each hand; Rufus hands one to Reeve, while Tifa comes across and hands one to Tseng. The curve of her jaw speaks to her determination to avoid any personal matters. Tseng obeys her unspoken request and simply takes the pack from her without pressing further. "Up to you if you want to grab a cold-weather parka or just get by with a sweatshirt," Tifa says. "It's colder than you'd think up there, although the sunlight and the exertion will probably keep you warm enough."

The way she's bracing herself against whatever else he might say makes guilt stab through Tseng. He has tried his best, through the years, to make certain he never has occasion to leave her feeling lesser than she truly is, and his irritation at the situation should not transfer itself at irritation at she who is not the architect of his annoyances. But now is not the time to get into any of the details -- not when they are in the midst of something much larger than they are -- and so all he does is nod. "Thank you," he says. Something sparks in her eyes, but he doesn't look too closely. He doesn't really want to know.

The sunlight is warm against Tseng's hair as they make their way out of the mansion and through the outlying paths beyond the backyard. Tifa leads them through the scraggly thicket of evergreens that form the back boundary of the mansion's yard, and Tseng can tell -- from what he knows of where the reactor lies in relation to the town; from the sense of where he is in relation to the world around him that is the only one of the spirit-gifts he's never tried to shake -- that she is leading them well out of their way. He keeps his own counsel. He will trust her knowledge; he's lost the knack of navigating in environments other than urban, and she shows no sign of hesitating.

For the first few minutes their walk is almost pleasant; they're all quiet, and Tseng can hear the song of some mountain bird in the distance. As they come out onto the edge of a narrow, dirt-packed pathway that stretches up and into the hills, though, Tifa -- in the lead, with Rufus behind her, then Reeve, Tseng holding up the rear -- stops short. She cocks her head, listening, and Tseng might not be able to tell what's wrong, but he can tell by the frown on her face that something is.

"What is it?" Rufus asks, coming up beside her.

Tifa shakes her head, but doesn't say anything; her brows are drawn together and she turns in a slow circle. Tseng catches himself sweeping the space around them for potential threat. It's been years since he's spent any significant amount of time outside the city, and the hills of Wutai are nothing like the fierce rock and treacherous footing of Mt. Nibel, but he does remember what mountainous terrain should look like. He can't spot anything wrong here.

"I don't know," Tifa finally says. "I can't put my finger on it. Something's --" She stops, frowns more. "I might just be imagining it."

"Assume you're not," Tseng says. "What aren't you imagining?"

Tifa bites her lip. "It feels wrong up here," she finally says. "And I know it sounds crazy. I -- I caught a whiff of it this morning, I think, but we were mostly on the other side of the plateau and I was trying to wrangle Reno. This --" She breaks off, her eyes roving over the rock face on the side of the narrow trail. "I can't put my finger on it," she says, again. "But it feels wrong."

Tseng is the last person on this earth to mock another's sense of the world around them. "Bad enough to justify turning around?" he asks.

Tifa appears to consider the question for a few minutes. Tseng watches as she crosses over to the rock face, reaches out a hand to touch it. Tiny pebbles crumble away at the touch. She frowns again and brushes harder, and a larger chunk comes free. She bends down and picks it up, rubbing her thumb over it, and seems to come to a decision. "I need a better look," she says. She shrugs out of her pack, sets it on the ground next to her, and unzips the front pocket, pulling out a smaller pouch and clipping it to her belt. When she straightens up to look at them all, her eyes skim over them all and come to rest on Tseng's, a fraction of a second longer than they should. "I need you all to do exactly what I tell you. I'm going to scramble up and get a view from higher ground. And usually it wouldn't be a problem at all, but --" Her gesture sweeps across the rock, clearly trying to communicate something Tseng isn't familiar enough to follow.

Rufus follows her gesture, frowning as though if he concentrates hard enough, he'll be able to see whatever mysterious signs and portents Tifa is reading. "What's the issue?"

She shakes her head. "I don't know. If I did, this would be a lot easier." She cranes her neck back, looking up at the rock stretching up above them. The trail circles around and around them, switchbacking up the side of the mountain. Where they're standing, the next pass of the trail is easily fifty or sixty feet above them. Tseng can't imagine she intends to climb that herself. "Not here," she says abruptly, picking her pack back up. "Up the trail about two hundred yards or so. There's a spot I used to use for beginners to bouldering. Maybe that's more stable."

"Do you want a spotter?" Reeve asks, quietly. "We do most of the outdoor reactor maintenance on rope, but I can spot without, too."

Tifa blows out a breath. "No. I'm sure you know what you're doing, but we haven't worked together yet. I'm rusty, but I'm not that rusty. Best thing you can all do for me is to stay out of my way. I don't even know why I'm so jumpy. I used to free climb things three times as high with a lot shittier handholds." She looks over her shoulder again, more jumpy than Tseng's ever seen her look, and actually shudders. "I don't know," she repeats. "I might just be on edge from all the weird shit we've run into already."

"I'll trust your instincts," Rufus says, grimly. "Lead the way."

Watching Tifa stand at the bottom of the rock face and dust chalk over her hands from the pouch she's clipped to her belt is, Tseng discovers, much like watching Tifa flowing through her morning kata: the pleasure of watching an artist at work. Her eyes rove over the rock, lips moving faintly as she makes brief, abortive hand motions. Trying to work out the sequence of moves, Tseng imagines. He can see, now that he's looking for it, the faintest dusting of old chalk in a few of the cracks.

"Stand back," Tifa says, finally, turning around and fixing Tseng and Rufus with a fierce glare. Reeve is already giving Tifa a wide berth; Tifa nods her chin at him. "At least where he's standing, preferably further. If I see one of you getting any closer, I'm going to kick you in the head."

Once they're arranged to her satisfaction, she rubs the tips of her thumbs over the tips of her fingers in a brief gesture that feels almost ritualized, and steps up to the base of the cliff rising upward before them. Try as he might, Tseng can't tell how she chooses this handhold, how she selects that foothold, but watching her flow up the side of the mountain is like watching her become one with the rock. He can tell, watching her move, that she's testing each hold before trusting her weight to it; pebbles skitter down the side of the cliff as she dislodges them, and only the fact Reeve is grinning, watching her, keeps Tseng from lunging forward in protest when she reaches for a hold and it breaks away beneath her hand. It doesn't seem to disturb her; her lips move in what he can tell is a curse, but she doesn't even wobble, only redirects her hand to a crack about six inches higher and tries again.

It's only the work of a few minutes before she's reached a slight ledge in the rock that was clearly her destination all along. It doesn't look wide enough to be able to sit comfortably on, but that doesn't seem to stop her; she hooks her heel up onto it from below, her leg stretching implausibly high above her waist, and even Tseng's eye can't quite follow the order in which she somehow pushes herself upwards on what looks to be thin air and flips herself around until she's spidered against the rock, facing outward. She shades her eyes against the sun as she cranes her neck and surveys the scene around them, looking for something.

Then she sighs, lets her hand drop, and -- Tseng's heart nearly stops to see it -- leaps from her perch, rolling with the landing the same way she'd roll with a throw to shed her momentum and coming up kneeling and dusty. ("And that would be why she told us to stand back here," Reeve says, watching her dust the chalk off her hands against her skirt.)

"Anything?" Rufus asks.

"Maybe," Tifa says, climbing back to her feet and rocking the shoulder she'd rolled over. "Maybe not. It might just be that I'm not seeing the wildlife I'd expect -- this time of year there should be at least a few Kyuvilduns, maybe a Sahagin or two, but I haven't seen anything. Could be it was a bad winter and they're still hibernating, I don't know what the weather was like this year, but ..." She shrugs, still looking tense. "It's been too long. I can't say for sure. It could even be bad memories and bad associations. If I see anything concrete, I'll tell you immediately, but until then... stay behind me, and stay close. If you see anything that makes you think something might be wrong, sing out."

