( 10. )

Faint rills of panic keep washing through Tifa's veins, and just as she thinks this is it, we've seen the worst, something happens to prove that 'worst' is an endlessly-shifting watermark. She'd thought the betrayal of her mountain crumbling under her hands would have been enough to drive her over the line, but seeing Tseng standing silhouetted against the belly of the reactor, his hand splayed across his forehead (like him, like Sephiroth) had been unfathomably worse.

Rufus is crouched in front of where he's pushed Tseng down to sit on the bench. His hands are spread over Tseng's head like a parody of a village priest offering benediction: thumbs pressing against Tseng's temples, palms spread over the back of Tseng's head, fingertips notched into the muscles between skull and neck, smallest fingers slid down to tuck behind Tseng's ears and into the hinge of his jaw. Pressure against every spot that might be the headache Sephiroth had exhibited. The headache that had started here, and ended everything.

The position they're in makes Tseng's hair curtain off his face, keeping her from being able to see whether that something has reached him as well, but Tifa's already-abused breath still keeps getting higher and tighter in her chest if she looks at him too long. Her worst nightmare, brought to life again before her eyes: that something, riding Tseng's shoulders, twisting Tseng's face. Every instinct in her body is begging her to disarm him before whatever he's hearing that none of the rest of them can hear can convince him they're a threat. To take away everything he could even think to use as a weapon, before he tries to use it against them. (But this is Tseng. To take away everything he could use as a weapon is impossible. It always will be.)

Well-hidden behind his mask of control, behind the layer of command Rufus is so clearly clinging to, Rufus looks terrified, but he keeps it out of his voice. "Is anyone else feeling what he's feeling?"

There's something almost whispering in Tifa's ear, and she feels as though -- if she held her breath and closed her eyes and listened, listened more fiercely and more carefully than she's ever listened to anything in her life -- she'd be able to understand what it's saying to her. She doesn't let herself try. She's seen enough movies, read enough novels and heard enough tales, to know that inaudible whispers with no true source are things you should never seek out on your own. "It's too cold in here," she hears herself saying, and the minute she does, she realizes it's one of the other sources of wrongness she's been trying to place. "And I feel like someone's looking over my shoulder. But it could be -- you know. Being back here." The feeling of being watched intensifies; she shudders, once, before she can make herself hold still.

"I don't feel anything," Reeve says. "Except being furious at whoever thought it was a good idea to unbalance the ecosystem in this entire half of the continent."

"Okay." Rufus blows out a breath, short and sharp. The tiny shifts of expression on his face keep flickering back and forth between panic and terror, each carefully and quickly locked away. Tifa makes herself look away from his face, because if she's watching Rufus's face for hints, she isn't watching Tseng. "Now entertaining suggestions on what to do next."

"I'm all right," Tseng says, barely audible, from behind his hair. "I know you have no reason to believe me, but --" He lifts his head, gasping for air, shuddering faintly. "This place is wrong. Like the basement of the mansion. I just wasn't braced for it. I should have been. It feels like I've been showering in shit, except inside my head. I'm all right. Now that I've caught my breath, I can ignore it." His lips twist a little. "And stop making a fool of myself."

Tifa looks at Rufus; Rufus looks back at her. She can read his thoughts as clearly as though he were speaking them in her ear: do we trust he's telling the truth?

She knows he can read her response just as clearly: I have no fucking clue, but if we lose him, we're pretty much fucked.

It's true. If Tseng decides it's time to kill them all, the two of them together might be able to stop him, but she wouldn't want to bet on it.

She wishes there were some other sound to listen to, something other than the soft musical chime of liquid surging beneath their feet and the harsh rasp of four people breathing more loudly than strictly necessary. Something to block out the sound of the shadows, of the silences that are not silent, of the clinging and awful sense of wrongness that seeps through every inch of air.

Rufus closes his eyes for a fraction of a second (exhaustion, fear) and then opens them again. "Go sit outside," he says to Tseng, the neat sharp sound of Rufus making a decision, for good or for ill. "Top of the stairs at least. I'd be happier with on the other side of the clearing."

Tseng shakes his head. "I need to clear the --"

"You need to listen to me," Rufus interrupts, and his voice rings through the air, like a gong being struck, like the high clear note of crystal singing. The sound cuts through the space surrounding them all. Tifa could be imagining it, the way the shadows seem to writhe and draw back from the purity of that sound, but somehow she doesn't think she is. Tseng hears it too, or feels it: he falls silent as though his body has decided it will follow Rufus's dictates even if his mind still wishes to argue, and Tifa definitely isn't imagining the way his spine grows straighter, the haunted look clearing further. It's something else to add to the list of things she's observing, how from the minute Rufus touched him Tseng started looking slightly less like he was about to kill them all, and she can't put it into words, but it makes her want to step closer to Rufus and see if it works on her, too. "I don't know what's in here. I don't know what you're reacting to. But you are, and you're clearly the most sensitive, and I will not lose you to whatever this is."

Tifa can hear the words Rufus isn't letting himself say. I won't lose you too. I won't let this have you, too. She remembers that naked emotion in his voice Friday night, the first hint she'd seen of the cauldron seething beneath his calm controlled seeming, confessing he'd been the one to ask Sephiroth to look into the mysteries of Nibelheim. She remembers the plaintive cry: he never came back. She knows, now, that Sephiroth had been Rufus's friend once. One of the only friends Rufus has ever had. It's hard to remember that, standing here scant feet from where her father's body had fallen, but looking at the implacable command on Rufus's face, looking at the terror he's only barely holding at bay even though he's doing his best not to show it, it's easier than she thought it might be.

Tseng can see it too. His face goes through a series of contortions, emotions more raw and naked than she's ever seen him display, before settling on self-loathing. For his weakness, Tifa thinks; that's certainly what he would see it as, and his eyes are sick and haunted. "I can handle it. I have to handle it. I can't leave you to face this without --"

The sound of Rufus's hand striking Tseng's cheek rings against the walls surrounding them, too loud for how light the blow truly was; Tseng's head jerks back at the impact, but more from shock, Tifa can tell, than from kinetic force. He brings his hand up to press his fingers against his cheekbone, where the skin is flushing red already. The look on his face is like worlds ending.

"I have never forced the oaths you have made me but we have never spoken," Rufus says. His voice is shaking, tiny quivers threading through it, as close to losing control as Tifa thinks anyone has ever heard him. "If you ever intend to keep them, now is the time. Get outside. Now. I can't --" His voice cracks, awful and rending. The only thing keeping Tifa from rushing to his side is the way she can't move, can't even breathe, lest her interference tip the confrontation to either side of the knife's-edge it is balancing upon. "You are the one person I couldn't lose without breaking," Rufus says, his voice a thin whisper, too quiet for how desperate it is. Too quiet for how it lays his soul bare for anyone to hear. "Please. Don't force me to prove it."

Tseng's eyes are too wide, two dark pools in a too-pale face, as he stares up at Rufus, unblinking. For a minute Tifa thinks he might argue again, and she tries to think what she'll do if he does -- how she will react, if confrontation flares into open conflict, and there's a part of her wondering is this what happened before? is this what the whispers want us to do, to fight each other until there's no one left? -- but her thoughts feel as though she's swimming in mud. She realizes her vision is hazing, going grey around the edges, and she realizes it's because she hasn't drawn a breath in far too long. Hasn't dared to. She breathes out, breathes in, and tastes the air on her tongue, cinnamon and ozone and rain on metal.

Tseng finally breathes in too, weak and gasping like a premature kitten drawing its first breath. When he stands, it's almost too slow, too halting, and his knees nearly buckle as he does. Rufus catches at his elbow before he can fall. Tseng doesn't seem to notice.

"If you feel anything --" Tseng finally says. His voice trails off before he can finish the sentence.

"Yes," Rufus says, too quickly, relief written in his every line. "If it reaches any of the rest of us like this, we will leave. I do so swear. Get outside."

Tseng's face is blank as he obeys, his step uneven, his gait halting. Rufus stands in place and watches him go, eyes intent on his back as though willing him strength. Once Tseng has stumbled through the door and closed it behind him, Rufus collapses onto the bench like a puppet with its strings cut, chest heaving, and buries his face in his hands. He looks utterly wrecked. His shoulders are quivering, minute aftershocks running through him in wave after wave.

Next to Tifa, Reeve exhales like he's been punched in the stomach. "What the fuck just happened?" he asks, sounding utterly lost.

"It was trying to get its claws into Tseng," Rufus says, muffled against the palms of his hands. He drags them up his cheeks, presses them into his eyes and against his supraorbital ridges, plunges his fingers into his hair and pulls. "Whatever 'it' is." He looks as though he's just run the entire rim of the plate. Remembering this morning's conclusions (was it only this morning? this week has felt like a full year already) that he's desperate for touch even if he doesn't know it, remembering how quick he was to offer her comfort two nights ago while she was weeping on Tseng's floor, Tifa steps around the side of the bench until she's at his back and rests her hands on his shoulders, digs her thumbs into the taut lines of his muscle. He lets his hands drop and slumps back against her, tilting his head back until it's resting against her breastbone, eyes closed tightly. She slouches enough that she can lean forward and rest her chin against the top of his head. His hair smells like mountain air.

Reeve's eyes flick back and forth between them, as though he can't quite believe what he's seeing. "I don't feel anything," he says, repeating his statement from earlier. Tifa thinks he might be preparing to call them all mad, say she and Rufus are imagining the crawling horror they can both still feel even though clearly not to the extent Tseng did, but his next words make her realize why he holds his place among the circle of those Rufus relies on: "So clearly, whatever it is, I'm the best one to go looking for it. Stay here. Both of you. I'll be right back."

