( 4. )

Two hours later, Tifa is breaking down the coffee maker and cleaning it, while Wedge and Jessie are working together to inventory the walk-in fridge and the booze storage room so that Tifa knows what she'll need to reorder from her main distributor on Monday. (What she'll need to tell whomever takes over for the week to reorder from her main alcohol distributor on Monday. She hasn't quite yet come to terms with the thought that she won't be here. It won't be a vacation, she knows, but it will be the first time she's gone more than a day without being behind her bar, and the thought is unnerving.) Tseng is unpacking and loading pallets of beer into the chest refrigerator. They haven't said a word to each other since breakfast finished. Rufus is in the kitchen; having finished whatever mysterious alchemy of the telephone he'd excused himself to perform, he is now frying the potato strips he'd cut earlier in batches and flash-freezing them. She'd watched him through the first, and found nothing she could fault in his work.

Her life, she thinks, applying scrub brush to the inside well of the coffee machine, is more than a little bit surreal.

The door opens just as she's finishing up, and she has to stop herself from twitching towards the sawed-off shotgun she keeps well-hidden behind the bar for problems that can't be solved with fists and feet alone. She's on edge today.

Reno steps through the door first. He's not wearing the suit that marks him as one of the Turks (although trying to disguise Reno's hair, his tattoos, is a losing proposition) but has on a pair of SOLDIER BDUs and a plain grey t-shirt instead. Reeve, behind him, is wearing jeans and a well-worn light blue t-shirt with the Midgar University Architecture Department's logo over a stylized skyline of Midgar, done in a draftsman's hand. Tifa doesn't know the woman who follows Reeve: she's slight and blonde, wearing jeans and a faded black t-shirt with the logo of a band Tifa doesn't recognize. Rude is last, in BDUs and a plain grey t-shirt identical to Reno's, with the addition of his ever-present sunglasses. Reno is the only one of the four who isn't wearing an overstuffed backpack; Reeve is juggling, in addition to the backpack, a briefcase, a messenger bag, and four long cardboard tubes tucked under one arm.

"Hey, Tif'," Reno says, giving her that sweet smile of his Tifa has always been slightly wary of. "Nice hair. Brought you some help."

"Reno," Tseng says, softly, at Tifa's side. Tifa doesn't jump to hear his voice coming from right behind her, but only because she doesn't want to show weaknesses. "I don't recall asking for your presence."

Reno shrugs. "The chief pressed me into service as an errand boy." His hands move, just a little; Tifa controls the impulse to flinch. (Reno is excellent at sleight of hand.) When he holds them up, there's a small plastic rectangle tucked between the index and middle fingers of his right hand. The other three new arrivals (and Tifa suddenly realizes how badly she's outnumbered, and doesn't let it bother her) stay near the door as Reno crosses the room. When he holds the card out to her, she realizes what it must be.

Reno's face is more solemn than she ever remembers seeing it. Looking back, she doesn't think she's ever seen him on duty before. There's no doubt in her mind he's here in his professional capacity, functioning as Rufus's hands, an agent by which Rufus will redeem his promise to her.

Her hand reaches out for the card without her quite telling it to do so, and when she looks down at the card, her own face looks back up at her. She wonders how they found a suitable picture to use. The name on the face of the ID reads 'Miki Walker'. The corner of the card has a stamp she's never seen in person before, except the few times she's seen Tseng's ID thrown casually on her bedside table overnight. It's the unlimited travel card Rufus promised her.

Or rather, it is if the card is properly coded and doesn't simply claim to be, and she hates that she has to think that, but she does. She looks up to Reno, intending to ask how she can be certain it isn't a trap. Reno holds up a hand before she can, though, and she can't tell if her face is that transparent or if Reno is just that used to dealing with the details. A little of both, perhaps. He takes a tiny handheld gizmo out of one of his pants pockets; it takes her a minute to recognize it as an ID card reader, the kind Shinra security guards carry at the train stations when preparing to let people board a circumplate train.

"Boss," Reno says, holding out his other hand. Tseng must know what he's asking for; he reaches into the pocket of his own BDUs and produces his ID card. Reno takes it gingerly, holding it between nothing more than two fingertips, moving slowly enough that Tifa thinks he's trying to show her he hasn't switched the cards without her noticing. (She's pretty sure Reno could switch them anyway. But she has to take something on faith.) Reno swipes the card through the reader, then turns the reader to face her. She looks down at it to see Tseng's face looking back up at her, his personal information scrolling by on the screen faster than she can read. Above his ID picture is the same unlimited-travel stamp the card Reno has brought for her bears.

She expects Reno to run her card next, to demonstrate that hers, too, is coded for unlimited travel. He doesn't. Without taking his eyes from hers, he holds his hand out and to the side. "'Lena," he says. It's an order, somehow, even though it doesn't sound like one. The woman who accompanied them crosses the bar on hesitant feet; she gives Tifa a tiny smile, one Tifa thinks is supposed to be reassuring. Her face is sweet and open. She fumbles in the front pocket of her jeans for a minute before pulling out her own card, and instead of taking it, Reno holds out the cardreader for her to swipe her card through it herself.

She does, fumbling the card twice before getting a clear read, and Reno turns the cardreader to face Tifa again. The ID picture is clearly the woman Tifa is looking at; she can just catch her first name (Elena) before the information starts scrolling. The section above her ID photo is coded "travel, limited, Above all sectors, Below restricted commercial".

Reno holds out both the cardreader and Tseng's ID card for Tifa to take; when she does, he pulls out his own ID and hands it over as well. "Here," he says. His eyes are still fixed on Tifa's face, and the look she can see there almost makes her shiver. She's known for a while that Reno is Tseng's second-in-command in the Turks, and she's wondered, every time she's reminded, why Tseng puts up with the insubordinate, sloppy, casual, outrageous attitude Reno has always shown every time he darkens the doorstep of the Heaven. If this is the person Reno is while on duty, she can understand a little better now. "'Lena, give Tifa your card. Tifa, run those three however many times you need to feel comfortable that I haven't rigged the reader, then run yours. If it makes you more comfortable, any of the rest of us will hand over ours for you to run, too."

Tifa looks down at the piece of electronics she's holding, at the three Shinra employee ID cards Reno has handed her. At the card Reno has given her with her own face and a stranger's name. Reno only watches her. His face is patient; his body language says he's willing to wait all day for her to be satisfied.

A part of her is tempted to simply hand back the reader and tell him she'll take his word for it. It would serve to set him (them) off balance, and she is certain having them off balance would serve her well in the hours and days to come. But trust comes hard to her, and harder when the person she is facing is one of Shinra's own, and so she runs Tseng's card twice, Elena's once, and Reno's twice before running her own. Then she runs all three of the others again, to make sure nothing has changed. The results are precisely what the face of each card proclaims.

When she hands the reader back to Reno, it's as though a switch has been flipped. The professional demeanor Reno is wearing slides off his face as though it never were as he replaces the reader in his pocket and sprawls across the bar stool he was standing in front of. "Hey, Tif', hey, boss," he says, as though the last five minutes hadn't happened at all. "Tif', I want you to meet Elena. She came down with Reeve and Rude to give you a hand, that's okay with you, yeah?"

By the door, Reeve and Rude start moving as well; Rude shuts the door behind them, while Reeve awkwardly dumps his briefcase, his messenger bag, and the cardboard tubes he's holding across a nearby table. Both of them come across the room as well to take stools of their own. Rude gives her a nod as he sits (she's always suspected he has a crush on her; he never says more than three words in a row to her, or maybe it's just his nature); Reeve gives her a little half-wave. Elena, meanwhile, stands up on the railing at the foot of the bar, and Tifa thinks she's preparing to sit down as well, but instead she leans over the bar and holds out a hand.

"Hi," Elena says, smiling. Tifa likes her smile immediately, and has to caution herself against accepting that snap judgement (no matter how good her snap judgements usually are). She takes Elena's offered hand and shakes it; her grip is firm, and Tifa can feel calluses on her palm. "You probably don't know of me, it was before your time, but I put myself through college running the Down and Dirty over in Wall Market. I'm out of practice, and from everything I've heard, this is a much classier place, but I can be trained."

Tifa can sense the presence of someone else in the room a few seconds before Rufus says, from the pass-through to the kitchen, "Will they do?"

The atmosphere of the room alters subtly. Elena's eyes grow wide as she sits down onto the barstool; Rude's spine straightens a little; Reno slouches a little more; Reeve just glances over, his face a question. Tseng, still standing two steps behind Tifa and at her left, doesn't move.

Tifa closes her eyes, counts to three, and takes a deep breath. "I find it hard to believe that you're willing to lend me a company director, one of the Turks, and another one of your people for a week or so, just to run a bar in the slums."

"I'm in Corel on an emergency reactor visit right now," Reeve says, cheerfully enough. His smile is as friendly as it always is, without any hints or undercurrents behind it. Tifa has often thought that Reeve is one of the most open and honest people she's ever met; she's wondered, more than once, what he's doing with Shinra. "I think Rude is -- where was it, Rude?"

"Junon," Rude rumbles. "Training exercise."

Rufus's eyes flick over to Elena, and Tifa has no problems reading the message there: not in front of her. "I gave you my word," he says. "It is best backed by people capable of being trusted."

Tifa notices that he doesn't say people I trust. She closes her eyes again, pinches the bridge of her nose against the headache that is threatening to return. "All right," she says; hearing her own voice, the tight and snippy sound to it, she nearly winces. She opens her eyes again and sweeps over Reeve, Elena, and Rude. If Rufus is going to up the stakes like this, she can play the game too. "Come on. I'll introduce you to Wedge and Jessie. Biggs isn't in on Saturdays, but he'll be in tomorrow, and you can meet him then. Then I'll give you the rundown of what needs to be done."

She wonders what reason Rufus gave them for why they're all here. She wonders what sort of leader Rufus is, for his people to be willing to drop everything and head to the slums to do a job that has nothing to do with their job descriptions, at nothing more than Rufus's bare word. She wonders what they think is going on, and whether they're going to ask her, and if they do, what she can say.

At the bar, Reno puts his feet up on the stool next to him. "What d'you want me to do?" he asks.

Nerves, more than anything, make her voice come out snappish. "Sit right there and don't touch anything," she says, gesturing the other three to the kitchen. (As they follow her, she can hear Rude leaning over and muttering in Reno's ear: "Told you she was still pissed.")

Jessie and Wedge are nakedly curious about what the fuck is going on as Tifa walks her ersatz employees through the process of running the bar, but they don't ask. (Know better than to ask.) They've all had more than one conversation, over the past year, about political sympathies and where theirs lie. All her employees know she sympathizes more with the anti-Shinra faction than not. Wedge has questioned, more than once, her habit of allowing Shinra employees -- and more than that, Shinra's elite -- to not only drink in her bar but help run it as well; he's never said a word about her relationship with Tseng, but she's been able to tell he's been controlling himself rigorously from mentioning. (Wedge's brother is part of Johnny's rebellion, Tifa knows. She hopes none of the Turks do.) When she'd finally explained her theories of slum/Shinra interaction, he'd looked thoughtful, then nodded and never asked again. She hopes to all the gods he won't ask now, because she doesn't think she can explain without screaming.

Like most of her regular customers, both Rude and Reeve have filled in behind the bar here and there before; it doesn't take long to get them up to speed in the kitchen as well. (Jessie will handle the administrative end of things while Tifa is gone; she's been working for Tifa long enough that she'll know what needs to be done, and Tifa has built up enough goodwill with her various suppliers that if things get missed, she can recover easily enough later.) Elena, meanwhile, is clearly delighted with everything she sees; she holds out her arms and twirls in circles to take everything in. "This is sweet," she finally declares, her eyes shining. "At the D&D, I had one microwave and a single stove burner. I could do anything in here."

Tifa wonders, again, what Elena thinks is going on, why she's willing to drop everything and return to her bar-running days at nothing more than a phone call. Does Rufus hold that much sway over his employees? Does Shinra worship him that much?

It's early afternoon by the time Tifa has finished taking them through everything and shown them where they can sleep and leave their things upstairs. (Both Reeve and Rude insist Elena take Tifa's bedroom, and say they'll flip a coin for who gets the guest bedroom and who is relegated to the tiny couch in the tiny living room. Tifa won't say as much, but she's desperately grateful; of the three of them she's far more comfortable with Elena in her personal space than either of the men.) She shoos them back downstairs, telling them she'll be down shortly to start lunch, intending to hang back and pack a bag with clothes and supplies for a week (and the most private of her belongings, the things she wouldn't want an outsider to see -- not that she thinks Elena will necessarily snoop, but precautions are only sensible).