Tifa's uneasy feeling aside, the hike up the mountain is not unpleasant. Tseng was expecting something far more gruelling -- and from the way Tifa keeps looking over her shoulder and starting at every small noise, so was she -- but the only things that interrupt them are a few small animals (and one very startled mountain goat), and the largest danger they see is a broad-winged bird, its wingspan looking greater than Tseng's height, circling overhead once or twice. ("Zuu," Tifa says, noticing Tseng watching it. "They won't attack you unless you're out in the open, or if they spot metal on you. Try to keep out of direct sunlight when you see it, so nothing glints at it and makes it think you're a good target, but we should be okay.")

They're about an hour into their hike up the trail, having fallen into a two-by-two pattern with Rufus at Tifa's side and Tseng pacing Reeve behind them, when Rufus breaks the silence they've all fallen into. "So, I'm curious," he begins. He sounds idle, like he's just making conversation, but Tseng's ears sharpen: underneath the casual, relaxed tone Rufus has adopted, his question is a probe, a test. "Why us three?"

Tifa turns back from where she's still sweeping the terrain around them. "Why what?" she asks, frowning.

The little gesture Rufus makes encompasses everything: the trail, the mountain, the four of them. "Why'd you bring the three of us? You found out this morning Reno can climb if he has to; Rude's less exhausted than Tseng or I. And you didn't know anything about Reeve's capabilities. Why'd you bring the three of us with you?"

Next to Tseng, Reeve opens his mouth; Tseng doesn't know what he might be planning to say, but he snakes his hand out and catches Reeve's wrist, and Reeve quiets down. Tseng isn't actually certain either of them knows he and Reeve can hear them. Rufus's voice was pitched quietly, and Tseng and Reeve are a good twenty feet behind them. But Tifa was right, sound does carry, against the rock. He desperately wants to hear Tifa's answer, because he knows Rufus isn't just making conversation. Underneath the easy, idle tone, Rufus is testing Tifa, questioning her tactical decision and forcing her to justify her choices, and it's a sound Tseng knows damn well. He did it to Rufus for years.

Ahead of them, Tifa glances over her shoulder at some faint noise only she can hear, the late-morning sun glinting off her hair. Tseng can't tell from the look on her face whether she knows what Rufus is doing or not; she's worn the same faint frown since they departed. "Reeve was the one absolute in the party, actually," she says. Her voice is just as casual, but Tseng can hear the faint note of challenge in it, and he realizes she knows precisely what Rufus's motivations are. Or thinks she does, at least. "He's the one who'll be able to explain whatever it is we find up there. Reno's my second-best climber, but he's also been awake for over a day and is on at least one dose of Fury that's probably going to wear off before we get through this. He was also with us yesterday, so if anyone comes knocking, he can answer the door and it won't look suspicious. Rude, I thought about, but he is less exhausted than anyone else, and if something happens back at the mansion, there'll need to be someone there in good enough shape to handle -- whatever comes up. Tseng ..." She trails off, tossing another quick look back over her shoulder. Tseng tries to look like he isn't listening; he must succeed, since she turns back again. "He's quick enough on his feet to handle anything that might attack us, he got more sleep this morning than you did, and out of everyone available he's probably most likely to be able to handle a fight without firearms. One shot would at least make the town aware that someone was up here, and it's too early in the season for anyone to be out hunting."

"Hmm." From the sound of it, Tseng can imagine Rufus's expression: eyebrows precisely raised, face neutral, no hint at what he might be thinking. "And me?"

Unexpectedly, Tifa laughs. It rings off the rock around them. "Don't honestly tell me I wouldn't have had to knock you unconscious to keep you from following. This way I get to keep an eye on you."

Rufus chuffs, soft amusement. "Okay, I'll grant you that. What's the biggest danger up here? Aside from the predators, since they seem to be mostly missing."

Tifa sighs. "Don't think I don't know what you're doing," she says, instead of answering. "You don't want the information; you're trying to figure out how my tactical brain works."

"Still a valid question," Rufus points out. And Tseng once more desperately wants to know what happened this morning before he woke up, what changed the way they were interacting so thoroughly he's scrabbling to keep up, because if asked, he would have thought it even odds Rufus would have gotten huffy at Tifa's recalcitrance to answer or Tifa would have gotten stiff-necked at the questioning, thinking Rufus to be implying she was less competent than she is. Instead, they sound like they're making conversation over afternoon tea.

"You know," Tifa says, still ignoring Rufus's question, "this morning you said you'd get back to talking about me and leadership, and you never did. I have this sneaking suspicion you're up to something."

"Would I do that?" Rufus sounds perfectly innocent. Tseng's heard that sound often enough to know it to be a perfect lie.

Tifa snorts. "Weren't you the one who spent twenty minutes this morning telling me all about different kinds of manipulation? I believe you'd do just about anything if it'd get you what you wanted. I'm just having trouble figuring out what it is you'd want. I'm not a --"

She stops dead just as Tseng is starting to boggle at what her words imply (what it implies that she is confident enough of their reception to risk saying them), throwing out an arm across Rufus's chest to halt his steps as well. "Stop," she says, her voice pitched louder this time, intended to carry to Reeve and Tseng as well. Tseng palms a knife as he comes up behind them, eyes flicking around to see what she noticed that made her call a halt, but he can't see anything.

"Wait here," Tifa says. "Don't move." She slips around the curve of rock blocking sight of the upcoming path before anyone can protest. No more than thirty seconds pass before they can hear her, swearing viciously.

"We've got a problem," she says, coming back around the curve. She looks worried and furious, in equal measure. "We're coming up on a switchback -- it's what'll get us up there --" She jerks a thumb above them, where they've been pacing a narrow track higher above them, heading upwards in the other direction, for about ten minutes. "Except there's been a rockslide. The entire side of the trail's sheared straight off; it's nothing but rubble. Twenty foot gap in the trail, easy."

Rufus blows out air in something slightly more emphatic than a sigh. "Is that what was tripping your warnings down there?"

Tifa hesitates. "I -- don't know. I don't think so. Or if it is, it's only a symptom. There's something really wrong up here, and I don't know what. That trail shouldn't have gone; I deliberately brought you guys up the most stable route." She chews on her lip, her eyes distant. "You know," she says, slowly. "Whatever it is, it might be the same thing that made the bridge collapse on us, back when -- back when. I said Saturday night, we were all waiting for it to go, but -- you know, thinking about it, it wasn't the ropes of the bridge that frayed. It was the edge of the ravine crumbling in."

"Hold that thought," Tseng says. "Practicalities first: is there any way to get past this?"

Tifa sighs. "Yeah, that's what I was just asking myself. There is, but it'd be about another two hours of detour, and that would mean a descent in the dark, and..." She shakes her head. "I don't know. I really don't. If Reeve has enough climbing experience, between the two of us, maybe we could talk the two of you through climbing up, if you do everything I tell you to do, without question and without hesitation... but that could wind up taking just as long, if not longer, depending on how bad things get. I don't like it. My gut instinct is to say we descend and try again tomorrow, leave just at dawn, but ..." She trails off again, shrugs. Transfers her gaze to Rufus. "How much longer do you think we have before somebody comes looking to see whether we've found the monster in the basement?"

