( 8. )

Tifa wakes up with dust and Tseng's hair in her nose and a weight on her chest that feels like a Valron is sitting on top of her. The dust is from the fact that no matter how hard they tried, they couldn't get all the dust out of the sheets and blankets, and the mattresses are a lost cause. The Valron on her chest is because even though she was drinking water until she thought she'd nearly float away, all night long while they worked and listened to Vincent dance around all the things he wasn't yet going to tell them, and even though Reno was pressing more pills on her every three hours like clockwork, she knows she's not going to be able to breathe clearly again until she gets back down to sea level. (Dammit.) Tseng's hair is because despite having gone to sleep alone -- the first out of everyone to sleep after a night of trying to figure out what the hell had gone on down there, and though she'd thought she'd toss and turn all night, seeing the horror-show images of what was lurking in the basement beneath them playing out before her eyes like a slide show of death and destruction, she'd dropped off immediately -- and though she'd thought she would perhaps be the only one sleeping that night, at some point Tseng had climbed into bed with her.

Usually, when they sleep together (more often this week than in the past six months before, and at least the human connection is a small comfort in the middle of this madness), she wakes to find herself draped over his chest. This morning, she's on her side and he's spooned up behind her, one arm draped over her side and one hand splayed across her chest, his nose buried in the nape of her neck and his hair half-tangled with hers and lying everywhere. Their relative positions tell her she was unconscious enough when he came to bed that she didn't wake at all when he did. That's unusual. She suspects the last set of pills Reno pressed upon her might have included a sedative or a tranquilizer of some sort, although she doesn't feel anywhere near as groggy as she felt yesterday morning. Which is good; she never wants to feel that groggy again in her life.

She rolls over, slowly enough that hopefully she won't wake him as she wiggles her way out from under his arm, and apparently he's tired enough for it to work; he doesn't stir. Once she's sitting up, she takes an experimental deep breath (get it over with quickly, learn the bad news). She has to close her eyes against the way her inhale catches on something at the halfway point, hitches and skips and slices its way through her chest. She lets the breath out, tries again and gets three-quarters of the way through before it happens again, and does not let herself react. (This wasn't home anymore anyway. Home is a surprisingly large apartment over a surprisingly-hers bar in a city she loves surprisingly more than she should, with people who look to her for life and livelihood and respite and retreat. It doesn't matter that she can't breathe comfortably here anymore. This is the last time she'll ever be here.)

She's wearing the same clothes she went to sleep in, her tank top and skirt. The hair elastic and pins that had held her hair in its bun yesterday are piled on the nightstand. She leaves the pins, but takes the elastic and uses it to pull her hair back. It's tangled enough from sleep that she can't braid it; she isn't sure where their suitcases were left, though. She'll dig out her hairbrush later and try to conquer it. Or let Tseng do it.

As she eases out of the bed, her feet as silent as she can make them on the floorboards, there's a movement from the far side of the bed. What she took for a pile of discarded blankets shifts; she barely keeps herself from squeaking as Rufus sits up, blinking owlishly. When he sees it's her, he lowers the pistol he'd pulled from underneath his makeshift pillow and runs a hand through his hair. She lifts a finger to her lips, gesturing for silence, before he can say anything, indicating Tseng still sleeping soundly. Rufus nods, yawns once, and climbs out of the nest of blankets. He's wearing nothing but a pair of sweatpants, and part of her can't help but notice the firm, solid musculature of his chest. His suits hide it, rather well. She thinks that's probably deliberate.

Tifa gestures to the hallway -- I'm awake; I'm going downstairs -- and Rufus nods again. She isn't surprised when he follows her, but he doesn't say a word, even when they're far enough from the door to the bedroom they slept in (not, thankfully, the one with the door to the secret basement lab) for his voice not to carry. He peels off when they get to the top of the steps downstairs; he heads down, while she heads for the bathroom.

Her toiletries case is on the back of the toilet tank -- Tseng's work, no doubt; he's got an attention to detail that she'd kill to find in any one of her employees -- and she makes quick work of her morning routine, brushing her teeth and detangling and braiding back her hair before making her way downstairs. She can hear water running in the kitchen, and finds Rufus muttering imprecations at the coffee maker. (The pantry, they'd discovered last night, is well-stocked enough that they can probably just get by without having to visit the town for supplies, even though all of it is canned or freeze-dried or under a Stop spell to be nonperishable and doesn't look like it was all that great quality to begin with. Rufus had said uncomplimentary things about the quality of the coffee, although Tifa hadn't noticed anything wrong with it.)

"Reno's downstairs, on guard," Rufus says, before she can figure out what kind of greeting she's supposed to give him. He sounds bleary and exhausted, but awake enough. "Tseng and Valentine spent the rest the night after you fell asleep going through the rest of the papers and books down there, working on figuring out what we should take and what we can destroy. Valentine still hasn't told us much past the absolute basics; he's still trying to figure out whether or not he can trust us, although I think he's starting to come around. The SOLDIER -- his name's Zack Fair, I looked up his jacket from the ID on his tags -- woke up again for about fifteen minutes. He wasn't very coherent, but he could at least confirm it was Hojo who put him there, and Hojo has been back at least a few times to ... inspect his work. The other man -- Cloud --" She can't see his face -- he's still fussing with the coffee maker, trying to get it to turn on, but from the sound of the pause she thinks he might be biting his lip, trying to figure out how to say it. "He hasn't woken up again. Reno isn't ... sanguine about his potential for a full recovery. I'm sorry."

In the cold light of morning, the realities of what she'd seen last night -- of Cloud, whole and real and not the hallucination she'd feared he had been, for so damn fucking long -- it's easier to be optimistic. Still not easy, but easier. "Thank you," she says, softly. "I ... Cloud's always been more stubborn than any of us ever gave him credit for. I'm not going to give up on him yet. No matter what's been done to them." She crosses the kitchen on light feet, reaches for the machine. "Here. Let me; it looks like the one I used to have in the bar before I replaced it."

Rufus cedes his position to her. She can feel the weight of his regard as he watches her out of the corner of his eye. Trying to decide how sincere she's being, she thinks, or possibly trying to figure out how much blame she places on his shoulders for this entire clusterfuck. (Less than he might think, she thinks. Not nothing, because he does bear some culpability -- all of Shinra does, and he more than most, since he should have known what was going on inside the company that will be his someday -- but she won't judge him by his father's failures. She'll judge him by what he makes of the knowledge, now he has it.)

"We need more people to take care of this before we leave," Rufus continues. "There's no way we'll be able to relieve the basement of enough of its files without help, and a truck, and I'm not leaving anything behind us when we go. I called in this morning before Tseng and I crashed, while I was handling all the shit I left back in Midgar. Rude and Reeve are flying in to Rocket Town, then coming in overland. They should be here anywhere in the next few hours, depending on how bad the mountain passroads are. Rude said to tell you Elena's been, quote, 'kicking ass and everything's running just fine', unquote. I really wouldn't have pulled them, except we don't know what's going to be useful and Valentine's got his lips sewn --" He stops; she looks over to see his eyes reflecting the sudden horror of a man realizing a metaphor might be more literal than not. "-- Valentine's being cagey. Tseng told them to stash the car somewhere in the mountains and make their way down on foot, and to be careful when they do, and we think they can probably get in without tipping anyone off."

Tifa pushes the last two buttons in sequence, and the coffee maker gurgles and starts to drip. "If you can get a message to them before they get here, I can tell them the best places to hide the car, and the trails that have the best chance of making it down here undetected," she says. "Or I can go pick them up and guide them in." She's not sure how well her lungs will handle the exertion, but it would be easier than trying to provide directions; she's not entirely sure how the paths have changed.

The weight of Rufus's gaze grows sharper, until she imagines she can feel it, sweeping along her jawline, pressing against her cheek. "I thought you'd need more convincing about the merits of the plan," he says.

Tifa shrugs and reaches up to the cabinets, standing on tiptoe (she misses her bar, dammit, where everything is hung at heights she can reach without having to stretch) to rummage through for two coffee mugs. "You mean, you thought I'd flip out because two of the three people you arranged to cover for me while I was gone are no longer on the schedule," she corrects. When she turns to the sink to fill a glass of water -- her head hurts, goddamn it, worse than her chest even does, and while she knows it's probably not going to stop hurting as long as she's here, staying hydrated can at least prevent it from getting worse -- Rufus is staring at her, confusion and chagrin written clearly across his face. He shakes himself, just a little, when he sees her looking at him, and the familiar blankness settles over his features again. (She thinks she only got to see it in the first place because he's too exhausted to cover, and because he's had a shit week and he hasn't had his coffee yet.)

She takes pity on him. "It's all right, you know," she says. "I didn't think it was going to last. They're too valuable to your organization to tie up in a bar in the slums for long. If I'm right, you can count the number of people you trust enough -- or can fake trusting well enough -- to call on for something like this on one hand. You can't afford to have half of them out of commission for something so relatively minor."

She has surprised him. He stares at her, that uncanny lack of emotion splayed across his face. By now, with enough time together to have begun to learn how to read him, that flat affect is enough to be a cue on its own; it means he's thinking something he doesn't want anyone to guess at. "I keep underestimating you," he eventually says. "I'm not sure why. You've certainly demonstrated enough times that I shouldn't."

That makes her laugh, which sets off a fit of coughing. He takes a step towards her, concerned, and she waves him off. The unthinking expression of concern makes her decide to take a chance at saying what she's really thinking; he's proven enough times that he's willing, or at least able, to hear it. (All right, and because she wants to prove to him that her insight isn't a fluke.) "Because you've spent your whole life building an identity based on being the smartest person in the room," she says, leaning one hip back against the counter and watching him closely. "Because subconsciously you still think 'slum' means 'stupid', even if you'd never let yourself think it consciously. Because you don't have many -- any? -- examples of intelligent women in your life, and most likely have to cope with a lot of women throwing themselves at you in the hopes of snaring the Shinra fortune, and it's built up a great deal of negative association. Because you've had a series of very bad shocks in the last seventy-two hours or so, and most people, when they're trying to deal with something this stressful, retreat back to first principles, whether consciously or not."