Elena doesn't leave the room, though, and Tifa looks up from her dresser to see the woman standing in the center of the room and looking incredibly serious. "Look," she says. "I don't know what's going on here, or why Vice-President Shinra wants us to do this, or what you're going to go do instead that you need somebody -- somebody from Shinra, even -- to come and take over for a bit. And I am absolutely not asking. But --" She bites her lip. "I'm probably totally out of line here. But I remember my days down in Wall Market pretty well, and I still keep in touch with a bunch of people down here when I can, and I've heard a few things about this place. I think you've been damn careful for the past two years to make sure this is a place where anybody can come and be safe, no matter who they are or who they work for or -- what they believe. And I want you to know that we'll -- I'll be careful with it. I promise."

Tifa lifts her head to meet Elena's eyes. It's almost a relief to realize Elena has none of the training in self-control that Tseng has, that Rufus has; her sincerity shines through in every line. Tifa can see an incredible curiosity there, and all the things Elena isn't saying (and she realizes, in one sudden rush, that yes, Elena can see there's at least some small measure of sympathizing with the rebels here, and she wonders if Elena thinks she's joining forces with Tseng and Rufus to go do something to stop the rebellion, and the thought makes her squirm). But Elena stands there in her bedroom and looks back at her, her eyes wide and serious, willing Tifa to believe her. In that minute, Tifa feels a rush of solidarity with this woman she met for the first time only a few hours ago, and she thinks it just might be okay to leave her bar in this woman's hands.

"Thank you," she says, and her voice is rough, and Elena does her the favor of not saying anything to call attention to it.

Elena bows her head a little, awkwardly, and Tifa likes her a little more for how out-of-place she seems, how she isn't as perfectly polished and presented and self-composed as Tseng and Rufus (and even Reno and Rude and, to some extent, Reeve). That awkwardness soothes something in Tifa's soul she hadn't even been aware of; she hadn't realized until right that minute how much she'd been resenting that control. Elena's awkwardness is real, not a face she's fronting, and Tifa thinks what she sees is what she'll get from Elena. It's reassuring.

"I'll just ..." Elena trails off and makes a face (involuntary, Tifa thinks), waving a hand in the direction of the downstairs.

"Wait a second," Tifa says, as she turns to go. Elena turns back to her. Tifa makes herself smile at the girl. (Girl, hell; she's likely older than Tifa is. But sometimes Tifa feels so, so old.) "I'm sorry. I'm being incredibly rude here."

Elena winces. (The expression says yeah, you kind of are, but it's understandable.) "You've got a lot on your mind --" she starts.

Tifa holds up a hand to stop her; Elena falls silent. "Still. I --" She considers, debates with herself, finally says fuck it and throws caution to the wayside. "I have no idea if I'm doing the right thing here. With any of this. I slammed head-first into things that are way bigger than I am a while back, and I've been trying to run away from them and hide for a few years now, and it's time for me to stop running and hiding now. And you being willing to come down and help take care of the bar for a week is part of what's letting me be able to do that, and I appreciate it -- I mean, I don't want to turn my bar over to strangers, and I don't appreciate the fact that I have to, but I appreciate that you were willing to disrupt your life and come and handle it, and I appreciate how hard you've been working to learn enough to make sure that everything will be okay while I'm gone, and I ..." She runs out of words. "Thank you," she repeats. This time she means it a hell of a lot more.

Elena's expression turns rueful as Tifa speaks. "You're welcome," she says. "I'll do my best to keep the home fires burning." She pauses, and just when Tifa thinks she might turn and go back downstairs, she adds, "This is probably just as inappropriate for me to say --"

Tifa can feel herself smiling. "It's okay," she says. "I serve drinks to Reno. I'm used to inappropriate."

It makes Elena laugh. "Yeah, okay. Um. Is it okay if I say that whatever it is you're doing, I hope you get through it okay? 'Cause I just met you, but I really like you, and when you get back from whatever, I really want to sit down with you and have a beer and get to know you better."

Tifa is struck with a rush of ... something. Comradeship, she supposes, or fellow-feeling, or sisterhood. "Yeah," she says, and her voice is getting rough again, but this time it's more okay. "Yeah. Thanks. I hope so too." She crosses the room, intending to hold out her hand to shake Elena's, and changes her mind when she gets there; instead she holds out her arms for a hug, and Elena blinks once and then delivers it. She smells nice, Tifa thinks; fancy soap and lotion, and her shampoo smells like flowers. Tifa holds on for a minute longer than she'd been intending to. The simple human contact, from someone whom Tifa can be reasonably certain isn't carrying an agenda, makes her want to hold on and soak it in against whatever is to come.

Then she makes herself pull back, before she can give away too much more. "Come on," she says. "I promised them lunch, and I don't want Reno to decide I'm not going to deliver and start trying to eat the bar."

When they go back downstairs, Reeve has moved his things from the table by the door to one closer to the bar, and has taken out his laptop and turned it on; he's frowning at it and tapping the space bar in syncopated rhythm. Reno and Rude are both sitting at the bar, beers in hand (she'd told them to help themselves; she squashes the little hint of annoyance that they took her at her word), talking to Tseng (who is behind the bar) in low voices. She can't see Rufus, and thinks he's probably in the kitchen working, and wonders (again) whether Jessie or Wedge have figured out who he really is, and if so, what they think is going on. (Rufus isn't trying to disguise himself this morning. He's wearing the exact same clothes as he did last night, but last night he'd been different somehow, some difference in carriage or in body language, that she can't put her finger on but she knows would have kept her patrons from looking twice at him. Today, he's holding himself like he rules the world.)

Elena, following behind her, looks to her for permission and then heads for behind the bar, clearly intending to start a pot of coffee. (She gives Tseng a wide berth, Tifa notices, but not at all like someone who is afraid of him, or someone who doesn't know him by anything other than reputation. She wonders what Elena does for Shinra. Perhaps she'll ask later.)

Tseng looks over to her as she walks by on her route from stairs to kitchen. His expression is as calm and controlled as it always is, but she can see the question in his eyes: are you all right? She shrugs at him, just one shoulder, rising and falling: I don't know, but I'm trying to be. He doesn't press the issue.

The kitchen contains one Rufus Shinra, and no Jessie or Wedge. (She can hear noises coming from the stockroom; they must have gone back to the interrupted inventory.) Rufus is standing at the stove, lifting the lid of the pot bubbling there and stirring; from the smell, she can tell it's the tomato sauce she serves with the fried cheese and the garlic breadsticks. He looks up and nods to her. She glances over to the prep counter; if he's still following the list, and he's gotten to the sauce portion, he should also be grating cheese and slicing the tomatoes and onions for that night's service. Sure enough, there are three neatly-stacked plastic containers waiting to be returned to the walk-in, and a half-sliced tomato sitting next to the chef's knife he was clearly using.

It says something about the adaptability of the human mind, she thinks, that she has ceased to find it surprising that Rufus fucking Shinra is standing in her kitchen, having blown through her entire weekend prep list in half the time it would take anybody but her.

Still, she gives in to impulse and asks the question that's been bothering her all day. "Where did you learn how to do all of this?" she asks. "I mean, call me crazy, but running a commercial kitchen doesn't seem like the sort of skill that's necessary in -- in your position." (She censors herself halfway through; if Wedge and Jessie haven't figured out who he is yet, she won't be the one to tell them, and while the conversation she can hear drifting in from the stockroom doesn't falter as though they're listening when she speaks and while it's hard to hear what's going on in the kitchen from the stockroom even with the door open, she doesn't want to push her luck.)

She's expecting Rufus to bristle at the implied insult to his competence, but all he does is shrug. "Your prep sheets are incredibly thorough; anybody could follow them. But I spent the summer I was fifteen working half-time in Building Catering," he says. He sets the wooden spoon down on the rest next to the stove, then grabs a tasting spoon and gathers up a bit of the sauce to blow cool and check for flavor. Apparently satisfied, he replaces the lid; rather than returning to the prep counter, he leans a hip against the counter next to the stove and studies her. "And the other half in the mailroom. I know it's not what you might expect, but --" He shrugs. "I like cooking. I don't get to do it often enough. There's something satisfying in making things."

Tifa shakes her head. "It isn't what I would expect," she says. Expect of you, is the undercurrent. She's seen more sides of Rufus Shinra today than most people ever get to, she knows.

Rufus only smiles. It is, she notes again, a surprisingly sweet expression. "I enjoy confounding expectations," he says, and it's probably the most honest sentence she's heard from him yet. "Are the arrangements I've made satisfactory, or is there anything else that needs to be done for you to be comfortable your empire is in good hands?"

There isn't a hint of impatience in his question. She remembers what she'd overheard, earlier that morning, creeping upstairs on silent feet more out of habit than out of desire to eavesdrop before she'd realized he and Tseng had been discussing her: She is possessive of what is hers, Tseng had said, and Rufus had answered well, I would be too. She wonders, abruptly, how much of his labor on her behalf today, how much of his quite frankly over-the-top arranging of coverage for her while she is away, stems from the respect of one business owner to another, no matter how different the scale upon which they operate might be.

"It's fine," she says. Manners, nothing more, force her to add: "Thank you." She crosses the kitchen -- dammit, forgot to put on shoes, and she knows from experience cooking barefoot is a bad idea, but she doesn't feel like going to find where she last left her shoes. Oh well. Dropping a kitchen knife onto her bare toes is the least of her worries today, anyway, and her reflexes are usually good enough. Opening the freezer, she takes out a pack of the hamburger patties she made up last week and froze, along with a bag of fries. (It's the last of the batches from last week's prep work, not one of the ones Rufus did this morning. She's almost tempted to put them back and take one of the new ones, to check their quality and to satisfy her curiosity, but she's pretty sure he would consider it an insult, and besides, they haven't had long enough to freeze for proper results anyway.)

When she turns to fire up the grill and realizes both it and the fryer is already on and starting to warm -- Rufus must have flipped them both on when he'd returned to the kitchen -- she finds Rufus still watching her. "I'm pretty sure Elena will be willing to call you however often you'd like to provide you with status updates," he says.

Tifa puts the bag of fries down on the counter next to the fryer a little more forcefully than they truly deserve. "It's fine," she repeats, a little more of an edge creeping into her voice. "Look. I am cooperating with you. I am cooperating with you against my better judgement, against every little voice in the back of my head that is telling me that this is quite frankly ridiculous, and against every instinct that I have, because Shiva help me, you've managed to convince me I've been running away from what happened in -- what happened back then for too damn long and it's time to step up and do what I can to help fix it. And I appreciate the fact you're trying to make this as easy as possible for me. I truly do. But for the love of anything you might find holy, stop trying to arrange my life for me. Just stop. All it's doing is reminding me constantly of who and what you are, and it isn't helping."

Even as she's speaking, even as she hears her own words, there's a voice in the back of her head screaming at her, telling her to stop fucking talking. Telling her this is Rufus fucking Shinra, who does rule the world, or close enough at least, and who is capable of making her life as difficult for her as he is trying to make it easy right now.

Wildly, she thinks, looking at the way Rufus's face shutters over at her words, that she may have actually hurt his fucking feelings.

"My apologies," Rufus says after a few minutes, taking refuge in formality. "It is ... habit, nothing more."

Tseng tells me ten times a day I have no concept of how anybody lives further down than the sixtieth floor, she remembers him saying -- oh, Shiva, it was only this morning, even though it feels like a week. Tifa realizes, before he can say anything else, this is his way of trying to show her -- respect, perhaps, or maybe just his way of trying to prove to her he is telling her the truth. That if she goes with them, she will be safe, or as safe enough as she can possibly be, and when she returns, she will not have cause to regret having cooperated with them in the first place. Her worldview shifts a little, and she looks at him and suddenly sees a young man with far too much power for his own good, trying to give a gift in any way he knows how.

She still can't quite manage to make herself feel gratitude.

"Look," she says. "You and I don't only come from different worlds; we come from different universes. Just ... it's okay. Stop trying so hard." She smiles a little. (Makes herself smile.) "Just go and sit at the bar with Tseng and Rude and Reno and relax a bit. You've been working since before I was awake."

Rufus nods, once. "Tell me when there's something more I can do," he says, and she grits her teeth at the way it's an order.

Alone in her kitchen -- alone for the first time since her run this morning, really -- Tifa takes a minute to close her eyes and fight off the urge to scream. When she thinks she can control herself well enough that she won't put her fist through the wall or something, she heads for the stockroom to pick up the hamburger buns while the grill and the fryer finish warming.