Part of Tifa wants to follow him, to be doing something -- anything -- to take her mind off where she is and what she's doing. (To take her mind off what Tseng might be doing, and she realizes there's a part of her desperately trying to remember if he'd had any materia equipped, bracing herself against the thought they might open those doors once they're done and walk into a replay of the scene that still haunts her nightmares.) The rest of her is leaning into Rufus as much as he's leaning against her, knees weak with the aftermath of adrenaline and panic, and that's the part of her she thinks is winning. She should go outside and make sure Tseng is all right. But right now, she's not sure if she can handle finding out that he isn't.

She wasn't imagining it. The shadows do feel lighter, this close to Rufus, as though he is his own sun. She wonders what he's doing (or what he is) to make him feel that way, and whether or not it's costing him. (No: how much it is costing him.)

Tifa watches as Reeve opens one of the lockers lining the walls, takes out protective gear made of some faintly-shimmering white fabric: long-sleeved coveralls with elastic at hands and feet that he pulls on over his clothing and zips up, booties of the same material that he slips over his shoes and pulls the elastic at the coveralls' ankles down over, bright purple gloves of a thin flexible material that doesn't look like it should be as durable as it clearly is that he pulls over the elastic at the coveralls' wrists. He adds a face mask, hooking its elastic over his ears and pulling it up over his mouth and nose, then runs his fingers between the elastic and his face to pull out the strands of his long dark hair that got caught in it, gathering his hair into a quick twist and tucking it down the back of his shirt. His motions are quick and practiced, as though he's done this more times than he could count; he reaches for what proves to be a cross between goggles and glasses, slipping them over his face and settling them around the mask, then makes an involuntary grimace she can barely see around the mask and adjusts them further.

His last step is to reach behind him for the hood attached to the shoulders of the coveralls, pulling it up and over his head and arranging its elastic so it snugs into a ridge on the top of the goggles as though the pieces were made to fit together, then pulling up the cowl at the coveralls' neck until the elastic there covers the bottom of his goatee and overlaps the edge of the mask. The whole process takes him less than three minutes; when he's finished, the only skin left bare are two tiny triangles at the edges of his cheeks, where the mask and the hood don't quite overlap.

The setup looks like the most claustrophobic thing Tifa has ever seen. "Should we be wearing those too?" she asks, hoping beyond hope the answer is 'no'.

Reeve's voice is muffled behind the fabric of the mask as he shakes his head. The gesture looks strange from behind the protective gear. "No, you should be fine. The stuff's bioaccumulative, so anybody who's in a reactor regularly gears up every time, but it takes years for the lifetime exposure to become significant, so as long as you don't go swimming, you should be fine; we shouldn't be here long enough to cause issues." He hesitates, and Tifa wishes she could see his face; she hadn't quite realized how much she relies on subconscious cues of facial expression to tell what people are thinking, but with Reeve transformed into an inhuman-looking column of white, all she can see is the faint smudge of his eyes behind the distortion of the goggles' glass. "Though, you should probably put on breathing masks at least," he concedes. "There usually isn't this much raw flow, and I didn't realize until I put the mask on just how much particulate we were breathing. There's gear in the locker behind you."

Tifa pats Rufus's shoulders to indicate she's about to pull away, giving him a second to brace himself before she does, and opens the door Reeve indicated. The locker is divided into a dozen shelves, each with space for two sets of gear sitting side-by-side. Some piles have one or two pieces missing; some spaces are empty entirely. Tifa takes the masks from the two neat stacks on the bottom-most shelf and sits down next to Rufus on the bench, handing one to him before trying to figure out how to put hers on. Once she gets it over her nose and mouth -- it's not quite as claustrophobia-inducing as she'd feared, but it's not exactly comfortable, either -- she realizes what Reeve meant: the thick and heavy taste in the back of her mouth that she wasn't consciously aware of feeling eases almost immediately, although it doesn't go away entirely.

Next to her, the line of tension in Rufus's shoulders eases, so imperceptably she feels it rather than sees it (and is startled to realize that she is sitting pressed against him from shoulder through to knee; she hadn't done it deliberately). "Okay, that's better," he says, and she realizes that yes, the creeping sense of wrongness has faded slightly, the not-quite-whispers in her not-quite-ears easing somewhat along with syrupy coating in the back of her throat. It isn't perfect -- she still feels the hairs at the nape of her neck stirring as though something is watching her and waiting for an opportune moment to strike, still feels like her skin is trying to crawl off her body, but Rufus is right. It is better.

A horrible thought follows on the heels of that realization. (Horrible only in that she feels as though she should already have thought of the question, already know the answer; if that answer is affirmative, she thinks they will all feel rather silly for a few moments, but such a mundane explanation would ease her mind much more than some of the others that have already crossed it.) "Is Mako a hallucinogen if it's inhaled?" she asks, pitching her voice so that Reeve -- making his way down the steps into the reactor's belly -- will be able to hear her, even through the mask. "Could that be why --"

Reeve turns to look up at them, twisting his entire body to do it, instead of just turning his head; she thinks he's trying to keep from disturbing the various bits of protection he's wearing. "I thought of that already," he says, sounding rueful (though muffled). "It would be a -- reassuring -- bit of explanation. But no. Nobody's ever reported it as a side effect, at least."

"That we know of," Rufus corrects.

Reeve's shoulders rise, fall. A sigh, not a shrug, Tifa thinks, watching him and trying to suppress the little voice in the back of her head telling her that her inability to see his body language, his facial expressions, means that she should be on high alert. "That we know of," he agrees. "Hojo supervises the department responsible for the research into long-term effects of Mako exposure. I've worked with most of the guys on the research team that gathers the data and does our quarterly checkups and I think they're solid enough that they wouldn't allow him to suppress news of anybody having a side effect the rest of UrbDev should know about, but I wouldn't swear to it."

Rufus sighs as well. "And we're back to Hojo. Again. I'm really not liking the patterns we're seeing here, even if we don't have enough information to solve the equation yet." It's not a statement that requires a response; if anything, Tifa thinks, he doesn't even realize he's talking to himself, and knowing that makes her uncomfortable (nearly everything today has made her uncomfortable), knowing how much control this man usually keeps over himself. He runs his fingers through his hair again, tendons standing out in his arms as he pulls, and slumps over so his elbows are resting on his knees. He gives every impression of having turned into a statue, but Tifa thinks she can hear the sound of his brain working, furiously calculating possibility after possibility.

On the steps, Reeve waits an extra heartbeat -- to see if they need more information from him, most likely -- before turning and continuing his descent. Tifa loses sight of him after another few steps, and the protective booties he's wearing over his shoes muffle his steps until she can't tell where he is or what he's doing. In the silence, Tifa's skin starts to crawl again. She strains to hear any evidence of Reeve's passage, of what he's doing down there (out of her sight, away from her eye, in this womb of malevolence that was the site of her own death and rebirth), and it isn't until the chiming sussuration of liquid rushing beneath them turns into sounds she realizes she's struggling to pick out that she --

(you must know this)

(abomination)

(unclean)

(free us)

(help)

"I'm going outside," Tifa says, before she realizes she's speaking, before she realizes she's stood up and Rufus is looking up at her, eyes wide and startled as though he'd forgotten she was there. "I want to check on Tseng. Don't do anything stupid while I'm gone."

Rufus's eyes crinkle at the edges, and she thinks his lips must be curving behind his mask. "He'll only yell at you for leaving me unattended in here, you know."

"I hope he does," Tifa says, sharp and grim, and the rest of that sentence lies unspoken between them: because then at least I'll know it's still him.

Rufus inclines his head to her, rueful agreement with both the spoken and unspoken halves of her statement. "Don't take too long," he says, and lets the other half of his own sentence go unsaid: if I can't rely on him right now, I'm going to need to rely on you twice as much.

She wonders if he knows that's what he means, or if he'd admit it if he did.

Tifa's head clears a little as she steps out into the weak late-afternoon sunlight. Part of her is calculating angles, times, distances, fuck, if this takes more than an hour we are going to have to do at least part of the return in the dark, Shiva damn it. Tseng is half-sitting, half-kneeling on the topmost step of the staircase leading up to the reactor, his legs folded over themselves in front of him, each foot resting on the opposite thigh and his knees tilted downward and taking part of his weight onto the step beneath him. His hands are splayed in front of him: the tips of his thumbs, index, and smallest fingers lightly touch, while his third and fourth fingers are folded over so the full length of their second knuckles just barely brush. His eyes are closed. His breathing is calm and even, centered in his belly, and his color looks much healthier than it did inside.

She's moving silently, the deliberate stealth she's always made it a point not to adopt around him since the first time she realized that she could, and she'd eased open the reactor door as quietly as she could: no need to renounce whatever advantage she could have, if whatever was riding him inside hasn't relinquished its grip yet. He doesn't show any sign of having heard her. His breathing doesn't change, his shoulders do not tense, he shows none of the hundred tiny telltales of a man preparing for attack. It doesn't reassure her as much as it should. She doesn't doubt he's capable of producing threat without warning, no matter how closely she studies him.

One step towards him, and then another, her eyes trained on his face the whole way and bracing herself for the worst, but the only movement she can see is his breathing, in and out, steady and sure. "It stopped as soon as I got out here," he says, before she has to decide whether she's going to let him know she's there or not, and she startles to realize: she didn't have to. He knew she was there the minute she stepped outside. His next words confirm that he knows it's her, too: "And you shouldn't have left him alone in there, no matter what he told you to do."