"Not that long," Rufus says, grimly. "I'd be happiest if we were out of here by tonight and back in Midgar before somebody comes looking for me. Not only am I certain someone's going to come running up to the mansion as soon as we leave, I can only put off everyone for so long before somebody talks to somebody else and realizes I'm not really in Cosmo Canyon. I picked Cosmo deliberately because there aren't many people who'll talk to Shinra there, and I've been bouncing my emails through about a dozen different proxy servers so nobody can tell where they're being sent from, but there really isn't anything in Cosmo that would require me to stay three days. Four, by the time we got back, given the time difference."

Tifa closes her eyes for a few seconds longer than a blink would justify. Tseng watches as she takes a deep breath, clearly thinking hard, then squares her shoulders and opens her eyes again. "I can't make this call," she says. "We have two choices. No, three. One, I can get you up this cliff somehow and we can pick up the trail above us, bypass the rockslide. It would be hard, but I think I can do it, and I've got gear; not enough gear to be really happy about it, but I've got gear. The only real danger is to me -- once I get up, I can top-rope you all, and the worst danger is getting banged to shit by falling rocks. It'll be a fucking pain -- I can tell just by looking that the holds here are not what I'd put a total novice on in the least -- but once I'm up, we can make it work. Two, we go back down the trail, take the other way up."

She breathes in, short and sharp. "I really didn't want to take you guys that way, because I have no idea if the bridge is still out and if it is we'll have to climb down into the ravine and trail up that way, but down is easier than up and the remnants of the bridge are possibly still there as a ladder. Downside to that, beyond the bridge, is that it would almost certainly give us a much more limited time in the actual reactor before having to head back, and we'd have to go extremely out of our way to get back without climbing back up the ravine -- it could easily take us until midnight to make our way back to the mansion. Hell, at this point, we may be looking at that anyway, because with this trail out, all the routes back are going to involve climbing somehow, and -- I really, really don't want to take mountain virgins abseiling in the dark. But that route would almost certainly take us longer to get up there, so it'd be a guarantee we'd either be camping out or braving the dark."

"That isn't the only reason you don't like that option, is it," Rufus says. It isn't a question.

"No, it isn't, which you fucking well know," Tifa snaps back at him, and Tseng realizes they're talking about the prospect of recreating her mad, desperate rush to the reactor while her home burned beneath her. Next to him, Reeve looks as thought he wants to ask, but doesn't, sensing the charged nature of the moment. "Which is not to say I can't handle it, because I can. But if I have to, it's going to cost, and that's something you have to take into account. Because I could do it, and if I have to I will do it, but I can't guarantee how well I'll do it, and I honestly don't think we can afford to have me fighting off a panic attack every thirty seconds in the dark on uncertain ground. I could get you through it. It wouldn't be pretty."

Tseng's heart is breaking for her, but Rufus only nods. "What's the third option?" The way he sounds, Tseng knows he's already identified it, or something he thinks is a third option; he wants to know what Tifa thinks it is.

"We drop back to the mansion, pack everything up, shove everything and everybody into the helicopter, and take that up. Which blows any chance of pretending we weren't up there, because, once again, sound carries. When a helicopter lands at the reactor, everyone knows it. But we may have lost any chance of stealth anyway -- whoever's been left there to babysit is almost certainly going to come running the minute we leave, and they're going to find the wreck we made of that basement and report back. But there's still a chance we can leave them guessing about who we are and how much we know, if we destroy the place behind us when we leave." Tifa sighs again. "Like I said: I can't make the call."

Tseng's eyes flick to Rufus. "Fourth option," he says. He doesn't need to say more; he knows Rufus will know what he means. The fourth option, and the one Rufus almost certainly already had in mind, is for them to neutralize anyone who might be inclined to report back to whomever pulls their strings. Which, since they can't be sure who that might be, means leaving the town as much of a wasteland as Sephiroth left it, and almost certainly means killing hundreds of people who may or may not be complicit in what really went on here. He doesn't think Tifa needs to hear him elaborate; he is certain she would never forgive him, or them, for doing it. But it needs to be said.

But Tifa shocks him. "Yeah, I thought of that, too," she says, and her voice sounds dead. Soul-weary, at having had the thought, at having considered the thought, and the complete lack of inflection in her voice says she did more than just consider it in passing. "Except we don't know how frequently they check in, and we don't know if they've reported back already -- I would have, if someone came out of nowhere and told the story we told -- and we don't know if they may've described us, and I'm pretty sure whoever they report to would find it horribly suspicious if the entire town turned up dead after we left." (Again, the twist of her lips says, shouting silently to the heavens.)

The silence stretches out between them. Rufus is staring off into the near distance, eyes flicking back and forth in the uncanny fashion he tends to use when reasoning through something from start to finish. Tseng has always wondered what he's seeing, in those moments. "You said the danger's to you," he finally says. "How dangerous?"

Tifa sighs again -- this time, heavily enough that Tseng can hear the whistle of her breath in her chest. Or perhaps that's just the wind blowing by them. (Please, Tseng thinks, to an uncaring universe; please, let it just be the wind.) "Three years ago, I would have said not much danger at all, but three years ago, I was convinced I was invincible. Now? I don't know. Barring utter disaster, I can keep myself from getting killed. I can't guarantee I can avoid breaking bones. And I don't mind taking the risk, but if I'm down, you lose your guide."

Rufus dismisses that with a wave. "I have a mastered Restore, I can heal just about anything shy of death," he says. The cavalier way he says it startles Tseng. Rufus has always hated casting restorative magic, avoids doing so whenever possible. But of the four of them, there's no doubt he'd be the best choice. Tseng himself would be anyone rational's last choice of healer, while Reeve is competent enough in an emergency but lacks the magical strength to cast anything more powerful than a first-level Cure. And Tifa is an unknown quantity; she's almost certainly never equipped a materia before in her life. (When this particular mission is accomplished, Tseng should rectify that. Or have Reno rectify it; she'll likely learn better from him.) "Reeve, are you confident enough that you'd be able to do what she'd need you to do?"

Reeve has been listening to the discussion with interest, but one of the things Tseng loves about working with Reeve is that he never talks just to feel as though he's made his stamp on the conversation; he isn't as taciturn as Rude is (some rocks are not as taciturn as Rude is), but until his input is needed, he generally keeps his own counsel. Since Tifa first proposed the option, Reeve's been studying the rock above them, chewing on his lip and evaluating the terrain. Instead of answering Rufus directly, he turns to Tifa: "I've never done rock climbing, as opposed to reactor climbing. I take it you'd want me to belay?"

"Yeah," Tifa says. She doesn't sound happy. "And there's a good chance you'll have to catch me -- if the rock gave out less than a hundred feet up the trail, I'm not all that confident about it here, either. But if you can belay me, and I can get up there and set an anchor, I can bring everyone else up from up top. As long as you pay attention and don't panic, I think it can work. Assuming nobody's scared of heights."

"I can do that," Reeve says; he doesn't even need to stop and think. "I've belayed a bit before. Not for something like this, but I'm familiar with the basics. And if I can avoid panicking when one of my idiot juniors hits the wrong button and leaves us two minutes to containment ignition, I can avoid panicking through this. Just tell me what to do."

"Right, then," Rufus says. "In the interests of maintaining some hope -- however vanishingly faint -- of getting out of here without fucking everything six ways to Sunday, let's start with that, with the one provision that if you get partway up and you think it's not going to work, you call it off." His eyes are fixed on Tifa; Tseng bites back the protest. It's not the choice he would have made -- if this were his mission, he would have chosen option four. But it isn't his mission, and he knows Rufus would not take well to having his objection vocalized, especially since he knows full well Rufus knows Tseng's choice would be option four. (He realizes, watching Tifa watching Rufus, that -- despite knowing Rufus could read his counsel from his face in that brief moment -- he is still disquieted by the fact he is the only one Rufus has not asked for input on the decision, that it is Tifa Rufus is looking to for answers to his questions. But now is not the time to examine that revelation in greater depth; he makes himself set it aside. He will not let his own insecurities endanger them all.)