Both Jessie and Wedge look up as she enters; the way their conversation stops tells her they've been talking about her. Or at least saying something they don't want her to hear. She wonders how many bridges she'll have to mend when she's done with ... whatever it is she's going to do. "Hamburger buns," she says, shortly, with an undercurrent of and I don't want to talk about anything while I get them.

Jessie reaches up and pulls down the box of hamburger and hot dog buns, pulls a bag out and tosses them in Tifa's direction. Then she takes a deep breath. "Look, Tif' --"

"Don't say it," Tifa says, before Jessie can get any further. "Please. Just ... don't."

"We're worried about you, Miss Tifa," Wedge says, softly, putting his clipboard down and taking half a step closer. "Those are the Turks out there. And you say you're going with them. I mean, I know that you and Tseng -- but still -- you know a lot of --"

At least that answers the question of whether or not Jessie and Wedge have figured out who Rufus is. If they had, they'd surely be even more worried. Tifa reaches for her reserves of strength and summons up a smile; Wedge's worried expression doesn't change, though, and she knows her attempt's probably not at all convincing. "It's okay, guys," Tifa says. Orders. (If she can say it enough times, maybe it will be true.) "It doesn't have anything to do with any of you. And it doesn't have anything to do with anything that happens here, or any of the people who come in here." Wedge opens his mouth to say something else. She overrides him before he can get a word in edgewise. "I would tell you, if it did. You're my people, and it's my job to protect you. This is about something that happened before I came to Midgar. Long before I came to the Heaven. I have some information they need to know, and there's something I can do to help make things better for everyone, and they're doing everything they can to make me feel safe while I do it and make sure nothing happens to the Heaven while I'm gone. I'm fine. You'll be fine. Everything is fine."

She can tell they don't quite believe her, but Wedge only drops his eyes and toes the floor, unhappily, before picking up the clipboard again and going back to counting bottles of vodka and gin. Jessie looks at Tifa, then at Wedge, then back to Tifa. "I hope you don't regret this," she says, finally.

I hope so too, Tifa thinks. But all she says is, "I won't. And I'll tell you everything I can, once it's over. All I can say now is, this is the right thing to do."

Jessie sighs. "I'll make sure everyone knows you went with them willingly, because of something you felt you had to do," she finally says, and Tifa knows that by 'everyone' she means 'everyone who hates Shinra as much as we do'. "It might help ... avoid some unpleasantness."

Tifa realizes what she means, in one sudden rush: if certain of Midgar-Below's people thought Shinra had taken her away, because of something she'd done or something she knew, it would have the potential to spark a war she can barely imagine. She's been doing her level best for the past two years to ease the tensions that would lead to that war, but she's only one woman and there's only so much influence she can have. She's been careful (so careful) to maintain the Seventh Heaven as a place of neutrality, but her personal sympathies have always fallen more on the rebel side of the equation, and she knows there are enough people down here who are only waiting for her to decide it's time to start a rebellion of her own. To many who are opposed to Shinra but who, like her, disagree with the tactics of many of the existing anti-Shinra groups, she's something akin to a figurehead. An inspiration. A leader, no matter how much she tries not to be.

Her blood runs cold at the thought of what those people might do if they thought their leader had been taken away.

"Yes," Tifa manages, through suddenly-dry throat. "Please. If anyone asks, tell them -- tell them I've gone to redeem a promise, and to right a wrong." She is carefully vague about whose promise, and whose wrong. "And I'll be back as soon as I can be, and ... I'm acting out of necessity, and honor, and doing all I can to serve the best interests of everyone down here."

"I hope it's worth it," Jessie says, and Tifa doesn't dare agree out loud, but inwardly she prays that Jessie is right.

Lunch is painfully awkward. Which is a step up from the "utterly miserable" that Tifa had been fearing, at least. Once they're done eating and Tifa has wasted as much time as she thinks she can get away with in cleaning up afterwards, she excuses herself and goes to finish packing her bag. Tseng looks up from his conversation with Reeve, and she can see him arguing with himself; a few seconds later, he excuses himself as well and follows her.

"I'll leave you alone in a minute," he says, once they're on the stairs, before she can get a chance to protest. "But not only did I leave some things in your room, you're going to need to change before we leave, and it would be best if I took a look through your closet first to tell you what's best to bring."

Tifa bites back the first three things that spring to her lips. He's right, and she knows he's right; she dresses better than most of the people who live Below, but fashion Above is much different. She's expecting him to say something else once they reach her bedroom, something supportive or insightful, but he doesn't. All he does is go straight for her closet and begin picking briskly through her clothes, tossing things on her bed next to her open backpack.

She wonders, watching him hold up shirts and skirts and eye them thoughtfully, whether he'd done her hair so formally that morning because he'd suspected, consciously or unconsciously, that they would be arriving at this moment before the day was through.

"There," Tseng finally says, turning from her closet with one of her least shabby miniskirts in his hands. (He is smart enough, or observant enough -- or both -- to have only selected outfits in which she can have full range of movement. She rarely wears anything other than skirts for that reason; it's nearly impossible to find jeans or pants that give her enough range of motion through the thighs and the crotch without having them custom-tailored, and she doesn't know of anyone in the slums who'd know what she meant when she asked.) "The shirt's all right. Put this on instead, though, and add this on top --" He adds a loose button-down shirt, plain white cotton, that's at least three sizes too big for her. She doesn't recognize it; it's probably his. "Your shoes might be a problem, but we'll hope nobody notices."

"I'm not one of your assignments," Tifa says, quietly, taking the shirt and skirt from his hands. She throws the shirt onto the bed, then hooks her thumbs into the skirt she's wearing and pushes it down to change into the one he'd handed her. (There's no point in worrying about modesty, not with Tseng.)

When Tseng doesn't reply immediately, she looks up. He's studying her, and she can't read his face. "No," he says. "No, you're not. I'll meet you downstairs once you're ready." He picks up his own backpack and walks out without another word.

Something in his voice, in his words, makes her want to shiver. She gets the sense he wasn't necessarily agreeing with the same thing she meant when she'd said it, or he meant something utterly unlike what she had, and she can't decide if that's a good thing or not.

She puts returning downstairs off for as long as she thinks she can once she's finished stuffing the clothes Tseng chose for her into her shabby and disreputable backpack, but she's pretty sure the clock started ticking the minute they finished eating. She struggles into Tseng's shirt (it's far too big, uncomfortably so; she eventually unbuttons it again and ties the tails in a knot under her breasts the way she remembers seeing a woman from Shinra about her age having done in the bar last month), then goes into the bathroom to pack her toiletries. While there, she catches a look at the mirror. For half a second, she wonders who that woman is, with her too-old eyes looking out from underneath a hairstyle that would not look out of place at a formal banquet, and then she realizes she's looking at herself.

When she comes back down the stairs, the backpack slung over her shoulders, four pairs of eyes look up and give her a once-over: Tseng's, Rufus's, Rude's, and Reno's. All four have identical looks of professional evaluation. Tseng is the one to nod. "You'll do," he says, then kicks the legs of the stool Reno is leaning back in. "Saddle up, Reno. You're coming back with us."

Tifa squares her shoulders and descends the last two stairs. Reeve, returning from the bar with a fresh bottle of water, rests his hand briefly on her arm as he passes by her and gives her a reassuring smile. "You'll be fine," he says, his voice low enough to only reach her ears. "You can trust him. And -- thank you." His control slips for one brief second, and she can hear relief and gratitude in equal measure.

So. Rufus did tell them what was going on, why they were doing all of this. Or told Reeve, at least. It's a useful data point, if nothing more.

As she watches, Rude produces a baseball cap from the depths of his backpack and tosses it at Tseng, who hands it to Rufus. Rufus makes a face. "Yeah, yeah," Tseng says -- Tifa nearly chokes at how unsympathetic he sounds; she'd've sworn Tseng would rather chew off his own arm than speak to Rufus in that tone. "Three PM has different rules than nine PM. Be lucky I don't insist on the vest, too."

"Bite me," Rufus mutters, but he puts on the baseball cap anyway, tugging it down low over his eyes. As Tifa watches, Rufus takes a deep breath; as he lets it out, he rocks back on his heels, swings his arms back and forth and shakes his shoulders out, and then -- changes, somehow. She watches in pure fascination as his shoulders hunch over, one slightly higher than the other, and his hips turn out slightly and back slightly more. When he's finished, he looks precisely like the Midgar U student her cover story for him named him, down to the slight jitter of one leg as though he's been drinking endless cups of coffee all afternoon.

Tseng looks to Tifa, and she realizes even though Rufus is Tseng's boss, something has changed enough for Tseng to be in charge now. "Say goodbye," Tseng says to her, jerking his chin at the back room where Wedge and Jessie have gone back to work, with Elena joining them.

Tifa shakes her head, tucking one thumb under the strap of her backpack, more to have something to do with her hands than anything else. "It's okay," she says. "I've never been big on goodbye."

Tseng studies her face for a few seconds, then shrugs and slings his own backpack over his shoulder. "Your choice." He looks at Rude. "Standard call-in schedule. I'll text you if anything changes." Rude nods, not bothering to verbally agree. Tseng transfers his attention to Reno. "Reno, you're on point. Rufus, stay in the Leviathan-damned rocking chair this time, or I'll make you regret it later. Go."

Uncertain of what she's supposed to do -- or why, precisely, Tseng is treating a walk to the train station like the invasion of Wutai, although she's pretty sure it has something to do with Rufus Shinra being about to walk out of her bar and into the Sector 7 slums -- Tifa looks at Tseng. His face softens a bit. "Just follow Reno," he says. "Rufus and I will be right behind you."

Next to her, Reno offers his arm, crooked so that she can place her hand in the curve of his elbow. "C'mon, Tif'," he says, genial as always. "Nice day for a stroll, yeah?"

Tifa takes a deep breath, shoves her feet into the shoes she'd left by the door last night, and rests her hand in the crook of Reno's arm in a perfect parody of manners Above. "Yeah," she says. "Let's go."

Reno keeps up a cheerful line of patter as they make their way through the six blocks to the train station. She does her best to tune him out for the first block, until he looks down at her and hisses, through his smile, his lips barely moving, "Look like you want to be with me, for fuck's sweet sake."

Startled, she looks up at him and realizes the chronic slouch and the loose and sloppy movements she's so used to seeing from him are still there, but right now they're layered deliberately over a tense and wired alertness. She remembers Jessie's words, earlier, and realizes if the wrong people see her leaving on Reno's arm and looking like she's marching to her own execution, it will not end well. She takes a deep breath, steels herself, and gives him the best smile she can, making herself relax her shoulders and lean in as though she's hanging on his every word. It must work; nobody they pass gives them a second look.

Rufus comes strolling up to where they're waiting on the platform a few minutes after she and Reno finish buying their tickets. (At this time of day, the security checks are automated; she'd fished her newly-minted ID out of her bra where she'd stashed it and run it through the turnstile with the ticket, forcing herself not to look over her shoulder like she was waiting for security to rain down on them both.) He hasn't dropped his university-student body language, but Tifa realizes, looking closely at his face, something has left him utterly furious.

Reno sees it too. "You all right, chief?" he asks, voice low, body language incredibly casual. "Something happen I missed?"

"I'm fine," Rufus says, and oh, if anyone were close enough to overhear him, their disguise would be done for; he sounds like he's about to start breathing fire. Rufus's eyes flick to Tifa, then across the platform, taking in everyone around them with a single glance. "Just noticing a few more things Daddy dearest has been trying to keep from me, that's all."

Reno winces. "Ah. Yeah. Gotcha." He doesn't press the matter further. There's a part of Tifa wishing he had; she wants to know just how much Rufus Shinra knows and doesn't know about what happens down here in the slums. She wants to know how much he would change, if he knew. (But she will, won't she? He gave her his word, this morning, that in exchange for her help, he'll listen to the litany of her grievances. She should probably begin composing the presentation now.)

Tseng joins them a minute later. "We're clear," he says, just as quietly. "Next train's in five. If they're not running late again."

"Mmm," Rufus says. "How likely is it that they're running late?" He pauses, considering something. "And why the fuck doesn't the station down here have the same information boards that the stations Above have? No, I know, don't answer that."

"Keep your voice down," Tseng says, and even though his body language and his expression are completely neutral, if not downright pleasant, his voice is a whip cracking. Rufus makes a face at him in return. "And it's the same answer I gave you this morning: money."

Tifa keeps her mouth shut. If she is careful, if she is quiet, they may forget she is here, and she may hear more information that might lead to getting some of the answers she so desperately wants.

