Tifa wakes once for a screaming argument in the alleyway to the side of her imperfectly-sealed bedroom window, again for Tseng sliding carefully out from underneath her and padding to the bathroom, the third time because she is dreaming that she is making dinner and laughing with her father only to look down and realize she's leaving bloody footprints on the floor of a windowless room ringed round with rows of pods hooked into a glowing green tube, and when she wakes the fourth time for no good reason except it being dawn she opens her eyes and stares at the ceiling and tries to figure out what time it is by the patterns made by the light seeping in around the edges of her blackout curtains before sighing and gently extracting herself from under Tseng's comforting arm.
He makes a soft noise of protest when she moves; she rests two fingertips on the curve of his temple. "Shh," she says, in her dawn-voice, her voice of reassurance and comfortable lies. "Just me. It's all right. Sleep; you're safe here."
Meaningless platitudes -- they always are -- but he murmurs again and subsides, rolling over onto his back in one economical motion and throwing his arm over his eyes. He's asleep again within seconds, breath evening back into the soft patterns she is so familiar with. She thinks -- not for the first time -- how ironic it is that he should sleep so deeply in her bed and quiet at the sound of her voice when he does wake, and how easy it would be for her to fit one hand over his nose and mouth and hold, and she leans over (as she always does) to press a light kiss against his forehead before climbing out of the bed to gather her clothes in the dark.
In the bathroom, she brushes her teeth and uses the toilet, combs through her hair and braids it back, then pulls on her sweatpants and laces up her running shoes. It's still early spring outside, and no matter how much the plate Above traps heat down Below and no matter that she grew up in a mountain town, it will be too chilly at first outside for her liking if she ventures out wearing only the tank top she slept in. She always warms up quickly once she gets moving, though, and it's more trouble than it's worth to bring a jacket and have to stop just as soon as she hits her stride to struggle out of it again. She'll just pick up the pace at the beginning until she warms through.
When she lets herself out of the bathroom and through the bedroom, she can see a light coming from downstairs where there was no light when she went to sleep. Her heartrate spikes for half a second, adrenaline coursing through her veins (better at cutting through the morning fog than the cup of coffee she always has before starting on her run, although probably less good for the heart) before she remembers her other, far more unwanted visitor. The door to the guest room is open, and the bed has either been re-made or was never slept in to begin with; the jeans and t-shirt Rufus (Rufus fucking Shinra) was wearing the night before are folded into one tidy pile on the foot of the bed, and there's a damp towel neatly folded in half and draped over the bedframe.
He must have found something in the spare-clothes drawer to fit him, Tifa thinks, and has to press the back of one hand against her mouth to stifle the hysterical laughter threatening to bubble up from her throat. She isn't even sure what's so funny. Maybe that's the funniest part.
The clock on the bedside table of the guest room says it's 6:45AM. She never keeps a clock in her own bedroom. She hates knowing what time it is when she first wakes, because the answer is always "too fucking early". She is far, far too much of a morning person to be the owner of a business that stays open well past midnight each night without fail, but everyone knows she shuts down for an afternoon nap between lunch and dinner, and she can't think of anything else she could be doing down here that would give her anywhere near the number of chances this does to serve her cause. She doesn't hate her life here -- far from it; it has its moments of stunning reward -- but it's a harder life than she'd expected, and a harder one than she'd ever wanted.
(Enough. It is what it is. Don't dwell. The refrain of self-correction is long-familiar by now. She's learned which things she can't let herself think about too closely if she doesn't want to put herself into a snit for days, and the subject of what her life might have been is close to the top of that list.)
Tifa makes her way down the staircase leading to the bar, moving as silently as she can in her rubber-soled running shoes. (Which is pretty damn silently. Tseng claims she's the only person who can regularly sneak up on him, and while she doesn't know if he's exaggerating to flatter her, there's no way he could fake the genuine surprise when she touches him when he thought she was across the room -- something she learned quickly not to do, at least not without making sufficient noise, after the second time he'd drawn his gun on her.) She doesn't doubt Rufus (Rufus fucking Shinra) has similar startle responses; Tseng almost never talks about the man, but she's overheard enough discussions among Tseng and the other Turks to know Tseng was the one who taught him self-defense and more, and Tseng believes paranoia is a sacrament. She knows what she's risking, trying to surprise her unwanted guest.
But this is her bar and her building, owned free and clear between her and Kyle as she pays down the debt (so much more than monetary) she owes him, and this is her life, the life she built with her own two hands out of the ashes of Nibelheim and beyond. She will not let Rufus (Rufus fucking Shinra) waltz in and commandeer it with nothing more than pretty empty words about responsibility and reparations, and she knows, knows, just from looking at him, that Rufus fucking Shinra is a black hole whose gravity sucks in everything around him to crush it into nothing more than a ball of stardust to be scattered for his own purposes. If she gives him an inch, he'll take a continent.
Besides. Knowing what he does when he's startled may be useful, somehow. Someday.
Rufus isn't sitting at the bar as she expected him to be when she descends the last few steps of the curving staircase to reach the point where the bar is visible. The lights are on in the kitchen, though, and she can hear the low murmur of staticky voices from the radio she keeps back there to keep her ears and mind busy throughout long involved prep work, and over it all she can hear a cheerful sort of whistling.
He's very faintly flat, Tifa notices. She has a good enough ear for pitch that usually it would set her teeth on edge, but she's startled to realize that from him, it's almost charming. Evidence he's human after all.
When she comes over to stand so she can see over the saloon doors -- she'd had to drop them six inches when she'd bought out Kyle; Kyle had been much taller than she is -- all she can do is close her eyes and pray for patience. The countertop they use to stack dishes in need of washing -- which had been about three-quarters full when she'd closed and locked the doors last night -- is now empty and gleaming. The dishwashing sink itself, which had been piled high with pots and pans -- many in need of more than a little elbow grease -- is empty as well. The plates are neatly stacked in their proper order and arrangement at the finishing counter; the pots and pans are racked as well, their handles all facing outward and turned forty-five degrees to the right, perfectly placed for a quickly-moving hand to grab them. The grill, which had been two days overdue for a good holystoning, is spotless. It looks like the oil in the fryer is even new.
He's going step-by-step down the Saturday prep list tacked to the door of the walk-in refrigerator, she realizes. She certainly hopes he doesn't view bar labor as some kind of bizarre penance. For one, indentured servants are inconvenient to deal with; for another, a few hours or days of labor can never even approach the point of redeeming Nibelheim and after, and to think it could is an insult so profound that if it is a proposition he is advancing, wordlessly or explicitly, she may very well be obliged to murder him and bury him in the backyard.
The whistling comes from where Rufus is standing at the prep counter, knife in hand, methodically dismantling the hundred-pound bag of potatoes next to him into julienne strips for potato fries. He's wearing a pair of black sweatpants, two sizes too big, and a t-shirt advertising Wall Market's pharmacy, from the series printed ten years ago (well before Tifa's time, but a good advertising campaign never dies) with the cartoon-pink moogle mascot cavorting through bottles of pills across the faded grey front. His hair is damp, and it curls even more strongly than it had the night before. He is nothing like his public image; she doesn't blame any of last night's patrons for failing to recognize the vice president of the Shinra Electric Power Company in this man. She likes to think she would have, even if Tseng hadn't been the one to bring him and thus predispose her to looking, but she's honest enough with herself to admit she can't ever know for sure.
He's about halfway finished with the potatoes, she thinks, squinting at the way the top of the sack slumps over. Whether through coincidence, native intelligence, or just plain dumb luck, the oversized bucket full of water he's tossing the finished product into is the one she always uses for the proto-fries before their first frying and subsequent freezing for later. (She wonders how he knows that soaking the potato strips before frying them is one of the keys to perfect fries. Stick that in the same category as wondering why he could haul a tray like a pro last night, she tells herself: completely fucking useless.)