The climbing lesson Tifa gives them is brief but intense, conducted in scraps and pieces as she confiscates each of their backpacks -- apparently she spread out the essentials among the four of them, something Tseng sees Rufus quietly approving of -- and piles heaps of unfamiliar tools on the ground, sorting through them. The basics are simple -- never move until you know where you're moving to; keep three points of contact on the rock at all times; don't put your weight on any hold before you test it. Don't worry if you fall, because the rope will catch you before you go anywhere, and all you have to do is not panic.

"And you're going to fall," she says, looking up at them as she recoils ropes, inspects gear. The spikes (pitons, she calls them) she's produced from the bottom of their packs come in seven or eight different styles; some of them have a faint sheen of rust over the loops on the ends. She must have salvaged them from somewhere; they all look used. "I haven't worked out the route yet, but I can tell just looking at it, this is not the kind of thing I'd start a beginner on. At all. The only reason I'm willing to risk this is because I'll have you on top rope, Reeve has some experience, and the two of you are used to listening to where your body is in relation to the rest of the world around you. But this isn't like fighting. You saw me climbing earlier; you have to work with the rock, or you're going to fall. You're going to fall anyway, but if you're trying to fight the rock, you're going to do nothing but fall. You can't make the rock do what you want it to do. It is what it is, and you respect that or you get hurt."

She sounds calm and steady, commanding and in control, but Tseng is looking at Reeve, who has never learned to control his face. Reeve is watching the pile of gear she's assembling, watching as her hands move over each of the pitons and testing to make sure the rust is only surface discoloration, watching as she sorts them into three piles. At a guess, those piles are "use only in emergency", "tolerable but not fantastic", and "adequate"; the "adequate" pile is by far the smallest. With every piece Tifa assesses, Reeve looks at it, looks at her, looks up at the face of the rock, and the grooves in his lip where he's biting down on it get worse. He doesn't say anything, but he doesn't have to. The look on his face tells Tseng, as plainly as though Reeve were shouting it at the top of his lungs, that this is a lot more dangerous than Tifa is letting on.

"I'm going to do my best to chalk the route for you as I go," Tifa says, "but I may have to do a lot of backtracking, so you're going to have to pay careful attention to what gets me up the rock. But don't assume a hold that works for me will work for you." Her eyes flick over them, careful assessment; she focuses on Rufus. "You're going to have the hardest time of it," she says, reluctantly. (Reluctant because she doesn't want to place Rufus in danger, or because she thinks -- rightfully so -- that Tseng would be willing to accept danger to himself but quails at danger to Rufus?) "You're the heaviest out of all of us. I'm guessing you have sixty, seventy pounds on me. And I know it's all muscle, but --" She sighs. "That might work against you more than it works for you, because this isn't about arm strength, and if you try to treat it like you're doing pullups, you're going to be a wreck before you're even halfway up. Tseng, I want you first up after me, in case I need you to help me haul him. Then Rufus. Both of you, take as long as you need, and be smart about it."

Her lecture delivered -- and Tseng thinks she's probably glossing over a great deal, even though his head is spinning from trying to keep all the details straight -- she rises from her crouch and tosses a small device to Reeve, who catches it and inspects it carefully. "So, our first problem," she says. "There's one harness. I found two in the gear closet, but one of them was so worn I wouldn't trust it to hold a housecat. Are you all right with an improvised harness out of rope, or will you feel more equipped to catch me if you have the harness and I'm on the makeshift?"

Reeve blanches. "No," he says, so quickly that Tseng knows Tifa has just suggested something shocking. "I'll be fine. You take the harness. Please wear the harness."

Tifa snorts. "If you're sure," she says, but she doesn't argue too much, which tells Tseng she's grateful for the answer. She tosses Reeve one end of the bundle of rope. She watches him for a few seconds as he pulls a small loop of the rope through the device and secures it with a carabiner. Whatever she sees seems to reassure her; she turns away again after a few seconds, picking up the bundle of straps and buckles that must be the harness and strapping herself in. She has to yank up her skirt to position the leg loops over her thighs, and yank it up further at the waist to prevent the waistbelt from resting against bare skin; she seems sublimely indifferent to the fact this leaves her underwear (pale pink and bleach-stained) visible to the three of them, but Reeve blushes and looks away anyway.

"Come here," she says, to Rufus and Tseng, once she's secured herself to her satisfaction and hung the gear on the harness's loops, and brings them over to the base of the cliff to demonstrate how to apply the basic principles she's taught them.

She makes them climb the first few feet over and over again, teaching them as quickly as she can how to recognize a hold, repeating her rules like a mantra: Weight on your feet. Arms straight as possible. Move from your center. Turn your hip into the wall to reach further above you. Rufus struggles more than Tseng does, and Tseng can't quite tell why; he's better at recognizing the right holds to reach for than Tseng is, even, but where Tifa is elegance and grace and Tseng is making what he thinks is a fairly adequate showing, Rufus looks like a gorilla trying to waltz up the rock. Tseng can see Rufus's frustration building, until Tifa throws up her hands after he misses one hold and nearly turns his ankle.

"You need to --" she starts, then stops herself, recognizing the signs of Rufus's temper starting to flare. Her eyes skim quickly over their tiny party, falling on Tseng before darting back to Rufus, and she takes him by the elbow. "Come here," she says, and gently but firmly guides him twenty feet or so away. Tseng strains his ears, but he can't hear the brief-but-intense conversation she launches into, hands moving emphatically to underscore her points. She's pitched her voice deliberately low; Rufus is leaning in to hear her.

"It's all right," Reeve says in his ear. Tseng is concentrating on trying to listen; he hadn't quite realized Reeve was so close, and he starts, then tries to cover the motion. "This is crazy, but it's not as crazy as it could be."

Tseng trusts Reeve's evaluation of the situation, but still, he can't help ask. "How dangerous is this?"

Reeve hesitates before answering, covering the hesitation by looking down at the length of rope he's knotting himself into with an elaborate series of loops around his waist and thighs, and Tseng can see the moment he decides to deflect. "For us, not very. Once she gets up there, she'll set up an anchor and toss the harness down for us to come up one at a time. She's right that top rope is a lot safer. It's tough to trust the rope will catch you, but it will. We'll all wind up bruised, especially me if I have to catch a fall, but we'll get through it."

Tseng can hear what he isn't saying. "And for her?"

Reeve's eyes skitter over the face of the rock. "More dangerous. She's not admitting it, but the gear is shit. I saw her picking it up on salvage when she and Reno came up to get us this morning, which is why it looks so rusted. I think some of it had been up here for generations. She says she's out of practice, but if this is out of practice for her, she must have been amazing before, though. She's good. I wouldn't want to do this, but I'm pretty sure she can." He bites his lip. "Pretty sure."

It'll have to do. (If only they didn't have to maintain even the illusion of stealth -- But they do, or rather, they should, because even without knowing what lies on the other end of this quest Tseng already knows they've stumbled on something huge, and one thing he has learned over the years is that it's never wise to show your hand before you can begin to guess what cards your opponent is holding.)

Out of the corner of Tseng's eye, he sees Tifa makes one last emphatic gesture. Rufus nods and bends over, unlacing his shoes -- heavy work boots he'd picked up from the disguise bin, originally Rude's, and almost certainly at least half a size too large -- and pulling the laces so tightly Tseng winces to see them. Whatever lecture Tifa has delivered, whatever wisdom she's imparted to Rufus, seems to have helped; she leads him back to the space they'd used for practice and stands close to him when he tries again, and this time he is -- still not easy with the motions. But improving.