But all Rufus does is snort, as though Tseng has just fed him the punchline to a bad joke. He slides a hand into the inside pocket of the leather jacket he's wearing; Tifa forces herself to not tense up, but all he brings out is a slightly-battered pack of cigarettes, opening it to take one out and fish out the disposable lighter shoved into the half-full pack. Reno perks up to see them and holds out a hand. Rufus rolls his eyes, but shakes out another cigarette and hands it to Reno. Then he flicks the pack back and forth between Tifa and Tseng. "Anybody else?" he inquires, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

Tifa shakes her head. She doesn't smoke; with her lungs, it would be a death sentence. She hadn't realized that Rufus did, either -- she knows Reno does; she's banished him to the porch countless times -- but of course, he had been in her space, and the bar has clearly posted No Smoking signs.

Tseng, who comes to her smelling of cigarette smoke occasionally and of clove cigarettes far more often, shakes his head as well. "The platform is a nonsmoking zone," he says, dryly.

"Sure is," Reno says, filching Rufus's lighter to light his cigarette and taking a deep drag. "Same as it was the last ten times you bitched me out for smoking on it."

Well, Tifa supposes, it's not as though anyone is going to stop and tell Reno of the Turks that he has to put his cigarette out. (She's probably the only one in the slums who would dare to.)

The wait goes by quickly enough; the train is late, but by no more than five minutes, which makes it practically on time for this time of day. There are only two seats left in the car they get onto. Tseng waves her to one and Rufus to the other, while he and Reno take up positions hanging on straps immediately in front of them both. Reno launches into some outrageous story as soon as they're settled, starting halfway through as though he's been telling it all along, holding onto the strap with both hands and leaning forward like he's hanging his whole body weight from it. He looks like any one of the overly exuberant transit riders, haranguing his fellow travelers, and Tifa wonders how many people completely miss the way his eyes are constantly sweeping the car around them.

Tseng's fingers flick twice at them when the garbled announcement proclaims the next stop to be Upper Three, Twenty-First Street. Tifa lifts her backpack from where she'd stowed it on the floor between her feet. Reno holds down his hand to help her up; she bites back the protest that she doesn't need the assistance, and doesn't miss the way he deftly folds her hand back into the crook of his elbow again as they join the crush of people getting off the train. The way he's holding his arm means her hand is squeezed tightly in between his forearm and his upper arm. She could get free if she wanted, but it would take her more than a single motion, and he'd know she was trying the minute she moved.

She doesn't object. Doesn't struggle, either. The station they've gotten off at is nothing like any of the stations down Below; it's underground, for one, and she realizes they're in one of the sectors Above where the train runs under the plate, not above it. Even on the weekend, the push and crush of people flowing from one platform to the next, from the platform area to the turnstiles for the exit, is enough to be almost dizzying. Tifa is a small-town girl at heart, and Sector 7 is the smallest of the sectors Below. This is more people than she sees in an average week, and they all seem to want to push her off her feet.

Tifa is suddenly, sharply aware of how the balance of power in their little party has shifted. Drastically.

She's expecting Tseng to be more relaxed about Rufus's presence now they're back Above, but if anything, he's more on edge; she wouldn't be surprised to see him draw his weapon and sweep a security corridor between the platform and the exit. He doesn't, but when she glances behind her to check that he and Rufus are still behind them, she can see in his face (drawn and tight, his eyes moving constantly over the crowd) how unhappy he is. (Rufus catches her looking, and rolls his eyes. She has to choke back a laugh at the exasperation on his face.)

"Eyes front," Reno says, glancing down at her. She bites her lip and complies.

Scanning her ID card at the turnstile to exit produces the same lack of alarm as scanning it for entrance did. A minute later, they're on an escalator heading upwards. A minute after that, Tifa catches a hint of breeze, carrying air that is very nearly fresh and clean, and when the escalator disgorges them on the street level of the plate, she quite frankly has to gape.

Night began to fall while they were in transit, and the sky above them holds only the faintest remnants of sunset, glorious fingers of red and purple streaking across the grey and dusky sky. It smells like clean air here; she can catch the very slight hint of the tang of people and garbage and misery the slums always reek of, but only a hint, and the air is much, much clearer without the plate to hold in the smog. Above her head, buildings tower so high as to look as though they're reaching for the heavens. She can see the main Shinra complex, something she's only seen on television before, in front of them and slightly to the right; it looks to be about half a mile away. It's bigger than it is on TV. As she watches, more lights begin to wink on in the buildings around them, everything from neon to incandescent white.

It's stunning. It's very nearly beautiful.

She realizes, a few minutes too late, that she's gaping. It's all right, though; Reno has gently steered her over to the edge of the sidewalk nearest the building they're standing in front of, out of the crowd's push and press, and all three of the men she's with are watching her crane her neck and inspect her surroundings. Reno looks bored; Tseng looks tolerant. Rufus --

Rufus is smiling at her. It's a crooked smile, one edge of his mouth higher than the other, and he's watching her like a proud parent watches someone else admiring his child. As she meets his eyes, he inclines his head to her, the smile deepening. See? that smile says. This is what you had me swear by. Now do you see its worth?

She can't decide whether she's falling in love with Midgar-Above, or whether she's utterly furious that its beauty comes at the expense of Midgar Below. (Probably a little bit of both.)

"I don't suppose you'll let me hail a taxi," Tseng says, to Rufus. The sound of his voice tells Tifa he knows full well Rufus won't.

Rufus snorts. "Five blocks, Tseng. The day I call a taxi for five blocks is the day they put me in my grave." His eyes don't leave Tifa. "Besides. I'd like to show the lady my city when she's wearing her best face."

Tseng only sighs. "Yes, sir," he says -- the honorific more than a little bit sarcastic. "If you get killed, I'll be sure they put that on your tombstone. 'He was an excellent tour guide.'"

Rufus flips a rude gesture at him, then turns back to Tifa. "Come on," he says. "We're heading this way." He holds out his arm, and Reno drops his, loosing Tifa's hand along with it, as smoothly as though they'd rehearsed it. Tifa only hesitates for a minute before resting her hand on the sleeve of Rufus's jacket. He gestures with the other hand. "If you see anything you want to stop and look at, just let me know."

Tifa doesn't, but only because she's too busy looking at all the people. She's relieved to notice at least four other women wearing the same thing she is, or close enough; it means she won't stand out too badly. They pass a tiny park, halfway down the second block they walk down. It's the first growing grass she can remember seeing in two years. She wonders how they do it, and how much painstaking care it must take to keep the grass from dying. The plate below the grass carpet means the park is one giant planter.

The building Rufus leads her to is the tallest for at least a few blocks' radius. There's a doorman on duty; he opens the door for them, bowing slightly. The building has a front desk, the same way every building has in every movie and soap opera she's ever seen about the life of the rich and famous, Above. The uniformed man on duty there calls out, "Evening, sir. Been a while since we've seen you."

She's expecting Rufus to answer, but to her surprise, it's Tseng who does. "Been busy," he says. "I'll come down for my mail in a few hours, or send one of my men."

This is where Tseng lives, she realizes. Or one of the places. (She thinks she remembers him telling her, once, that he has two apartments: one in the Shinra residential complex, and one he keeps for when he needs to get away.)

Once they're in the elevator, Tseng produces a keycard -- not his Shinra ID -- from the pocket of his BDUs and swipes it, then pushes the button for the fortieth, topmost floor. The elevator opens on a tiny hallway, no more than a few feet long, with a door at the other end. He unlocks that with the same keycard and pushes it open, and Tifa recognizes the way his eyes sweep the hallway beyond as his professional paranoia at work again. Once he's satisfied there are no assassins in wait, he steps through and holds the door for the rest of them. "Welcome to my home," he says, directly to Tifa.

She steps inside, looking around her, trying to disguise her naked curiosity and knowing she's doing a bad job of it. The door opens onto a medium-sized room, walled with screens of paper and wood; she knows there's a word for them in Wutaian, just as she knows there's a word for the reed mats that start just past a few-foot-wide entrance hallway of light-colored wood, but she can't remember them off the top of her head. There's a rack next to the door, with a few sets of shoes stacked neatly in it; on the other side of the door is another rack with about a dozen pairs of slippers. Rufus and Reno, behind her, are already taking off their shoes. She starts and leans over to follow suit.

Tseng has already taken off his shoes and exchanged them for a pair of slippers; he gestures for Tifa to leave her backpack next to the shoe-rack, then waves her into the main area of the apartment, one step up and onto the reed mats. She can smell fresh flowers coming from somewhere; it isn't until he walks over to one of the screen-walls and slides it out of the way to make the room larger that she realizes each of the walls is movable. The screen he moved reveals a nook with wooden shelving, upon which rest several vases of flowers, on either side of a sword in ornate scabbard hanging on the wall. There are neatly-framed sheets of rough paper with Wutaian characters painted on them above each vase. Tifa squints at them, but her ability to read Wutaian has always been iffy; iffy turns to hopeless when there's any calligraphy involved. She wonders who did the brushwork, and where he got them, or if he did them himself. (She wonders what they mean.)

There's a futon-style wooden-framed couch and two wood-framed chairs, both padded with extra cushions, in the area of room that Tseng has revealed; they're both more Midgar in style than Wutaian, but they have the hint of Wutai to them that Midgar popular culture picked up after the Second Wutai War. It makes them blend, at least a little. Tseng waves one hand towards them. "Have a seat," he says. "Who wants a drink?"

"A bottle of water. And a glass of whiskey, if you have it," Tifa says, softly. She's pretty sure she's going to want something to drink when they reach the true reason she's here.

"Whiskey sounds good, yeah," Reno agrees. He's already thrown himself onto the couch and put his feet up on the low table in front of it. Rufus hesitates for a second, looking at Tifa, then joins Reno on the couch, although he leaves his feet where they belong. (She gets the feeling it's not his usual seat -- she doesn't doubt he is a frequent visitor here -- but she also gets the feeling he's deliberately leaving the two freestanding chairs for her, so she isn't forced to sit next to one of them.)

Tseng looks at Rufus. "Rufus?"

"Just water for me," Rufus says. Something passes between the two of them, but try as she might, Tifa can't tell what it is.

Tseng nods. Turns to Tifa. His voice drops, becomes quiet enough that Tifa doesn't think it will carry across the room to the other two. "Be at home here. I only regret the circumstances that allow me to offer you the hospitality of my home are so unpleasant."

Then he is walking through another gap in the screen/walls, looking perfectly at home -- of course -- and Tifa is left standing in the doorway, looking at Reno and Rufus making themselves comfortable, and thinking this is not how she expected her day to end when she woke up.

She chooses the one of the two chairs with its back to the wall, rather than the one with its back to the rest of the apartment, and she can see Rufus's lips quirking in a quickly-hidden smile when she settles herself into it and curls her feet up under her and to the side. (The better to propel herself out of it quickly, if she should need to.) She's almost expecting Reno to keep going with the last story he'd been telling on the train, but all Reno does is pull his phone out of his pocket and turn his full attention to it, thumbs moving over the built-in keyboard quickly. She feels incredibly awkward and out of place here, but she fixes her eyes on the calligraphy scrolls and occupies herself in trying to puzzle out what they mean.

She's almost decided the kanji on the left means 'virtue' and the one on the right means 'courage' when Tseng returns, carrying a lacquered tray upon which rest four bottles of water, a bottle of whiskey, and three delicate crystal glasses. He sets the tray down on the table, knocking Reno's feet off with a practiced (and annoyed) motion that says he's used to doing it, and Tifa has to blink when he doesn't sit in the remaining free chair but instead sinks down onto his knees with a grace and beauty she's never quite seen him display in the same form before.

His gestures, as he pours, are just as graceful; he moves like a line of song. He serves Tifa first, passing her the whiskey before following it up with a bottle of water; Reno is next, and she expects Rufus to follow, but Tseng pours a third whiskey and sets it and a bottle of water aside for himself before uncapping the last bottle of water and handing it to Rufus. The motions have the feel of ritual, the sense of something Tseng has done a thousand times before, and she thinks she might be seeing one of the touches of Wutai that still live in him. She touches the whiskey glass to her lips, changing her mind as soon as she feels the burn and taking nothing more than the tiniest of sips before setting it down on the wooden arm of the chair. (And reminding herself it's there, and she must watch how she moves, or else she'll knock it over.)

"If you wish it," Tseng says to her, picking up the last glass of whiskey and the last bottle of water and rising to his feet with as much grace as he had gone to his knees, "we can order food before ... speaking of anything of consequence. It is purely up to you."

She has the feeling he's telling the truth, too. She has the feeling she could say yes, and he would order dinner, and they would talk of anything but Nibelheim while they ate, and none of them would so much as hint that she should be getting on with it. "I'd rather get it over with," she says. Her voice sounds harsh and rough in her own ears, particularly against the grace and peace of the room.