Something flashes deep in Rufus's eyes, even though he manages to hold on to the control he's keeping on the rest of his expression. Tifa expects an immediate denial, expects spluttering and shock and possibly for him to turn her words back on her, since she's pretty sure he believes that the best defense is a good offense. But he surprises her: all he does is tilt his head to one side, his brows drawing together thoughtfully, and he's quiet for a good long moment as he studies her. Looking for hints, she thinks, on how she means her statements and which aspects he should address first.

"Add another example to the list," Rufus finally says. "You know, most people wouldn't dare to say anything like that to me."

Those words could be a threat, Tifa knows -- would be a threat, if they were delivered in a different manner, or by a different man -- but she knows Rufus doesn't intend them to be. They're an observation, a statement of absolute fact, delivered in a meditative and dispassionate tone: most people in the world wouldn't dare to confront Rufus Shinra with the evidence of his own privilege, of his own preconceptions, and Tifa is pretty certain the list of people who would is a near-exact overlap with the list of people whom Rufus would trust enough to call in for something like this. (Which makes it ... four people. Tseng, Reno, Rude, and Reeve. Shiva's garters, she hasn't quite realized up until this very moment just how isolated Rufus really is, or how miserable his life must be in some ways.)

"I'm not scared of you," Tifa says. It's not exactly the truth. She is frightened: of what he could do to her if he decided it was necessary, of what a wreck he could make of her life if it would advance his cause in any meaningful way. Or just by accident, through not realizing what effect his actions might have on someone who lives in a world so drastically different than the world he knows. That's almost worse: that he could destroy her and not even realize he was doing so. But she may have only known him for three days, but she's already confident enough in her assessment of him -- in her assessment of Tseng's loyalty, and the quality of Tseng's ability to judge character -- to say with certainty that he would not do it covertly.

If she gets in his way, he will have no compunctions at eliminating the problem she poses. But he will look her in the eye while he does so, and that's more than nearly everyone in the world gets.

She realizes, suddenly and swiftly, that -- for the time being, at least -- she has been included on the list of people Rufus Shinra will deal openly and honestly with. She doesn't doubt it's temporary, and she doesn't doubt she belongs on that list solely because of her connection with Tseng -- and she wonders how much of that Tseng intended, when Tseng first decided to seduce her and found her all too willing, and how much of all this Tseng has been planning from the start -- but it doesn't change the fact that she's there now. She can't quite place her finger on what she feels about her inclusion in what is perhaps the most exclusive company of people in the world.

She should be planning ways to exploit it, she knows. She should be thinking of what she can get out of this, and how she can use the situation to her advantage and to the advantage of all the people in the slums, and how she can ingratiate herself further into Rufus's good graces and influence him in the future. Or, at the very least, she should still be gathering information, plotting and planning and storing away scraps and fragments of intelligence that might be useful later.

She's not sure when she stopped doing that. All she knows is the thought of exploiting the situation she's found herself in -- exploiting Rufus -- makes her feel vaguely queasy. She'd sworn, going into this whole insane adventure, that she wouldn't let it change her mind about Shinra. She should have realized it was a fool's vow even as she was making it. She hasn't changed her mind about the Shinra Electric Power Company, but this particular Shinra is another story altogether.

Rufus can't quite meet her eyes; it's the only thing, she knows, preventing them from falling into that strange unspoken communication she still doesn't understand. (She has no idea how it is she can read him so well, how she's found this much commonality with a man with whom she has nothing in common.) "Yes," he murmurs, as though to himself. Then he shakes himself again and reaches for one of the two mugs she'd brought down. He swaps the carafe of coffee for the mug so deftly that only a drop or two of the dripping stream of coffee falls to the burner; it hisses and dances, boiled away, as he watches the mug fill. It's a server's gesture, another of those quick, instinctive actions that feel casual and offhanded like he's done them a thousand times before, and it's just another one of those weird character notes she can't quite manage to explain away.

He switches out the full mug for the other, empty one after a minute, and then surprises her by handing her the full mug and waiting for the second one to fill for his own. "What're yours?" he asks, watching the coffee drip.

Tifa shakes her head. She's found him easy enough to follow so far, but this time he's lost her. "My what?"

In profile, she can see his lips quirk upward, a self-deprecating smile delivered quickly and then let to fade. "Sorry. Usually I'm better at showing my work, but I haven't had my coffee yet. You said most people retreat to first principles when they're dealing with something this stressful. What're yours?"

The question has the air of something deadly serious despite the light, almost teasing tone he adopted to ask it. Normally, she would give a question like that a flippant reply, something to deflect her interlocutor away from taking a good hard look at her, something to keep from giving too much away. She's already stripped herself bare for this man, though -- figuratively, literally -- and at least since Saturday night she's been dancing around admitting to herself that she's agreed to be Rufus's ally. For a while, at least. He's entitled to ask the question; he's entitled to know as much as he can about her strengths and weaknesses, in order to be able to make intelligent decisions. For the good of the mission they've teamed up for, even if it means giving him enough that he'll be able to predict her later once the mission is over. (But Tseng already knows that much of her, and when they find themselves on opposite sides, she's sure Tseng will be one of the ones sent to deal with her. She's not thinking about that, either.)

So Tifa starts opening cabinet doors, looking for the sugar -- there's no milk, not even those awful fake-milk plastic pods she sometimes has to resort to in the Heaven when her suppliers can't find her milk that hasn't soured, but she's pretty sure she saw some powdered non-dairy creamer, too; she just can't remember where it all was -- and does him the courtesy of thinking about his question. He doesn't interrupt while she does. Eventually, though, she has to give up. "It's going to sound like I'm ducking the question -- which I'm not trying to -- but I don't actually know. Not the extent of them. Three years ago I would've had an answer for you. I've changed in the past few years. A lot."

Rufus opens the drawer at his right hand, unerringly, and pulls out a spoon to hand to her for the sugar. She takes it; he swaps his mug for the carafe again (managing to avoid spilling anything this time) and reaches past her for the one cabinet she hadn't gotten to in her search yet. Of course it's the one that has the sugar and the powdered creamer. "So give me both answers," he says. "Then and now."

Tifa gives him a good hard look. He looks back, meeting her eyes fearlessly -- of course he would, even though most people have trouble holding her gaze when she puts that much push behind it. But Rufus can do that push too -- she's seen him do it, to Tseng, to her -- which is probably why he seems immune to hers.

His eyes really are impossibly blue.

Tifa isn't sure what the answer to his question is. Not consciously. So she does what she usually does when she knows she knows an answer somewhere deep inside her head, but can't put her finger on it: she starts pacing and she starts talking, trusting that sooner or later, she'll find the words she's looking for. She isn't sure why she wants to answer his question, except the possible hope that if she explains her belief system to him well enough, he'll begin to see all the ways in which Shinra is failing her. Failing everyone who isn't part of their elite. He's already shown signs of seeing far, far more than she would have expected him to see, but she's not sure what his underlying principles are, past the commitments of honor and responsibility he's already claimed in her hearing, and there are a thousand different ways to interpret honor. Maybe if she tells him what hers are, he'll help her understand a little more of his own.

"My -- My father raised me to have a few basic principles," she starts, slowly. "To treat people equally, and equally well, no matter who they were or how much power or money they had -- or didn't. To work hard at whatever I did, no matter what it was. To always do my best, no matter how exhausted or upset or angry or just plain not into it I was, no matter whether I was enjoying what I was doing or not. To always be prepared, and always plan ahead, and always think before I acted or before I said anything, because not being prepared can kill you in the mountains and if you stop to think before you do anything you're less likely to make mistakes because you're panicking, but at the same time, to trust my instincts and not stop to over-think things in the middle of a crisis." Hearing her father's lessons laid out like that, even in summary, her throat itches with the desire to weep for him again, but she's done her share, and more than her share, of grieving. "I guess that hasn't changed much," she adds. She hadn't thought about it in so many words in a long time, but she's been living by her father's credo for as long as she can remember.

When she turns on her heel to pace back the way she came, she sees that Rufus, ignoring the table and chairs at the other side of the room, has vaulted up onto the counter. He's sitting cross-legged, his back ramrod-straight, drinking his mug of coffee and watching her over its rim. He doesn't pretend he isn't inspecting her closely when she meets his eyes, just salutes her offhandedly with the mug and takes another sip. He looks interested. No, strike that; he looks fascinated. At the thought of her having a good enough relationship with her father for her to have learned standards of ethical behavior from him? From what Tseng has told her, from what Rufus has insinuated, that must be as alien to him as his upbringing was to her.

Tifa makes her way back over to the counter and picks up her own mug of coffee; she has to blow across the surface to cool it off enough to drink, since the non-dairy creamer does nothing to assuage the heat, and she wonders whether Rufus has heat-resistant skin lining his mouth and lips, to be nearly halfway through his already. He still doesn't say anything, just continues to watch her, and the expectant weight of his silence tells her that he doesn't think she's done talking yet. (She isn't, she supposes. But it's irritating for him to assume.)