Tifa is a bit surprised that it only takes a few minutes of watching him before he can feel the weight of her eyes on the back of his neck. The untamed ape living in the back of humanity's mind always knows when it's being closely watched, sooner or later, but most people take far longer for the ape's warning signal to get through to them. She was wrong about the dramatic startle response: she's looking, carefully, but she doesn't spot any cue, no tensing of muscles or shifting of weight, when he moves. He just turns his head, swift and smooth, to meet her eyes. The motion is so natural it takes her a full four seconds to realize his grip on the knife in his hand has effortlessly flipped from the loose overhand hammer grip used for chopping to the underhanded reverse grip favored by those who fight with knives in close quarters.
Then he smiles, and the moment passes. "Good morning," he says. His hand moves again, and if she hadn't been trained to look, she would have called it nothing more than a minor adjustment; but when he turns his whole body to face her more fully, he is back to holding the knife as though the most dangerous thing he's ever faced in his life is a pile of potatoes and an angry chef with a deadline. Against her will, she's forced to respect the competence that implies, both in the easy familiarity with the weapon he had to hand and the control and judgement displayed in not using it. Whatever else, it's clear he has trained, long and hard, in how to protect himself from people who wish Shinra ill.
(Part of her, buried behind her eyes, is coolly taking notes. She sits in the center of a web of people from all Midgar's walks of life, and she abhors the violence espoused by so many of the slums' anti-Shinra fighters, but she has no doubt this is closer than any of them will ever get to Rufus Shinra, and the chance to gather knowledge on his skills and capabilities may not arise again.)
"Good morning," she says, keeping her voice as neutral as she can. She pushes the swinging saloon doors out of the way, slipping into the kitchen. She can't help but check his work, taking a quick tour of grill to fryer to counters to stacks of dishes; she isn't sure whether to be grateful or annoyed that everything is precisely as she would have done it herself. Rufus has left off his chopping, watching her circuit with an expression that manages to be both amused and -- vaguely -- fond. "You didn't have to do this," she says, abruptly, turning back to face him. His expression doesn't change when she does.
Rufus inclines his head. "I know," he says. "I -- don't sleep well in strange places. At all. Rather than tossing and turning, I decided to make myself useful. I used the list marked 'Saturday prep' on the refrigerator; I just started at the top and worked my way down. As you can see, I've hit the potato portion of the program."
Tifa grits her teeth. There is something about this man, his calm equanimity and subtle dignity, his stupid little jokes and the light tone of mockery that infuses everything he says, that makes her want to jump up and down like a two-year-old, throwing things and screaming. She overrides the impulse. Hard. "Fine," she says. "Do whatever you want; I certainly can't stop you. I'm taking my morning run. If Wedge and Jessie get here before I get back, you're a friend of Tseng's from Costa del Sol who just started up at Midgar U, I put you up last night because you two outstayed the circumplate train, you won't be making a habit of it so they don't have to rearrange the standard Saturday morning prep chores permanently, and they should start in on the inventory. Which you will not be touching."
She can hear her voice getting more and more clipped as she runs down the list, but hey. At least it isn't getting louder and more clipped. The last thing she needs is to wake Tseng up so it's two-against-one again, the way it was last night; if he's left to his own devices he'll sleep for another two hours at least, and that way she'll only have to defend herself against one of them instead of both at the same time.
(Unfair. Unfair, and even mostly untrue -- Tseng hadn't placed himself between her and Rufus last night, had in fact gone out of his way to avoid making it into a conflict between Shinra and slum rat, and she had known what she was getting into the minute she'd first smiled at him and leaned in a little closer instead of leaning away, had known all the way back to the night she'd taken a deep breath and given him the barest hint she held the answers that he was clearly seeking about what had happened on that night. He'd never pretended to be something he wasn't, never played disaffected and disgruntled to win her trust and consideration, had made no apologies and offered no excuses. We both know who we are, she'd said last night, not for the first time, and it's true: they always have. He knows her sympathies have always tended closer to activist than status quo, knows she disapproves of Shinra from the top on down, knows she thinks his job is ahborrent and the company he does it for is criminally negligent at best and actively malevolent at worst, and he has never once attempted to change her mind or expressed disapproval about her convictions. It's unfair of her to draw the battle lines now, when they have both so scrupulously avoided drawing them for so long even as they each hold out against the possibility, the certainty, that someday they will be forced to use each other. But she is, and she can't stop herself from doing it, and she's looking straight at the reason why.)
But Rufus is only nodding, as though what she has just said is the most reasonable thing in the world, and she thinks, actually, she would very much like to drive her knuckles into that perfectly proportioned face right now. "What should I do when I finish the potatoes?" he asks.
Tifa bares her teeth at him. It isn't a smile. Not even close. "Cheese graters in the third drawer over from the left. Take one out, lube it up, and fuck yourself bloody with it."
As exit lines go, it's a pretty good one. If she does say so herself.
She grabs a bottle of water and sticks it in the waistband at the small of her back as she goes through the bar itself. Behind her, she hears Rufus laughing. Genuine amusement, she would say, if she were forced to characterize it, and when he goes back to whistling, the melody line shakes a few times from voiceless laughter as his amusement continues. It's good to know he can laugh at people telling him to go fuck himself, she thinks. (Oh, God, she's going to kill him. She can see, objectively speaking, how his actions might be taken as charming, or helpful, and she certainly isn't going to dispute that he is worlds away from the perception of Vice President Shinra she would have put together three days ago if asked. His confidence and self-possession is still like nails down a chalkboard.)
Fuck it, she decides, abruptly. She can cope without her pre-run coffee, today. Anything to keep from extending the amount of time she's stuck here. (Her bar. Her refuge. And today it isn't safe, and it isn't secure, and she knows precisely why Tseng did this and can't fault him for the act even as she wishes it didn't have to be like this. Dammit.)
Her breath puffs out in giant clouds as she steps out onto the porch and begins her warm-up stretches, and the chill makes her throat and lungs hurt. The air down here always feels heavy, dense, full of invisible particulates that weigh down her lungs; she imagines she can feel the smog reaching down her throat, spreading through her chest, choking her bit by bit. She will never again be able to take a deep breath without feeling it catching on her scars; she will never again be able to breathe without thinking of everything she's lost.
(Enough. Stop. She knows better, knows better, and yet it's been a morning full of endlessly stubbing her mental toes against things she can usually set aside.)
Around her, Lower Seven is starting to whisper to life: Saidy next door is out walking her son to the school Mrs. Miller runs out of her attic; Bai is stumbling home from his boyfriend's apartment still wearing the clothes he was in last night, his eyeliner smeared across his face; the working boys and girls are starting to pack up from their corners and make their way to the cafés and bakeries just starting to open their doors to pick up breakfast-cum-dinner before falling into bed and sleeping the day away. Tifa greets them all with a wave, a smile. They're good people, all of them. Her people, in a way. There are thousands of stories down here, and all of them unique. Shocking at first for a small-town girl who'd never met anyone so far out of her experience, but she's come to appreciate each and every one of them for who they are and what they can offer.
Strange to think she wouldn't have met any of them, if it hadn't been for that night. She wonders, sometimes, who she'd be if she were still Tifa Lockheart of Nibelheim instead of Tifa of the Seventh Heaven. For all Midgar's a prison (well then is the world one) and life here is hard, there are moments of shocking beauty and great reward as well, and she never stops finding it odd how much she loves her life here even as she wishes she hadn't been forced to build it.
Enough, she tells herself, yet again, and launches into her morning route before she gets even more maudlin than she already is.
She's gasping for breath before she even hits the train station, pushing herself harder than she usually does. Dr. Ellis had warned her, when he'd finally proclaimed her as cured as he could get her, that she would always suffer from shortness of breath when exercising; he'd cautioned her against trying to push too far, too hard, too soon. She'd listened and nodded and agreed with him sweetly, and they'd both known she was going to ignore him completely the minute he discharged her. Sure enough she had, and it had landed her straight back in Ellis's care a day later, and he'd muttered under his breath and put the oxygen mask back on her face and twenty minutes later dumped a workout plan hastily scrawled on scrap paper in front of her. "That's the furthest and fastest you can push it," he'd said. "It will take years for you to get back to your previous condition. If ever. If you rush it, you will do permanent damage. More so than has already been done to you. And this is the last time I'm rescuing you from your own stupidity."