Reno flips his phone shut and focuses in on her. "That's my cue, then," he says. He picks up the whiskey glass that Tseng poured for him and salutes her with it before knocking it back with a single flip of the wrist. Setting it back down on the table, he picks up one of the throw pillows off the couch and the bottle of water Tseng handed to him. "Lemme know when we decide what we're ordering, yeah?" he says, to Tseng. Tifa blinks. Reno, pillow and water bottle in hand, heads across the room, kicking off his slippers at the door but not reclaiming his shoes. The front door of the apartment clicks softly shut behind him. She imagines him tossing the cushion on the floor in the hallway and settling down on it.

...Does he intend to stay there the entire time she's here?

Tseng sees her look, interprets it correctly. "He's just there to make sure we aren't interrupted. It's a secured floor, but we wanted to be absolutely certain. And I didn't think you'd want him listening in."

"No," Tifa says. She looks down at her hand. It looks like someone else's as she watches it reach for the bottle of water, open it, drink.

Tseng takes the place where Reno had been sitting. She watches as Rufus adjusts himself next to Tseng, until their legs are pressed together from thigh to knee; it has the feel of something they've done a thousand times before. "Whenever you're ready," Tseng says, softly. "However you'd like to start. Or -- if it would be easier, I could ask --"

"No," Tifa says, again. She watches her hands cap the water bottle and set it aside. Watches them pick up the glass of whiskey and cradle it between them. Then she takes a deep breath and looks up, meeting Tseng's eyes. "Just -- don't interrupt. That's all I ask."

Rufus is the one to nod. "We won't," he says. Tifa glances at Tseng, trying to see if he will object to that 'we' -- object to Rufus speaking for him -- but of course he won't and doesn't. He must be used to it by now.

"All right," Tifa says. Her voice feels thin and reedy. She looks down at the glass of whiskey in her hands again, then -- acting before she can change her mind again -- slides back out of the chair and paces over to stand in front of the nook, so close she could bury her face in the spray of lilacs without having to crane her neck. She can feel two sets of eyes on her back, but it's easier, somehow, when she doesn't have to watch them watching her.

The flowers smell beautiful. (She'd forgotten how much she loves the smell of lilacs.)

She takes a deep breath. Tries to think of where to start. "It was early summer. The mayor of Nibelheim sent to Shinra. The creatures in the mountains had always been dangerous, but that spring -- We'd lost three children from the families who lived at the town's edge, further away from the lights and the people, and there was always some kind of -- ichor or slime around where they found the bodies." Partly eaten bodies. She leaves that detail out; it probably isn't necessary, and she doesn't want to remember them any more than she already does. "You -- they -- Shinra said they'd send help. I was old enough that my father and the mayor wouldn't let me stay in the room when they were talking, like they did when I was much younger, but I wasn't above listening at keyholes, and I remember Papa saying he thought the monsters were coming from the reactor. That he'd seen it happen before, about twenty-five or thirty years ago, and Shinra had fixed it then. I remember thinking, if Shinra could fix it then, why couldn't they fix it so it wouldn't happen again, period? Why did it have to wait until three children died?"

The quality of the silence from behind her is expectant. Listening. She lifts her eyes to the calligraphed scroll on the wall, the one she thinks says 'courage'. Courage, she tells herself. "I'm going to tell it all out of order," she says, abruptly. "I know I am. I don't -- I don't remember as much as I'd like. I don't know if what I remember is what really happened, or if I'm just remembering things I was hallucinating while I was dying. I still don't know how I survived. And -- I'm sorry, but I can't -- I can't be careful about how I'm saying it. I can't be careful to make sure I don't insult you while I'm telling it."

There's a stirring behind her, the sound of Tseng and Rufus having a conversation with eyes and faces. A moment goes by, and then Rufus speaks. His voice is soft. Gentle. (The tone he'd use to a spooked chocobo, trying to lure it back to its pen.) "It's all right. I understand. Just keep talking, and don't worry about insult. I will take no insult from your words."

Tifa laughs, hollowly. She picks up the hand that isn't holding the glass of whiskey and scrubs it over her face. "Yeah," she says, her voice wild. "Yeah, okay. I -- They sent a crew of four. Two men I never saw without their helmets on, wearing -- some kind of uniform, all blue and fancy. I think they were from the regular army, or from the guards. I'm not sure. I haven't seen that uniform since -- since I came here."

She pauses a second, to see if either of them will fill in the answer, but they both seem to have taken her request for no interruptions to heart. "Then there were two from SOLDIER. Or -- one SOLDIER, and General S-Sephiroth." She hears the catch in her voice when she says his name, and hates herself for it. (Hates that she thinks of the SOLDIER, and remembers black hair and an easy grin, and remembers thinking, Cloud, Cloud --)

She wasn't planning to tell them anything about that, but she opens her mouth to keep going, and it's as though something else takes over her voice. "I remember -- This is the part I can't remember. This is the part that makes me think I might have hallucinated what happened. There was this boy. I grew up with him, and when we were seventeen, he decided to go to Midgar and take the SOLDIER entrance exams. We didn't hear from him again, but when we heard they were sending a SOLDIER, I thought maybe -- maybe he would --"

Hearing the hitch-skip-hesitation in her voice, she stops herself. Makes herself take a deep breath. "It's stupid," she says. "Hearing it now, I know that it's stupid. But before he left, I made him promise me that -- that if he became a SOLDIER, he would -- if I ever needed him, he would -- he'd come back and save me. I was young, and it seemed so romantic, and I --" She stops herself again, before she can make a fool of herself even more. "Anyway. It wasn't him. It was s-somebody else. I remember that. I know I remember that, because I remember sitting out on the well in the middle of town and waiting for the SOLDIERs to get there, and I remember being so disappointed it wasn't him. But later on, when I was dying, he was there. He was the one to help save me. You need to know that. You need to know I can't tell you when this stops being real and starts being something I made up to comfort me while I was dying."

"I understand," Rufus says, again, and she can't decide whether to love him a little or hate him a little that there is neither pity nor comfort in his voice.

Tifa scrubs her hand over her face again. "Okay. Okay. I -- The team got there. None of them was from Nibelheim; none of them knew the area. They needed a guide. They hired me. I'd been playing in those mountains since I was young." Her lips curve, without her conscious decision, thinking of her mother, thinking of arguments she'd fought and won over the years. Even despite the pain of her mother's death, those memories are still fond. "My father ran the inn -- he'd inherited it from his father, and it had been in our family for generations -- and I knew I'd take it over from him one day, but he wasn't anywhere near ready to retire, so I needed something to do. I spent summers hiring out as a guide for the mountains, both for travel and climbing. Mt. Nibel was a popular target for recreational climbers, and there were always people who wanted to get from Nibelheim to --" She brings her hand down, slashing the air, gesturing sharply. "That isn't important. I'm trying to -- I'm putting it off. Okay. Yeah."

She takes another deep breath, lets it out slowly enough that by the end, she's seeing spots in front of her eyes and feeling the burn of lungs that won't ever work fully again. "They hired me. I remember thinking -- S-Sephiroth was this distant, mystical figure for us. We knew him as a name, as reports on the TV, in the papers. I remember, before they got there, once we heard it was going to be Sephiroth himself who came, wondering what he'd be like. What he really was like, when there weren't any reporters around or anything."

Tseng's words from earlier that day echo in her memory, and her corresponding promise. She knows she needs to be as honest, as forthcoming, as she possibly can. She knows she is the last person (the last person alive) to have seen Sephiroth before his death, and she knows she is the only one who could possibly tell them enough to help them figure out what had been the precipitating incident to send Sephiroth over the edge. She knows.

It is a fucking gods-be-damned bitch to have a sense of responsibility. But she's said she'll do this, and so she will.

"He struck me as cold," she says. Turns the word over in her mind, decides it isn't quite the right one, corrects: "No. More ... reserved. But cold, too. The little boys of the village lined up to get a look at him, and they begged him for pictures, autographs -- he posed, he signed, but there was this -- this feeling to him, like he was wishing the whole time he was anywhere but there." She closes her eyes, conjures up memories she's been trying her best to forget for two years. "I remember thinking he looked -- tired. Exhausted, really. Like he hadn't slept in a few days. Or a few weeks. I remember thinking, I wonder if they sent him here because it was such an easy mission, so that he'd get a chance to get a little rest."

"He --" Rufus catches himself before he can say more than that one syllable. "May I ask a question?" he asks, carefully. (Still trying to obey her request for silence while she speaks.)

Tifa opens her eyes, makes herself turn around. Rufus is leaning forward, his hands twined together and dangling between his knees, his elbows propped on his thighs. He looks as though he's listening to her with his whole body, with a fierce and focused concentration; the intensity on his face makes her head swim. "Go ahead," she says.

Rufus nods a thank-you. When he speaks, his voice is careful, neutral. "He left Midgar after a week of vacation. I saw him the day before he left; he'd been pushing himself hard, but he always pushed himself hard, and he looked as good as he ever did after a week of rest. Better, maybe. Was it the sort of tiredness that comes from one or two nights of not sleeping well, or did it look more systemic?"

Tifa frowns. It's a good question, she supposes; she closes her eyes again and thinks, summoning up the picture of that night and fixing it in her mind's eye, weighing it against another two years' worth of experience in evaluating men and women for drunkenness, exhaustion, and how close they are to wanting to snap and blow up half the slums. She isn't sure, but -- "It looked recent," she finds herself saying, before she realizes she's going to speak. "It looked like -- There was something bothering him. Something about being in Nibelheim, or -- Didn't you say he was born there?" She still can't decide how much faith she puts in that report.

"He was," Rufus says.

She opens her eyes again. Makes herself look at Rufus. "He didn't seem like a man who was curious about the place he'd been born," she says. "He didn't seem like someone coming back to someplace he remembered, but he wasn't looking around him like -- like he wanted to learn what the town was like, either. He just seemed tired, and a bit cranky, and like --" She closes her eyes, summons the mental image again, builds it up in her mind's eye until she can feel her elbows and knees starting to tremble from the adrenaline those memories summon. "He looked like something hurt," she blurts out. "He kept rubbing his head, like this --" She gestures, lifting her hand to her forehead, fitting her thumb against one temple and her little finger against the other, mirroring the gesture she remembers as closely as she can.

"Hm." Rufus chews on his bottom lip, but he doesn't say anything more. "Go on."

Rufus is thinking something; she can tell, but she doesn't know what it is. She turns back away from them -- she still doesn't think she can stand to be watching their faces as she speaks -- and takes a sip of the whiskey before she keeps going, more for something to clear her thoughts than out of any need for chemical assistance. Her throat, tight and closed, protests. "They stayed in my father's inn that night," she says. "We -- my mother and I, mostly, because my father usually wound up staying at the inn overnight in case there was a problem, except my mother had already died before that -- before everything happened, so it was mostly just me, but anyway. We lived in a house nearby, not in the inn itself. But I was always there at the inn late at night, helping -- by that point I was usually the one who cooked for the people who were staying there, it was how I learned to cook for a commercial kitchen, so I'd be there until pretty late, every night."

She hears herself babbling, makes herself stop, takes a deep breath. Takes another sip of whiskey while she's at it. "I knew we would be leaving at dawn -- Sephiroth was very clear about needing to get an early start." It's getting easier to say his name. (Things only terrify you until you can call their name, she hears Zangan saying, in her memory.) "So I left the cleanup to the rest of the kitchen staff that night. But I wound up not being able to get to sleep, so I went down to the well around midnight or so, to sit on the edge and watch the stars. I used to do that a lot, it was --"

She stops herself again. Shiva damn it; focus. Both Tseng and Rufus are listening, quietly, and she can't sense any impatience radiating from behind her. But she can hear herself, the way she sounds like a babbling child, and she knows she's just putting off telling the worst of it, and she knows both of them are carefully observing all the things she's talking around, taking mental notes on the things that make her babble and the things she can say without flinching, and she knows Tseng, at least, will be cataloging all her reactions and storing them up against the day when he may be forced to exploit those weaknesses.