After she watches him struggle up the sequence one last time, she sighs and steps back from the rock, picking up the end of the rope and tying it to a carabiner with an elaborate and complicated knot before clipping the carabiner to her harness and then turning to Reeve and beginning to inspect his makeshift harness, running her hands along each length and adjusting the way it lies over his clothes. "You know you're going to bruise like fuck if you have to catch me," she warns him.

Reeve gives her a lopsided smile. "I'll be fine."

Tifa gives him a piercing look, but leaves it be, turning to Tseng and Rufus. "I need you to do one thing for me above all else," she says, serious and sober. "Stay back. It's not just dangerous for you; it's dangerous for me, too, because if I have to worry about whether I'll hit you when I kick some rock loose, it will distract me. And given the gear options we have, and the way I'm going to have to ascend this, if I fall on the beginning of the route, Reeve won't be able to catch me, because the rope won't be attached to anything yet. If I fall before I get some gear in, I may break something when I land, and I'll have fractions of a second to try to land right. You can't help. I know it will be tempting, I know you'll probably do it instinctively, but do not try to catch me. Understood?"

"Understood," Tseng says softly. Looking closely, he can see the faint thrumming of nerves running through her, her earlier jumpiness made manifest twice over; she's controlling it now, where she wasn't before, but it's there.

She studies him for a few more seconds, her eyes worried on his, looking suddenly small and uncertain beneath the cool control she's trying to project. Just when he's trying to think of a way to undo the damage he did earlier this morning with his careless words, a way to tell her that he has faith in her skill and admiration for her valor, she nods. "Okay, then. Let's do this thing."

Tifa stands at the foot of the cliff for fifteen minutes or so, eyes roving over the rock; they watch in silence, not willing to distract her, as her gaze moves upward, stops, backs up, sweeps sideways, moves again. Her hands flex and contract in midair, sketching out positions and holds. At one point, she stops, looks down at her feet, takes a deep breath, mutters something none of them can hear, and then paces about ten feet up the trail, repeating the inspection -- this time with more backtracking -- before shaking her head and returning to the place she'd originally chosen. "Okay," she finally says. "I see three trouble spots. Maybe four, I'll know more when I get up there. Fortunately it doesn't start to get really ugly until halfway up or so. Reeve, I'm ready when you are."

Reeve checks the rope he's puddled up next to him, his makeshift harness, one last time, even though Tseng has watched him check five times, and Tifa twice, already. "Ready," he says. It has the sound of a ritualized call and response.

Tifa looks over her shoulder at Tseng and Rufus. "Five feet further," she says -- Tseng obeys; after a minute, Rufus follows -- and takes a deep breath.

After the buildup, Tseng somehow expects her actions to be more showy than they are; the most interesting thing she does at first is tighten the laces of her shoes, then tuck the length of her braid down the back of her shirt and, reaching behind her, underneath the webbing of the harness she's wearing and into the waistband of her skirt. She flows up the first few feet, the holds she'd used for training, as though they're nothing. It isn't until her feet are reaching shoulder height that she stops, cranes her neck backwards, and studies the rock above her for several minutes before making each move. The next fifteen minutes are a constant loop of small, discrete motions: first she chooses where her hand or foot will go next, then she pulls or kicks at the rock to test it, then she eases her weight on to it as slowly as she can until she's certain it will hold. Twice, she changes her mind after starting to transfer her weight; once, she's nearly entirely finished the motion when the hold she's reaching for with her right hand pulls away beneath her.

Her feet slip out from underneath her as well; she's left with her whole weight dangling from her left arm, fingers fingers flexing white-knuckled as she scrabbles her feet against the rock. "Fuck, fuck, fuck," she chants -- Tseng thinks she doesn't even realize she's doing it, although he can't quite tell if the quiver in her voice is fear or excitement -- once she gets back to the stable position she'd originally moved from. She switches her grip from the left hand to the right hand, taking her left hand off the rock and shaking it vigorously before chalking that hand again, then rubs the back of her wrist over her face to dash sweat from her eyes. (She leaves chalk smudges and dirt behind.)

"Shinra, you Shiva-damned motherfucker, get your fucking ass with its fucking overdeveloped sense of chivalry back another ten fucking feet before I have Tseng shoot you," Tifa hollers, and Tseng is startled to realize -- he hadn't noticed, too intent on Tifa's compact form working its way up the rock face -- that Rufus lunged forward the instant Tifa's hand slipped.

"Instinct!" Rufus yells back. He looks faintly embarrassed, stepping backwards; Tseng grabs him by the pants and hauls him in, curling his fingers into his waistband to hold him there.

"Well, curb your fucking instinct," Tifa calls. She rubs her face again, this time against the inner crook of her elbow (smudging the chalk even further) and blows out an unsteady breath.

Reeve steps in (metaphorically; he hasn't moved yet) to defuse the situation before Rufus can take offense. "I think you need to get some gear in," he calls up to her. (The undertones in his voice tell Tseng that Reeve thinks she needed to get some gear in a long damn time ago.)

"Yeah, I know," Tifa says. "It looked solid enough. I was saving the pitons for higher up. I don't fucking have enough of them." But she's studying the rock face, reaching for one of the pitons and the hammer clipped to her belt, wrapping the leather loop at the hammer's hilt around her wrist twice before unclipping it.

The next twenty minutes are incredibly tense and nerve-wracking for Tseng, and he isn't even the one on the rock. He can tell, watching Tifa's lips moving in silent invective, that this isn't going well for her; twice she has a piece of gear half-hammered in when the rock she's hammering it into splits beneath her, and once he can tell she has a split second to decide whether to catch the piece of gear as it falls. She doesn't, and Reeve winces as the piton comes clattering down towards them. "Damn," he mutters. "She's going to miss that when she gets further up."

"This isn't normal, is it?" Rufus asks. Above them, Tifa bangs a fist on the rock, resting her forehead against the back of her other arm for half a second; she looks as though she wants to cry. Then she takes a deep breath and uses the hammer to clear away debris before selecting another piton and trying again.

Reeve hesitates. "I don't know. I've never been here before, much less climbed here, and I don't usually do rock. But --" He breaks off, tensing slightly as one too-hard swing of the hammer nearly overbalances Tifa; Tseng watches his hands flex on the rope he's holding, unconsciously preparing to catch her. She recovers after a few seconds and finishes placing the piton, then pulls on it a few times, testing the placement, before clipping another carabiner into it and roping in. Reeve exhales sharply. "I don't know," he says, again. "But I don't think it is. She's trying really hard not to show it -- I think she doesn't want us to worry -- but I'm pretty sure this is worse than she was expecting. I'm honestly not sure how we're going to get past some of those moves. It might make more sense for us to ratchet up the rope instead of trying to use the rock."

Step by step -- in some cases, inch by inch -- they watch Tifa work upward and upward. Her arms are trembling by now, and her stops to rest are growing more and more frequent. Tseng can hear her breathing, rough and heavy and too damn fast. She's cursing constantly now, but voicelessly; she's saving her breath. Beside Tseng, Rufus's shoulders tense every time she moves.

She's close enough to the top of the cliff that they're all almost starting to relax when it happens.