The pace she's driving today is far past what it should be, and her throat is burning, her chest is burning, the cut-glass sharpness of the near-freezing air slicing through her like Sephiroth's sword sliced through her; she can feel the edges of each rib that had been struck through. She can't make herself stop. Even her body isn't her own anymore; it's been colonized by Shinra as thoroughly as half the world has, and this is her one last chance to rebel and say this is mine. No matter how much she'll pay for it when she stops.
She's all the way to Lower Four -- well out of her usual circuit -- by the time the endorphins burn the last of the anger and protest out of her, and their absence (drained away like water out of a cracked and broken cup) leaves her weak in the arms and knees. (Or maybe it's the oxygen deprivation; she's gulping for air so hard her throat is dry and sore, and there are spots and greyness at the edges of her field of vision.) Halfway across the city from her usual haunts, she doesn't recognize any of the people around her, and despite it being early morning (the worst of the predators don't come out until after dark) she's getting more than a few assessing stares.
She bares her teeth at the most obvious, a gang of men sitting on a pile of crates at the mouth of an alleyway smoking and drinking out of a flask they keep passing around, projecting you really don't want to do that as fiercely as she can. It works, at least a little; the amount of misogynist commentary increases (bitch looks like she needs someone to teach her her place; why are they always so unimaginative?) but their body language eases out, projecting far less of a threat, and that's what she always looks at anyway. Still, she jogs another two blocks before finally sitting down on the edge of a planter clogged with dead weeds (there are still people who try to grow flowers down here; she admires their dedication) to pull out her water bottle and drink. It takes a good ten minutes before she can breathe without gulping for air, and as she starts to cool down, the chilly air blowing over her sweat-damp skin makes her start to shiver.
It's a different world over here, so far from the enclave of sanity against the wider world she's always tried to maintain in Lower Seventh. Sometimes she starts to wonder if she's even accomplishing anything, if her patient and stubborn insistence on trying to keep order and civiliation around her is having any effect at all. Next time she starts to doubt, she should just head on over here again and see what it could be without her.
Still, this city has two faces; it always has. Next to Tifa, an old woman steps out onto the porch of her rowhouse and starts sweeping soot and dust off the stones. She gives Tifa a hard look, clearly trying to decide if Tifa is a working girl. (That euphemism has always amused the hell out of Tifa; she works her ass off, of course, but not in the way they mean.) Tifa smiles at her and salutes her with the water bottle before taking the last sip, and that's apparently enough to ease the woman's suspicions, at least somewhat. (Looking around her, Tifa can see the reason for the woman's suspicion; this doesn't seem like the type of neighborhood to often get joggers.) "Morning," she calls, imbuing her voice with a bit of extra cheer. "Would you like a hand?"
Her motive is more giving herself some extra time to recover before making her way back to the bar -- she really shouldn't have driven herself that hard -- and less altruism or neighborly sentiment, but the woman's look turns harder before she grudgingly nods. The work doesn't take long, and by the end of it, Tifa's breathing has evened out completely and the old woman -- Lilah -- has unbent enough to tell Tifa a bit of her story. Husband and son dead in two wars with Wutai twenty years apart, a grandson living Upstairs and too ashamed to come back to visit, but at least he sends money when he can; Lilah takes in mending for the families nearby and made just enough to get by, up until the recent Shinra energy rate hike, and now she's chewing through her savings and her husband's miniscule pension faster than she ever wanted and isn't quite sure how she'll make ends meet when the last of her savings runs out in six months or so.
Tifa resolves to gather up the pile of mending she's been putting off for months and months and have Biggs or Wedge bring it over later this week. She can't save everyone, for all she's no doubt one of the richest individuals in the slums aside from Don Corneo himself. But she can do what she can, where she can, and it's enough to salve her conscience. (Mostly.)
Lilah invites her in for a drink and some breakfast when she's finished sweeping Lilah's stoop and that of her neighbors to either side and weeding out the planters (leaving nothing behind save a few pale mis-shapen shoots, starved for sunlight). Tifa demurs -- not only does she not want to take food out of Lilah's mouth, she really needs to get back to the bar; Shiva alone knows what's going on in her absence -- but she does accept Lilah's offer to at least re-fill her water bottle. (Shinra owns the water supply the same way as they own the electric supply, but rates are far lower. For now, at least; she's heard some muttering about a potential hike there, too. She should ask her unwanted guest. It might be interesting to see him splutter.)
Midgar Below is filled with hundreds of thousands of stories like Lilah's, Tifa thinks, as she re-laces her shoes at the foot of Lilah's stoop before taking off again, this time at a far more sedate pace. The only ones who are making a living down here, the only ones who are doing more than just getting by, are almost always the ones who have taken to preying on others. Law and common decency are usually the first things to go when people are starving. The miracle of the slums is that they haven't slid even further than they have.
Meanwhile, Above, Rufus fucking Shinra wears suits that cost more than what Lilah could make from a decade of work, to parties where enough food to feed an entire sector is thrown out at the end of the night, and has the nerve -- the absolute sheer gall -- to tell her he will do anything he can to make reparations to her for the harm she's suffered at Shinra's hands.
Tifa catches herself speeding up again when her chest starts burning, her rage transmuting itself into speed, and she forces herself to slow back down to nothing more taxing than a jog. She has until she arrives back at the bar to decide what to do about this whole mess; the minute she walks back through her front door, she'll be confronted with the reality of what her life has turned into, and if she goes in blind and reacts out of nothing more than emotion, she'll make mistakes. (Although she will maintain until her dying day telling Rufus fucking Shinra to fuck himself with a cheese grater wasn't a mistake.) All right, Tifa, she tells herself. Work through this rationally. Start at the beginning.
The problem is, the beginning is in Nibelheim, in that night of blood and pain and fire.
And she doesn't actually know the things they want to know.
Oh, she can tell them more than what they know already. Over weeks and months she's given Tseng a bare-bones outline of what she remembers from that night, fed to him in bits and pieces to pique his curiosity and see what information he would provide her in return. (None, at first. She hadn't expected there to be. Playing Tseng of the Turks in a long-term game of chess is either the bravest or stupidest thing she's ever done.) From what Rufus told her last night -- and she's still not sure what was his motive for baring his soul in such a fashion, and she doesn't believe him in the least when he says he's not trying to create a sense of obligation in her in return -- she can even say with certainty she has information they don't.
But the majority of that day is drowned in blood and death, written over in her memory by the heat of the flames, the stench of burning flesh and the pain (oh, Shiva, the pain) and try as she might to piece the facts together, she can't make them make sense.
(She remembers lying on the floor of the reactor, drowning at seventy-five hundred feet while her lungs filled with her own blood, thinking Cloud isn't here, and he promised he would be. She remembers closing her eyes and thinking it would be the last time, only to open them again, realizing the cool soft green light surrounding her was the light of a high-level Restore materia, and Cloud had been leaning over her and looking panicked and she'd thought oh, there he is. She can't reconcile the two. No matter how much she tries. And if her memory is unreliable on that so-central detail, what else is she wrong about? What else is she missing?)
And it isn't that she objects to sharing what she knows with Tseng (and, she supposes, by extension, with Rufus; she knew from the start that what Tseng knew, Rufus would know, sooner or later) on principle. She likes Tseng. She shouldn't; others call him Shinra's hired killer and he's called himself far worse with neither shame nor pride, simply plain fact. He neither apologizes for himself nor makes excuses. At least, he never has in her hearing, and for all they tend to avoid the topic of what he does for a living the same way they avoid the topic of her political views (which is to say, both creep into their discussions because both are so pervasively tied into everything else they are, but they back away as soon as they realize they've strayed into an area marked here be dragons) she thinks she's heard enough of his feelings on the subject to say with confidence he views his work as a job, nothing more.