So she takes another deep breath. Brings her hand up to the scar between her breasts, which started aching (in memory, in sympathy, in reminder) at least ten minutes ago, and when she takes another deep breath she imagines she can feel the sword cleaving her ribs in two. "I went down to the well around midnight," she says, forcing her voice back to neutrality, or as close as she can make it. "It was habit, by then. Whenever I went out, I'd check the windows of the inn, to see what was going on. See if anybody was awake, or if I should stop in and check to see if there were any problems, or -- I looked up that night, too. I always did. Sephiroth was at the window, on the second floor. We had a little lounge area there, with a windowseat, and I'd always leave some cookies and an urn of hot water for tea, in case someone couldn't sleep and wanted to relax a bit. But he was just standing there, staring down at the main square. I couldn't see his face. I wasn't close enough. But when I woke up in the morning and got dressed to go meet the rest of them at the gates, I looked out the window first thing, the way I always did, and he was still standing there. Like he hadn't moved all night. I was -- I remember being creeped out by that. I remember thinking, they always said that the Great General Sephiroth didn't need to eat or sleep, and there he was, standing exactly where he'd been standing the night before, and when I met up with them all an hour later he didn't look any different than he had the night before."

But no. She stops herself. Rewinds. Remembers. "Except -- We were the first people there that morning. I always wake up at the crack of dawn anyway, and he looked like he just hadn't slept, and we were waiting for -- for the other SOLDIER and the two guards to finish breakfast and come down. He didn't say anything to me. I remember thinking, he's not much for small talk, is he? But all he did was keep ... looking over his shoulder, like he kept waiting for something. I remember thinking he was getting impatient at the others for making us wait. Except -- he wasn't. He wasn't looking at the inn, the way he would have been if he'd been waiting for them. He was looking back behind him." She pauses. Thinks. "Over to where the mansion was," she adds, slowly. (Holy Alexander and all his knights, it is astonishing her how much she's remembering.) "He looked -- Haunted, almost. The way people get when they keep feeling like something's breathing down their neck, except every time they turn around there's nothing there."

Behind her, she can hear Rufus stirring again. "Can I --"

"Just ask," she says, closing her eyes again, breathing against the sudden surge of weariness. (The process of remembering, of conjuring those memories in her mind's eye until they are real enough to see, to live again, is causing her adrenal glands to keep trying to tell her that disaster is about to strike.) "You don't have to ask if you can. Just ... try to wait until I'm done talking before you do."

"All right," Rufus says, softly. She can hear something lurking in his voice, something underneath the careful calm neutrality he's clearly trying to summon to match her own efforts. She almost wants to turn around again, to look him in the eye and see whether the hidden emotion is respect or reluctance, but she squashes the impulse. "You said, last night, that you used to play in the mansion when you were children. Did you ever see anything there that might explain anything about why Sephiroth kept looking at it?"

Tifa shakes her head, sharply. She remembers, when she doesn't feel the swing and heft of her hair moving with her, that Tseng had braided it for her this morning; that might have something to do with how awkward she's feeling in her own body right now. Or it might just be because she's remembering being the Tifa Lockheart of two years ago, gangly and uncertain and not quite yet at home in her adult body. "Nothing," she says. "It was mostly abandoned and run-down. There were a few books scattered here and there, mostly science textbooks."

She pauses, frowning, as something occurs to her. "Although," she says, slowly, casting her mind back, trying to cudgel her memory into producing a conversation that happened longer ago than she cares to think about. The pause draws out until she's quite frankly impressed by Rufus's self-control. She finally shakes her head. "I can't -- I can't remember exactly. My father said something once or twice about how there were hidden rooms in there. I think he was trying to scare us out of playing there -- you know, there are things in the hidden rooms that are going to come eat you. But we never saw anything like that. The stories worked, I guess; we were usually too scared to go anywhere past the front entryway and the front parlor."

She sneaks a glance over her shoulder. Rufus is looking at her, face intent. So is Tseng, but Tseng has the good graces to drop his eyes the minute he sees her looking. "Hm," Rufus says. "Tseng?"

Tseng shakes his head. "The blueprints have been 'lost'," he says, the quotemarks of scorn plainly audible. "It's one of the things we checked while you were in Junon."

The sound Rufus makes can only be described as a growl. "Why am I not fucking surprised? Okay. Put a trip out to Nibelheim on the list." (Tifa blinks to realize that he means it literally; Tseng has caused a notebook to spontaneously appear sometime in between the last time she looked and now. Or maybe he had it before and she hadn't noticed, too intent upon Rufus.) She must make a noise, or her face must change, because Rufus looks back at her, quickly. "Not you," he hastens to assure her. (Whatever's showing on her face must be particularly revealing.) "You don't have to --"

"I want to," Tifa hears someone saying. She only realizes it was her when Tseng's head snaps up and he stares at her. She blinks, once, twice, and realizes the stranger who'd used her voice was speaking nothing but the truth. "If -- if it's at all possible, I want to. I want to see it. I want to see what they did to it. I want to see what's there now." (Wants to see the common grave, and lay a flower there for her father's memory.)

Rufus stares at her for a long minute. He doesn't blink. He barely even breathes. Then, just when Tifa is ready to back off, to say something to defuse the situation, he nods, once, slowly. "Yes," he says: just that, nothing more. His eyes are locked on hers, and in them, she sees a moment of pure understanding.

Next to him, Tseng stirs. "Rufus --"

"Shut up, Tseng," Rufus says, pleasantly enough. He doesn't take his eyes from hers. "If I want your opinion, I'll beat it out of you."

Tseng subsides, muttering under his breath. "Thank you," Tifa says, her voice barely above a whisper; she feels the way her lips shape the words more than hears herself say them.

"It's what I would do, too," Rufus says. Looking at him, at the way he is looking at her, she is reminded of those few moments while they were sparring when they fell into perfect accord. This moment feels exactly like those. She believes him when he says he would want the same, and she believes he understands every inch of the necessities driving her.

The insight into him -- his insight into her -- sweeps straight through her, and she suddenly feels like she needs to sit down, and she thinks, looking at him, that for the first time, she's beginning to understand what Tseng sees in him. She turns back to face the flowers before her face can give too much more away. (Lost cause, undoubtedly. But if she can't cling to her pride, she has nothing left.) She clears her throat. The prospect of revisiting her memories has suddenly become more of a refuge than the conversation of present day.

"We didn't say anything to each other while we were waiting," she says, closing her eyes again and summoning back the moment she's narrating. "But the other SOLDIER and the two guards showed up eventually, and we left for the reactor."

She pauses again, picking through her memories, trying to remember what happened in what order. Taking her pause as permission to speak, now that she's lifted the blanket prohibition on interruption, Rufus is saying to Tseng in a low voice, "Check on who those other three were. If you can't find it, tell me, I'll try to hit up the mainframe mail spool, maybe hit the old offsite backups, see if anybody's still got the emails about that mission hanging around in their inbox." She lets the sound wash over her, nothing more than background detail.

In her mind, Tifa can feel the mountain sunlight on her face. Can remember how it felt to lead the Great General Sephiroth and his party out of the town gates, through the foothills, into the mountains proper. (Can remember how it felt to be young, and strong, and free.) "Someone stopped us as we were leaving," she remembers. "Joey. He lived three doors down from us. He wanted to take a picture of us all. For -- for the newspaper, I think. Or maybe just for him. He said he'd give us all a copy once he got it developed." She'd forgotten until that very moment. And out of nowhere, it hits her: Joey is dead. Joey is dead, and that roll of film never got developed, and her home is gone, and her father is dead, and she can never see any of the people she grew up with again.

She brings her fist up to her mouth. Behind her, she hears Rufus swearing, soft and vicious. The smell of the whiskey she'd been holding gets suddenly sharper, more demanding, and she realizes, a minute too late, the hand she's pressing against her lips to hold back the sound trying to struggle free is the hand that had been holding the glass. The glass is on the mat right now, and so is the whiskey. (Tatami. That's the word for it.) She wraps the other arm across her stomach, because she thinks she can feel the blood pouring out of it again. The room's swimming. She can't decide if it's her head or her eyes causing the problem.

Tseng's hands are on her shoulders a minute later, strong and reassuring. "This way," he says. "Come here, darling. It's all right. Come on." She stumbles, but he's there to catch her. A minute later, she's sitting in the nearest chair -- not the one she'd sat in before, and part of her is watching and thinking, no, not this one, it's out in the open -- and Tseng's hand is warm on the back of her neck, holding her head down between her knees. "Breathe," he says. "Just breathe. It's all right, darling. It's all right."

He keeps talking to her, a steady stream of nonsense words in Midgar common and Wutaian both, kneeling beside her chair (not in front of her, thank fuck not in front of her) with one hand on the back of her neck and the other on her shoulder. She doesn't know how much time passes before she can feel -- air currents, the sound of footsteps, something -- another person beside her. Rufus. She flinches, then flinches at having flinched, but all Rufus does is say, soft warning, "I've got a cold towel. I'm putting it on your neck." He does, right below Tseng's hand. It feels good.

It's another long, long eternity before she sits up (Tseng's hands fall away, immediately), gasping for breath. The towel slides down her back. Tseng rescues it and presses it into her hands. She clutches it for a minute, then presses it against her eyes. The cool dampness feels good.

"I'm sorry," she says, shuddering, chest heaving. (Oh, Holy Alexander, she can't breathe, can't breathe at all, and it brings back too many memories.) "I'm sorry --"

"It's all right," Tseng says, sitting back on his heels. "Physical reaction. Nothing you can do to stop it. Nothing you can do to predict what'll set it off, either. Don't worry about it. You lasted longer than I was expecting, actually." His eyes, when he looks at her, are brutally kind. "Come on. I'll show you where the bathroom is, and then I'll tell Rufus it's safe to come back in."

Rufus isn't in the room, she realizes, only after Tseng has pointed it out to her. Dimly, she can remember the sound of a door shutting, in the depths of her -- her whatever. She looks around her. The whiskey she spilled has been cleaned up, as has the glass, and the mat has been lifted from its place on the floor and propped against the screen to air out and dry. It must have been Rufus; Tseng has been with her the whole way. She lets Tseng lead her to the bathroom, bending over the sink and running the insides of her wrists under the cold water until she can barely feel them anymore before washing her face, then pooling cold water in her palms and pressing it against her eyes.

When she looks up and catches sight of herself in the mirror, she looks less like she's been dragged backwards through a thicket of branches than she was expecting. More than anything else, she looks tired. Tired, and old.

The bathroom is paneled in a dark-stained wood (all the wood in here must have cost millions of gil, she catches herself thinking); there's a bath in the corner, hip-high and also wooden, that reminds her of the Wutaian baths Zangan used to describe. This whole penthouse suite feels more Wutaian than anything else, an oasis of elsewhere in the heart of Midgar. She wonders why Tseng went to such pains to recreate the styles of his native country here. Up until today, she would have said she knew him well enough to predict him, well enough to say he'd left Wutai behind him as thoroughly as he could. The fact she was so wrong makes her wonder what else she's been wrong about.

But she's committed now, and second-guessing herself will lead to nothing more than an ulcer. She makes a face at herself in the mirror, then reaches for one of the towels that are hanging on the rack. (It's softer and more plush than anything she's ever touched before.) She dries herself off: wrists, hands, face. Once she's done, she straightens the towel and makes herself leave the bathroom before she can delay any further. Rip the bandage off cleanly, she thinks.

Tifa moves as silently as she can, pausing in the hallway made by the shifting screens to see what's happened in her absence before she's willing to risk re-entering the living area. The penthouse's front door is open, and Rufus is standing in it, facing out into the hallway; she can just barely hear his low voice conversing with Reno, and there's a hazy but distinct cloud of smoke around him. Tseng is sitting on the couch again, looking down at the notebook he was holding earlier, frowning and scribbling down notes. He's taken another pencil and used it to twist up his hair, shoving the pencil through the knot to hold it; a few strands are falling around his cheeks. As she watches, he blows one of them out of his face with the annoyed look of a man who does the same thing a thousand times a day.

Courage, she tells herself, and clears her throat.

Rufus turns at the sound. (Tseng doesn't look up; Tifa thinks he probably knew she was there the whole time.) His eyes lock on hers, and Tifa feels as though she'd rather like to sit back down and put her head between her knees again, because the look on his face is terrible, compassionate fury.

As she watches, he turns back again, stabs out the cigarette he's holding in the ashtray he must have carried out with him, and leans down to hand the ashtray to Reno. He steps back inside the apartment and shuts the door so deftly she doesn't have a chance to catch sight of Reno, and she thinks he might have done it so Reno couldn't catch sight of her. Another of those shocking and unexpected moments of courtesy she's seen from him. Once the door's closed, he crosses the room to stand in front of her, leaving her about twice as much space as she'd need in order to not feel crowded. His voice, when he speaks, is utterly formal; she thinks he's using the formality as a refuge. "If you wish, we can postpone --"

"No," Tifa says, before she realizes she's interrupting. She bites her lip, but Rufus doesn't look annoyed, only calm. "I haven't gotten to anything you need to know yet."