A large swath of the rock crumbles beneath Tifa's left hand, from small pebbles to head-sized rocks and worse, and time seems to stop; Tseng sees the foothold she'd had most of her weight on begin to give way. Her left hand flies frantically over the wall as her fingers scrabble for purchase, as she twists in midair and tries to kick away the pieces of rock that have become suddenly treacherous beneath her and throw her weight to a more solid hold. One oversized chunk of rock slams into her leg as it falls, leaving long gouges behind it. For a heart-stopping second, it looks as though she might be able to recover, to take her weight onto her right hand and hold, but gravity wins and she's falling, too far, too quickly --

She slams into the rock, feet and legs first, and the weight of her body hitting rings loudly over them. Reeve's feet come off the ground as her weight jerks the rope. The sound Tifa makes is half sob, half scream, as she dangles loosely in her harness, and Tseng can see blood welling up along the length of her thigh, her shin.

He opens his mouth to call to her, to see if she's all right (to see how not-all-right she is), when Reeve beats him to it: "Grab a hold! Get your weight off that gear!" Tseng isn't imagining it; he sounds frantic. He can't see whatever Reeve sees to make him worry, but he doesn't know what he's looking for. All he knows is that she's lost too fucking much of her progress.

"Which fucking one of us is on this rock?" Tifa snaps back. "I could do with a little less --" She gets her fingers into a crack in the rock, grunts, gets her feet beneath her. (The right leg -- the one that's bleeding -- buckles the first time she tries to put weight on it.) "--A little less fucking backseat climbing here!"

Tseng can see the blush rising on Reeve's cheeks. "Sorry," he says. "If the rock goes again --"

"I know," Tifa snaps. "Oh, fuck, Shiva, blessed Alexander, this fucking hurts, fuck --"

She rests her forehead against the rock, her shoulders heaving, blood dripping from her leg. Seeing it, she swears again (Tseng has heard her swear more in the last half an hour than he has in the last two and a half years) and takes that foot off the rock, holding it away from her so the blood drips freely, without wetting the rock.

"Ramuh," Rufus mutters, then raises his voice. "Get down. We'll take the chopper."

"Fuck no, we won't," Tifa says. "I've gotten this far. I'm not giving up now."

It's been years since Tseng has heard anyone dare to outright deny one of Rufus's orders that vehemently. For half a second, Rufus seems to barely understand her words. "We agreed that if conditions were worse than you thought, we'd call this off and try another way."

"You agreed," Tifa snarls. "And you can do whatever the fuck you want to do. I am going to send this son of a fucking bitch, and then I am going to bandage my fucking leg, and then I am going to break into that fucking reactor and figure out why my fucking mountain is fucking crumbling under my fucking hands, because something is really fucking wrong here." She pulls herself up another foot, kicks at a piece of loose rock. The tip of her shoe leaves smears of blood against the rock, and she slips against it. She takes her foot back off the rock and wipes her toe against the shin of her other leg to dry some of the blood, leaving smears in bright contrast against her skin, and the sound she makes is rage as pure as Tseng has ever heard from Rufus in the depths of his worst temper. "And then we are going to fly back to Midgar, and we are going to add up the rest of what's been buried for years, and then I'm going to kill a few people who desperately need killing, starting with your father and ending with whoever thought it was a good idea to put living human beings in a test tube and cut off a man's arm and keep him asleep for thirty years, and if you say one more fucking word to me right now, you will be first on that fucking list."

Tseng has never seen Tifa this furious before. He has seen her upset; he has seen her angry; he has seen, once or twice, the faintest hint that her easy geniality and her dogged ability to see the best in people is, while nonetheless genuine, something she occasionally has to work for. He has never before heard her vow murder. He has never thought her capable of murder. And yet -- watching Rufus take a step backwards as though her rage might reach out from forty feet away and too fucking high above their heads to strike him, watching Rufus actually fucking back down in the face of her anger and her determination -- Tseng knows, without question: he was wrong.

She is. And that means she has been, this whole time. This creature of determination and rage has been present, underneath the sweet smiles and the listening ear and the thoughtful gestures, underneath the quiet words of encouragement she gives to anyone who demonstrates a need and underneath the perpetual outpouring of care and concern she demonstrates in a thousand tiny ways to everyone around her, day in and day out.

Tseng isn't sure what it says about him that this realization makes him desire her even more. (No, that's a comfortable lie. He knows what it means. He just isn't sure he likes the knowing.)

He can see Rufus deciding not to answer her, and after a long pause for Tifa to collect herself, she starts working her slow and painful way back up all the ground she'd lost to her fall.

They make it up the cliff. His own ascent is miserable and exhausting, full of rope burns and skin abrasions and moments where Tseng is certain gravity is holding a direct and personal grudge against him, and no matter how often he tells himself the rope will catch him when he falls, each time he does it takes him longer than he'd care to admit to stop the panic from the part of his brain that insists he's about to dash himself against the rocks beneath. By the time he drags himself over the top of the cliff, his forearms are stiff and swollen, his hands scraped raw and beginning to blister, but he forces himself to ignore it and tries to tend Tifa's wounds. She ignores him so thoroughly he begins to wonder if he's somehow mastered the secret of invisibility without noticing, unhooking him from the harness she'd thrown down for them to use once she'd finished with it and limping over -- unable to fully put weight on her injured leg -- to throw it down again for Rufus's turn. He closes his eyes and wills himself to patience, stripping off the long-sleeved shirt he's wearing beneath his coveralls and cutting off the sleeves, then slitting each of the tubes into rectangles for a makeshift bandage, since their packs with the first-aid kits are far beneath them. She doesn't say anything when he presses them upon her, but she takes them from him and binds up her leg while Reeve is buckling Rufus in, and that's something at least.

Rufus's attempt is even worse than his. It takes longer than Tseng expected, and by the way Tifa keeps casting worried looks at the relentless progression of the sun overhead, longer than Tifa would like. The first time Rufus loses his grip and swings away from the rockface, his face plastered with startled betrayal at his body's refusal to bend the laws of the universe to his mind's will, Tseng has to stop himself from lunging for the rope to catch him. The dozenth time, it's merely an annoyance. By the twentieth, Tifa presses Tseng into service as a counterweight to allow her to haul Rufus up the rope. It's a process Tseng can tell Rufus finds both humiliating and infuriating, but by the time Rufus makes it up the last few feet, he's set the humiliation and the infuriation both aside. He tries to get Tifa to let him treat her injuries as well, but Tifa ignores him just as thoroughly. Instead, she leans over the edge of the cliffside and tells Reeve to gather up their abandoned backpacks and rope them all together for her to haul up. Rufus lets his hand fall from where it was hovering over his materia armlet. He doesn't say anything, but the way his jaw flexes tells Tseng he's spoiling for a fight.

It isn't until after Reeve has made his own, much-less-traumatic ascent and is taking charge of rope, harness, and what climbing gear they have left that Tifa finally limps over to lean against a nearby boulder, her face ashen underneath the wind-whipped redness of her cheeks. "Somebody toss me a bottle of water," she says. "And I think the first-aid kit is in the backpack Tseng was carrying, if someone could find it for me."

"You won't need it," Rufus says, pushing himself off from where he's been leaning against the mountain on the far side of the trail. He sounds calmer than Tseng would expect him to sound. That isn't necessarily a good sign.

Tifa doesn't recognize the tone as the potential disaster it truly is, though. She glances over at Rufus, looking up from where she's unwinding the makeshift bandage of Tseng's shirt, and frowns. "I can still walk on it, but I need to bandage it better. This material's already soaked through."

"Sit," Rufus commands. His voice slices between them, rattles around the spaces they occupy, until Tseng would not be surprised to find the force of it had knocked loose half the mountain. Rufus lift his hand to his bicep again, pressing his thumb against the Restore orb until faint green tendrils of magic begin to twine around his hand.