He does reprehensible things, and he does them for pay, and he does them without a hint of guilt or apology. But she can't help remember one night over a year ago, when he'd come to her with bloodstains imperfectly scrubbed out from under his fingernails and between the creases of his knuckles, when he'd drunk more than he'd meant to and clung to her tightly when she'd put him to bed, when he'd confessed to her he does those things because if he didn't, someone else would. And when it's him, he can at least make sure the people he kills are given a clean and painless death.
(She remembers his words, last night: the bodies were given a decent burial, with all respect possible in the situation. She doesn't doubt they were, and she doesn't doubt he was the one who made it happen, and she doesn't doubt he fought hard and long, in his own way, for the right to make it happen. She doesn't doubt if she goes back to Nibelheim, the burial fields will be unmarked, but Tseng would be able to lead her straight to where her father's body lies.)
(Oh, Shiva, her father.)
Tifa lifts her hand to wipe away the tears burning in her eyes and tells herself to think. Think. They've come to the point she's always feared, where she has to decide whether to cooperate with him -- with them -- the rest of the way or to back away now, and for all she thought she was ready for this moment, she keeps having second thoughts now she's standing on its shores. If she works with them, if she gives up her secrets, in return she might get the answers she's been pursuing since the moment Nibelheim burned. (Why it happened. What really happened. What there was in that reactor, in that mansion, to make Sephiroth angry enough to murder a town and powerful enough to pull it off. Why he'd been sent there, and why there, and who was behind all the death and destruction and what they'd all done to deserve it. Knowing those answers won't bring back the dead. But knowing those answers may help them sleep more soundly in the worlds beyond until they can be born again, and might tell her what she can do to avenge those deaths until her own conscience is satisfied.)
If she works with them, she may be in a place to learn things other than the truth of Nibelheim. That thought has motivated her since the moment she first took over from Kyle, has been the reason she's so adamant her bar will be refuge for Shinra and slum-dweller alike, the reason the Turks (and others) have always been welcome to step foot inside her doors. (That and a ruthless practicality -- she knows she couldn't have stopped them, once they'd decided to patronize the bar -- but just as every good barkeep knows how to make a guest feel welcome, every good barkeep knows how to drive unwanted customers away, so subtly they'd feel it their own choice not to return, and she'd learned those lessons at her parents' knees. She could have driven them away without them ever realizing. She never has.)
The coin of her decision has two faces: on the lighter face, she's hoped since the beginning that by providing a space for the 'sides' of Midgar's eternal class war to mingle freely, to learn each others' faces and voices and lives and history, she could get both sides talking in a way that could lead to positive, meaningful change. She's seen it happen before, where putting a face to a nameless they changed hearts and minds, and she knows that in her own way, she is creating a small but measurable change among the lower echelons of Shinra. The ones who will be in charge, someday. If she can influence policy in some small way, if she can motivate the man or woman who will be making decisions in another five or ten years to think of the people who live in the slums as people instead of walking wallets, she will have succeeded.
On the darker face, she has spent the two and a half years since her recovery keeping her ears open and the drinks flowing, and she has taken each scrap of knowledge dropped from a beer-loosened tongue and filed it away behind her eyes against the day when she finds an anti-Shinra group whose methods and ethics she doesn't find utterly repugnant.
If she buries her misgivings behind a cool smile and gives Rufus fucking Shinra what he wants from her lips and from her memories, she will have a chance to spin out some of that influence into the ears of the man who will someday be the de facto ruler of the world. He would be willing to listen, she thinks. She hasn't yet gotten the full measure of the man -- doesn't think she can get the full measure of him; she already can tell he's the type who lives his whole life in a carnival of funhouse mirrors and has learned to reflect back any face he thinks his watcher wants to see. But even in the few hours she's seen them together, she can already tell she was right in assuming Tseng has given Rufus his unconditional allegiance. Tseng may take orders from Rufus's father, but it's Rufus he follows, and from the things Tseng has let slip over the years, she thinks it always has been.
And she knows Tseng -- better, perhaps, than Tseng might think -- and she knows Tseng's values, bred into him at an early age in a school far harsher than the one in which she herself learned the Wutaian fighting arts and the philosophy and ethics so deeply intertwined with them. For all Tseng defected to Midgar when she was still a child, she knows those values are graved into him so deeply he couldn't undo them, even if he tried. If Rufus were the inveterate monster slum gossip paints him, Tseng would obey him, but Tseng would never respect him.
And it's as clear as a Nibelheim mountain lake Tseng respects Rufus.
If Tifa takes that respect as a sign, if Tifa gives in and compromises her distaste for working with the enemy (but she's been sleeping with the enemy for a long damn time, now hasn't she?) and gives them what they want, she might be able to open Rufus's eyes to the realities of life in the slums and convince him things have to change. And bloodless revolution is far, far better than the guns and bombs and endless chances for disaster Johnny and his crowd of wannabe-revolutionaries have been trying to sell to her for years. She'll have a chance to listen to what Rufus and Tseng say, store up information on the inner workings of Shinra, information that could spell the difference between victory and defeat in some nebulous future war, should Johnny ever change his tune or if she should finally get fed up and start the revolutionary cabal she's been flirting with the idea of starting. (Last night alone had been more information than any of the slums' assorted rebellions have managed to put together in all the time she's known of them, and Rufus had offered that information freely, with no strings attached and no hint he knew the value of what he was providing.)
If she does this, she could change the face of the world.
Then again, they could decide she knows too much and have her killed once they're done. (His father would have him killed if he tried, Tseng's voice whispers in her memory, followed by Rufus: and he's the person who'd probably be tapped for the job, too.) She'd like to think Tseng would quail at carrying out her assassination, were it to be ordered. But she has no illusions about him. She never has. He'd look her in the eye and tell her what he'd been ordered to do, and he'd give her as long as she needed to make peace with herself and with him, and he'd make her death quick and painless, and he'd mourn for her after. But he would do it, no matter how much he would hate himself for the deed. And if she agrees to this madness, she may be placing him -- and herself -- in a position where, somewhere down the line, he will have to.
Can she do that? (Can she not?)
She doesn't have an answer. Can't have an answer, not without information she doesn't have, not without being able to see the future or see into the hearts of men. She's almost certain she can read Tseng well enough to say with confidence she has all the information she needs to make a decision, but Tseng isn't the only player in this game, and Rufus fucking Shinra is a complete unknown. She is conditionally willing to trust Tseng's read on him, but there's nothing to say Tseng's read on him is built from information any more comprehensive than she has herself; she doesn't doubt Rufus would be just as capable of lying to Tseng as he would be of lying to her and for all she knows Tseng has been one of Rufus's teachers since Rufus wasn't even in his teens, she doesn't know how well Rufus had learned to lie for his own purposes by the time they'd met.
All her decision-paths keep coming back to Rufus. Trusting him is out of the question -- she would as soon trust a chocobo to tend bar -- and the most annoying thing is how he knows that, how every word of his speech last night had been carefully calculated to say I know you won't trust me on the surface while underneath he built the case for her to do that very thing. I'm not trying to manipulate you, he'd said, all the while manipulating the fuck out of her, playing on her emotions and her rationality both, like a stage magician who tells you precisely how the illusion is built while pointing to the trick but your eyes can't help being fooled anyway.
She can't evaluate his sincerity. Is literally incapable of evaluating his sincerity, because the man (if he and Tseng are to be believed) has been manipulator and manipulated since before he could even walk, and she has no idea if he even knows what sincerity is. Oh, it's clear he believes he does; looking at him last night, even through the haze of wretched memory and emotional overload his words had conjured, she hadn't doubted for a moment he believed what he was saying. But believing one's own words and actually being sincere are two different things, and it's terrifyingly possible Rufus's life up until this point has left him broken into a thousand shards, each facet capable of being summoned to the fore of him and imbued with enough life to pass for the whole. She can't say. There is no way for her to tell.
She has maybe twenty minutes left to her before she needs to make a decision, one way or the other.