Tifa lets herself exhale in relief -- okay, it is you in there, even as she makes herself consciously not dwell on the question of how he could know it was her -- and lifts a hand to remove the mask from her face, tucking it into the waistband of her skirt, at the small of her back, before coming over to sit at his side.

Tseng does open his eyes then, turning his head just enough to be able to see her out of their corners, and she stifles a shudder. He looks like he did this morning when she walked out into the backyard of the mansion to find him on his knees, speaking words she couldn't fully understand to someone who wasn't there: grim, haunted. But at least it's nothing like he looked inside. She's seen this expression on his face before, on the late nights and in the early mornings when she thinks he's wrestling with unanswerable questions, and at least this time he looks human.

So she forces a smile, and if the tightening at the corners of his eyes and the sudden tension flowing back into his shoulders tell her it's not a good one, there isn't much she can do about that. "It was my idea, actually," she says. "And he said you'd say that."

Tseng keeps his eyes on her for a few more seconds, then closes them again and turns his head back to a neutral position. He doesn't say anything, just breathes, in and out. She draws her knees up to her chest, wraps her arms around them. The tips of her fingers sting and throb, and her arms and her shoulders are burning with exertion, and she's missing half the skin on her hands from rope burn and friction, but everywhere Rufus's hands touched, glowing with green fire, feels like the way she feels after ten hours of sleep and a long slow workout: warm and limber and raring to go. (She isn't thinking about what it felt like, the long liquid slide of his skin over hers, the soft euphoric cloud whispering it's all right, it's okay, just let go, let me, everything's going to be just fine. Magic disturbs her. It always has.)

"You know what that is in there," she says, abruptly. She isn't sure what makes her so certain. All she knows is that he'd looked sick, and he'd looked haunted, but he hadn't looked surprised.

Next to her, Tseng exhales. More sharply than he'd intended, judging by the way his spine stiffens slightly and his next breath is careful, so careful. "No," he says. He's never lied to her and he isn't lying now, but he isn't telling her the whole truth, either, and she is suddenly so fucking sick of this, of being constantly on edge, of having to watch for every tiny cue, of having to step around him like the landmine everyone else has always accused him of being.

She closes her eyes and breathes, too. It doesn't fucking help.

"I can't -- Not here," Tseng says, just as she's trying to decide if she'd be better off getting up and going inside after all, if the voices whispering in her ears inside the carnival of horrors would be a better option than the silences singing so loudly outside. "I will tell you. I will explain the things that let me -- I will explain what I can. But not here, not when we do not know ... what is listening." He opens his eyes again, but this time it isn't to look at her. It's to look over his shoulder, back at the door to the reactor, the quick nervous look of someone trying to see if the danger is still there. "I did not lie to you; I don't know for certain. But I have an idea. And -- not here."

The silence stretches out between them again. "I thought I heard something speaking to me," Tifa finally says. "Inside. That's why I came out here. I -- I didn't tell Rufus --" didn't want to worry Rufus, didn't want to make him think that another of us was cracking -- "I just thought, he promised. So I came outside."

Tseng looks at her. And she's so fucking sick of having to watch for every tiny cue, so tired of having to turn up her perception to maximum gain in order to avoid being left in the dust, so worn-out and weary and exposed, but she can't make herself stop reaching for those fractional scraps of information, and that's why she can see it in the stillness of his face: surprise, and confusion, and the faintest hint of anger and she can't tell why. "You would hold his vows for him?"

Anger washes through her, too. This is the second time today he's tried to pick a fight with her over nothing, and now is even less the time for it than this morning was. There are so many things she could say: how much of an asshole did you expect me to be and you were the one who manipulated things so I would start to see him as a person, what did you expect would happen and maybe, just a little, if you didn't spend so much time loudly expecting everyone to try to betray him, maybe more of them wouldn't. She doesn't say any of them, though, because now is not the time, and she doesn't know, exactly, what they've stumbled into but every instinct in her body is telling her that it's important. Important enough that they don't have time for this.

"I'm pretty sure," she says -- slowly, evenly -- "that the right question there would have been, what was the creepy voice that doesn't actually exist saying to me, not something about some obscure point of honor that nobody but you actually gives a shit about right now."

Astonishingly, Tseng blushes, the stain spreading over his cheeks, and one part of her is watching with morbid fascination. She hadn't thought he was capable of blushing, had thought him capable of controlling his reactions closely enough to avoid his body betraying his thoughts. She digs what's left of her fingernails into her legs, feels dust and grit and her own dried blood flaking away over a wound that didn't even have the courtesy to leave a scar, and she breathes slowly and deeply and reminds herself: you knew. You knew exactly where his loyalties lie. None of this should be a surprise to you.

The thought doesn't make her feel any better. Not in the least.

"I --" he starts, and then his head whips around again, eyes searching for the reactor's door. Which opens, a fraction of a second after Tifa's eyes automatically follow his (looking for the danger, looking for what made him move so quickly). She tries to tell herself he only moved once the door opened, once he conceivably could have heard the door opening, and she knows he didn't, and she prays, silently, more sincerely than she can remember praying in a very long time: Blessed Lady Shiva, please let this not happen again.

Rufus stands in the doorway, blinking against the late-afternoon sunlight. Tifa watches his eyes sweep over Tseng's face, watches him come to the same conclusion she had without needing the confirmation of speech, intuiting the truth of Tseng's self-possession from nothing more than the fractional tells he takes in with a speed even Tifa finds uncanny. "Good," he says, abrupt and sparse, and throws something at Tseng, whose hand flashes up to catch it automatically. (A third protective mask, Tifa realizes, when Tseng blinks down at it.) "Put that on, Reeve thinks part of the problem might be breathing the raw Mako particulate in the air. And get in here, both of you. I --" He breaks off, and Tifa realizes the tight, taut lines around his eyes aren't only from having just emerged from the relative darkness of the reactor into the sunlight after all. "We looked in the pods."

It takes a second for his words to sink in, and then Tifa's on her feet, reaching for her own mask and fitting it back over her face as she moves, inside the reactor again within a dozen seconds and not stopping to wonder what the fuck she's doing. (She has always been the person who runs towards the danger instead of away; she's always been the person who interposes herself between the threat and the others being threatened, and if there's a particular sharp pain in her chest at doing that now, here, ten feet from where she hasn't let herself look to see if her father's blood is still staining the floor, she can blame it on her lungs. She's probably overdue for another round of the pills Reno keeps forcing on her, anyway.)

She'd only faintly registered pushing past Rufus as she went, but he's on her heels as she goes, Tseng half a step behind, and so when she pulls up sharply at the top of the stairs down into the reactor's belly, frozen at what presents itself below, Rufus steps on the back of her heel and only barely stops himself from body-slamming her down the steps. Tseng makes a noise, low and sick, and Rufus is snapping, "Dammit, I told you to wait," and the mass of crinkly white fabric and not-quite-rubber and not-quite-glass that is Reeve is crouching on the floor in a puddle of translucent liquid all too similar to the liquid Cloud and the SOLDIER had been suspended in and there is a thing on the floor next to him --

It's moving, faint twitches that look like it's trying to gather its strength. It might have even once been human.

"I didn't open the pod," Reeve is saying, hands fluttering frantically over the -- the thing's body, looking like he can't decide whether to offer it aid or push it away. "I was trying to figure out the circuitry and it opened its eyes and it saw me and pushed open the pod itself --"

Tifa takes the steps in two quick bounds, her shoes skidding in the liquid on the floor as she lands, and shoves Reeve up and out of the way before she even realizes she's moving. Reeve slips too, comes down heavy and wrong-footed, his legs flailing underneath him until he loses the struggle to remain even partially upright, He lands, heavily, on his ass. Tifa hears him go down, spares one quick look over her shoulder to make sure he isn't injured -- he doesn't seem to be, unless you count the injury to his pride -- and to fix his location in her mind so she can make sure she stays in between him and ... it. 'It' is probably the right word.

"Get back up those stairs before it decides to attack you," Tifa orders Reeve, and her own voice in her own ears sounds wholly strange. The thing's skin ripples, the -- spikes? crests? -- on the top of its head spreading and flaring, and she swears and settles her weight more firmly, brings her hands up, tells herself, the floor's wet, that stuff's more slippery than water is, watch where you step --

The sound the creature makes is the scream of a wounded animal, sharp and desperate. The cry echoes off the metal of the walkways, the ductwork, the walls. Tifa is just opening her mouth to repeat her order when she hears Tseng's voice from above her, thick and choked: "Wait."

She spares him a glance, taking her eyes off the creature long enough to see that he's descending the stairs as well, looking ghost-pale, looking like he's using every inch of his will not to vomit. "Wait," he says again, and Tifa drags in a shuddering breath, trying to decide if it's Tseng speaking or if it's -- whatever was speaking to her, whatever was trying to control Tseng, whatever must have, has to have, been controlling Sephiroth. (She believes it now, she realizes, one tiny fleck of knowledge ambushing her from the deep sea of emotions simmering just beneath conscious thought: the thing she's feared, hated, for so long was not Sephiroth himself but a manifestation of whatever thing they've all been feeling since the moment they set foot across the threshold of this promontory of hell, and she does not have the fucking time to think about that any further.)

She looks up to Rufus, still standing on the catwalk above, his hands curling over the railing and his knuckles standing out white, and she can read the agony and indecision on his face as though it were an open book: he doesn't know, either.

Tseng looks as though he's barely holding himself upright, as though he's half a heartbeat away from collapse, but he levers himself stiffly down to kneel at the side of the creature, his motions jerky and pained, holding none of his usual grace. He reaches out both hands without hesitation, cupping the creature's face, turning its head (gently, so gently) to meet his eyes. "Tell me," he says, and his voice is a terrible mercy.