Tifa looks up at that, her face alarmed. "I told you yesterday, you can't cast Cure on me. Not with my lungs --"

"You said," Rufus corrects her, each word neat and precise, "that you can't have Cure cast on your lungs. I wasn't planning to go anywhere near your lungs. If you wish to continue onward, if you wish to get those answers you oh-so-eloquently informed me you were seeking, you will sit. Because I can either heal you or shoot you, but I am not taking you one step further while you are injured. I will not allow you to be a liability."

Their eyes are locked on each others', firm and unyielding, and Tseng has to blink, because the halo around Rufus's shoulders isn't just the glow of the afternoon sunlight. Tifa's face has gone even paler than it was a few minutes ago. Next to Tseng, Reeve makes a soft sound of disbelief. Tseng knows it's only for the words Rufus is speaking -- he knows Reeve has none of those other gifts of perception -- but he still can't help wondering what Reeve sees.

"I can heal you, or I can shoot you," Rufus repeats, looming over Tifa and looking like the mountain will move before he does. (With how unstable the mountain's proven to be, it's certainly likely.) "And right about now, I'm just looking for a reason."

Tifa bares her teeth. It isn't a smile; it's the warning sign of a cornered animal, spitting defiance even as it surrenders. "Go on, then," she says. "Pick one."

The thing that sticks in Tseng's mind about the exchange is how calm they both sound. They could be discussing the question of what to have for dinner.

Rufus smiles at her -- his shark-tooth smile, the one he uses for victories and for warnings -- and kneels, majestic, in the dust at her feet. Tifa shifts her weight so she's sitting on the rock and not leaning against it; she lifts her foot and sets it on his thigh. His hands come up to cradle her calf, curiously gentle, and his eyes slip shut. His hands flare with the more pronounced glow of a high-level Cure spell, the faint flicker indicating Rufus is drawing out the casting. Tseng knows how hard it is to cast a master Cure that slowly, and he knows how much Rufus hates casting restorative magic in general -- he once likened the experience, to Tseng, as stripping down all the way to peeling off his skin and doing the same to the person he was healing -- but Rufus shows no sign of his discomfort. He only sweeps his hands up Tifa's leg, so fractionally Tseng can barely see them move.

Tifa squared her shoulders and set her teeth into her lower lip the minute Rufus's hands touched her, clearly bracing herself against an experience she was expecting to be painful, but just as the wave of Rufus's magic is reaching its crest, her eyes fly open to stare off into the distance at nothing. Her eyebrows lift, and her lips part in surprise. Not what she expected, then. Tseng wonders how badly the last person to heal her performed magic, for her to be expecting the process to hurt.

"There," Rufus finally says, once his hands have made their journey up Tifa's leg until his fingertips are resting beneath the hem of her skirt, soothing away the faint abrasions the harness produced as well as the more urgent injury. His tone is much more gentle, much less triumphant, than Tseng would expect. Rufus's fingertips skim almost tenderly along the inside of her thigh as he lifts them away, as though he can't quite bring himself to stop touching her yet; he runs one palm lightly along the length of the wound, brushing away the pebbles and dirt his magic forced to the surface as he went, the bits of clotted blood and already-forming scab that no longer have an injury to cling to. When finished, he shakes those hands, sharply, as though trying to shake free droplets of water from his skin; the traceries of light and magic ripple against his skin before fading away. He glances up at her, his look assessing and his eyes narrowed, before rocking backwards onto his feet. "Next time," he adds, "don't fucking argue with me."

"Because that's really going to happen," Tifa says, but any last fraction of heat has gone from her voice, and she's sounding thoughtful now. Almost affectionate. She tests the leg, standing slowly and putting weight gingerly on it as though she's waiting for it to buckle at any moment, and when it doesn't, she casts another look at Rufus under lowered lashes.

Between the streaks of blood still painted on her skin, Tseng can see the long pink line of the injury, fading further and further to the white of a long-healed scar with every passing second. Rufus ignores her, pressing his thumb to the materia again and turning to Reeve, who's been valiantly trying not to show how badly injured he was by catching Tifa's fall. It's a lower-level Cure this time, and cast from a distance and not skin to skin, but Rufus still looks queasy afterwards, and when he turns to Tseng and reaches for the materia again, Tseng only shakes his head.

The journey to the reactor proper takes them another hour after that. From the worried glances Tifa keeps casting up at the sky, that's longer than it should take. Twice they have to pick their way over a pile of rubble from a rockslide higher up the mountain's face; once, at the entrance to a cave-mouth that clearly reaches back into a network of caverns inside the mountain, they pass by what Tifa calls a Nifl wolf, stick-thin and growling. Tifa's hand flashes out and clamps down on Tseng's wrist as he reaches for one of his throwing knives. "It's all right," she says, softly. "She's only trying to warn us off her pups. They whelp in the caverns every spring. We're fine as long as we don't go any closer."

By the time they get to the clearing in which the reactor lurks, the sun is no more than two fingers' length away from the horizon, and the temperature has dropped precipitously; even Tifa has started chafing her hands against each other when she thinks no one is watching her, bringing her hands to her mouth to blow on her fingers from time to time, and Tseng's skin has begun to prickle from the cold air against skin that is still sweat-dampened from their exertions. Or maybe it's not from the weather, he realizes, watching all three of his fellows simultaneously whip their heads around to stare off into the distance, in three different directions, as though they've heard some unhearable noise, as though the backs of their minds are telling them something dangerous is lurking just out of sight with its eyes trained upon them all. Maybe it's whatever mysterious sense first told Tifa there is something wrong up here. Right now, the irrational animal living in the back of his mind is screaming at him to get out of the open, to get to safety, to get away.

"If I were watching this movie, I'd be yelling at us not to go in there right about now," Reeve mutters. Then he takes a deep breath, crosses the clearing, and walks up the steps to bend over the keypad at the door, all with the air of a man who knows he's walking to his own execution.

"Alexander keep us," Tifa says, underneath her breath.

Rufus looks over at her. "You can stay out here." His voice is unutterably gentle.

Tifa breathes in, sharply. The sound is rough and ragged, and Tseng thinks it isn't just from her lungs protesting the atmosphere and exertion; the sound is a memory. "Yeah, no," she says. "I took three years to get here. I'm not going to back down twenty feet away." The clang of her boot-heels against the metal mesh of the steps rings out loudly through the clearing as she follows behind Reeve.

Rufus watches her, his face thoughtful. Then he turns to Tseng, bowing him ahead with one sweeping, mocking flourish. "After you," he says. Tseng grits his teeth and goes.

The design of this reactor is nothing like any of the others Tseng has been in, over the years. The door, when Reeve finally manages to coax it into compliance, opens onto a tiny vestibule, with pipes stretching overhead and mesh grate beneath. Tseng stops Reeve with a hand on his shoulder before Reeve can step inside; it's his job to be the first in. He finds himself pausing at the threshold of the door, though, and he can't say why. His skin prickles, sharp and disconcerting, and he catches himself thinking -- for the first time in years -- of the moment he arrived at the torii of Leviathan's temple, five years old, his brother's hand on his shoulder and urging him forward, knowing everything he knew up until that point was about to change.

"What is it?" Rufus asks, at his shoulder. Right where Godo had been, once. One prince to take the place of the other, and the minute Tseng had laid eyes on those too-old eyes in that too-young face, he'd tried to make himself forget everything that had happened before. Today seems determined to stir up old memories. For more than one of them.

Tseng shakes his head (shakes away the memories, shakes away the pieces of someone else's life he'd left behind him long ago). "Nothing," he says, knowing it for a lie, knowing he couldn't name the truth even did he search for the proper words for days. He makes himself step forward.