Everyone in this entire clusterfuck is manipulating everyone, and she can't help thinking she's far over her head, in waters full of sharks scenting blood and rocks she'll break against if -- when -- she hits them, and she started this whole mess knowing she'd have to see it through or else things would turn out worse than they'd been when she'd started and knowing that doesn't help. And the worst part is (they are all worst parts) she knows she could tell Tseng everything she has just thought, from beginning to end, leaving nothing out, and he would nod and go away and never bring up the topic again, and it wouldn't change anything.
She doesn't know what to do. (Lie. She knows what she's going to do. She's known what she's going to do since the moment Rufus fucking Shinra walked into her bar. She's known what she's going to do since the moment Tseng pulled her onto her porch and rather than excoriating her for knowing the secret teachings of his people, had -- rather gently, all told -- corrected her grammar and then asked her about that night in Nibelheim once she'd stammered out the truth of the place of her birth. She simply isn't ready to believe it. Not yet.)
Tifa has reached the fringes of her territory, and she realizes -- as she tunes back in to the world around her, as she replays her mind's recording of the last few moments -- that she's answered more than a few hails and greetings as she's been jogging through neighborhoods and niches reclaimed from the lawlessness and anarchy so prevalent here in the slums by the people who've been taking her example and starting to fight back. It's tempting, too tempting, to slow down, to get lured into conversation after conversation, to postpone the moment of reckoning as long as she can. She squashes the impulse as firmly as possible and schools her face as she turns left at the trainyard to make her way over to the market she uses for most of her supplies. (The people who live here look to her for their cues, and if they see her unhappy or frightened about something, they will know something is wrong. She doesn't want any of them to start looking too closely, because they might find something she didn't intend for them to know. This is Midgar: knowing too much is often a death sentence.)
Kenji, the market's owner, has set aside the three bags of her usual order -- mostly produce, brought in over the mountains at great expense from the Grasslands farms that supply Midgar-Above and "lost" by an enterprising trucker or stockboy to be sold to slum grocers at an exorbitant markup -- and she goes through the motions of their typical morning banter, negotiating price and bewailing his "highway robbery", as though someone or something else is possessing her. He doesn't seem to see anything wrong with her, at least. It's good to know she can play normal when she needs to.
She 'wins' the haggling to everyone's satisfaction -- she never tries too hard, since she has the resources to even pay Kenji's original prices and Kenji's trying to raise a family of seven children and a wife too ill to work much, but Kenji would be insulted if she didn't make at least a token effort to bargain, thinking it charity. (Pride is the only meal many slum denizens have, too many nights out of the week.) He throws in an extra loaf of the bread his wife used to bake in batches of hundreds daily and now can only provide for Kenji's most loyal customers. Tifa bites her lip against the useless protest. She, due to the regular order the Seventh Heaven places, is his biggest customer, and he tries his best to keep her happy. She doesn't have the heart to tell him she'd pay twice what he asks.
(You can't save everyone, Tifa, she tells herself. You shouldn't even try. But she does what she can, and she always will, and the day she stops trying is the day she'll borrow Tseng's gun to put a bullet in her brain, because the day she stops trying is the day she will have lost the last of the humanity she's been desperately clinging to, here in the Midgar slums.)
The bar's front door is still closed when she returns. She transfers the straps of all the grocery bags into one hand and pushes it open. The radio's still playing, having transitioned from the morning news to a collection of the pop and rock hits she remembers from her childhood. In the kitchen, Rufus is singing along, half under his breath, dropping into humming along when he can't quite remember the words. Unlike his whistling, he's perfectly on key.
Tifa takes a deep breath and squares her shoulders, then (after a brief but vicious argument with herself, in which she tries to think of any reason why she should turn around and go back out) makes her way across the bar and into the kitchen. She's careful to step a little more heavily than she might otherwise. Rufus turns from the prep counter as she hip-checks the saloon doors open; seeing her, he puts down the knife (he is nearing the end of the bag of potatoes) and comes to help her with the bags.
She grits her teeth and surrenders them into his keeping. "Produce," she says. "Stick them in the walk-in. There'll be an invoice tucked in one of the bags; make sure that gets tacked up on the front of the fridge for me to pay later."
Rufus nods absently, nudging each bag open in turn to glance briefly inside as he turns to the walk-in refrigerator. He pulls out the invoice before he even opens the door to the fridge; she can tell, watching him, he doesn't intend to look more closely, but he is apparently one of those people who are literally incapable of letting the written word pass by them unread. "That's ludicrous," he says, looking at the line-item prices, the total. "That's ten times what I'd pay for this Upstairs. At least."
The only thing that keeps her from snarling at him is that his tone isn't accusatory: it's genuinely, honestly baffled. "I know," she says, feeling too worn and weary to think about how her words might be received. "They're Shinra's policies: priority on fresh food goes to Upstairs first. The only way we get anything fresh at all down here is when somebody 'liberates' a crate or two and smuggles it down for resale, or buys in bulk and transports down here to be marked up for quadruple what they paid. If I want lettuce that isn't brown soup or cheese that isn't moldy, I have to pay through the nose for it, or find someone who lives or works Upstairs and is willing to bring me down a bag or two regularly -- but I can't count on that coming when I need it. That's why my markup on top-shelf liquor and premium beer is so high; it subsidizes the food, so people who live down here can at least get fresh fruit and vegetables in a meal every now and then without having to pay a week's wages for them." She carefully, so carefully, does not add: your people do this to us; why are you so surprised?
Rufus stands there, every inch radiating utter disbelief. "I hadn't realized," he says. He sounds completely shocked, and more than a bit angry.
She knows she should be angry in turn at this display of thoughtless privilege, but something about the outrage she can see building behind his eyes makes her rein in her temper. "Where did you think we got our food from?" she asks. She is careful to keep the accusation out of her voice; it comes out, instead, as curious. She's been operating under the belief all Shinra's top executives knew the company's policies and the conditions in the slums and simply didn't care, or couldn't get support to change things if they did. If that isn't true...
Rufus shakes his head and drags one hand through his hair. "We have whole departments devoted to the logistics of provisioning the city," he says. "I get their reports every week. Reeve has been riding my ass for the past six months about freeing up some money to revamp the supply chain to make it more efficient, but he never said a word about any of this. And if he knew about it, he would have."
Tifa recognizes the name -- Reeve Tuesti, VP of Urban Development, a quiet and unassuming man who accompanies Tseng and the Turks from time to time; he drinks ale, tips generously, busses his own table, never fails to stay late to help with the cleanup if he's there at closing and never gives the impression manual labor is beneath him, and always asks Tifa questions about the experience of living in the slums in gentle and non-judgemental tones. She likes him; he's always seemed too good a man to be working for Shinra. She's mentioned a few of the worst problems to him from time to time, and he's done what little he could to make those problems better. She'd never thought to tell him about the problem of getting fresh food down here; she'd assumed it was an ironclad Shinra policy, another example of saving the best for the chosen few, and Reeve's response if she'd mentioned anything would have been a sad smile and the careful not-apology he uses for when he knows whatever she's talking about is a battle he can't win. "He probably doesn't know," she says. "Or he thought it was the way things were supposed to be."
"No." Rufus shakes his head, still staring at the invoice. "No, it's not how things are supposed to be. And believe me, I'm going to have words with a few people about it when I get back Upstairs."
Cool resolve suffuses his tone, anger transmuted into a soft and deadly determination, and watching him Tifa is suddenly sorry for whomever it is Rufus intends to have those words with. He seems to have forgotten she's watching him; his eyes rove over the paper he's holding, and the more he looks at it, the more locked-down his face becomes. She is virtually certain she is seeing his true, genuine, unmediated reaction. It leaves her more than a bit shaken. It isn't anything like what she would have predicted.
"Is it all right if I keep this?" Rufus finally says, looking back up at her. "Or a copy of this. And any other invoices you can spare from past purchases. It would help to have evidence in my hands when I start knocking heads together."