It's not speech, not precisely -- it can't be, not with that many teeth in the way -- but the sounds the creature makes, wretched and terrible, resolve into words anyway: SOLDIER. Hojo.

And, finally: Help.

With those few words the world realigns itself -- not monster, but victim -- and Tifa realizes she's shaking, deep waves that start at the small of her back and spread outward. She can see their echoes in Tseng's hands. He closes his eyes for a second or two, clearly steeling himself for something, and then opens them again and looks up at Rufus. "Throw me down a bottle of water," he says, and Rufus hesitates for no more than half a heartbeat. Tifa can see the effort it causes him not to ask. He turns to where they dropped their packs when they entered the vestibule and pulls out a bottle that's three-quarters full. It catches the light oddly as it tumbles arrow-true, end-over-end, stright down into Tseng's waiting hand, and Tifa shakes herself out of the stupor of fear and adrenaline and horror she's fallen into and makes herself go to Tseng's side.

"Tell me what to do," she says, not quite able to make herself kneel next to him (next to it) but forcing herself to look, to see what's been done. To witness. This close, she can see that the writhing she took for the creature (oh, Shiva, the person) trying to get up, to attack, were actually spasms of agony. Its skin looks raw, peeled or burned away. Its chest is heaving, the sound wet and labored and gasping.

Tseng shakes his head. "There's nothing we can do," he says, sounding sick. His eyes are unfocused, like he's listening to something nobody else can hear, but for the first time it doesn't make her worry at all. "He can't fully breathe air yet. He isn't -- finished. He wanted to warn us --"

"Phoenix have mercy," Reeve says from behind them. Tifa can hear him scrabbling to his feet. "Can we -- let me try to figure out how to get the pod he broke out of refilled, we can put him back in it before --"

"No," Tseng says, sharply, just as the -- man -- on the floor makes another sound, this time weak and thready. "No. It wouldn't be a mercy. Not at all."

That's what finally breaks through the last of Tifa's resistance (thinking: is this what they were trying to turn Cloud into? is this what would have happened to him if we hadn't come for him?) She wonders who this man was, if there's anyone who's missing him, if there's anyone out there wondering what happened to their son, their brother, their father. She kneels down at the man's other side, one hand hovering in hesitation before resting it, as gently as she can, on a part of his shoulder that looks less raw than the surrounding area. He makes another noise, pained and rough, but when she draws back her hand Tseng says, absently, "No, it's all right. It'll hurt no matter what, give the poor bastard a bit of comfort." She puts her hand back on the man's shoulder. The texture of the not-skin beneath her palm is wet and unnatural.

"Do you think restorative magic would help, or hurt?" Rufus says, softly. He's come down the stairs from the vestibule, but he hasn't come any closer than the bottom step; not because he's frightened or disgusted, Tifa thinks, but because he doesn't want to split Tseng's attention or make Tseng feel he had to protect Rufus instead of concentrating on -- whatever Tseng is doing.

Tseng does look up at the question, though, and Tifa thinks something about it has surprised him. "I don't know," he says. "It can't hurt to try, but first let me just --"

He doesn't finish the sentence, only uncaps the bottle of water he's holding and pours some into his palm. Tifa thinks he's going to offer it to the man, shifts her weight in preparation for helping to hold up his head so he can drink, but Tseng only closes his eyes and brings his palm up to his own chin, pulling down his mask and blowing so gently across the surface of the water that it barely ripples. He mutters a few words in Wutaian, and Tifa's ears sharpen: conversing with him over the past few years she has learned, out of necessity, how to listen for his high-caste inflections even if she can't quite keep track of them when she herself is speaking. This isn't just a different mode, though. It's almost a different language, the vowels older and more wild, the consonants familiar but meaningless. Her ear won't follow it; the only word she can pick out is Lord.

Whatever Tseng's doing, the man -- poor bastard indeed -- is calming, his eyes following Tseng's gestures with what looks like hunger. Tseng closes his eyes -- trying to remember something, or trying to brace himself for something? She can't tell -- and dips the fingers of his right hand into the water in his left palm, flicking them out so droplets fall against the man's chest. He repeats the gesture another two times, then traces lines over the man's forehead before turning his left palm over and resting it there, water trickling down over his face. Tifa has to blink; she doesn't know why, but her head is swimming, almost like the way she felt when Rufus was healing her. Like there's some magic being performed here, deep and primal.

"I am sorry," Tseng says, still in Wutaian, but slipping back into the manner Tifa is more used to hearing from him. It's the gentle tone he uses in the middle of the night, when she wakes from a nightmare. "It's all I can do. I left the temple half a lifetime ago."

The man's breaths are getting deeper and more rapid, great whooping heaves as animal instinct tries to force his lungs to suck in more of the air that isn't doing him any good at all, but he opens his eyes again and jerks his chin in what Tifa thinks is trying to be a nod. Tseng bows his head for an instant, low enough that the edges of his hair slip over his shoulder and brush against the man's chest. He holds his palm over the man's eyes and says, so very softly, "It's all right, little brother. Let go. I will carry it from here, and I will not rest until it is made right."

Under Tifa's hand, the man breathes out one last time, and then is still.

There's a minute of silence, in which Tseng's lips move again but he makes no sound, and then Rufus asks, "What did you do?" His voice is calm enough, but there's a note hidden deep within it, firm and unyielding, that tells Tifa he won't be satisfied with half-answers.

Tseng finishes whatever litany he was wordlessly reciting, head bowed, before looking up again. Tifa's breath catches. He looks unearthly, the way Rufus looked in the kitchen this morning while crowned by morning sunlight, the way Rufus has been looking for the past half-hour, light to drive back the shadows. In a way she cannot name, it's the precise opposite of how Tseng looked half an hour ago when they first walked into the reactor. He looks somehow ... more than he ever has before. (The tiny sound Rufus makes, an inhale too sharp and an exhale too-long-delayed, tells her he can see it too. Whatever it is.)

Then she blinks and it's gone, and Tseng looks drained and weary, swaying slightly on his knees.

"He is -- was -- of Wutai," Tseng says. "I gave him the final blessings, that he would not die with the desecration of what has been done to him weighing down his soul." Tifa inhales -- there's more to it than that, she knows there is, even if she can't guess what that more might be -- and Tseng's eyes flick to her, quickly, then back to Rufus. "The rest of it -- not here. There are some things that cannot be spoken where evil sleeps." He pauses. "Slept, I think," he corrects himself. "I think ... whatever did this is no longer here. But it was. For a long time."

His words hover in the silences between them, filling up the space more than they should, for half a minute. Rufus is the one to break the spell, the not-spell, the whatever. "All right," he says, something unidentifiable buried deep inside his tone. He turns in place, once, slowly, eyes sweeping the room for ... something. Some hint at what might be going on here. "I -- This is obviously even bigger than we thought it was. And we're going to have to..." He trails off, more uncertain than Tifa has seen him yet be. Or, no. Realizing what none of them have quite yet let themselves think. "Alexander's mercy. There are dozens of those things in here. And there's someone in each of them, isn't there."

Tseng's eyes look sick. "Yes," he says, and says the other half of what they all are avoiding: "And we can't help them. Not without leaving too much proof that we were in here."

Tifa sucks in a breath. He's right. She knows he's right, knows it's his responsibility to weigh those factors and make those decisions, knows precisely to the inch how much those decisions weigh on his shoulders after, but she can't help the fierceness of the hatred that tears through her for his saying it. The emotion slices through her more cleanly and keenly than Sephiroth's blade did, fifteen feet and three years from where they are all (re)discovering this chamber's horrors, and Tseng's eyes flick to her for half a second before darting away. He sees my hatred, she thinks, and then, more urgently, he can sense my hatred, and she holds her breath, on the cusp of some realization that feels far more earth-moving than it should.

It blows away, though, as soon as Rufus speaks. "I think that cat is already out of the bag," he says, tense and unhappy. "We've already fucked with enough that whoever comes after us is going to be able to tell we were up here too. And probably make a few good guesses about who we are, and what we were doing."

"Probably isn't definitely," Tseng counters. "We have a cover. It's not a good cover, but if we blow it and then walk out of here and head back to Midgar, we'll be committed; our enemies will know for certain --"

Your father will know for certain, he means.

"Tseng," Rufus says, war-torn and weary, shoulders bowed too far. "We've already passed that point. We declared open war the minute we walked into that mansion; we just didn't know it." His chin comes up; he's staring beyond them, at the steps leading up to the door, at all of the secrets they still haven't unearthed. "I declared war on him a decade ago and more," he adds, softly enough it could be an afterthought. "This is just the point at which I can't pretend anymore that I haven't."

The sentence hangs in the air between them, as heavy and oppressive as the rest of the atmosphere in here, and then Reeve breaks the spell by stepping forward, shoulders squared beneath his protective suit. "Mr. Vice-President," he says -- stark, formal.

Rufus's whole body jerks to hear it; he looks back at Reeve, face guarded behind his mask. "Mr. Director," he says. He's matching cadence for cadence and formality for formality, but Tifa hears the wariness buried behind that formality, hears himself bracing for whatever Reeve will say. Expecting Reeve to declare him anathema, Tifa realizes; steeling himself for Reeve's betrayal, for Reeve to discover at this late moment that he cannot countenance a direct attack. Not for the first time, she curses the mask and protective gear Reeve is wearing. If she could see him, if Rufus could see him, perhaps --

But Reeve's chin tips upward, set and determined behind the white filter pressed against his face. "Mr. Vice-President," he repeats. "As the only other representative of the Shinra executive board present -- I vote we sink the fucking bastards."