"I started studying the Wutaian arts when I was six," she says. The corner of Rufus's right eye twitches at that revelation. She wonders why. "So -- sixteen years, give or take. My teacher taught me a lot of things beyond just the fighting moves. I've learned enough from Tseng to know that what he taught me wasn't exactly what a Wutaian child learns, but Tseng says it's close enough. He -- my teacher -- he was half-Wutaian, came to Wutai as a teenager and lived there for twenty years. I'm still not sure how he persuaded them to teach him -- they're not fond of anyone whose heritage isn't pure -- and he won't say anything one way or the other, but from him, I learned a lot of the same lessons. Work hard. Train every day. There's always room for improvement. The thing he taught me that my father didn't, though, was that -- When you're stronger than someone else, when you're faster or better or more dangerous than someone else, it's your responsibility to protect them. To take care of them. And you have to watch yourself, every day, every minute, because the more you learn the fighting arts, the more dangerous you are. You're making yourself a weapon, and nobody's going to tell you what's right and what's wrong. You have to figure that out for yourself. And I learned that the hard way."

Bitter shame floods back into her throat at the memory. She'd forgotten about it until that very minute. She's forgotten so much, washed away by the flame and the agony and the fear, that sometimes she feels like her whole life before she came to Midgar is nothing but a half-remembered dream. This, though, is something she'd tried so hard to make herself forget, long before that horrible day, even as the lessons she'd learned from it had written themselves deep.

Sensing that she isn't going to say anything further without being prompted, Rufus says, "I won't push, but if it's something I should know --"

Tifa shakes herself out of her reverie. "No, it's just -- I -- My mother died when I was young, and I went a little wild for a -- long time, afterwards. There were four of us who always used to run all over the town and the mountains together, me and three boys my age, and when I was sixteen, one of them --" She stops and shakes her head, slowly. "He thought I was his girlfriend. I thought we were all just friends. He used to come and throw stones at my window on the nights my father was staying over at the inn to take care of things, until I would sneak out through the side door so Mrs. Strife next door wouldn't see us and tell my father what I was up to. We'd go out exploring the foothills by moonlight together -- oh, it was so stupid of us, really, but we were teenagers and we knew the mountains like we knew our own backyards, and we were invulnerable and nobody could tell us otherwise."

She folds her hands around her coffee mug, looking off into the distance, her gaze soft and unfocused out the windows of the mansion. From here, all she can see is the yard behind the mansion -- overgrown and weedy, wildflowers peeking through the tall grass -- and the smallest sliver of the concrete helipad. The treeline of the evergreen forest that marks the edge of the Shinra land occludes any hope she might have of seeing the mountains from here. She's glad, really. Inside the mansion, far enough inside that she and Johnny and Nick and Ranulf never saw it as children, she can pretend she's anywhere but in the town she watched burn. She said to Tseng, yesterday morning, that this isn't her Nibelheim. She still believes it. The town outside these doors is a mockery, a sham constructed by the same people who destroyed it, and she's capable of drawing lines and boundaries in her mind. Has drawn them. But that doesn't make it easy.

"It's a squalid little story," she says, tearing her eyes away from the forest and looking back at Rufus. He's wincing, ever-so-slightly -- as though he isn't even aware he's doing it -- and she knows he's figured out where the story's going. "I thought it was just another late-night hike. He thought we were meeting up for an assignation. When I realized what he had in mind, I made it clear to him I wasn't interested in what he thought we were there for, and he made it clear to me he didn't really care if I was interested or not."

She turns away from Rufus, unable to face that edged sympathy, and paces over to open the pantry and inspect the shelves to see which of the nonperishables can be turned into something resembling breakfast so they don't have to face the MREs they'd eaten for dinner again. "I found out later I wasn't the only girl he'd pulled it on. I didn't realize at the time, or I'd probably have done even more damage. As it was, I broke both his arms, shattered his kneecap, and broke his nose and one of his cheekbones. The doctor said later I came this close to driving bone splinters up into his brain, and he never quite walked properly again. I hadn't -- It wasn't on purpose. I didn't make the deliberate choice to hurt him that badly. I wasn't even scared enough for it to legitimately be self-defense. I was just so angry, and I couldn't stop hitting him --"

Behind her, there's a soft click as Rufus sets his coffee mug down on the counter. She braces herself for whatever he's going to say, her shoulders tensing, preparing herself to hear the same platitudes she'd heard over and over again from her father at the time or any of the judgemental things half the town had said about her from that point until the night the town burned. All he says, though -- soft and meditative, without a hint of the sympathy that would set her teeth on edge -- is, "I was fourteen."

Startled, Tifa turns around: he's still sitting on the counter, his legs folded up carelessly beneath him, his posture still perfect, watching her with careful concentration. He sees the confusion on her face and smiles, another of his fractional expressions, the barest hint of lips drawing upwards. "The first time I killed someone. Like you, I was somewhere I wasn't supposed to be, and a group of people who took exception to Shinra's policies and methodology happened to notice that I'd failed to notify my guards that I was stepping out. They thought if they could kidnap me, they'd have leverage over my father, although they'd have probably settled for killing me if they couldn't manage the kidnapping. The story at the time was I was a helpless, incompetent child. I'd played the role long before Tseng took over my training -- I figured out early on that my life would be easier if everyone underestimated me while I was still that young; it gave me leeway -- but Tseng agreed it was a good idea and helped me perfect the appearance. They weren't expecting me to be armed. They certainly didn't expect I knew how to use the knives I carried. Tseng caught up with me just as I had finished slitting the second man's throat, and for a minute I was actually disappointed, because it meant that he would take over and I wouldn't be able to finish taking care of myself. But all he did was watch while I killed the third and final man, and when I asked him why, afterwards, he said that I needed to prove -- not to him, but to myself -- that I could do it, so I'd know for the next time."

He pauses, and the smile returns, this time more fond, even though it fades quickly. "Of course, he ruined the effect by saying that if I ever slipped my security detail again, it wouldn't matter, because he'd kill me himself. But I know what you mean. For me, it wasn't anger. I wasn't angry at all. There was just this little voice in the back of my head telling me what to do next, how to move and where to strike, precisely like just another drill. It wasn't until much later I realized I probably should have been angry. Or frightened. Or upset, or sick, or something, anything other than being proud of myself that I remembered my training in the heat of the moment and thinking blood was a lot messier than I thought it would be."

"So you know, too," Tifa says. "How easy it is." How seductive it is, the idea of vengeance, the idea of acting as judge and jury and executioner. She has had to enforce her will upon the streets around the Seventh Heaven by fists and feet multiple times, after giving fair warning and full chances, and each time she does, she's always disgusted by herself afterward at how easy it is. Nobody should have that right. Treat people equally, and equally well. Dr. Ellis had told her about the oath doctors take, at the conclusion of their training. First, do no harm. She's been trying to live her life by that code for a long time, and over and over, she's been failing.

Rufus nods, unsmiling, his eyes calm and intense on hers. "Yes. I always have. And not just physical violence. I know you think I'm not aware of all the power I hold, but believe me, I am. And I'm not afraid to use it, because power you don't use winds up using you. But I try to use it well. As well as I can, at least."

Tifa thinks about what he's just revealed about his childhood, what kind of a life it must have been to know your whole life you were a target of people who wanted to kill you just for the name you bore, to have drilled and trained over and over again how to handle an attempt on your life enough for it to be second nature when that attempt actually happened. She can picture the child he must have been, too quiet, too sober, never knowing who he could trust. Or worse than that: knowing he couldn't trust anyone. It makes her heart hurt for that child, the child who grew into this wholly-unexpected man before her, and the strength of her reaction surprises her enough to make her cranky. (Crankier.)

"I don't understand you," she says, the words bursting from her lips. "Every time I think I have even a tiny grasp on -- on who you are, or what you'll do, or what you're capable of, it all just falls to hell ten minutes later when you do or say something that doesn't fit that model. It's driving me crazy."

She doesn't like not being able to understand people fully at the best of times, and that's when the most pressing decision she has to make about someone is whether or not to serve them another pint or show them the door. When she's trying to decide if she's right or wrong to work with -- to trust -- the man who could be the key to achieving all her plans and goals or who could crush her like an insect beneath his heel without even noticing, it's infuriating. "I have absolutely no frame of reference with which to calculate your trustworthiness," she says, before she can think twice and censor her words, before she can count up the cost of saying such a thing flat-out. Even though she knows damn well he already knows what she's thinking, and has known for a while. Maybe even since that first conversation in the Heaven, which feels like years ago by now.

She doesn't know what kind of a reaction she's expecting -- isn't that the point of what she'd just said? -- but what she gets is a crooked smile and a wistful, half-apologetic shrug. "I know. If it makes you feel any better, I confound everyone like that. I learned very, very early in life that people were going to try to use me, that everyone I knew was trying to manipulate me in some fashion, and I had to learn how to read people in self-defense. To figure out what they were trying to manipulate me for, and whether or not I was going to allow them to think they'd accomplished it in exchange for what I wanted out of them. It's second nature by now. I do it as easily as breathing, and most of the time, with about as much thought."

He finishes the last of his coffee, sets the mug aside on the counter with a soft click, but doesn't move further, only stays sitting on the counter and studies her with thoughtful eyes. "I'm doing it to you, too, of course," he says, just as calm and uninflected as the rest of the conversation so far has been. "That's what you're hesitating over, I think. You can see I'm manipulating you, and your instincts register it as dishonesty or deceit, even as your conscious mind is evaluating the balance of everything else you've seen me say and do so far and trying to tell you that yes, I am dealing with you honestly and above-board. I bet that conflict is what's driving you mad. If you think it would help, I could tell you what I'm manipulating you to do." He smiles a bit more, more ruefully this time. "The bits I've noticed, at least. I'm not always aware of it."

Tifa has to laugh. If she doesn't laugh, she'll scream, and thirty seconds after she did the kitchen would be full of well-armed men looking for the thing that made her scream, and she's pretty sure she only gets one free pass before they start thinking she can't handle the stress of this whole situation. (Although she will maintain until her dying day that finding a man in a coma in a shipping crate where she'd expected to find more jars and vials of chemicals and drugs is a damn good reason to scream.) "I'm not sure whether it would help or not," she says, a bit wildly. "But tell me anyway."