In that moment, standing in her kitchen still filthy with sweat from her morning run, watching the man who very nearly owns this city become outraged over the price she pays for lettuce, Tifa comes closer to actually not hating him than she ever did while he was actively trying to win her approval. "I need that one," she says. "It stays on the fridge until I pay it off, and then I need to keep it to reconcile my books and do up my taxes. But I have all of last year's invoices on file, and I can spare you those, if you think those would help."
"Yes," Rufus says. "Yes, they would." He pauses, eyes going back to the invoice, until he seems to remember his manners: "Thank you," he adds, and tacks the invoice to the fridge, next to the others Tifa has to pay. (Sundays are for bookkeeping. Assuming she's still here tomorrow, and not dead in an alley somewhere.)
Tifa bites her lip. "I need to finish my workout and cool-down before I totally cramp up," she says. "I'll dig through my records when I get back."
Rufus nods. He opens the walk-in and stows the bags on three separate shelves (precisely where she would have stowed them herself; she still can't decide if those flashes of near-telepathy are annoying or amusing). "Do you mind if I join you?" he asks, the absent-mindedness in his voice indicating he's probably still deep in thought. "I'm assuming you have a gym somewhere I just haven't seen yet, given the shape you're in, but I didn't want to be nosy and go looking."
He comes from an entirely different world than you do, Tifa reminds herself. She shouldn't get angry. In all likelihood, he literally does not know what it is to want something and be unable to have it. To him, she and her lifestyle are as unfamiliar as a space alien would be. There's no point in yelling; it would be like shooting fish in a barrel.
So instead she decides to go for the olive branch, thinking of the shock on his face when he saw her invoices, thinking (again) of the potential for change inherent in having this man's ear even for the few hours she may have it. "I don't, actually. I do my kata in the backyard." Which is actually a strip of dead and dying grass about ten feet by twenty feet, about a quarter of which is given over to the tangled bed of choked, dead weeds that was Kyle's (failed) attempt at growing fresh produce for the bar. She's been meaning to attack it with rake and hoe one of these days, or send one of the volunteers who keep offering their time and effort, but she hasn't been able to find the time as of yet. Maybe one of these weekends she'll organize a work party of regulars, free beer and pizza in exchange for back-breaking labor. She bites her lip and adds, against her better judgement: "If you want, you can join me."
That earns her a smile. She notes, objectively, that Rufus Shinra's smile is beautiful. "Yeah. Yeah, thanks. I get a bit antsy if I can't get moving in the morning. I can give you a sparring match or two, if you want." His smile transmutes into something a bit more rueful, self-deprecating. "Tseng calls my form abominable and my reaction speed slower than a snail on barbituates, which means you might find sparring with me more annoying than helpful, but still."
Tifa snorts. "Tseng has ridiculous standards," she says. The response is purely in order to give herself time to think. On the one hand, she doesn't necessarily want to let him see just how good she really is, on the chance that having him underestimate her could be beneficial in the future. On the other hand, she doesn't get a chance to test herself against a partner very often -- Tseng is always willing to be her opponent when their schedules align and she has time that isn't claimed by her duties to the bar, but that rarely happens any more frequently than once a month or so -- and even if he is as bad as he claims to be (and she doubts any student of Tseng's could be as bad as Rufus claims to be, especially given the way he moves) it will give her valuable practice time. Sparring against a less-skilled opponent can in some ways be more useful than sparring against someone with whom she is matched in ability.
On the gripping hand, testing herself against him would give her the chance to evaluate his skills, which she's already seen the faintest fragment of, and even if he tries to hold back against her at first, she's realistic enough about her talent to say with confidence she can push him into revealing what he's capable of. If not at first, then at least after a round or two.
So be it. "I don't know how well our skills will match up," she says. "But we'll go a round or two, and we can see."
His smile blossoms further, and she thinks: if she knew nothing about him and had just seen his expression change into that smile, she would believe she'd just made his day. "Great," he says. "Let me just finish the last of the potatoes first, and then I'll join you. Shouldn't take me more than ten, fifteen minutes, tops."
It's almost endearing, how seriously he's taking the task of turning potatoes into strips for her to fry up and serve. (She wonders, suddenly, if she is seeing an echo of his work ethic, if he would treat any task he'd set his mind and hand to with the same commitment. The thought feels strange. She wonders if she's trying to talk herself into seeing the best in him because she wants to believe Tseng's trust isn't misplaced.) "All right," she agrees. "Back door's over there."
She doesn't wait for a response, only lets herself out the door, grabbing two bottles of water from the fridge as she goes. She takes her gloves and athletic tape off the shelf by the door, pulling the gloves on and taping up her wrists with the same deft motion she's been using her whole life. Outside, she toes off her shoes -- she can fight in anything from high heels to workboots, but she prefers barefoot when given a choice, for just about everything, and she goes to great effort to keep the backyard free from trash and debris that might endanger her -- and starts in on the set of stretches designed to keep her from pulling a muscle during her training. She keeps a dummy bolted to a pole out here -- a busted-up store mannequin, salvaged from Wall Market's clothing shop that Jessie painted clothing on in garish colors and drew a ridiculous face on, one slow afternoon. (It's the third of its kind; the first two had been stolen. This one's been double-chained to the pole.) When she's finished with her stretches, she bows to it (feeling the usual ridiculousness, but Zangan taught her customs and philosophy in addition to raw technique, and she feels naked if she doesn't follow them) and begins the first of her kata.
As always, the sheer joy of motion chases away any other thought that might be haunting her. She starts slow and steady, the way she always does, with the first training kata designed to further loosen her muscles and begin to focus her mind. Step, strike, turn, strike, turn, kick and kick again; the steady thud of impact after impact vibrates through her until she can think of nothing more. She's been studying these moves for nearly three-quarters of her life. If her body has betrayed her since -- and it has -- at least it has left her this.
She's breathing hard by the time she reaches the tenth kata in the series. She shouldn't be -- she's in excellent physical shape by now, perhaps the best of her life. But the air at sea level is thick and heavy with the chill of early spring, and the air in Midgar's slums is thick with things she doesn't want to think about. Her lungs protest the exertion just as much as they protest being asked to run. (She will blame the air, and not her lungs. It's more comforting that way.)
When she finishes the twelfth set (step, punch, slide, leap, kick, step, punch) and lets her motions flow to their natural close, stepping back and bowing to her plastic opponent, she's startled to hear soft and understated applause drift over to her ears. She turns her head to see Rufus sitting on the tangled grass, his legs splayed out in the V of someone who had been stretching. He's smiling at her. Again. Still. "Beautiful," he says, showing all evidence of complete sincerity. "You really are going to kick my ass."
Tifa wishes, suddenly and sharply, that she didn't have to examine everything this man said to her for evidence of duplicity or deceit. That wish surprises her, and surprise makes her cranky. She does her best to keep it out of her voice. "I don't have an extra pair of gloves," she says instead. "The tape's over by the door, though."
Rufus nods. "Give me five to finish warming up." He bends forward, sliding each hand down one leg until he's gripping his ankles; the motion is swift and graceful, and he moves as though he's long familiar with the routine. Tifa leans one shoulder against the practice dummy and uncaps the bottle of water she'd set beside it, using the drink as an excuse to watch him. He moves through each stretch like water flowing downhill, until he's lying on his back pulling both knees to his chest, and by that time she's watched him long enough that when he plants his palms on the grass on either side of his ears and rolls backwards into a handstand instead of forward to his feet, she is not surprised in the least.
He holds the handstand for a good twenty seconds; she can see his biceps standing out, trembling in sharp relief, but he is as solid and steady as a tree's trunk, and just as motionless. When he comes out of the pose, it's to arch himself backwards yet again, one leg touching down a full second before the other until he is in a perfect back-bend, which he holds for a slow count of five before flowing up to his feet.
He happens to be facing her, and she can see his face for the first time in a good five minutes. His eyes are closed. If she had to pick a word to describe the expression he's wearing, it would be rapture.