That sentence, too, hangs between them, until Rufus blows out a breath Tifa hadn't realized he'd been holding, on a sound that's more of a laugh than anything else. It breaks the tension, even though Tifa's not sure how it does. Rufus runs a hand through his hair, and when it drops again, he seems to have found some new source of strength: he seems, once again, larger than he should be, or more solid, or something. "Yeah," he says, and then, "yeah, okay," and laughs again, one short sharp bark. "Sometimes you pick your battles. Sometimes the battles pick you." His gaze sweeps over each of them in turn, and Tifa finds her own shoulders setting, her own chin rising, when he gets to her. "Let's get what we can from this place, and I'll figure out what our next steps are on our way back down."

It only takes a minute, and one long shared look, before the three men each turn (in near-unison) and scatter throughout the cavernous emptiness of the reactor's womb. Tifa is left standing there, next to the body of the man (not-man) who was willing to die to bring them a warning and to set them on this path, and realizes that the three of them have been marching steadily towards this moment for years. She remembers the revelations of Rufus's history this morning, remembers the careful confessions in Tseng's apartment the other evening, and thinks: Rufus had said, then, that he and Tseng have been planning their coup for years. Have been laying ground and preparing alliances, setting each tiny seed into place and nurturing it as it grows. She hadn't realized then, listening to them, that there must be others inside the company they've been courting and creating, setting into place or seducing away their loyalties, but of course Reeve must be one of them. Rufus cannot hope to overthrow his father with only the Turks at his side.

So she follows along behind Reeve as he heads unerringly for the wall of switches and dials, pipes and cutoffs, and watches as he lifts a hand and runs his finger in midair, clearly tracing the progress of one of the pipes or conduits or wiring out of the rats'-nest before him. "How can I help?" she asks.

Reeve barely spares her a glance, though his tone is kind. "Unless you know anything about electrical engineering or Mako flow, I don't think there's a --" He breaks off, mutters something rude under his breath. "Of course he's got this box locked." He wraps his fingers around a padlock that's securing a metal box, barely visible behind bundles of wire and flexible tubing, and flips the padlock up to squint at the faint markings on the bottom of it. "...And of course it's not one my master will open. Rufus! Did you bring your picks or am I going to have to cut this?"

"Hold your chocobos," Rufus yells back -- Tifa can't tell from where; both he and Tseng disappeared while she was watching Reeve watching the panels. "I've got them with me, just lemme --" He breaks off, with a yelp; there's a sound of something buzzing, and the sharp cinnamon-and-steel scent around them takes on an overtone like metal and lightning. "Son of a bitch," Rufus swears, but it sounds more rote than urgent. "Tseng, get over here for a second, I need another pair of hands --"

Tifa takes a few steps back. All three of them clearly know what they're doing, or at least far more than she does; she won't interrupt, since they're on a deadline and telling her what she could do would clearly take more time than if they just did it themselves. It makes her feel superfluous, unnecessary -- slum girl good only for getting them where they need to be, not good enough to do anything once they get there -- but she stops the thought as soon as she realizes it's forming: this part isn't hers to help with. It doesn't need to be.

That she wishes it could be -- that being left alone in this reactor with nothing to distract her from the memories and the overwhelming, oppressive wrongness is enough to make her skin crawl -- is not their problem; they have other things to do.

The chill of the air is getting worse, and she chafes her hands along her upper arms to warm them. Her fingertips catch on a series of tiny bumps that weren't there earlier; she frowns and looks more closely, moving closer to the nearest pool of light from above and running the side of her thumbnail along her skin. The roughness lifts as she scrapes her nail along, and she lifts her hand up to squint at her nail, moving it back and forth so the light catches it. Tiny droplets wink back at her, sharp crystal structure glistening as brightly as diamonds or starlight, and when she looks down at her skin again she can see the pattern of spray, each individual fragmentary chip seeming to glow with a light that is not entirely reflected.

She shivers. Mako becomes materia. Sephiroth told her that, years ago, on this very mountain, and she'd filed the information away as something that would likely never be useful for her to know but would remember anyway in case she proved to need it. She wonders what magic is forming on her skin, and the thought is so unsettling that she scrubs her hands against her arms harder and harder until the droplets begin to slough off.

It's too cold in here.

If she is to be the only one who is not working on whatever mechanical wonders the other three have committed themselves to, it falls to her to set the watch, to guard against dangers from without and within. The cold is setting into her muscles, already worn and weary from their day so far, save for the spots where Rufus had healed her, and so she makes herself start moving again. Ten steps in one direction, ten steps in the other, back and forth, until she switches to pacing a box instead of a line. Her boots echoed against the grate, upstairs, but down here the flooring is concrete, thick and stone-like, and it absorbs the sound.

She detours around the puddle of liquid that spilled from the pod when the man-creature hurled himself out of it; one part of her notices that it hasn't begun to crystallize yet. It must not be pure Mako, then. Her eyes follow the splash, tracking it along the floor, back up to the cracked pod, to the door that fell (was broken) off its hinges and was cast away to land against another pod in that row. Something other than the Mako-liquid must have spilled or leaked at some point as well, since that pod and the one next to it both have a spray of dark rust along their bottom edges, flaking up from the floor --

It hits her, then, like a fist to the stomach, like a fall from a great height. It's not rust.

It's blood.

Her blood, sprayed and splattered across the margins of the pods, stained where it pooled along the concrete of the floor. She'd left part of herself here, and through apathy or distraction, whoever architected this warehouse of suffering never bothered with more than a cursory cleanup. The discoloration of the concrete stares up at her, a grisly memento that has seeped into the stone to become part of the permanent mute testimony of this place. Of the horrors that happened here, then and now.

Blessed Lady Shiva, save us all, she thinks, half obscenity, half prayer, against the rush of memory, and shivers again as the cold seems to get worse.

Against her will, Tifa's gaze moves along the spray, calculating the angles almost absently as part of her remembers the lurching, dizzying sensation of flying across the room, of gravity dragging her downward even as her mind tried to catch up with what had just happened. Memory rushes back in to her, like water rushing in to fill a space dug in the sand when the tide rolls in: it had been like taking a fall off the face of a rock, and she'd been trying -- mind sluggish, body in shock -- to roll in mid-air, the way she had been taught, to take the impact somewhere she would do herself the least damage when she landed, knowing even then it was too late to bother. She'd told Tseng and Rufus it hadn't hurt until she'd hit, but she'd forgotten that grinding, shocking sense of betrayal, having those few seconds to try to prepare herself and finding that her body refused to obey her, those few brief seconds that had felt like an eternity in lived time, until it ended and she'd felt her head bounce against the floor like a ripe melon, felt her arm splinter beneath her --

She'd forgotten about the arm, until just now. It's amazing what you can forget. It's amazing what you can remember, later.

Her eyes lift from where she'd landed, tracing the trajectory of her flight. Her fall. Thirty feet up, at least: from atop the stairs, where Sephiroth had been trying to open the door marked 'Jenova'. Jenova, she thinks, and mother, she thinks, and she hears Valentine saying I tried to save Sephiroth, both before he was born and after and Rufus saying his mother had been a woman named Jenova, and she died giving birth to him and she thinks of death and of life and of the voices that have been whispering at them all since they opened this door --

"Tifa, c'mere and --"

Someone's calling her name, looking for her help, but there's something else she has to do first. Something important, something critical, and she takes another step (she is climbing the stairs; she does not remember having decided to climb the stairs, but the door is above her and therefore she must climb the stairs to it) and frowns. The door is thick and dense metal, not wood or even metal-clad panels but one slab set flush into the wall as though it had grown there. There's a scanner next to it, the outline of a human hand marked on the face of the glass; she sets her hand on it, but is not surprised when nothing happens. There are no hinges, and she crouches and runs her fingertips along the edgeseam to find nothing but a few chips gouged out of the stone of the wall. The door itself is untouched. (Remember this: Sephiroth, the sword he'd taken from her in his hands, hacking desperately at the door and making no headway, shouting -- something. Remember this: Cloud, leaning over her, the cowl he'd stripped from over his hair pressed against the gaping wound in her chest to stifle the flow of blood, chanting, "it's all right, it's all right, Tifa, I'm here, it's me, look at me, stay with me, Zack will stop him --")

"Tifa."

Someone hisses, a sharp shushing sound. Unseen hands close on her shoulders, helping her as she stands from her crouch. (Behind her, a voice, beloved, furious: "-- touch someone in the middle of something like this, Leviathan's scales, Rufus, you're going to --" but it's a distant thread of sound behind the pounding of her heart in her ears and the susurration of her blood in her veins. Remember. Remember this.) She tenses against the touch for a moment, then blending with now, but they aren't Cloud's panicked hands trying to stave off her death: these hands are warm and surprisingly callused, gentle and encouraging, keeping her from falling as her knees threaten to give way beneath her weight. She can hear herself making an absent sound of thanks. She puts her own hands on the door again, fingertips questing along the seams, until she's risen onto the tips of her toes and balanced there, hands stretching far above her to feel. One of her helper's hands slides down her back, spanning the stretch of her spine where it's arched, and stays there with just enough pressure to ground her and not enough to cause her to unbalance. It's so warm, burning like a brand against her skin.

"Stay back," someone says in her ear, voice sharp and commanding, and, "I don't know, but it isn't a fucking flashback, all right? Look at her. Let her work."