Rufus unfurls his legs from where they've been folded up in front of him, dangling them over the edge of the counter and leaning back to rest his palms against the surface of the countertop. "At first I was trying to get you to agree to tell us your story, of course," he says, so quickly she knows he isn't picking through his words for the best way to present them. Or if he is, it's on such an instinctive level to be nothing more than he always does, and she thinks about what he's just said about growing up knowing everyone around him was trying to manipulate him somehow, about learning to manipulate them in return, and she is suddenly and sharply furious at the world he lives in, for being somewhere a child had to grow up with that knowledge. "I honestly thought you'd need more convincing, but that was before I realized you'd been looking for someone to listen to the story, really listen, for a really long time. Probably since just after it happened. Which made me realize you're not a leader by temperament, for all you've got the natural gift for it. Which is a tragedy, by the way."

He offers her another one of his crooked, endearing smiles. It's a surprisingly boyish expression, and she finds herself stopping to think, to calculate what she knows of his public biography and the timeline of Shinra's history, realizing he's no more than a year or two older than she is. He seems so much older, really. (She feels so much older than she is, too much of the time.)

Tifa's head still fucking hurts, and her thoughts are swimming, and she can't seem to get her feet underneath her in this conversation. It's worse because she doesn't think he's trying to put her off-balance. If anything, he's trying to set her mind at ease. "What is?"

"That you dislike leadership so much. I mean, I have to be grateful for it on a professional level, because if you didn't my company probably wouldn't be standing by now, but on a personal level, it seems like such a waste. I could do stunning things with you, if you'd let me plant you in the middle of things and nudge you a little to get you used to playing politics the way you'd have to. But I'm getting off track." Rufus picks up one hand from where it's leaning against the counter and uses the other as a pivot with which to leap gracefully from his perch, picking up his empty mug and heading over to take the half-full, warming pot from the burner. He refills his mug and gestures with the carafe in her direction, brows lifting in a question; she shakes her head, thoughts still whirling, not certain how the fuck she's supposed to react. Surely he can't be talking about giving her a job in Shinra. Surely.

"Or maybe not," he adds, thoughtfully, setting the pot back onto the burner and leaning one hip back against the counter as he sips from his mug. "Getting off track, I mean. Huh. Just realized that one." His eyes go distant, reviewing -- something -- in the depths of his mind, flicking back and forth as though he's reading lines of writing in midair that only he can see. "I'll come back to that. Anyway. I realized pretty quickly, you've been looking for someone to ally with in your quest to topple the most abusive parts of the Shinra regime -- or the Shinra regime, period, although I think you're smart enough to realize doing so would create a power vacuum nothing good could come out of, and the disruption to the world would be too sharp and too severe for whatever arose from it to be better than the things it replaced -- and that spelled out the next step, pretty much without even having to think about it: persuade you that the internal coup d'etat I've been planning for years is the movement you'd like to ally yourself with, and secure your help with my long-term goals. Which are, right now, in no particular order: overthrowing my father, breaking down whatever Hojo has planned, and undoing and repairing the worst of the damages the two of them have managed to inflict on my company, my city, and the world."

He ticks off each of the points on his fingers as he speaks them, then spreads his hands and shrugs. "That was easy enough, really, since by that point you'd seen enough of my style of leadership, in what I'd said and done -- to you, for you, and on your behalf -- to realize I might not represent the ideal rebellion you'd build -- if you didn't despise the idea of being the one to make moral and ethical judgements for others to follow, I mean -- but I was probably the best chance you'd get to actually accomplish your goals with a minimum of bloodshed and without having to compromise the principles you refuse to back down from -- just the ones that you could live with breaking."

Tifa's staring. She knows she's staring. She can't help herself; hearing him lay out the facts like this, neatly dissecting his motivations and hers, is at the same time both utterly fascinating and utterly nauseating. She can tell, by the way he's speaking -- dispassionate, detailed, with no hesitations and no gaps where he has to pause or struggle to find a word -- that this rundown is familiar to him. That is how he thinks all the time. That having to put things into words for her is unfamiliar, because he doesn't often articulate those thoughts, but isn't alien enough that he's struggling. Which tells her he lives with a constant, chattering stream of thought in the back of his mind doing these calculations, running these analyses, every waking moment.

She has no idea how he's managed to stay sane. (Or if he even has -- but no. Not even he, the master manipulator, could fool her that well.)

Whatever she's thinking must not be showing too much in her face, though. Or Rufus has already decided not to let whatever it is he can read from her interrupt him, for the duration of his little lecture. He keeps going: "It was easy enough to tell that the tactic you'd respond best to would be honesty. Unmitigated honesty, really, because you're swift enough, and empathic enough, to be able to tell when someone's lying to you. And I'm good at lying -- damn good, really -- but I'm not that good, I don't think. Trying to play you by telling you only what you wanted to hear might have worked, but it wasn't a guarantee, and the failure mode for that method would have been ... epic, really. So I decided to roll the dice and go for broke, and from that point onward, I haven't been trying to play you at all."

The boyish smile makes a reappearance, amused and self-deprecating. "Which is what you're registering as an attempt to play you. Because it is, really. This whole thing has been. I decided to take a hell of a gamble on Tseng's character assessment and his ability to evaluate who's trustworthy and who isn't, and everything I've done, said, and shown you since then has been the true, honest, and unmediated self that maybe five or six people in the history of the world have ever gotten a chance to see. I'm manipulating you with complete honesty. Which, of course, I'd say no matter what the truth was, but I really do think you're good enough to spot that. Which, again, I'd say no matter what, but Tseng agrees. He said Friday night that he didn't warn me what he was bringing me into your bar in order to do ahead of time because you'd be able to spot the -- oh, what did he call it? Inauthenticity of my reactions, that's it."

He shrugs, artlessly. "So I decided -- consciously, in this case, but usually the process happens on a subconscious level -- that I was going to let you use me to get what you want -- in this case, a change in Shinra's humanitarian policies and the dismantling of the worst of my father's abuses, which I happen to agree with but I would've gone along with no matter what, unless your goals and mine were violently mis-aligned, which fortunately they weren't and aren't -- in order to get what I want out of you: your information at first, and then, your active cooperation in that dismantling. Something I've wanted to do for years. And thus, since our goals happen to line up so closely, since you respond so well to honesty and to authenticity -- pretty good word for it, I suppose -- and since I happen to actually respect the hell out of you and like you on top of it, as much as it's wise for me to ever actually like anybody, you get to see Rufus Shinra in all his flawed glory, all the way on down."

Rufus salutes her with his coffee mug again and takes another sip, watching her carefully over the rim, his eyes fixed on her face. That odd communion she's almost starting to get used to snaps back into place, though, and she can see -- buried beneath the light, casual overlay he's wearing like a cloak -- a vulnerability that she's almost certain he isn't aware of, for all he's just demonstrated a level of self-knowledge (self-manipulation) that borders on the obscene.

He's watching her to see how she'll react, whether his honesty (and it was honesty; she knows, can tell, that much) will cause her to flee screaming. He's braced for her to step back from the tentative and slowly-growing connection they've been building for the last few days, for her to slam up the barriers and walls she thinks he's used to seeing as a matter of course. For her to decide that she can't abide cooperation with a man who views the world so coldly and dispassionately, for her to reject his worldview as so alien to her own, withdraw the parole she's tacitly offered them, and refuse to cooperate further in what he'd termed the "dismantling" of Shinra's crimes against the world. (She wonders, dizzily, how much of what she would term criminal would also merit that label in his mind.)

Strangely, the thing that sticks out most, in all that flood of words, is Rufus's casual and unthinking aside after admitting to liking her: as much as it's wise for me to ever actually like anybody. He hadn't said it regretfully, or as a play for sympathy, or as a method to manipulate her emotions back in his favor after the potential loss of goodwill represented by his admission of manipulation. It hadn't been a confession, or to give her a fuller picture of his mindset, or a piece of information he thought it was important for her to know. She would have been able to sense any of those. It was simply one of his truths, the truths he's apparently decided she has a right to, and she can't tell if he even was aware he was saying it. The picture those few words paint of his life right now, to say nothing of his childhood, is heartbreaking.

"I think," Tifa says, slowly, meditatively -- seeing the way his eyes ice over, go more blank, as he steels himself to hear the worst, which only makes her conclusion more evident -- "that at some point in the next few days, before I hand back the all-access card you've given me --" and that's a shock, hearing herself say it, when that access could be a more valuable weapon in the struggle for freedom from Shinra's dictates than an entire warehouse of bombs and guns, but she'll deal with that bit of revealed knowledge later -- "I'd really like to use it to let myself into your father's office, at some point when he's likely to be the only one there. Because after hearing all this, I really think I'd like to go and kill him for you."

Shock blossoms in Rufus's face for half an instant before he locks it down. "What?" he asks, the artless syllable falling from his lips in the most unguarded utterance she's heard him make. "-- I mean, wanting to kill him, all right, yeah, I don't blame you at all there, but what do you mean, 'for me'?"

Dimly, Tifa is aware of the throb and burn of anger, deep in the pit of her stomach. It's the same anger she was feeling, slapping Nick's hands away from the hemline of her skirt for the second time. It's the same anger she was feeling, kneeling in the puddle of her father's blood and reaching for his pulse, knowing she wouldn't find it. This time it burns cold, not hot. She can feel her ears buzzing, feel the rush of blood through her veins, feel the way her fingers flex and relax, over and over, without her conscious instruction. "How anyone could do that -- to a child -- to their child --" Her voice sounds hollow, and not at all like her own.