Every time she thinks she has figured out so much as one small part of him, something comes along to destroy the mental model she's built, sending her scurrying back to step one. It's exhausting. It's infuriating. It's a puzzle she can't help but want to solve, and she wonders if this is what Tseng intended, in bringing Rufus here, in apparently-deliberately leaving them time to interact without his presence as buffer and mediator. (He knows she rises with the sun each morning; he would know Rufus doesn't sleep well, or at all, in strange beds. It would be far too much like him to have arranged an overnight stay, just to give them this chance for unmediated time together. She wonders what else he might have intended, and whether or not she'll ever know.)
"There," Rufus says, opening his eyes and fixing them on her. He doesn't smile this time, but the quiet, radiant joy he clearly takes in having a body that does what he asks of it is still lurking around his eyes and mouth. She knows that feeling. It's the first point of commonality she can consciously identify as having with him. He turns to the door and the table she keeps there, finding the tape and winding it around his wrists and palms, tearing it with his teeth once he's gotten it arranged to his satisfaction. "Rules?" he asks.
Unsettled by the directions her thoughts are taking, Tifa takes refuge in the formality of reciting the rules of engagement. "No blows to the face or head, no blows to the groin; I don't own padding. When Tseng and I do this, elbows and knees and other delicate joints are fair game, because we both know we're good enough to keep from inflicting permanent damage, but since you and I haven't found each others' measure yet, it's probably safer to call those out of bounds for now. I won't fuss if you aim there by accident or out of instinct, but try to avoid it. We fight to takedown and tap out as soon as the sequence would result in immobilization if followed to its logical conclusion. If you can't tap out, say 'yield', and I will."
Rufus smiles at that. "It could be me pinning you," he points out.
"It could," Tifa agrees. The dryness of her voice should tell him how likely she finds that possibility.
Sure enough, he laughs, and his laugh is free and unfettered. "Yeah, okay. Three out of five? Five out of seven?"
"Three of five is good for now," Tifa says. She shifts her weight into ready stance, waiting until he takes up his position across from her. She's unsurprised to see him bow to her at the same moment she bows to him.
Then they're fighting, and all her thoughts are focused on answering his moves with ones of her own, with no time to analyze anything beyond her next step.
He launches the first attack, hand flashing out for a punch she blocks as easily as breathing. (More easily.) She can see, immediately, the truth of Tseng's evaluation: if Rufus isn't holding back -- and he probably is, just as she will be, but still -- his speed is half of what she's capable of on a good day. (Which is to say, faster than anyone who hadn't been training since their age had been in single digits would be capable of, but still slow enough for her to see and counter any move even as he begins to make it.) His form is just as sloppy as he'd claimed, but not from lack of effort or from not caring; it's the sloppiness stemming from having learned multiple fighting disciplines all at once instead of adding the others on later, once his form had already codified. He has the instincts of a fighter, and the ability to move without telegraphing his movement. She has seen far, far worse.
She can see Tseng's handiwork in every move Rufus makes, from the kick he snaps at her torso to the way he flows with the motion as she blocks the attack with her forearm and turns his momentum against him; instead of fighting her throw, he goes down in a controlled fall and bounces back up before she can take advantage of his momentary weakness. He presses her hard for a few minutes, blows coming fast and furious as he tries to discern her reach and her skill level, and she notes that he does speed up as he goes; he had been holding back, then. That pretense is forgotten, or at least eased back on, as he tries again and again to land a true blow that she can't block and fails, over and over.
"Alexander's balls, woman," he finally says -- not quite breathing hard, but not quite easily either -- as she fends off a one-two combination punch deftly enough to nearly unbalance him, then steps neatly back instead of pressing the opening. "Don't just stand there and defend. Fight me."
The last two words are an angry snarl; in them she can hear years of pent-up frustration, and even if she can't fully pinpoint its source, she can guess at least part. How hard must it be, to find sparring partners willing to press you honestly, when you control every aspect of their lives from employment to housing and beyond? She wonders, suddenly, if he has as much trouble finding someone to practice with as she does. She can tell from the way he moves, from the single-mindedness with which he throws himself into the physicality of their bout, that he takes this seriously; it isn't a whim or a rich boy's lark, isn't his attempt to imitate his teacher and mentor in the hopes of gaining approval or praise. No matter what his reason for learning to fight in the first place, he glories in the motions, in having skill hard-won and the chance to use it. Whatever started him on the warrior's path, his feet found a home there once they had stepped upon it.
So she discards her plan of letting him wear himself out against her defense to grin back at him -- he blinks twice, seeing the expression on her face, the first real smile she's given him, but in that moment she can't not -- and steps back to regroup. "Okay," she says.
It's the only warning she gives him.
She has him on the ground in another thirty seconds, his arm twisted up behind his back, her knee in his kidneys. He taps out with no shame or pause the minute she settles her weight against him, and he's actually laughing as he follows with the verbal "Yield!" She rolls off him as soon as he does, coming up to her feet in a loose ready position, and he's grinning like a maniac when he bounces back up to match it. They bow to each other again, eyes locked on each others' chests -- she's gratified to see he knows as well as she does where to watch for signs of one's opponent's next move -- and his laughter is damn infectious as they circle each other slowly and wait to see who'll make the first move.
She's the aggressor this time, feinting neatly to the right -- he moves to block, checks himself as soon as he realizes it was a feint -- and striking left. He blocks that one, and the one after, and by then she's laughing too, part out of joy (she loves doing this) and part out of sheer, unrelenting surreality. Step, strike, block, whirl, snap-kick that brings her back foot off the ground, and he hollers in triumph as he manages to block what most men would have fallen from. "Nice," she calls to him, and then it's back to block, push, feint, strike, speeding up as she goes, pressing him harder and harder until he's retreating backwards with each move. Another man might be furious with himself. Rufus Shinra only keeps laughing.
She wins that bout too, taking him down when he rushes for an all-or-nothing charge (one she will admit would have worked with almost any opponent other than her) and she exploits the weakness he had left unguarded. He's calling the yield even before they roll to a stop, he on his back and her hand on his throat, and he looks more alive than she thinks he may have felt in months.
Roll, stand, step back, bow, and he's breathing hard (as hard as she is) but he doesn't let it stop him. They are suddenly in mutual, wordless accord, deciding through nothing more than tilt of head and twist of mouth this bout is for trading blows back and forth, passing the role of aggressor from hand to hand as they work over the full expanse of the yard available to them. She can see, on one pass, that Saidy and Hidetoshi from next door have popped their heads over the fence that separates their property from hers, probably having dragged over chairs to stand on so they can watch the spectacle. She doesn't blame them. She's holding back -- fighting at what she'd guess is sixty-five percent of her full capacity -- and she thinks Rufus might be holding back too, but the end result is nearly perfectly matched, and they both seem content to let it be. It must be stunning to watch.
Tifa has hit the strange, glorious meditative state she's fallen into a few times before -- bouts with Zangan; bouts with Tseng -- where the world seems crisp and edged around her, where she feels as though she's caught in slow-motion and each second takes five seconds to go by. From the way Rufus is moving, with her and around her, she thinks he might have as well. By this point, they're very nearly playing; she pulls out a kick she'd never dream of trying in actual combat, half front-flip and half thumbing her nose at gravity, and he answers with arms crossed to trap her foot and a controlled fall backwards that leaves them both sprawled in the grass. She's laughing as she rolls backwards and body-flips back to standing, and he answers with a whoop that's half admiration, half delight.
Step, strike, kick-kick-kick, around and around they go, and by now neither of them is trying to win. They both know she will in the end -- it's plainly clear she's the better fighter, and Rufus's movements acknowledge as much, with no shame or anger, even as he throws himself fully into testing himself against her. They've slipped out of the perfect forms they've both been drilled in: she throws a punch that quotes the street fighting Biggs keeps trying to teach her; he closes in and answers with a throw that's three-quarters classical wrestling and one-quarter pure Tseng dirty trick.