"--didn't say it was a flashback, I know exactly what --" the first voice is saying, but Tifa bites her lip and closes her eyes, trying to block out what's happening around her. The darkness helps for a second, and then with a sharp twist (like a broken bone being set) that darkness falls away and she feels as though she's looking over her own shoulder: Reeve at the foot of the stairs looking agonized, Tseng half-frozen halfway up the stairs where he had been charging upward to her rescue when Rufus had thrown out a hand to command him to stop, and that means the compact woman with the look of absentminded concentration on her face must be herself. The woman's head turns and her eyes open; she blinks, and the dizzying double-vision collapses. She's looking at Rufus. He's looking at her, calm and confident, and he leaves his hand aginst the small of her back as an anchor.

"Go on," Rufus says. "I've got you."

Tifa turns her head back again and sinks back down until her feet are once again flat on the floor. "He couldn't get through the door, no matter how much he tried," she hears herself saying. "Not until after Zack charged him. They fought. Up here."

She takes two steps back from the door, turning in place, eyes sliding over the thin landing. Remember beats in her ears, in her blood, with her heartbeat. (Remember this: the sounds, and Cloud leaning over her, the lights a halo behind his hair, the soft blue-green of his eyes boring urgently into her as he leaned down against the makeshift bandage one-handed while scrabbling at his bracer of materia with the other. Remember this: the green glow building up against Cloud's hands, the way he kept chanting "shit, shit, shit" and starting over when he fumbled and lost the spell, the sudden searing burn of the healing magic tearing into her, harsh and painful, so unlike the easy and gentle wash of Rufus's casting. So. It was Cloud who healed her, then. Not Zack. Cloud, and the magic had been too powerful for him, and he'd done it anyway, because he'd needed to. Because she'd needed him. It's another old question answered, and she thinks, distantly, that she must do whatever she can to repay that debt now that Cloud's the one who needs her.)

"They fought," she repeats. Makes herself keep speaking, to reassure them she's still in here, to let them know it's her speaking no matter how odd she might feel at the moment. "Sephiroth was shouting. He said --" She turns around again, staring at the door, at the label (epitaph or warning) emblazoned across the top of it. "He said his mother needed him."

His mother had been a woman named Jenova, and she died giving birth to him.

I tried to save Sephiroth, both before he was born and after.

Mother, I'm here for you. I've come to save you. Let me in, mother.

The words tumble in her ears, mingling and melding, falling over each other and tumbling over a precipice into cacophony in her memory. She tilts her head back, as far as it will go, looking up (and up, and up), letting her eyes unfocus as she looks at the inscription. The letters aren't painted there. They're carved into the wall, like letters chipped into a headstone, and she thinks doors have two sides and it wasn't a prison, it was a bunker and she remembers the piercing, inhuman sound of Sephiroth screaming as Zack's sword bit into his hand.

Remember this: Zack tumbling down the stairs, droplets of his blood following his fall in furious arcs. Cloud sobbing as Sephiroth turned and set his bleeding hand against the palm-scanner that had refused to open for him. The sound of the door: stone against stone, scraping, twisting, as Sephiroth cried out.

Let me help you, mother. I have come for you. I swear I am of your blood. I swear I am worthy.

She reaches for more, closes her eyes and breathes in the smell of the place as an aid to memory even though it's missing the stink of blood and despair. The only other thing she can summon is a tiny flash, herself clutching the cowl Cloud had been using to stave the blood and looking down, dizzy and seeing double, to watch her own blood welling up between her fingers from the sodden fibers.

"Give me your knife," she says. It ignites a brief but fierce argument behind her. She tunes them out, closing her eyes, holding on to the fragments surfacing from the depth of her memory and trying to weave them into some unified whole; she's absorbed enough in the task that she starts when Rufus gently unfolds the clenched fingers of her fist, places the hilt of a knife into it, and folds her fingers back over. She sets the blade against her other palm, ready to close her hand on it and draw it through her skin, before pausing. No. If any blood were enough to activate the scanner, it would have opened for Sephiroth the first time he'd tried, when her blood had been sprayed across his skin.

Blood of the Abomination, she thinks. Hears. She isn't certain.

Tseng reaches out a hand to her as she steps past him on the stairs, but stops just short of touching her. She frowns at that hand for a second, before realizing what he means by the gesture: he probably thinks she's gone mad by now. Thinking back over the last ten minutes, Tifa's not entirely certain he isn't correct, but she makes herself smile at him anyway. "It's all right," she says, cool and reassuring. His worried look doesn't smooth over, but she doesn't have time to explain. (The words in her ears tumble around each other and form into polished diamonds of I cannot aid you for much longer, beloved daughter, not without harming you, and she knows she should be more concerned, but the voice feels right somehow, the echo of her own best self that goads her to her moments of greatness.)

It's ridiculously cold in here; her breath is fogging as she exhales it, even through the mask she's still wearing across her mouth and nose.

She kneels down next to the body of the man who died to warn them. "Little brother, I am sorry, but I have a need," she says -- only realizing after she's spoken, after she hears Tseng's shocked inhalation, that she's spoken in Wutaian. He has been dead long enough that his blood will not flow properly, but she makes the cut where gravity has pooled it, and gravity helps her along just enough. Even in his death, his blood is warm on her hand. She climbs the stairs again, and this time, when she rests her blood-covered palm against the plate glass of the scanner, the door pivots on its axis and lifts, swinging up and away from them, and she looks down at her hand on the scanner and hears, in the voice of her own thoughts, Sephiroth was the first, but too many have been forced to bear the Abombination in their veins since.

Then whatever odd numbness has been holding her breaks. Tifa staggers as everything lands on her at once: fear at how she has spent the last ten minutes obeying the voice of some impulse not entirely her own, some atavistic panic at the sight of the gaping maw the door has revealed, terror and pain at the memories she's been reliving. Rufus catches her again, his hands somehow not seeming quite as warm as they had felt only a moment ago, and she stumbles against him and turns to bury her face against his chest. She's shivering, but it isn't from the cold. Not entirely. She can't say what it's from.

"It's clear, go ahead," she hears Tseng saying over her head a moment later, and then he's standing next to her, to them, and resting his hand on the back of her neck. This time, something about his touch is even more reassuring than Rufus's. She can't tell why, but she pulls her face back from Rufus's chest, gasping in air. She feels more exhausted than if she'd just run around the entire edge of the Plate, as drained as though she's been awake for days, and she couldn't possibly say why.

"Tell me what you need," Rufus says -- she can feel the rumble of his voice, conducted through skin and the arms still encircling her. She takes a breath to speak, trying to figure out how to say that she has no idea what she needs -- no idea what the fuck even just happened -- but he's not talking to her. He's talking to Tseng, and Tseng is gently but firmly taking charge of her so that she's leaning against him instead of Rufus.

"Up in the first-aid kit," Tseng says, and he isn't talking to her either. "There's an Elixir; we need to get it into her as quickly as we can, before her body realizes how much mana she just burned." She makes a noise of protest -- mana powers magic; she hadn't cast any magic, doesn't know how, has never even touched a materia -- but Rufus slides his arms away from her, having transfered the burden of her weight to Tseng. She can hear him, taking the steps two at a time, down to the floor and then up to the catwalk. "Shh, it's all right," Tseng says, at her protest, and to her eternal shame she can feel her knees buckling.

Tseng shifts with her, bending and twisting until he can get one arm underneath her knees, and lifts her up into a sideways carry, held against his chest as though she weighs nothing. He carries her down two of the steps, then -- rather than taking her down the rest of the flight -- sits back on the landing and arranges her across his lap. "Faster would be better, Rufus," he calls.

"Pack the first-aid kits more sensibly next time, then," Rufus says, from far too close. Tifa opens her eyes (when had she closed them?) to see him holding out an uncapped glass phial. The liquid in it is a thick ruby-red syrup; it clings to the side of the glass. She's never seen an Elixir before. Sometimes the pharmacy in Wall Market will have a rare Ether or two in stock, kept behind the counter and sold for far too many gil, and she's heard rumors of more powerful versions available in Midgar-Above, but she's never needed one. She reaches out a hand to take it from him, but Tseng redirects her, gently, and takes it instead; with the way her hands are shaking, the way one is still smeared with blood, that's probably wise. He unhooks her mask for her, then holds the phial to her lips and helps her drink it down.

She's expecting it to taste like chalk and sawdust the way a Potion does, but it doesn't; it tastes the way she imagines sunshine might, or happiness, or love. It doesn't burn on the way, but a few seconds after she drinks it, she realizes she's gone from leaning listlessly against Tseng's lap with him supporting her to sitting there under her own power, and a few seconds after that she realizes that she feels better than she has in a long damn time.

"There you are," Rufus says, smiling at her.

He's nothing but kind, but humiliation scalds the back of her throat anyway -- she's spent entirely too much fucking time in the past four or five days being held and comforted, having her tears wiped or her wounds tended. She remembers, belatedly, that Reeve is here too -- someone else to look the fool in front of -- but she can't see him; sounds are coming from behind the door at the top of the stairs that started this whole thing, though.

She rolls off Tseng's lap, ignoring the way his hands flex against her as though he's trying to keep himself from trying to stop her, and winds up in an awkward sort of half-crouch on the step next to them both. She can't bring herself to meet anyone's eyes. "Sorry," she says, throat tight. "I don't know what just -- Go back to what you were doing, I'll be fine now."

She feels, rather than sees, the look Tseng and Rufus exchange, the way they decide between the two of them which one has to deal with her next. Rufus must win; his steps recede, and she hears his voice murmuring something to Reeve a few seconds later. She closes her eyes, steeling herself for pity or irritation or disappointment, and then looks up at Tseng, ready to apologize again.