Rufus's brows draw together, and he regards her with absolute, unfettered confusion. "Do what?" he asks. And three days ago, she'd have said he was acting, trying to play on her sympathy, trying to elicit this very reaction, but no one, not even him, could possibly play at that much blank incomprehension. Not well enough to fool her. She's never been shy of admitting her own talents, and Tseng's words quoted to her by Rufus himself are correct: she's almost certain she would spot any attempt at acting. No matter how good Rufus is. He calls himself a very good liar. She believes it. But Tifa is very, very good at spotting when people are lying to her.

She closes her eyes and breathes deeply. There's nothing getting angry right now can possibly do, except make her short-tempered and full of rage for the rest of the day, and that's hardly a recipe for making successful choices. The few scant things Valentine had told them last night while they'd been searching the library were horrific enough for her to know that whatever they're going to find in that reactor is going to make her want to kill things -- people -- already, over and above the stress she knows she'll be under just from being back there again. The last thing she needs is this knot of rage and fury gnawing away at her. She knows herself. When she is this angry, when she is this close to losing control, dangerous things happen. She knows better than to let herself make decisions when her judgement is this clouded by emotion, and she's going to have to be making a lot of decisions today, and they're going to have to be the right ones.

She still wants to put her fist through Jonathan Shinra's face. And she doesn't think she'd be able to stop there.

"You don't even see it," Tifa says. Her voice is shuddering from the effort of keeping it even. "Because to you it's just the way things are. The way things always have been. You think it's normal, it's the way everyone grows up, it's the way things are for everyone. And it isn't. It really, really isn't. You have to -- You've spent your whole life just waiting for the people around you to betray you, haven't you? You said yourself, your whole life, people have been trying to use you, and you had to learn how to read them, to manipulate them, to use them back, and -- That's no way to raise a child. That's no life for an adult, either, but an adult can at least choose how to handle things. You were a child. How could he do that? Did you -- did you even have anyone?"

Rufus is staring at her as though she's speaking Wutaian, his face painted over with bewilderment. That's perhaps the worst part of this whole conversation: he can't see a reason for her anger. To him, his upbringing -- his treatment during his childhood, the emotional abuse that produced the man who is standing before her and laying out a worldview where people must be treated like chess pieces and the only thing he can count on is that he can't count on anybody -- seems normal.

"I had Sephiroth," he says, speaking slowly and clearly the way she somehow knows, instinct sparking to life, that he speaks when he can't figure out where a conversation is leading. "Tseng. Reno, eventually, once he joined the company, and Rude, too. My father adopted Scarlet when I was eight and she was eleven, when her parents were killed, but we were never close, so she doesn't count. A few of the middle managers or the lower-level employees of the company whose departments I would go hide in when I wanted to escape my tutors -- I was popular in the secretarial pool when I was younger; they liked spoiling me. I started working in the lower echelons when I was eight or nine, and they took care of me, too. I wasn't alone, not the way you're thinking."

All Tifa can do is stare back. If that's his definition of 'not alone' -- She remembers her mother, curling up with her in the evenings even through her illness, watching the snow fall softly through the windows of her bedroom and reading her fairy-stories over hot cocoa. Remembers her father patiently teaching her trick after trick for keeping the inn's kitchen running and beaming at her the whole way, not because she'd gotten something right, but because he loved showing her the things he loved.

For her entire childhood, no matter what happened, she never doubted she was loved: loved for herself and not what she could do, loved because she was their daughter and their world and both of them would have done anything to make sure she was happy, healthy, and whole. (She remembers her father, his face pale and drawn, his hand cracking across her face, ordering her to safety in his last few doomed, gallant minutes: ready to give his life to safeguard hers, a parent's eternal impulse to sacrifice.)

"That isn't what I mean," she says, through lips that have gone white and numb with her fury. "You know that isn't what I mean."

Rufus sighs. She can see his instinct to protect himself warring with his vow to give her nothing but the truth, poised on a knife's edge so keen even she can't guess which one might triumph. "I know," he finally says, and she can tell the admission costs him, dearly. He turns away from her, fussing with the coffee maker, topping off his mug with the last of the pot and sliding the drawer out to dump the grinds. He's doing it to keep from having to look her in the face; that much she can tell. "You have to understand: I couldn't think like that. Literally was not allowed to think like that. My father thought attachments made me weak, and the last thing he wanted was a son and an heir plagued by weakness. After one or two times where people I showed affection for were removed from my orbit, once I realized that the minute I started to like my nannies and my tutors they'd be reassigned, I learned to stop showing it. If Tseng had defected three years earlier, he wouldn't have lasted three weeks as my teacher. I learned." He laughs, short and sharp. It isn't amusement. "I learned every last damned thing the old man had to teach me."

When he turns back to face her, his expression is back to being controlled: tight, motionless, blank. She can only tell how bothered he is because his shoulders are hunched high and tight, rounded in, the posture of someone trying to hide in plain sight and make himself less than he truly is. He follows her eyes, sees her noticing, and closes his eyes, briefly; surprised, she thinks, to discover his body is betraying him, skin and bone taking unconscious steps to brace itself against emotion his mind has learned to shrug away. She watches him inhale, slowly and deliberately, and bring his shoulders down on the exhale, shaking his wrists and arms to loosen them.

"How did you learn?" Tifa finds herself asking. Her voice is soft and uncertain in her own ears, gentle and restrained, and she can feel the beginnings of her anger draining away as she watches this living pattern of contradictions before her.

He opens his eyes again and looks at her, weary and worn. "Learn?"

"How to care about people." She's watching for his reaction when she asks, which is the only reason she can see the fractional twitch at the corners of his eyes, the sign of an arrow hitting its mark. It's the only sign he allows himself, and she thinks it might be unconscious. If his father taught him not to care about people lest they be taken away from him, his father must have also schooled him against showing emotion at all, no matter how strongly he feels it. Or maybe he taught himself, tired of his emotions being used against him.

Rufus picks up his mug of coffee again and studies her over its rim before drinking. "Most people would say I don't care about anyone," he says. It isn't an answer; he clearly meant for it not to be. (She's pushing her luck, half-drunk and all giddy with the daring of it. But she's on his side for now, or he's on hers, and if there's one thing she's always believed, it's that you should be able to understand the people who are your allies, thoroughly enough to be able to predict their motions.)

Tifa shakes her head. "We're not talking about what everyone else thinks. Everyone else is stupid to believe what you want them to believe, anyway. You do care. You have to. Otherwise you'd be a monster, and while there are people who say you are one, the man I've seen over the past few days isn't a monster. Not yet. After another few years of frustration and failure, maybe you would be, maybe not, but you aren't yet." She doesn't have words for the expression that scribes across his face, seen only because she's looking with every inch of her concentration: half relief, half fear. She's spoken words he's feared himself, she realizes, pierced to the heart of one of his midnight haunts. "And you've admitted yourself that you've been showing me the truth, and not another one of your pretty lies and poses. Someone taught you how to win the loyalty of the people who look to you. Tseng wouldn't have given himself over to your command so thoroughly if you hadn't."

The pieces fall into place then, one stunning flash of clarity fitting together all the signs and portents she's been observing, all the things she's seen and been unnerved by coming together into the larger picture she hasn't seen yet. Hasn't been letting herself see. The final dregs of her anger dissipate, leaving her with something she can't identify sitting in the pit of her stomach, hot and heavy. "He loves you," she says, slowly. "He wouldn't be who he is to you if he didn't. And you love him, too. You might not know you do, but you do, don't you."

It isn't a question; it doesn't need to be a question. If she'd thought about it ahead of time, she would have expected the thought to pain her, evidence of Tseng's affections being given to someone who isn't her, but it doesn't. She and Tseng have never promised fidelity. She wouldn't have allowed the promise even if he'd tried to give it, which he wouldn't have; their sole promises have been to make no promises, both of them finding safety in never allowing the words to be said aloud, and she -- knowing all too well how tightly he holds his honor -- would never willingly become the means by which he would find himself forsworn. She and Tseng knew from the beginning their affair wouldn't last forever. She's grateful to know there'll be someone there to love him after their time is through.

The thought is revelatory, unlocking something in her chest that she knows she'll have to think over later, but she doesn't have time for it right now: Rufus hisses at her, sharp fury spiking through the sound, and she would fear his anger more if it weren't accompanied by his chin dropping, tucking against his chest, the instinctive action of a wounded animal moving to protect his throat. "You may be my temporary ally, woman," he says, and his voice has frozen enough to cut her with its ice; his rage, like his justice, burns cold. "You are not my conscience. Stay out of matters that do not concern you."

The lump in the pit of her stomach is traveling slowly up her throat, lodging right behind her breastbone, acid and fear bound together. She's regretting the mug of coffee she'd half-finished. But he was the one to start this and she was the one who followed where he led, and if there's one thing she's certain of, it's that he will never respect someone who retreats back to safety once challenge has been declared.

Her body is moving to defend itself without her command, stepping free of the counter she's been leaning against, arranging a clear line of motion and defense if she manages to goad him past the limits of his learned control's hold on his far more primal temper. She can see him realizing, see her instinctive actions sparking instinct of his own: his mug of coffee forgotten on the counter behind him, he is tightening his form, straightening his shoulders, allowing his weight to settle properly on his hips and around his center of gravity. His motions force hers, instinct prompting instinct until she has set her feet in the most basic of triangular stances, weight balanced on both thighs, knees loose and ready.

He doesn't realize he's doing it either, Tifa thinks. They've both been too well trained. There's more than one way to defend yourself against an attack, and she's pretty sure he's learned them all, layers of defense built up over scar tissue no less real than the scar tissue clotting her lungs, for all it's invisible to the naked eye.

She could back down, could defuse this confrontation with soft words and open stance, but the little voice behind her eyes that tells her when she needs to cut someone off and when she needs to offer a shoulder and a bar-rag to cry into is whispering at her to push, push, push: follow the steps of the hidden pathways Rufus's eyes were whispering to her, lance the wound now, uncover the scars Rufus has unwittingly shown her the shapes of, put form and shape to the deeply-shadowed secrets he hasn't let himself see.