Tseng looks up at that; she notices, out of the corner of her eyes, that his face is one unmediated mass of held-back protest. She doesn't have attention to spare for him, though; her eyes are on Rufus. He's studying her, fierce and sharp and edged, and she'd thought the blade of his attention was sharp enough to cut her earlier today, but now it's so honed she wouldn't even feel it sliding into her skin before it gutted her completely.

All her metaphors right now feel like blades or fire.

"All right," Rufus finally says. He takes three steps back, without looking where he's going. Giving her space. "But you are owed this apology: I would not ask this, were circumstances less dire than they are. I am sorry."

Tifa doesn't quite know how to handle his statement, so all she does is nod. Rufus turns slightly, clearly intending to return to the living area; he stops himself before he can complete the turn and instead gestures to her, waving for her to precede him, to choose her seat before he chooses his. She holds back the twitch at the thought she'll be turning her back on him, but when she takes a deep breath and returns to the living room, she realizes he'd placed himself so it was trivially easy for her to keep him in her sights as she did.

(For a minute, she is possessed of warring urges to laugh hysterically or to scream, that Rufus fucking Shinra is taking such care with her.)

Tseng hasn't looked back down to the notepad in his lap; he's watching her, his face calm, his dark eyes sober and serious. Tifa takes a deep breath. She knows herself; she knows she could hold herself aloof and controlled throughout the rest of the story she still has to tell, but trying to would drain so much more of her energy than letting herself lean on someone would, and right now, the choices she has of people she can lean on are limited. (Maybe she could haul Reno in and use him as a teddy bear. Ha. Ha.)

So she crosses the room on silent feet and sits down on the couch next to Tseng. He relaxes the minute she does, suddenly and sharply, and in that instant he goes from being the leader of the Turks to being the man who shares her bed. (She can't help but glance quickly over at Rufus, to see what he might make of the transformation, but Rufus is settling himself into the chair Tifa had first chosen, and she can't see his face.) Carefully, giving her plenty of time to object with voice or body, Tseng slides his hand over to rest atop her thigh. She puts her hand on top of his, squeezing -- hard -- and lets herself put her head on his shoulder.

He rests his cheek against the top of her head, pressing a light kiss into her hair. She lets herself soak up the regard of his affection for a heartbeat -- two -- before making herself sit back up and pull away. There's a fresh glass of whiskey sitting on the coffee table; she reaches forward and takes it, cradling it between her hands, but she keeps her thigh pressed against Tseng's and he keeps his hand on her thigh. (She's very close to mirroring the position Rufus had taken earlier, she realizes, and has to fight the wild laughter again.)

"All right," she says, into the silence that feels comfortable and expectant rather than pressuring. (They'd wait all night for her to keep talking, she thinks. She'd expect that patience from Tseng, but from Rufus it is merely another proof her concept of the man is so incredibly flawed.) "So." She lifts one hand, rubs at eyes that still itch from her weeping. Another deep breath, and she lets it out slowly, and she tries to summon as much emotional distance as she possibly can while still retaining the memory of what happened.

"Take your time," Tseng says softly. He picks his notebook up out of his lap and balances it on the arm of the couch to get it out of the way. (She glances over at it, more out of habit than out of a true desire to snoop -- she, too, is one of those people who can't help but read things sitting under her nose -- but he apparently takes notes in Wutaian, or at least in the Wutaian alphabet, and she can't read Wutaian in a glance even when it isn't the flowing, graceful script of someone who's more used to calligraphy than stenography. All she can tell is it looks like a list, or maybe just a bullet-point series of notes and reminders.)

"I'm just going to tell it," Tifa says, in a sudden rush. "Because otherwise I'll be putting it off all night. I'm sorry if -- if I start reacting again." She'd have preferred for her body not to betray her with its reactions in the first place, but she knows Tseng's words were the truth: her reaction was purely physical, her body's response to a trauma it doesn't know what to do with or how to integrate. (She's avoided thinking about these things for over two years.) She takes a deep breath. Then another, and the first few words are agony, but after that they start to get easier. "We -- the group -- we kept going from there. About, oh, forty-five minutes out of town -- The path up to the reactor, through the mountains, is pretty treacherous. The Shinra engineers who came in and out of town kept doing what they could to shore it up, but there was a rope bridge across a canyon -- I'm pretty sure it had been a riverbed at one point, back in the depths of time -- I knew from hearing them talk there just wasn't the money to replace it the way they wanted to. We all knew it was going to go someday. It happened to go while we were walking across it."

She finds herself shrugging her shoulders, rocking them in their sockets, hunching herself over against the remembered pain of that fall; finds herself rubbing at one knee, remembering the skin, torn and bloody. (It's odd. She'd forgotten how it felt until that very moment, drowned in the greater blood and pain that was the week's ending.) "We lost one of the guards, in the fall," she says. "I -- I thought we'd look for him. But S-Sephiroth said we couldn't spare the time."

She frowns at hearing the hitch returning to her voice when she speaks Sephiroth's name. "I think -- I remember how he said it," she adds, slowly. She'd thought it would take her a moment to return to that state of heightened recall she'd reached before her body had decided to force her to stop, but the detail slots into place, seamlessly. "'It might seem cold, but we can't spare the time to search for him'. He seemed -- regretful, almost. Like he really wished it weren't the case, but there was something really important he had to do instead."

Next to her, Tseng keeps still -- the only sign he's there at all is the way his thumb keeps sweeping endless circles over her thigh -- but Rufus, who has been watching his own drink and not her face, looks up at that. She nearly shrinks back at the passion she sees burning there, until he makes a face -- at himself, she thinks -- and does ... something, and the mask (and it is a mask) of calm coolness settles down over his features again. He isn't trying to pretend it's anything other than a mask this time, but she can't bring herself to mind, not when it means he isn't looking at her as though he wants to grab her by the shoulders and shake her until she gives him the answers he wants.

"What makes you say that?" Rufus asks. His voice is low and hypnotic, almost as soothing as Tseng's reassuring touch. "And do you have any idea what it was?"

Tifa shakes her head, more to buy herself time to think (to remember) than as an answer. "He didn't -- I don't know. It was how he kept moving, kept looking around him, like -- This is going to sound stupid, but." She gropes for words, eventually decides she's seen enough of how Rufus views the world to know he'll know what she means. "You know the way that someone who's watching for danger moves?" (Rufus nods, understanding perfectly. She'd thought he would.) "It wasn't that. It wasn't anything even close to that. He wasn't looking out for the monsters, or watching for what might attack us, and it wasn't the kind of -- situational awareness you get, when you've been trained to divide the world into threat and not-threat. It was ..."

She closes her eyes, summoning the memory, putting herself into the memory, and this time she's so caught up in the puzzle she's trying to find the words to explain that the memory of Sephiroth doesn't start her trembling anywhere near as much as it had before. "It was like he had somewhere to be," she says, replaying those endless uncomfortable moments again and again, examining them through the lens of distance and nearly three years' more experience. "Like he had a very important appointment to keep, and he couldn't afford to stop for anything that might make him late."

She pauses again, frowns, tries (Holy Alexander and all His knights does her head hurt) to cudgel memory into some semblance of order. "I'd never been down in that canyon," she says suddenly, realizing what's been bugging her even as she speaks, the nagging sense of off coalescing into something she can actually describe. "I had no idea where we were. I remember thinking, I was hired to guide for them, and fat lot of good I'm doing, here. But Sephiroth had absolutely no doubt where he was going. He just ... took over. I didn't -- it didn't seem odd at the time, but now ..."

When she opens her eyes again, Rufus is watching her, and he's frowning, thoughtfully. (The frown smooths off his face the minute he realizes she's looking at him; she almost wants to tell him it's all right, he doesn't have to control himself so fiercely, but there's a part of her that's grateful for the effort. She doesn't think she could face down the full weight of that sharp regard right now. Not when she's this vulnerable.) "And he led you straight to the reactor?"

"Yeah," Tifa says. But -- "No. We were -- we went through this cave, first, and came out on this -- Sephiroth called it a Mako fountain. It was..." She remembers the sight, crystalline and glittering in the early-morning sun. "It was beautiful," she says, and the awe she'd felt at the time is right there, in her voice. "He said it was because of the excess Mako energy in the region, and it was why Shinra had chosen Mt. Nibel to put in the reactor. The SOLDIER who was there with us --" not Cloud not Cloud-- "Sephiroth said something about how rare it was to see materia in its natural state, and the SOLDIER didn't know what he meant. Sephiroth said materia is condensed Mako, and the Planet creates materia out of Mako to interface between it and us. He said ..."

She thinks, thinks, tries to remember the cool and distant sound of Sephiroth's voice telling things she'd known even then were Shinra secrets she shouldn't be privy to. The whole thing had been a lark, then. She'd been captivated by the Mako fountain, and she'd listened to what Sephiroth had to say out of curiosity more than anything else. She'd known even then she would never see any materia other than the single low-level Restore materia the town kept for emergencies, would never have a chance to use one. At the time, she'd listened for no other reason than than the knowledge she was hearing things she shouldn't, and the secret delight in having information others wouldn't. "He said..." She tries to remember his exact words. Something singing in the back of her mind is telling her they might be important, and she's learned to listen to that voice. "'The knowledge and wisdom of the Ancients are held in materia'. He sounded like -- like one of Ramuh's priests at Festival, trying to get others to believe."

"The Ancients." Rufus leans forward a bit further. "You're sure that's what he said?"

Tifa nods. "Positive," she says. Next to her, Tseng is scribbling notes again, his pen moving so quickly she can hear it scratching across the paper. She forces herself to ignore it, watches Rufus instead. Tries to decide what the little frown on Rufus's face could mean, stores away the memory of what parts of her story he chooses to question for her to go over later, to see if she can wrest any meaning from what he finds interesting enough to ask for clarification on. "He was -- it was like he was in some kind of trance, staring at the fountain. And then the SOLDIER said something about magic -- I can't remember exactly what it was -- and Sephiroth..."

She bites her lip; the memory burns. "He got angry," she says, her voice dropping down into a bare whisper. "I remember that. I remember how angry he was. It terrified me, and in that minute I could see why he was the Great General Sephiroth, why he could win all those wars, why everyone said he was so dangerous. It was like -- for that minute, he wanted to hurt something. And then he started laughing, and the moment passed, and the SOLDIER asked what was so funny, and Sephiroth said --" She tries, again, to recall his exact words, but all she can remember is standing there, knees weak, and trying to decide if she should run before she saw that anger again. (How little she'd known.) "He said, a man once told him there was no such thing as magic, and not to use such -- such 'unscientific words'. And ..." She looks up again -- remembering the conversation, remembering last night -- fixing her eyes on Rufus, and she knows that her own eyes are wide. "The SOLDIER asked who that man was, and Sephiroth said, it was Hojo. He called him -- a mediocre mind following in the footsteps of his betters."

Rufus's eyes skid away from her face and over to Tseng's, just as she can feel Tseng, beside her, go tense and taut at her words. She remembers Rufus's words of last night: And when -- some name she can't remember -- announced he had assigned Sephiroth on a mission to Nibelheim, Hojo freaked out, for half a second, before he got control of himself. She'd thought, at the time, she'd never heard the name before -- the names of Shinra's elite are not very well known down in the slums -- but there had still been a little nagging itch. Now she knows what it is.

"You know something," she says, abruptly, watching them have conversations with their eyes she can't read. "And you're not just holding back because you don't want to interrupt me. There's something else going on. Tell me what it is."

Rufus winces, just a little -- just enough for her to see it -- before he catches control of himself again. "It's long and complicated," he says, and right as she opens her mouth to protest, holds up a hand. "That doesn't mean I won't tell you, just that now's probably not the best time for all of it. But you're right, you should probably know it, in case it connects with something and proves to be useful. I told you last night, I think, that Seph was an orphan, raised by the company, a lot like I was." She notices that, even now, even after everything, the nickname trips off Rufus's lips with the ease of long familiarity. "We were friends -- well, as much as we could be, with a six-year age gap between us, but still. By the time I was really ready to start noticing things, Seph was a teenager, interning with the science department. Under Hojo. I asked him once, why Hojo, and he said, he had to spend enough time in the science department, he might as well do something useful while he was there."

Rufus pauses. She can watch him turning over his words before he speaks them. "This is the hard part, because here's where it gets into the things that will take a week to explain. I will explain them, it'll just take time. And probably some diagrams. But, Seph was..." He trails off. There's so obviously something he doesn't want to tell her, but all he does is look at her, sober and reluctant. "Look, you know about SOLDIER, right? You know they're ... different from other people. Stronger, better, faster."

Tifa nods, slowly. She doesn't know what Rufus is trying to tell her.