But he's looking at her, and the look he's giving her is somehow knowing and compassionate and tinged with a hint of sadness for some reason she can't name. "Lady," he says -- somehow not to her, but through her, acknowledgement or respect, she can't tell -- and she flashes back to this morning, watching him kneeling in grass still damp with the morning dew. He stands. "Come on. The first summon's always the hardest; if you wind up having to do it again, it'll be easier next time. You -- She -- got us into the antechamber; there's not much left in there, but maybe you'll remember something else we can use."

Tifa blinks, then blinks again. She puts her hand in his automatically when he holds his out to her, lets him pull her to her feet, but she still feels like she's swimming through mud when she tries to parse his words. "What?" is all she can manage.

Tseng's eyebrows draw together and he closes his eyes, not in confusion but in the expression that has always meant he is wishing for patience and the wisdom to say the correct thing. "Deliver me from unbelievers," he says under his breath, words half-muffled by the face mask; then, louder and to her: "Sometimes you don't need a Summon materia to call forth one of the gods, just an affinity and a strong enough need. On your part, or on Theirs." His eyes skitter away from hers, as though he's the one who can't meet her eyes. "Leviathan's been trying to get my attention since we walked in here, but I don't -- I can't -- it's been years since --" He stops himself, breathing deeply. "I'm explaining this badly."

"You really are," Tifa says, slowly. She's heard of Summon materia before, whispered around the edges of the Heaven, but has always thought them nothing more than something from the old stories, brought into modern times as a focus for what-if, something to cling to in desperate times: the idea that a bead of materia could invoke the power of the gods from all those old stories can sustain people when they need it. I'll go find a Phoenix summon and it will heal my mother. If I could find an Odin summon, I'd make it slice through all those drug dealers who've taken over Lower Two. If I had an Ifrit summon, maybe we wouldn't freeze this winter. She's never thought they were real.

There's a crash from the antechamber a few steps above them; Tseng's head snaps around to follow it, his hand twitching towards his sidearm, but Reeve's voice comes a few seconds later, calling reassurances. Tseng looks back at her. Tifa's breath catches: he looks ashamed. "The children of Midgar may swear by the old gods," he says, slowly, sounding as though he is picking through his words one by one, "but to so many, those names are nothing but pleasing syllables. I was ... raised differently. I do not know what you might believe or disbelieve, but I have had it proven to me time and again that it does not matter if you believe in the gods or not; it matters whether They believe in you."

As Tifa watches, trying to make sense of what he's saying -- she cannot believe that he believes what he's saying, but she can't believe he's lying to her, either -- his eyes flick down to the dead man's body: one tiny motion, there and back to her again. She wouldn't have noticed it if she hadn't been staring at him. Something in the back of her mind stirs again, the way it had to start this whole thing off, and some left-over shard of knowing surfaces from the whirlwind of her thoughts. "Your training," she says, thinking of the few scattered pieces of his childhood he's given her, thinking of the way she's always sensed him talking around some piece she thought must have been one of their taboos. "You were..."

She trails off, not knowing what word she's searching for. Tseng grimaces, though. "'Priest' is as good a word as any," he admits. "Leviathan's chosen, consecrated at His altar. I left it behind me. Or I tried to." He looks over his shoulder, up towards the antechamber, brief and haunted; she can't say for sure, but she thinks he might not even know he's doing it. "Whatever this is, whatever we're dealing with, it's more than just ..." He trails off as well. "There is a wrongness here," he says, abruptly. "I don't have words for it. I don't know if I would if I hadn't spent the last twenty years trying not to listen to those senses or not, but it's not just someone -- Hojo -- having redirected half the Mako on this continent into this reactor, or having used it to turn those poor bastards into monsters. It's not just physical. There's something deeper. And whatever it is, it's bad enough that Shiva Herself came to your aid when you called upon Her, and the aid She gave you was to open our way into ... whatever's in there."

"Nothing's in there," Rufus says. His voice is quiet, even, controlled; Tseng and Tifa both startle at the sound of it. She hadn't heard him approach. Judging by the horror in Tseng's eyes, he hadn't heard Rufus either, and for some reason she can't identify, the thought terrifies him. Rufus's eyes flick over them both; he lingers for a moment on Tseng's face, but doesn't say anything other than, "Not anymore. But something was. And I think, whatever it was --"

The last remaining bit of knowledge (that she will not believe was placed into her mind by one of the gods made manifest) clicks into place in Tifa's thoughts. "Whatever it was," she says -- feeling sick, feeling certain -- "it was what drove Sephiroth mad."

"Right in one," Rufus says. "And if Hojo was the one who put it here originally --"

Tseng closes his eyes. "Then Hojo's the one who knows where it is right now."

It's nothing they hadn't already suspected. Or rather, it's nothing Tifa hasn't been suspecting for at least since last night, and if Tifa suspects it, Rufus and his allies must have been suspecting it for years, must have strategies in place and contingency plans layered ten levels deep. But saying it out loud is apparently enough to make things real, because they all fall silent at once, and the space feels heavier than it should.

"Okay," Rufus finally says, breaking that silence when it becomes clear neither of the other two of them will. "So. Get out of here with as much information as we can get, get back down the mountain, collect everyone and everything from the mansion --" He breaks off, his eyes going distant and narrowed. "Which, if we're not worrying about stealth anymore -- save the objection, Tseng, it's already been noted -- we don't have to fuck around with. Then I'll call over to Beatrice --"

"Secretary," Tseng murmurs to Tifa in explanation. "She's the one who really runs the company."

Rufus gives him an annoyed look and keeps talking. "-- and have her activate the protocols for Crimson Lightning immediately; there's no need to wait until we get back, and it's probably better to give everyone a head start, just in case." His brows draw together; Tifa can tell he's frowning, even though the mask is in the way. "We'll need a base of operations that isn't the Complex. If we're starting this in earnest now, things are going to get rough pretty quickly, and I don't want to have to keep looking over my shoulder. Crimson Lightning might be the most militant of the plans, but it still wasn't set up with all this in mind." His eyes flick around the space they're in again. "And I don't have any fucking clue what Hojo has in place that we're going to have to work around. Not to mention, we've got two wounded we have to find care for."

Tifa takes a deep breath. There's no question; she made her vow with the old words and in full knowledge that keeping it was probably going to hurt like hell. She just hadn't expected the price to come due so quickly, but the fact Rufus is accounting for Cloud (and Zack) in making his plans proves she was right to have offered to pay it. "There's the Heaven," she says, quietly. "It isn't much, but it's safe, it's securable, there's an old bomb shelter under the property that nobody knows about but me --" Tseng startles at that; she can't help the little twinge of satisfaction that prompts. He hadn't noticed the hatch underneath the beat-up old pinball machines, then. "And it might be in the slums, and my neighbors and my patrons might be a little too invested in what I'm up to, but -- they're my people. If they spot anything odd going on, they'll keep their mouths shut."

Rufus hesitates for just long enough that she can tell he knows precisely what making that offer means to her, and is trying to find a way to let her know that he doesn't take the offer lightly. "Hold that thought," he says. "I'm not saying no; we might need it. I won't know more until we really start digging into things. But --" He grimaces, so vehemently she can tell even behind the mask. "I don't want to burn that until we really need it. And I don't want to put you in that much risk. If this goes badly --"

He breaks off, leaving the end of that sentence unspoken: if this goes badly, they will all be dead, and he doesn't want to risk his father and his father's people deciding to obliterate the Seventh Heaven along with the rest of the cleanup.

"It'll have to be your penthouse, Tseng," Rufus says. "Unless -- Reeve!"

He's raised his voice just enough to be heard, and Reeve appears at the door to the antechamber. Tifa blinks. There's a pattern of ash along the left arm of Reeve's coverall, as though something had caught fire at some point in the minutes she'd lost and he'd beaten out the flames with his bare hands. At least the coverall itself is unburned, just dirty. He's obtained a pair of thick, heavy tan work gloves somewhere and pulled them on over the thin purple gloves he had been wearing. They're stained bright turquoise, in multiple places. He's holding a small nest of wires attached to a block of some unknown metal, and even though he's looking at Rufus, his hands keep moving, twisting some wires and untangling others. Either the fingertips of the gloves are worn away enough that he can do it by touch, or he's done this enough times that he doesn't need the tactile feedback.

"We're activating Crimson Lightning," Rufus tells him, and strangely enough, Reeve's shoulders ease, as though that news is extremely welcome. (Tifa is guessing the phrase is the code-name of one of their sets of plans, set in place a long time ago and only awaiting Rufus's word to put it in motion. She wonders what other plans they've devised over the years, and how far-reaching they might be.) "Except the idiot who designed all the protocols didn't stop to think we might be activating in extremis, and didn't think to arrange a safehouse." From the way Rufus says it, Tifa's certain he himself was that 'idiot'. "Is there any property on UrbDev's books that's unoccupied, and out-of-the-way enough that people won't stumble on it? Someplace defendable. Ideally, with a network drop, but it won't scuttle the plan if we don't have one."

"There's the -- no, Scarlet took that last quarter, they're starting up the new line of anti-aircraft weaponry any day now. Hang on --" Reeve leans back against the doorframe, clearly running through options in his head. He looks down at the whatever-it-is he's wiring. Just as Tifa's about to ask whether this is something they can decide on the way -- they do, after all, have an nine-hour flight ahead of them to get back to Midgar -- Reeve straightens, as though the answer was waiting for him in among the wires. "There's the old armory in Upper Six. It's got the underplate tunnels to the main complex, so we've been trying to figure out what we can do with it to take advantage of it being connected, but it's just far enough out that it was a pain in the ass to get people and equipment back and forth, remember?"