Return him the favor he'd done her two days gone, for all it hadn't felt like a favor at the time. She's faced down her demons and looked them in the eye, given voice to the fears she'd locked in the depths of her mind since the night she was carried from this town dying inch by inch, and whatever they find in the reactor up there, whatever further depradations they uncover to match the evils that have been sleeping beneath this roof that they've already found, she will face it with more power for having unlocked those doors herself rather than having them forced open. She couldn't have faced what they've encountered thus far with as much equanimity as she has, without having faced down those memories first. There's something in Rufus's eyes, in the unconscious cues his body has been feeding her (protect, deflect, get away, if you strike first and decisively they can't hurt you before you can end them) leading her to believe he's protecting a similar weakness of his own, an ancient hurt he's taken inside his chest and nurtured like a grain of sand building up into a pearl.

"Do you need a conscience?" Tifa throws his words back in his face, but she keeps her voice low, her tone as gentle as she can make the words, considering the circumstances. She can't remember how well sound carries through these old walls, and she'd lay any odds a bettor would accept that Tseng's ear is sensitized to the sound of either one of them in distress or argument, even on the other side of the shores of sleep. The last thing they need right now is an interruption; something, the same something that prompted her down this road, is telling her that she's only got one chance at this and she'd lose it in front of anyone Rufus commands. Even Tseng, who has no doubt heard worse from Rufus over the years. Outside their structures, she alone has the power to speak this truth, and from the way Rufus flinches, she's already starting to see the shapes of that truth he'd rather deny.

"That's it, isn't it?" she probes again, and this time it is a question. Despite the way he'd reacted to her naming him not-monster, she isn't completely certain she's found the full shape of the secret fears that haunt him, until she sees the way his body answers her, his perfect defensive form melting away: shoulders creeping upward again, arms folding across his belly, spine curling inward as the knuckles of his left hand stand out, white-taut, against his right biceps and his right hand splays across his chest. Right over the heart.

It's the pose of a child, unconscious self-defense, and as his head bows over until his chin is nearly resting against his breastbone, her own heart breaks again for the child he was never allowed to be. "You taught yourself -- everything," Tifa whispers, certain even as she makes the guess, and the last pieces of her own defenses are whispering away as she takes two steps back to rest her hips against the counter behind her lest she cover the ground between them and fold him into her arms. The impulse is so strong it nearly floors her. She lifts one fist to press it against her lips, realizing when she blinks and the room clears for half a second before wavering again that her eyes are filling with tears. "Conscience. Duty. Care. From scratch and from nothing, without anybody to model the right way. You -- That's why it reads so wrong to me. To most people, I'll bet. You never absorbed any of the cues from anyone as a child, because you didn't have anybody who was showing you those cues. Not regularly. So you had to teach yourself out of what you saw from others in scattered moments, and because you did it consciously, the body language reads wrong to the people who learned it naturally. And to this day, you're terrified that you got it wrong."

She's laughing at the sheer, unmitigated audacity of it all, of the tiny child who must have had the wisdom and maturity beyond his years to identify nobility and honor and ethics as things he could not see enough around him to find a model and yet could know enough to know he would need them in the future. How old had he been? She remembers Tseng saying he'd had the teaching of Rufus since early adolescence, and it must have been before then, for Tseng to have seen enough worth molding in the raw clay Rufus had been. She cuts herself off the minute she hears the laughter in her voice, because she doesn't want Rufus to think she's laughing at him. It isn't humor. It's sheer, stunned disbelief at the scope of the realization.

Rufus looks up at the sound, though, and there are cities burning in the depths of his eyes. Tifa drops the last fractional pieces of her at-ready pose the instant she sees that ignition, flinging her hands wide (I am not armed; I am not a threat to you) and letting him see the tears (and she wonders when was the last time, if ever, anyone cried for Rufus Shinra) and the admiration both. "No, no," she says, bringing one hand back to dash away the tears, because she's cried too damn much in the past few days for her own self-respect, and she just fucking knows that if she starts again she isn't going to be able to stop. "I just can't -- For years I've been hating you, for days I've been gritting my teeth against the privilege you grew up with, that you exude like breathing, and I kept seeing it as --"

She cuts herself off; that isn't the right road to go down right now, not with Rufus watching her, wariness layered over fear over fury. "I couldn't imagine, literally could not have imagined you could've grown up with every single one of your material wants satisfied and yet not get a single thing you truly needed. You had everything in the world as a child, and I'd bet anything you asked me to bet that if I lined up a dozen children from Sector 7, I'd still find most of them had a happier childhood than you did. I've been hating you for years for having all the things everyone else couldn't, and it was stupid of me, because looking at you this minute? I'd swear on the bones of anything you hold holy that you'd give up every gil to your name in a heartbeat if you could've grown up being loved."

Tifa remembers the expression on his face when she'd told him the lessons she'd learned from her father: lacking any other word for it, she can only name it hunger. Of course. Of course. "I never realized it," she breathes. "Not once. All that power, all that wealth, and you're still, literally, a self-made man."

She knows she's winning, knows she's won, when Rufus buries his face in his palms for just long enough to scrub them over his cheeks, grind the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, run hands through his hair and pull, hard. "Ramuh damn you, woman," he says, more to himself than to her. He looks -- gutted. Like her words have been a sword as sharp as Sephiroth's was when it cleaved through her. "You see too fucking much."

Tifa laughs again, because it's either laugh or scream. His lack of denial is a confirmation; his posture tells her he doesn't want to admit the truth of what she's said, but his honor won't let him speak the denial. And honor it is, and she can only imagine at what price to himself he purchased it throughout the years.

"No one ever has before, have they. Not even Tseng, and he sees more of you than anybody else. You've let him see more of you than anybody else. Because he was the one who helped refine the code you'd created for yourself -- I can see so many bits of him in you, you know -- Oh, Shiva." The thought strikes her out of nowhere. She finds herself lifting her hand to her lips again, this time to press back the laughter, because like tears, if she starts laughing in earnest now she'll never stop.

Rufus's piercing stare is the last thing she sees before she squeezes her eyes shut, tightly enough the velvet darkness turns into amber sparkles. She's been trying his patience sorely this morning, she knows, which is why she isn't surprised to hear him grind out, after only a few seconds, "What?"

"I just realized," she says, the tremors still running through her, gasping from the sheer weight of the irony. "You -- Your father had no idea what he was doing, did he? He took Tseng and assigned him to teach you, and it was supposed to be an insult for you both, right? Him to be a servant, to be assigned to a child; you because it was supposed to be your job to 'civilize' him. And your father never realized -- You didn't civilize him; he did everything but make a Wutaian out of you. You saw that code of honor he wears like a second skin and it must have been like food for a starving boy, and you clung to it like you were drowning. And you made it yours too, until your father's heir has more of the worldview of the people he allegedly conquered than of him. And he's never noticed, has he?"

When Tifa opens her eyes again, Rufus is still looking at her, but the danger has passed. Some of the tension has eased out of his shoulders; the edges of his lips are rounded up, just a fraction, and his voice is thinly painted with amusement as he says, dry as the Corel desert, "We thought it best not to enlighten him, yes."

Tifa can barely imagine all of the ways in which he has had to hide throughout the years. She shakes her head again, in disbelief, in regret, in empathy. "I can't -- It must have been miserable. It must have been ..."

She trails off. Takes a deep breath, and it hurts the way every deep breath she's taken since she returned here has hurt, and as she exhales, she can feel the last dregs of her resentment slipping away. She'd forgiven him Nibelheim's destruction, but she hadn't yet forgiven herself for forgiving him; she'd seen he bore no true guilt for what transpired here, but somewhere in the back of her mind, somewhere even she never quite looks at in daylight, she'd still had one small piece of her insisting: he should have known. And now she knows: no. He couldn't have. Not given the games he's been forced to play since before he knew what games were.

She gives him her deepest look, the one Jessie laughingly calls her soul-reading look, and he lifts his chin to meet her eyes without flinching in the least. He's one of the only people she's ever met who can face that look with equanimity.

It's enough to give her the answers she's looking for.

Tifa crosses the space between them, trying with every movement to project calm and peace and I am not a threat to you. His chin comes up further, watching her warily. Out of the corner of her eye she can see his right hand twitch once, then be forced into stillness. She's let him place himself so the morning sunlight streaming through the windows is at his back, ceding the defensive advantage, and it halos over his bare shoulders and his rumpled hair. He looks unearthly.

Coming to a stop in front of him, she holds out her hand, precisely as though they have just met. It takes a long minute for him to decide to take it. Once he does, she doesn't let it go. His pulse flutters warmly against the tips of her fingers.

"When we started this, you gave me a oath," she says. "I took that oath, and I will not put it back into your hands yet, not until we're done, because I don't think you'd take it back until you redeem it fully. But I took it from you without making one of my own, and called it an even bargain, because what you were asking me to do was unthinkable. It's not unthinkable anymore. We're connected, you and me. By -- so many things, really. But right now, we're connected by a mystery, and by a matter of honor and duty and responsibility, and I know you well enough now to say, in that at least, we stand equally dedicated. So you deserve to hold an oath of my own." She takes a deep breath, and it's almost starting not to hurt. Or she's starting to be able to ignore the pain, at least.

Rufus's eyes are locked on hers, and Tifa (literally, physically) can't will herself to look away. She feels as though she's caught up in something much greater than she is, as though Something beyond her is witnessing her words and her vow. The weight of the moment, like history and the heavens are watching them, is more solid on her chest than the altitude or her scars. He knows what she's about to say, she realizes. He is Rufus Shinra, prince of the world, and she is a bartender from the slums, and yet in these few moments it has felt as though they are one person, one mind, one set of thoughts. (She'll freak out about that later.)