The vestibule is colder than it by all rights should be, even taking into account the sun passing behind the gathering clouds. Tifa, Reeve, and Rufus all crowd in behind him. At first glance, the entryway is nothing more than a corridor of perhaps fifteen feet with lockers and benches to either side. The walkway narrows into steps leading down at its far end, following the tracing of the pipes; the space beyond is unlit, save for the faintest of glows from the emergency lighting, but the impression is of cavernous space. The grated floor suspends them over a fierce drop -- forty, fifty feet if it's an inch -- and far beneath their feet, a pale blue liquid surges and whispers in a rapidly-shifting river.

It isn't until Reeve makes an indescribable noise and whispers, "Phoenix wept," that Tseng realizes what his nose is trying to tell him; the burnt-cinnamon and hot steel scent that in Midgar is nothing more than the faintest of teases is thick enough here to choke on, unbearably cloying inside the confines of these walls, so overwhelming he hadn't made the connection.

The grate they're standing on is supporting them over a river of pure Mako. Not the refined version that is Midgar's lifeblood, that flows through the arterial supply lines that stretch the length and width of the world, or at least those portions Shinra has claimed for its own; not the calficied and crystallized materia that allow them to harness and cast magic of all sorts. They are standing over a vein of Mako that would power Midgar herself for generations if refined and fed to the reactors to burn.

Tseng's head is pounding in his temples. Behind him, he hears someone fumbling; a second later, the overhead lights throw the scene into stark relief as they flicker twice and fluoresce with a series of pops and clicks, racing into life along the circuit with each light taking a fraction of a second more to follow its fellows. Thus illuminated, he can see the impression of space was warranted. The room below them is larger than the belly of any reactor he's been in before, rows of -- something his mind can't quite make sense of -- curving like an ampitheatre around a central staircase on the far wall that leads up to a door that looks far sturdier than it has any right. There's an inscription stretching over its arch.

(J-E-N-O-V-A)

"Phoenix wept," Reeve repeats, stronger this time, and what Tseng took for fear when first he spoke is more clear now. It isn't fear. It's anger.

Rufus can hear the difference, too. "What?"

"That's what you were sensing once we got away from the town. That's why the rock was crumbling under you." Reeve's talking to Tifa now, he must be, but Tseng's eyes are fixed on the door; he can't make himself tear them away no matter how hard he tries. Something in the back of his mind is screaming at him: threat, threat, threat. "He's diverted -- Kujuta's horns, he must have redirected half the continent to make this. You can't -- you don't -- it's --" He breaks off and takes a deep breath. Tseng has never heard him this flustered, this inarticulate. "It's raw, too. You can tell by how translucent it is. If it had been through pre-treatment, it would be thicker and brighter. This must go down to bedrock, and be tapped straight into the vein. I haven't the faintest clue what he thinks he's doing."

"That's Mako down there?" Tifa's voice trembles, oh-so-faintly, the only sign of the tremendous amount of control she must be exerting on herself at the moment; Tseng can hear it only because he knows the normal cadences of her voice. "Is that -- you said that's not how a reactor normally works?"

(The skin on the nape of Tseng's neck is prickling, as though something is watching him, as though he has become prey, and the rushing sound of his blood in his ears is echoed by the rushing sound of the Mako river beneath their feet.)

"No," Rufus says, quietly. "We tap natural veins, but we never let it flow freely like this without being treated first. It crystallizes too easily. We'd be picking bits of materia out of the grates twelve times a day." He blows out a breath, and it's the closest to flustered Tseng has heard him sound in years. "Are you sure it's tapped into the vein?"

"I'm not sure of anything," Reeve snaps. "And I won't be, not until I go down there and look. I just --"

"No." The decision to speak isn't a choice; the syllable falls from Tseng's lips before he could even think about it. If he turned around, he's certain all three of them would be staring at him. He doesn't turn around. He can't. "None of you are going down there until I figure out what's wrong in here."

Reeve laughs, high-pitched and too unnerving. "What isn't wrong in here?"

Rufus steps forward -- Tseng can feel him at his shoulder, one step behind, and for twelve years and more that's been his place, to face the world one step ahead of Rufus, to sweep the room and find the threats and face the dangers on Rufus's behalf, to shield Rufus with his body and his weapons and with his life if needs be, and if Rufus takes one step further into this reactor Tseng is going to tie him to the railing outside to keep him out of danger. "Stop," he says, the word gritted out between clenched teeth, and his head is throbbing and he doesn't know what's wrong.

He lifts his hand to his forehead, pinning his temples between thumb and third finger, squeezing tightly and rubbing in small circles as though external pressure could relieve the internal pressure pounding against his headbones. If Rufus asks him what's bothering him, he wouldn't be able to say. If he were held at gunpoint he wouldn't be able to say. All he knows is that something is deeply wrong here; the very walls around him cry out their unease, sharp and jagged, weeping lamentations into his ears. Wrong, they say, and evil, and tainted, and Tseng shudders, feeling the foulness crawling over his skin like a cloak of oil, besmirching everything it touches --

"That's what Sephiroth was doing," Tifa says. From the sound of her voice echoing against the walls, she's taken a step back, away from him, away from here. "That's exactly what Sephiroth was doing. Like his head was about to explode, and he was trying to keep it inside." She sounds one step from hysteria. He really can't blame her.

If this is what Sephiroth was feeling, for the four days between stepping into the reactor and the moment he set the town ablaze, Tseng has a certain tardy sympathy for him. The headache alone is bad enough; the feeling of sacrilege, the sense he will never be clean again, only worsens it. He forces his eyes open, looks for a source of this -- whatever it is. Nothing presents itself.

"All right," Rufus says. His voice is too loud in the space they occupy. "Tseng, come here."

It's a struggle to tear his eyes away from the belly of the reactor and look back at Rufus, standing in the center of the walkway as though nothing in the world could touch him, but the minute he lays eyes on Rufus, he is nearly blinded again: the pure golden haze of Rufus's shade blazes so brightly he wants to squint his eyes against the power of it. That sight makes him realize the darkness gathering down the stairs, in the depth of the reactor beneath him, isn't natural at all. He's seeing not what is there, but what is visible only to those with his particular ungift of spirit-sight. Which is, perhaps, seeing what is truly there, at a level more pure than simple vision. But he's always tried so hard not to think about it too closely, lest he receive answers he doesn't particularly want.

"Come here," Rufus repeats, his hand stretched out to Tseng, his voice as firm as though he is commanding mountains.

Tseng inhales, one deep shuddering breath, and makes himself take the first step. The instant he does, it feels as though something holding power over him breaks, as though he can breathe more freely, as though the thick oppressive cloak of foulness slides off his shoulders to pool at his feet. The second step is easier. The third brings him inside the edges of Rufus's golden aura, and he gasps for breath as the warmth seeps through him and banishes the last of the crawling, fetid atmosphere poisoning his lungs.

Rufus's skin is warm against his as he places his hand into Rufus's, fighting the urge to kneel at Rufus's feet. He can't even spare the attention necessary to be mortified at how badly he's failing in his duty to be in control, to be the one to take the risks, to be the first in and the last out and the one Rufus can always stand behind and be assured of safety. He lets Rufus guide him over to one of the benches that run down the sides of the hallway, does not protest as Rufus places one hand on the nape of his neck (the core of his soul vibrating like a harp-string plucked by the hand of his master) and guides his head down between his knees.

There's some discussion going on above him, faint and distant, but all he can do is breathe in, breathe out, focusing his attention on the feeling of Rufus's hands cradling his head and the automatic way Rufus digs his fingertips into the taut muscles at the base of his skull.

Breathe in. Breathe out --

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