Rufus is nodding; clearly he remembers. "Yeah. Perfect. Okay, now we just have to figure out what to do for those poor bastards we broke out of the basement. Valentine, I'm going to want with us in case he decides it's time to start talking, but the other two are probably going to need some dedicated care for a while, SOLDIER or not, and I don't want to just dump them on the clinic in Upper Three, no matter how used to weird shit they are --"

"I know where to bring them," Tseng says. Tifa's ears prick up at the sound in his voice: he's as hesitant to offer this as she was to offer the Heaven. Something he doesn't want anyone to know about; someone or someplace he doesn't want to place at risk. "There's an abandoned temple down in Lower Five. The woman who's taken it over has ... a way with healing. And growing things. She'll take them." He takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly. "And she might be able to give us a few suggestions about what all of this is. Or help us figure out what Hojo's up to, if the interest goes both ways."

Tifa isn't sure why such a pronouncement might make Rufus stop in his tracks and stare at Tseng as though Tseng has just confessed to murdering puppies. "You found her?"

Tseng flinches. And no, Tifa isn't imagining it: whatever he's just said, it's as significant as his confession a moment ago about gods and summons, and he's just as reluctant to discuss it. "We found her a decade ago," he says, closing his eyes as though he's bracing himself for an explosion.

Rufus closes his eyes. Tifa can see the titanic effort he's making to rein in his temper, to keep from exploding over whatever sins Tseng has just confessed. At least she's not the only one who doesn't know what's going on; Reeve is looking between them, just as lost as she is. "At any point in the last decade, do you think you might have seen it fit to mention to me you found the fucking fairytale both Hojo and my father have been chasing for as long as I've fucking been alive?"

Tseng winces. "The orders were to --"

"Don't you fucking talk to me about orders." It comes out low and savage, Rufus's temper breaking and spilling over the dam he's placed upon himself, and Tifa's breath catches; for the first time since all of this started, Rufus looks and sounds as dangerous as she damn well knows him to be. "When were you going to tell me?"

"When it became relevant," Tseng snaps, losing his temper in return. "Such as right now. If we'd told you sooner --"

Even Tifa can identify the mistake there. "'We'," Rufus says. "As in, the overgrown idiot who is your second in command, or as in, the entire Department of Administrative Research?"

This is not going anywhere good. Tifa shoulders in between them, one hand against each man's chest; out of the corner of her eye she can see both of their hands making the telltale flicker that speaks of instinct sending them reaching for a weapon and conscious choice overruling it, but she holds her ground. "Both of you, stop it," she says, and she's proud of how evenly her voice comes out. "Whatever the issue is, now is not the time to deal with it, and you both know that if you keep going with this, one or both of you is going to say or do something you'll regret later. Save it." There's a pause in which both of them take a breath to argue with her; she overrides it with, "Do you really want to do our enemies' work for them?"

Another long pause, and she's fighting the urge to grab their heads and bang them together until they see sense when Reeve says, quietly and with excellent timing, "I need another pair of hands to help me reroute the supply stream if we're going to be leaving this reactor in service. I can't undo all the damage Hojo's done without walking all the pipes back to the tap, but I can at least prevent more of the mountain from caving in."

Rufus tears his eyes away from Tseng's face. "Fine. Tseng, help him." He stalks off down the steps, across the floor of the reactor, and back up the steps to the catwalk without looking back. Tifa hesitates for half a second, looking at Reeve and Tseng and then back towards Rufus's retreating back, before sighing and following.

He's out the door by the time she gets up there, and Tifa follows him outside as well; the temperature has dropped enough that she wishes she'd brought the cold-weather gear she'd told everyone was optional, and the sun is hovering just at the edge of the horizon, which means it will only get colder. The sky is beautiful: red and gold and purple painting the sky in broad strokes, precisely the way she remembers. Part of her wants to sit down on the steps of the reactor and just watch. Rufus has taken off his facemask and is already on the phone, pacing back and forth and snapping out orders, heedless of the beauty spread out before him. She leans back against the wall of the reactor, folds her arms and tucks her hands into her armpits to keep them warm, and waits.

The mountain's beautiful. Not like she remembered, but she got to see it again, and she got to climb it again, and even if that climb was more of a struggle than a joy and even if her attempt to get them all up here without breaking the cover they're about to shatter proved to be unnecessary after all, she set herself against the mountain one last time, and she won. Maybe it will help her dreams a little, that her last sight of this mountain won't be from then.

Rufus finally hangs up without saying goodbye -- the mysterious Beatrice must be used to him -- and rounds on her. "Don't say it," he says.

Tifa holds up her hands, just long enough to make the gesture before folding them back under her arms. "I'm not getting between the two of you. Because I'm not stupid."

Rufus blows out a sigh, fogging the air in front of him. "Ten years. My father and Hojo have been looking for the girl for as long as I can remember, and he's known where she was the whole time. Do you have any idea how often I told him I wished they'd find her so I could sit down and ask her what the fuck the old man wanted with her?"

That's the heart of the matter, she'd wager. Not that Tseng was keeping Rufus from gaining insight into his father's motives, but the fact Tseng had withheld information from him, and in doing so, made him feel like a fool. But she knows better than to say it, not now, not when Rufus has had a very trying day. "Who is she?"

"I don't know her name. Or even much about her." Rufus pats down the pockets of his BDUs, emerging eventually with a battered pack of cigarettes; he shakes one out and lights it, then automatically redirects his pacing to bring him downwind of her as soon as he sees which direction the smoke is blowing. "Hojo calls her the Last Ancient. Says he wants to study her, to see what he can learn from her. He's convinced my father that the old fairy tale of the Promised Land is real, and that we can get there somehow. The old man's got binders full of plans for his Neo-Midgar project. The perfect city." He takes another drag on his cigarette, purses his lips, blows out a column of smoke. "I'd call it a harmless obsession, except he's been dumping millions of gil into the Science department to fund Hojo's research into it, and it's what got us ... well, that." His gesture with the cigarette encompasses the inside of the reactor, and everything it implies.

Tifa's first impulse is to probe further into the connection, to find out more about the situation -- she still knows very little about Dr. Hojo, except that he seems to enjoy his cruelty, if what Valentine says is truth -- but what she said inside applies here, as well: now is not the time. She tries to remember her mother's stories, about gods and Ancients and the days before humankind. "I thought the Ancients died centuries ago."

"Yeah. So does anybody who isn't a complete nutcase. But apparently Hojo has some kind of reason to believe it's all real. He set the Turks on trying to find her, a long time ago. Said the girl's only part Ancient, but it should be enough for his purposes. I don't know whether or not it's true." The undercurrent says: and I would have, if Tseng had told me. Tifa's curious as to what Tseng's reason for keeping the girl from Rufus really were. Could it only be because he'd never found the right time?

Tifa wonders what an Ancient looks like. What powers the girl has, if she really is an Ancient. The stories her mother had told her were always full of strange and mystic abilities, of magic without materia, of gods walking the earth.

If she believes Tseng, they were visited by one of the gods not half an hour ago, and she was the one chosen to help make that god manifest. She doesn't want to believe him -- the very thought is ludicrous -- but is there really any other explanation for what happened to her?

(Remember, says the back of her mind: cold like snow, slick like ice, stark and beautiful. Remember this.)

She shivers and makes herself change the subject. "How long do you think it'll take before we can get moving?"

Rufus sighs again, tense and unhappy. "Reno said they've got most everything loaded, so -- half an hour? We'll need to shuffle some people around a bit; he's not competent to fly right now, and we've got some weight limits and fuel issues to deal with. I'll probably have Tseng fly the other chopper back with Reeve on second seat and Valentine riding in back with most of the cargo, and I'll take ours with Rude on second and our other passengers in back. I'll guess you'll want to stick with your friend until we get them settled -- wherever that might turn out to be -- but once we've figured out where they're going, I'll make sure you get back to your bar." He looks off into the distance; his smile is bleak. "And when all this is over, I'll come by and make good on that promise I gave you. If I can."

It takes a few seconds for his words to sink in. Her first impulse is anger -- how dare he suggest that she'll abandon him at the first sign of trouble? Then she realizes: of course he expects her to abandon him. Everyone else has. "Yeah, no," she says. "Sorry. You're stuck with me."

Tifa watches the disbelief start to form. "This isn't your fight. And it's going to get messy. We're going up against -- well, a man who'd do that." Again, the gesture towards the inside of the reactor, and the horrors that sleep there. "We're going up against literally every other person on the Shinra board. We're going up against my father. I've spent, oh, at least half my life planning this war, and I think I've got a shot at winning it, but they aren't good odds and that's even without factoring in whatever monsters Hojo's apparently been making in his spare time for years now. I've got the Turks, I've got Reeve and a decent chunk of UrbDev who'll follow him, I've got, oh, five percent of the regular army, maybe one percent of SOLDIER, scattered pockets of the departments throughout the company that I've worked in, and that's all if I'm lucky and if they think I can win, because if they think I'm losing, they'll all save their own necks and go running straight back to the old man. And I can't fucking blame them. We're going up against an entrenched force that outnumbers us, that outguns us, with resources we don't know about and a willingness to do absolutely anything to keep their power, and I may have been planning this for half my life, but we're still way more likely to end up dead than victorious."

The setting sun catches on the line of Rufus's jaw, the auburn stubble on his cheeks. He looks exhausted. He looks like the weight of the world is on his shoulders. He looks like he needs a shower, a gallon of coffee, and ten hours of sleep.

He looks like the future.

"Well," Tifa says. "At least we've got a plan."

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