Low and lulling, soft and lyrical, he says, "Speak your oath, then and I will safeguard it with those of my own."

She looks into his eyes, and she feels something greater than they are is watching them both, summoned by the gravity of the moment, by the sincerity of what she's about to swear to. It makes the hair on her arms stand up, her skin pimple up with tiny pricks of meaning. Choose your words carefully, each shivering hair tells her, because you'll be bound by them far longer than you think.

"You've been spending the last however-many years of your life borrowing someone else's honor as a guide, to shield you against whatever part of yourself you fear the most," she begins, feeling out her way, and she doesn't, can't, miss the way his shoulders twitch as her words hit home. "You're worried I'll take him from you, and I won't. I'm not going to stand in the way of him doing whatever he needs to do to keep his oaths to you. You're worried whatever we find will outpace your understanding of the maps you've made of his honor, and leave you to rely on instincts of your own you can't be sure of and make dishonorable choices because of it, and I won't let it."

Some part of her, the part still curled up against her mother in the halls of memory listening to tales of the days when men walked with the gods and their children upon this earth, knows these things must come in threes, and she licks her lips before continuing, because she knows what the third must be. "You fear what will need to be done to see this through, and how long the task will take and whether you'll have the strength to see the end of the path we've started on, and --" Breathe. Breathe. But this is her fight too, has been since the moment she led Sephiroth of Shinra out of the town gates and into the mountains she loved so dearly, and there's no other answer but this. Not if she wants to live with herself after. "I won't let you do it alone. And --" She dredges her memory, digs up the old words, the ones of tales and song. The ones the gods Themselves pay heed to. "By blood, bone, and breath, I will not let you become what it is you fear on this journey. Not without putting up a damn good fight."

Strangely, what she sees breaking in his eyes is relief, stark and plain, sending its trails and tendrils throughout him. His fingers contract on hers, an unconscious squeeze as he registers her vow. Blood, bone, and breath. She's already shed one, cracked the other, and forever weakened the third, all sacrificed on the altar of whatever Sephiroth of Shinra was chasing. What they, too, are chasing now. Answers. And the questions they go with, which are often harder to find, and which usually mean more in the discovering.

Rufus is reading her even as she's reading him, their eyes still locked together as he weighs the sincerity of her words. Tifa wonders how many vows, each affirmed on whatever the promiser holds most sacred, he's held shattered into pieces and slipping through his fingers before. Too many, judging by how long it takes him to look into her own soul to guess at the worth of her word's coin, at whether everything he has seen of her so far adds up to someone who will keep a promise given by the old ways. By the time she sees him deciding -- against all odds, against almost every scrap of evidence he's known throughout his uncertainly treacherous life, against hundreds who have betrayed him and the scant handful who haven't -- that yes, everything he has seen of her so far testifies to her sincerity and her commitment, her fingers are beginning to go numb with the pressure of his death-grip.

Then he bows over their joined hands, taking half a step back, just enough so he can clear the space between them. For half a second she thinks he might be preparing to kiss her knuckles. He doesn't, though; he bends at the waist, dipping his head, and she helplessly looks down at the way his golden hair curls along the nape of his neck and wonders what the fuck.

"Yes," he says. "I'll hold that oath." His words feel like a breath exhaled, a breeze whispering through the windows and blowing away the weight of witnessing.

Tifa exhales with it. Her fingers are cramping, but she doesn't want to let go of him. Not yet. How many people touch him and mean it? Is that why he clung to Tseng so fiercely the other night? Skin hungers for nourishment just as much as bellies do, and she realizes as she's thinking it that somehow, Rufus fucking Shinra has become one of her people, one of the people whose hungers she's taken it upon herself to feed.

From feared to family in less than five days. The Gods save her. (The Gods save them all.)

Then Rufus lets go, and if there's regret in his eyes, he hides it well. He turns away from her, his back fully to her, and for the first time since she's met him she thinks he's completely comfortable with her in the room, as though her oath to him has placed her in the same category as Tseng occupies, trusted intimates. (It likely has. Well, she's already realized she's going to have to get used to occupying rarefied heights this week.)

"There's absolutely nothing in this pantry I'd be willing to eat unless we were starving," he's saying, the change of subject telling her just as his body is telling her that the conversation is over, staring into the same open door she'd been inspecting (a lifetime ago; twenty minutes ago) and coming to the same conclusion. "If you think it wouldn't be too out of place, I can run down to the town and carry back some supplies. Tseng'll kill me, but if he's asleep he doesn't have any right to bitch. And I --"

He's interrupted by the sound of a soft mechanical buzzing. Tifa looks around to see if she can identify the source, but he doesn't look surprised; he pulls his handheld computer out of the pocket of his sweatpants (she hadn't seen him put it there, which means he'd slept with it) and flicks his thumb over the screen even as his eyes are flicking over the message it shows on its face. It makes her think of all the tasks she'd been trained in yesterday, and she wonders if he's expecting her to be handling his email even despite all the other things they've found, but she'll have to check with him later; there are other things to worry about first. "Reeve and Rude made better time from Rocket Town than they thought," he says, looking up. "Reeve says Rude thinks they're twenty minutes out, tops. They just passed the sign for the Mt. Nibel bypass road and pulled over to await instructions."

Tifa's starting to shake with the adrenaline aftermath of the bomb she just defused, the confrontation she somehow knows may be one of the most significant she's ever had. It makes her slow, sloppy. She cudgels her brain, trying to make it call up the mental map of a place she once knew the peaks and valleys of better than the whorls and dips of her own palms. The vision is sluggish to rise, until she takes another deep breath (feeling the burn, feeling the ache) and thrusts herself back into the skin of Tifa Lockheart of the Nibel mountains and foothills, the guide without whom a mountain expedition was guaranteed failure. That child's skin feels tight and cramped, and she realizes, for the first time, how far she's grown out of it since her ordeal. "From the sign -- Tell them to take the right-hand road, not the bypass. It starts off looking like a regular road, but it'll narrow to a lane-and-a-half dirt track in about three miles. Once they leave the pavement, stay to the right -- the mountain side -- until they pass a large outcropping on the right that looks a little like a frog lying on its belly with its legs stretched out. We used to paint the rock green to help people see the frog, but I don't know if they still do and I don't know how well the paint has held up if they haven't touched it up."

The memory startles her, how fond it feels to remember the days with Johnny or Ranulf or, yes, even Nick on belay, the rope more a formality than anything else, scampering up the rock face with a can of paint clipped into her harness right next to her chalk bag. She can almost feel the early-spring sunlight on her face, feel the grit of the rock beneath her fingers and the giddy glee of telling gravity where it could shove it.

For the first time, the memory doesn't hurt at all. She finds herself smiling as she recalls herself back to her task. "Even if the paint's gone, it's the first real branch-off; there's three potential paths there, although the middle one is more a footpath than anything else. Take the left-hand road, and go for about ... Six miles, if I remember right. It'll wind towards and away from the mountainside for a bit. After about six miles, the trail widens to about three times the size of a car, and divides around a huge boulder. Tell them to park there, behind the boulder. It's hidden from the town, and nobody ever goes out that way unless they're specifically looking for a place to climb." She smiles, and -- feeling the expression on her face -- realizes it isn't a pleasant one. "I'm betting that the people who live here now don't care much about climbing."

Rufus's fingers are tapping over the on-screen keyboard, relaying her instructions no-doubt faithfully. "Got it," he says. "Right hand road, dirt track in three miles, once off the pavement stay to the right, road branches at the frog, which may or may not be green, take the left-hand path at the fork and in six miles the road widens and forks around a boulder, park behind the boulder." He looks up at her, his gaze piercing. "Are you going to give them directions to get down here from there once they park, or --"

"No," she says. "No, I'll -- I'll go meet them." The thought feels uncomfortable -- in no small part because she knows the most efficient route from here to there, the one that will give her the least chance of being seen, will require her to bypass at least three switchbacks by climbing up them, and she isn't entirely sure her lungs will hold. But her palms are yearning for the touch of Nibel rock one last time. Let this be her farewell; she didn't get a chance to make it before.

She expects Rufus to go back to his message, but his eyes linger on her face, and she gets the feeling he can see every last one of her fears. (Well, fair is fair, she supposes.) "Is the trail something Reno can follow too?" he asks. Something tells her he'd be demanding to go himself, except he wants Reno to be there with her because of Reno's skills with emergency medicine.

Tifa makes a face. "Gonna have to climb a few places, but he's skinny enough that I can probably boost him up the rock face if I have to, yeah. And don't think I don't know what you're doing."

The only answer she gets is an unrepentant grin. His thumbs sweep across the keyboard again and he gives the tiny computer one last look before swiping his palm across it, in the gesture she remembers is used to turn it off, and stowing it back in his pocket. "Right, then. I'll go get dressed and get us supplies." He opens a drawer and fishes out a pad and pencil, and -- paranoia or just plain habit -- tears off the top sheet to write on it against the countertop and not on the pad, where the impressions of his pencil could be read from the sheets underneath. The note he writes -- to Tseng, she assumes -- is quickly done, but even from here she can tell his handwriting is perfectly legibile, neat block capitals designed to be read as easily as possible. "Take that pad and write down anything you think we'll need," he adds, over his shoulder, as he folds the note over, prints Tseng's name on the front, and props it up against the coffee maker (where, presumably, Tseng will know to look if he wakes before they return). "Remember, we can't let them think there's more than four of us."

She remembers, and there's been a corner of her mind occupied with logistics all morning, keeping in mind that whomever is manning the general store these days will no doubt talk and they can't admit to mounting an expedition to the reactor. It takes her a few minutes to start writing down items and quantities, and just as she's finished and handed it to Rufus, Reno pokes his head into the kitchen.