They've gone beyond sparring and into the realm of dance; they've gone beyond dance and into the realm of conversation. Their bodies are speaking to each other, call and answer, question and response: here, see, this is what I mean, this is how you answer, and his body, pressed up against hers as his hands close on her arm and he ducks to throw her over his shoulder, is singing a radiant and exultant note of wonder, loudly enough that she can feel it even as her body is echoing it back to him.
In that instant, she feels like she knows him. (In that instant, she truly does. No one can fight a bout like this and still be strangers at the end, whether enemy or not; it is as intimate as love-making, in its own strange way.)
All perfect moments come to a close, and this is no different; she can feel him start to falter after innumerable measures of their dance, feel his fierce and open energy start to flag, and she herself is breathing hard enough for her throat to hold deserts and razors again. She's astonished he's managed to match her this far, but it's time to end it, and end it she does: "Close it down," she rasps, and "yeah," he husks back, and -- warning thus delivered and honor thus satisfied -- she has him in the grass again in another minute.
She doesn't bother waiting for his formal concession, just rolls off him even as he's tapping out to sprawl, boneless and exhausted, into the grass herself. Rufus slumps next to her, utterly wrung out, looking like she's used him for a cleaning rag. She feels about the same. "Ramuh," Rufus says, laughter threaded through his voice. "Told you you'd kick my ass."
Tifa turns her head so she can look at him. The grass feels good against her cheek even though it's almost completely dead, cool and still damp with the morning dew. He's looking back at her, and his face is open and unguarded, and in that instant she can see the traces of the boy he used to be.
She wants to say something to re-establish their antagonism, to put them firmly back on the footing of Shinra and slum-rat, to cut off the conduit that has sprung to life between them. She doesn't. Maybe it's the little boy she can see in his eyes, the open and unmediated glimpse at what she thinks might very well be the real Rufus Shinra peeking through the mask he's been wearing (more or less, yes and no) since the minute she met him. "You put up a damn good fight," she says instead. His grin gets even wider, and in that moment she can feel the first stirrings of being at peace with the decision she knows she's already made.
"You flatter me," Rufus says. He lets his head loll back until he's staring up at the plate. "Ramuh and Ifrit. I need to get up. I know I need to get up, or else I'm going to die, right here. Please tell my legs I'd like them to check in with me when they're done with their little vacation."
The self-deprecating humor is actually funny this time; something to do with the way that he isn't using it as a weapon, and it isn't actually mocking her even as he purports to be mocking himself. He uses humor as another type of shield, she realizes, one flash of insight that slides in through her exhausted neurons and slides away again. If he mocks himself first, no one else can get the drop on him; if he seems like he's taking nothing at all seriously, it will hide those things he is deathly serious about. "Tseng's going to be upset that he missed the show," she says.
Rufus snorts. "Tseng was watching from the bedroom the whole time, or I'll eat my leather jacket." He lifts one arm, groans again, and lets it flop back down in the grass. "I just saw the curtain move. He's trying to decide if he wants to come down here and risk interrupting whatever truce we've declared in order to give us a hand up. Or just to mock us for being lazy bums who are sprawling in the dirt instead of doing useful work."
"I'll put my money on the mockery," Tifa says. And then, since he's the one who brought it up: "I still don't trust you, you know."
"I know." Rufus's face, despite being calm and still, is somehow just as open as it had been while they were sparring, and she does not sense one bit of duplicity from him. He could be posing, could have summoned one of his faces and fitted it atop the true-self she'd seen, so smoothly she'd miss the change. But she doesn't think he has. "I told you last night. I know. And I don't blame you. If I were in your shoes, I wouldn't trust me either. Hell, if I were you, I'd have thrown me out of the bar last night so hard I'd still be bouncing this morning. You have no idea how much I respect the fact you haven't."
There is nothing but truth in his voice or in his face; he's not saying what he wants her to hear. For the first time since he stepped through the doors of her bar last night, she thinks she's hearing his true thoughts, without censor, without an attempt (conscious or not) at manipulation, without a hidden agenda and without trying to hold sixteen layers of shifting goals and desires silently behind his eyes. He sounds a little sad, and a little tired, and a little regretful, and a little in awe. She wonders if this is the Rufus Shinra Tseng gets to see, to have won his fealty so strongly.
"I can't give you back what you've lost," Rufus says. His face twisting, pure contempt flashing across it for one instant before sliding back to neutrality, he adds, "And I don't mean the way my father, that fuckhead, tried. I can't fix everything Shinra's done wrong. Hell, we saw not an hour ago, I don't even know everything Shinra's doing wrong. I can't bring your family back to you. All I can do is try to solve the mystery and go from there, and I need your help to do it. If we work together, I'm going to piss you off more times than you can count. I'm going to tempt you to the point of murder at least once. I'm a proud man, and I'm a stubborn man, and I'm an angry man, and Tseng tells me ten times a day that I have absolutely no concept of how anybody lives any further down than the sixtieth floor."
He turns his head, then, to look directly at her. His face is calm, but his eyes are burning. "But I can offer you one thing. When I'm working to redeem a slight upon my honor, or upon my name, I am relentless. And what happened to you and yours is a slight upon my name that will take years to wash clean. I'm prepared to do whatever it takes to find out what really happened in Nibelheim that night. I will not stop until I am satisfied. With or without you, I will not give up until my honor has been redeemed."
In his voice, Tifa hears death for whomever he determines bears the fault of that night. It isn't the death of fire and steel that Nibelheim died; it's the slow death of ice closing over the top of one's head, as patient as a glacier. His voice, his words, should be melodramatic, like the villain (or the hero) in an overwrought radio play. Nobody talks like that. Nobody thinks like that. But he isn't overacting. He isn't acting at all. He is simply telling her the way he views the world, and although she despairs of ever, ever understanding one fraction of the whole that is this man, she thinks she's seen enough of him by now to at least say he's offering her naked honesty in this moment. No masks thrown up between them. Not anymore.
"But it would be easier with you," Rufus finishes, and as suddenly as that, he's back to being the carefree young man with whom she's just spent half an hour dancing. He even smiles, just a little. "If you need more incentive, I'll even give you this: when this is over, once we've finished our work, I'll give you a week, for you to show me anything you think I need to know about the realities of life Underneath. Because this is my city, and I love her, and nobody should go hungry or homeless within her borders. I can't guarantee I can change anything. Not yet. You heard Tseng last night: my father holds the leash tightly, and every time I try tugging on it a little, I get exiled to Junon and I'm only allowed back once Daddy dearest thinks I'm ready to go back to toeing the company line. But I'll do what I can. And someday the company will be mine, and when that happens, I'll listen to anything you tell me and fix anything I agree needs to change. My word of honor on that. And hopefully, by then you'll have come to realize what it truly means to me."
Tifa notices that he doesn't promise to fix things. Only listen. Strangely, that makes her more likely to believe it's a promise he actually intends to keep. She finds her voice, somehow. "If I'm still alive."
Rufus's smile grows sad, and he rolls back over to stare up at the plate again. "If we're still alive, yes," he agrees. (She notices his change of pronoun and does him the favor of not commenting upon it.)
Tifa closes her eyes. Behind them, she can see flames. I'm sorry, Daddy. Please tell me I'm doing the right thing. But it's time to roll the dice, gamble everything on one single throw, and this will either be the best decision she's ever made or the moment she threw her life away, and she almost certainly won't know which for months. Years, even.
Now or never.
She opens her eyes, and pushes herself up: to her seat, to her knees, and from there she just keeps going until she's standing. Rufus turns his head to look at her. She can read unleashed curiosity in his face, and she wonders how much of it is real and how much of it is what he wants to show her. (What she wants to see.)
She holds a hand down to him. "Come on," she says. "I need a quart of water, a shower, and a change of clothes. Then I'll make breakfast -- I'm thinking waffles, maybe."
She takes a deep breath. Her ribs ache, and her lungs still burn, and she thinks she can feel every fraction of her scars. But it's time, and more than time, and Tifa Lockheart of the Seventh Heaven is many things, but she will not let herself be a coward.
"And then," Tifa says, and she sees the raw, naked hope leap into being on Rufus's face: "then, we'll talk."