"You texted, chief?" Reno asks, taking in the scene with one practiced sweep of his eyes. (She wonders what he sees there, what truths his trained-observer gaze can tease out of the way they're standing and the spaces between them. It isn't that she begrudges Reno knowing she's formally vowed to support them -- support Rufus -- on this quest; it's just that she's certain Reno is going to want to talk about it while they're up there.) He looks surprisingly less exhausted than he should, for having been up all night working in the basement, although he's covered in dust and looks like he could really use a drink.

"Mmm," Rufus says, reading over the list she's handed him. Reaching the end -- and apparently not finding any detail of her handwriting or her shorthand notation incomprehensible, since he tucks that into the pocket of his sweats too -- he looks up at Reno and winces. "Okay, nevermind the orders I was about to give, how many hours do you have left in you and can you handle a bit of exertion?"

"Eh, I'm fine," Reno says, leaning against the doorjamb and hooking both thumbs into the belt loops of the engineer's coveralls he's still wearing. "Took two Potions and a dose of Fury about an hour ago. I'll be good for at least another six, probably twelve. More if I take another"

Tifa winces. Fury is one of the street drugs she won't touch and won't let her employees use either, on pains of being sent home without pay for the first offense and fired completely for the second; it keeps you going all right, but it takes a strong personality to resist the berserker rage it has a tendency to cause. Reno looks none the worse for wear, though, or at least as calm as he usually does. Rufus shoots her a look -- gauging her reaction to Reno's disclosure, she thinks -- and then looks back at Reno. "Grab the medkit, pick up a pair of gloves from the useful-shit duffel -- I brought it in last night when I brought in the extra coveralls -- and follow the lady. You're going partway up the mountain to pick up Rude and Reeve."

"No gloves," Tifa says, quickly. Rufus flashes her a look. She shrugs apology for overriding him, but he should've known better. "That's for the movies. Real climbing, you don't use gloves, not the kind you're thinking anyway. Unless you've specifically got climbers' gloves in there, we'll be better off with just tape. I might be able to find a pair of gloves in the mountain gear, I haven't been through the depths of the packs yet, but don't count on it."

Rufus sketches half a bow in midair -- mocking, this time, rather than serious -- and flaps one hand. "You take care of the details. Tell Reno how much additional weight you both can carry; might as well take the first load up to the car with you. I'm going to go find something for us to eat -- assuming Valentine's good to take watch over our patients for a while?" he asks Reno, who nods.

"Yeah," Reno says, "we been having a nice little chat about what happened down there. He had some ideas about what we can do to stabilize them." His eyes look sick, and a little wild around the edges. "But wait, you said you were --"

"This is not one of the ones you can argue, Reno," Rufus says, quietly. Tifa's expecting Reno to protest -- so far, both Reno and Tseng have been fanatical about protecting Rufus's safety -- but Reno just growls, soft and annoyed, and throws up his hands.

"Fine. When the boss fires me because you got dead on my watch, I'll kill you myself. Tif' --"

"Half what you usually carry for a long haul," she says, cutting him off before he has to ask. "Fifty pounds for me. I'll be in the hallway going through the gear closet."

The hiking and mountaineering packs she finds in the gear closet -- she'd noticed them yesterday when Tseng and Reno were exploring the mansion -- are nowhere near as full as she'd like them to be for a climb. She allows herself thirty seconds to mourn the loss of the beloved gear she'd scrimped and saved to buy in early childhood and never had the heart to replace once she started earning thousands of gil per season. Then she makes two piles and starts sorting.

She should be able to salvage some abandoned gear from the mountain -- the spot she has in mind used to be a frequent route and it's likely nobody's been scavenging lately -- and there's plenty of rope and enough 'biners that if she has to rig a makeshift harness to haul Reno up the longest climb of the three, she'll be able to. She's packing bottles of water from the kitchen pantry (they're old, and the water's fusty, and she knows she's overpacking -- she did this route once a week from the time she was eleven to the time she was nineteen -- and maybe it's from spending too much time among men who treat a trip to the train station like a military maneuver and maybe it's just an attempt to ward off the skin-crawling memory of the last time she was in these mountains) when Reno drops a box full of papers on the floor next to her. She jumps -- she hadn't heard him come in -- and then makes a face at herself for jumping. On edge.

It only takes a few minutes to stow the papers into the bottoms of the mountaineering packs and layer the supplies over them. They'll have to unpack at the other end to get at the papers to transfer them into the truck, but Tifa's seen too many disasters happen because that one vital bit of gear is buried. She slides a protein bar into the outside pocket of her pack; she found them in the gear closet, and she knows from experience she'll be ravenous no later than the second ascent. Reno insists on giving her a check-over before they set out, listening to her lungs and frowning before forcing another round of pills on her. She knows he can hear the soft, wet crackling when she breathes in fully just as well as she can, but neither of them are going to say anything until it becomes a problem. They have shit to do.

The sunlight, when they let themselves out the back door and onto the lawn behind the mansion, makes her stop in her tracks. It's weak and yellowed, the pale, thin rays of a Nibel early-spring morning. The sunlight here has a quality she's never seen anywhere else, especially not in the smog-choked environs of Midgar. She'd seen the daylight yesterday, but yesterday had been tense and edgy, knowing she was on stage, knowing if she slipped and let show her surroundings were familiar to her she would be fucking the plan so thoroughly someone would probably get killed. This morning, there's nobody to watch but Reno as she huffs out her breath and watches it dissipate on the gentle breeze, as she swipes her boot across the thick native mountain grass and watches the play of the light over the morning dew clinging to the purple-tinged edges. Home beats in her heart, against the refrain of farewell, farewell.

Reno doesn't say anything. He just watches her, sticking his hands into the pockets of the parka she found for him in the hall closet, content to give her as long as she needs to take.

It's been years since she's been out here. They played in the backyard of the mansion as children, when there were no Shinra delegations staying here, but she'd set that aside as she grew into adulthood, and whoever repopulated the village that's outside the mansion's gates (and she is so carefully not thinking about it, not wondering, not thinking of indulging the sick fascination and the part of her that wonders how close they got it, how much of her house survived to be reconstructed, whether her mother's piano survived the flames and whether enough of the interior had been left unburned that the furnishings and decorations would be familiar) has clearly not been keeping up the maintenance back here.

The lawn is overgrown, overrun with the mountain grasses and wildflowers that have adapted to the altitude and the weather. A full quarter of the yard back by the line where lawn turns into scraggly forest has been claimed by a thicket of the everblooming Nifl rose, its hardy cane-stalks standing up to the worst a Nibel winter can throw at it until it can throw all its energy into making the tiny, dense blooms present through all but the deepest winter months. The plant had taken place of pride in nearly all the village gardens, given at least a border even in the ones used for food and not for ornamentation, with friendly competition going every year to see how many new colors each gardener could breed out of them each season --

Tifa stops, suspicion whispering into certainty as her eye sweeps over the thicket, noting each individual blaze of color, each blossom just beginning to open its petals with the morning light. Ellen Strife had called that pale blonde Cloud, and her mother said they teased her over which came first, the rose or the son. That deep purple -- Richard Svensson's pride; each year he got closer and closer to true black. Nita Westermark's pinks, dozens of subtle variations she'd nurtured, inherited from her father and his mother before him, generation after generation. Amy and Matthew Ahlquist's tri-colored variations: pink/white/yellow, red/white/orange -- and oh, Shiva, yes, there, in the back corner, the green-tipped white, each bloom smaller than its fellows elsewhere in the thicket, and she remembers her mother, laughing, the winter sunlight glinting off her hair, patiently showing her how to graft cane onto cane, cross-pollinate the blooms, always looking to perfect the color --

"This is where they are, aren't they," she says.

"Yeah." Reno lit a cigarette while she was busy surveying the scene. He's standing downwind; she hadn't even noticed. He can't quite meet her eyes, playing with the lighter, flicking it open and shut, open and shut. "Back here was chewed up enough, from us all camping out, didn't take long to dig. We didn't know who was who, so most of them, we couldn't match the flowers from the gardens and put them in the right place. But we tried our best, and the boss said it looked like everybody shared plants anyway, so they probably wouldn't mind." His gaze sweeps over the field of flowers, and there's satisfaction there. "Rude owes me ten gil; he said they'd never transplant well enough."

"They're tougher than you think," Tifa murmurs. He's being kind to spare her any more trauma, but she knows as well as he does the reason they couldn't match garden to body was because the bodies had likely been so badly destroyed that they would have been unidentifiable save by Shinra's most advanced technology; from watching the news she knows they can identify a body if they have -- something she doesn't quite understand -- on file, or with the presence of a parent or child to compare that something against. If Rufus had had his way, she realizes, they would've done that for the bodies they found. Compared them to anyone who came from Nibelheim to see if those who had left the village for the city had relatives whose bodies they wished to claim; compared those remaining against each other, so families could lie together. Under Rufus's father, the best that was done for them was the no-doubt-clandestine actions of the Turks, who are Rufus's hands far more than his father will ever know.

She knows which paradigm she prefers.

So she crosses the yard with her usual stride -- Reno scrambles to keep up -- and picks her way through to kneel next to the green-tipped white roses her mother had never bothered to name and Tifa and her father hadn't had the heart to, after they'd lost her. She reaches out, cupping one in her hand, stem sliding through her fingers, feeling the familiar silken petals. She walks her fingers down the stem, feeling for the bend, pinching it off with her thumbnail. The bloom falls into her hand, and she lifts it to smell -- their perfume is subtle, but oh so familiar -- before twining it through the end of her braid.

Then she stands up. Reno averts his eyes immediately -- he'd been watching her, then -- and pinches out his cigarette, field-stripping it and tucking the butt into his pocket. "Come on," she says. "Time's a-wasting, and I've got a cliff or two to show you how to climb."

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