Rufus's lips twist, and his voice is bitter. "Yeah, well. The reason is, they're stronger and better and faster because of a whole series of experiments Hojo and his department has been running for a long damn time. I don't know all the details -- I don't know any of the details; Hojo's files are the one set of files in the entire company I can't get into. And let me tell you, the fact a molecular fucking biologist can come up with crypto that I can't crack has been driving me fucking nuts for years, but that's another story. But whatever he does to enhance those boys, Seph had it start on him young. Very young. He spent a lot of time in Hojo's lab because Hojo wanted to keep an eye on him. Their relationship wasn't the most affectionate thing in the world, and Seph got to resenting Hojo pretty strongly by the time he got out of his teenage years, but in a lot of ways Hojo was the closest to a ... not quite parent, but mentor, really, that Seph ever had."

Tifa is staring at him; she knows she's staring at him. "You do what?" she whispers, through bloodless lips. (She's heard all the rumors about SOLDIER -- they take only the best, the training is grueling, half of those who enter the training don't make it. But she's never heard that.)

Rufus shuts his eyes for a second. When he opens them again, they're cool and composed, but she thinks it's taking him a great deal of effort to keep them that way. "My father gives Hojo a lot of leeway," he says. It isn't an answer. Except that it is.

"You --" But no, it's not 'you', now is it? The way Rufus is looking at her is the same way he was looking at her last night when he told her the truth of what happened to Nibelheim after she was carried, dying, from its wreckage: one part rage at what is being done in his name, one part sick acceptance of responsibility, all layered over with a grim determination to face whatever judgement she might pass on him. He hates this as much as she does, she thinks, suddenly, looking at the way his hands -- his only tell -- are endlessly turning his glass of whiskey around and around. He might not even know he's doing it.

The little voice in the back of her head is shouting at her again. "What does the enhancement consist of?" she asks. Hearing herself, she wonders who the fuck it is using her voice, and how that stranger dares to ask this, of this man, right now. (But she remembers -- in the reactor, while Nibelheim was burning, there was -- something --)

But Rufus only breaks her gaze and looks down at his drink. "Yeah," he says, and it's a total non sequitur, until she realizes he's saying he doesn't know either, and would very much like to. "That's the six million gil question. Because I want to know, too. Seph was the first person to get the SOLDIER treatments, that I know of at least. If whatever Hojo does to them takes time to manifest into an utter and complete breakdown..." He trails off. "I tried to work it out. I think -- if that's the case -- we have about another four or five years before the first of the others start showing signs."

There's a stark, bleak terror, lurking underneath his words. Tifa thinks about all the SOLDIERs who fought the war with Wutai, who even now guard Shinra's interests across the globe. She's never known how many there are. Nobody in the slums does. Rufus might. And if he's this afraid of what might happen if those SOLDIERs start going insane ...

She remembers Cloud, so eagerly convinced that he would go to Midgar and become a SOLDIER, one of so many boys who soaked up Shinra's stories of fortune and glory until his life's dream became to pursue, to belong. (She remembers a scene out of her nightmares, rows upon rows of pods, or coffins, and if what Rufus is saying is true, if what he thinks Shinra has been doing is real -- oh, Ramuh, what if they were people, SOLDIERs being grown, scant miles from her hometown --)

She doesn't realize how badly she's trembling until Tseng, next to her, bites off a low Wutaian curse and tosses his notepad onto the coffee table, turning on the couch to take her into his arms and tuck her under his chin. She doesn't fight it, but she doesn't relax into it, either.

"How can you live with yourself?" she asks. She's too upset to try to soften her words. "How can you look at yourself in the mirror every morning?"

But that's not fair, is it, not when Tseng -- when Rufus himself -- has already told her Rufus is sharply limited in what he can do, what he can accomplish, without risking his own life in the process. And that alone should have told her all she needed to know, because what father threatens his son's life over nothing more than a disagreement? Is that what Rufus grew up with? Knowing what was being done, helpless to stop it, helpless to even say anything, spending years and years storing every last atrocity being committed in Shinra's name, in his name, upon his personal balance-sheet against the day when he could begin to act? Is that why he hasn't noticed all the things that are going wrong in the slums -- because he has other things occupying him?

She opens her mouth again to retract her words, to apologize, but Rufus has sagged back in his chair, tipping his head back so he's looking at the ceiling, and he starts speaking before she can. "Sometimes I don't," he says. "Believe me when I say, that's one of the least of Shinra's dirty little secrets lurking in the darkness, waiting to pounce." He lets his head drop, stares at her, and in that instant she can see utter and complete exhaustion written across his face. It makes him look ancient. "I've been trying to uncover them for years, so at least I can know what I'm up against. I haven't had much luck. You see, now, why I'm pushing you so hard. Why Tseng is pushing you so hard. I already know just from listening to what you've told me so far: you have the key to unlock at least one of those secrets. And it might very well be the thing that gives us the knowledge and information we need in order to act to stop this."

Tifa stares at him. Behind her, above her, Tseng is cradling her against his chest, his hands moving briskly up and down her arms. She thinks, with the portion of her mind that isn't occupied in running in circles and screaming, that he's trying to keep her blood flowing against the possibility of this news sending her back into shock again. Tseng knows too, she thinks; Tseng knows just as much as Rufus knows, not knowing how she knows Rufus tells Tseng everything but knowing he does, and even the certainty that the sword over Tseng's head is no less sharp -- probably more so -- than the sword over Rufus's doesn't help the crawling, fetid feeling that washes over her skin.

She's off the couch before she realizes she's moving, out of Tseng's arms, and she only stops because she realizes she doesn't have anywhere she can go. (If she were back home, back in the Heaven, she would go out on the porch, or into the backyard, and tip her head back and stare up at the plate and run through her litany of curses against Shinra, over and over, until she felt better for having vented them. She can't do that here, and everything comes crashing in on her again, just how much she has put herself into their hands and taken them at their word.)

Behind her, she hears a rustling, knows it for the sound of Tseng preparing to rise from the couch as well. Half a heartbeat later, she hears Rufus hissing, the sharp and sibilant correction you use for a cat that just tried to jump up on your counter. The sound stops.

When Rufus speaks, she can hear death in his voice, and the death she hears isn't her own. "I was seventeen years old the first time I vowed I would someday undo every barbarity my father condoned if not outright ordered. I've spent the past seven years maneuvering myself into a position where I could someday hold him accountable for every single life destroyed in the name of the holy Gods of profit. I'm not there yet. I won't be for quite some time. But I will be someday. I can't protect you past a certain point. I can't undo anything that's been done to you. I can't guarantee this all won't come crashing in on your head like a house of cards in a high wind. But I'm closer than I've ever been before, and I will get closer and closer until there is nothing in this world or any other that could stop me, and I am begging you. Help me."

His voice is one long, naked plea. She suddenly knows she has to see his face, read what's written there -- if he isn't controlling it again, the way he's been controlling himself so assiduously throughout this whole clusterfuck -- and she turns, as fast as she can, hoping to spot the answers she needs before he can lock his face back down again. He doesn't, though. He is staring at her, and his eyes are burning, and his whole body radiates a fierce and elemental fury.

She should find it terrifying. Instead, she realizes, it only matches her own, the fury that's been sleeping unheeded in her chest (beneath her scars, beneath her secrets) for the past two years.

With that look, one thing comes clear: Rufus Shinra is even more invested in the idea of overthrowing the Shinra Electric Power Company than she is.

Tifa stands in the center of Tseng's living room, looking at the second most powerful man in the world, and her fists clench at her side, and all she wants to do is laugh. (Or scream. Or punch something.)

"I told this story once before," she says, abruptly, before she can decide whether or not it's wise to admit. (Truth calls truth. It always has, to her.) "When I came here. When I recovered enough to get out of the clinic I'd been taken to and start looking for the other people from Nibelheim who'd moved here. Before. I had to tell them. I had to tell them what happened. One of them was --" She flicks her eyes over to Tseng, trying to gauge how much she can afford to say, but Tseng isn't looking at her; he's looking at Rufus, and his face is a stone mask. No help there.

She rolls the dice and prays for guidance, prays she's doing the right thing, but Rufus has just handed her a shitload of information that's far more damaging and done it with (she thinks) full belief she would hear him and decide she would withhold even her tentative and embryonic cooperation. She owes him the same.

(Hadn't she, just this morning, vowed she wouldn't let Rufus's honesty force her into honesty in return? Lost cause. It always had been.)

"One of them was part of the rebellion," Tifa says, hoping they couldn't hear her pause, hoping they won't press her, hoping they'll take the past tense in her words as a sign that Johnny has already been captured and dealt with. She's expecting some kind of reaction, but neither of them so much as flinch; Tseng turns his head to look at her, steady regard, and she fights back the implications of the realization Tseng already knew. (And hasn't acted on it. ...Because he wasn't given explicit orders?) "He tried to recruit me. Tried to get me to agree to tell the story over and over again, to fire people up, to get them to act against Shinra. I didn't like his methods. I didn't like how willing he was to hurt innocent people just for a chance to get to his real target."

She closes her eyes and laughs, hearing the faint note of mania creeping into her voice again. "You're telling me Shinra doesn't care about hurting innocent people even more than Johnny's group doesn't. That they thrive on it. And -- You know, call me crazy here if you want, but I want to make sure I'm hearing things right. Did you or did you not just tell me you've been planning your own anti-Shinra rebellion for years?"

There's a pause. Then, astonishingly, she hears both Tseng and Rufus laughing too. "You know," Rufus says, sounding contemplative, laughter threaded through his every syllable, "I really think I did," and suddenly Tifa finds her laughter has lost the manic edge, become honest, become real, because he sounds like he's never had the thought before and has discovered he kind of likes it.

It takes a few minutes for the laughter to die down, and when it does, the air feels lighter in the wake of its passing. This time, when she looks at Rufus, she doesn't see the too-controlled executive or the man who thinks he owns every room he walks into or the man who was born to rule a world and knows it. She sees a man who's too young to bear the lines written across his face, too young for the dignity and self-control he's been forced to learn, too young for the burden resting on his shoulders but all too aware of its weight and his responsibility.

She sees a man who's trying his best to right the wrongs he inherited (or will inherit) and who's terrified his best might not be good enough. She blinks -- twice -- but the sight doesn't go away, and she knows -- knows -- that this is what Tseng sees in him, is why Tseng has given Rufus his fealty, and she understands, down to her bones: everything Rufus has told her since the moment they dropped all their pretenses is the absolute honest truth.

"I've spent the last two years hearing a lot of people tell me they've been just waiting for me to get my act together and start my own rebel movement," Tifa blurts out. (And then looks at Tseng, feeling a bit guilty -- they've never dared to declare their sides as openly as that -- but the edge of his mouth is tipped up, rueful amusement, and she knows her suspicion is correct: he's known. He's known for a while.) "I didn't think I could yet. It was almost there, but it wasn't practical, or possible, and there was never a strong enough reason to overcome those concerns. If I'd known any of this..." She trails off, watching Rufus nod along with her words, watching Rufus fucking Shinra agreeing with her that his company -- his father's company -- needs to fall. "But every single rebel group down there is fucking idiotic about things. They have no concept of how the world works, or what strategy or tactics even are, or what's possible and what will get them killed faster than you can say 'bullet to the head'."

Too late, she winces, realizing that Tseng is listening, realizing Tseng would probably be the one holding the gun that bullet came from, but he doesn't seem to mind. "I know," Tseng says, calmly. "None of what you've just said is a surprise to me." His lips quirk a bit more. "And I've often thought that on the day when you decide it is time to begin your rebellion and we must by necessity then become enemies, that at least it will be pleasant to have an adversary who thinks. You will be a better leader than the slums have ever seen." There's regret in his voice, and respect, and the sound of doors shutting and worlds ending.

Tifa opens her mouth -- not sure what she's going to say to that revelation -- but Rufus is leaning forward, all of his laughter gone as though it never were. "Don't be an idiot, Tseng," Rufus says. The blade is back in his voice, subtle and keen. Tseng looks over at him, expression sharp and annoyed, but Rufus is looking at Tifa, and Tifa has no words for the look on his face. "She isn't saying she's walking out of here and going back Downstairs and calling up her people and declaring war."

Rufus's voice is so confident, so self-assured, that it takes Tifa a minute to realize the contents of what he's saying; she can feel her face flushing, casting her mind back over what she's said and realizing of course that's what Tseng would believe. They've been so careful to avoid ever speaking of matters such as this, both of them knowing that the day the cards hit the table would be the day honor required them to part. Both of them have been trying so hard to postpone the day of reckoning as long as possible, and if her words have convinced him today is that day --

And indeed, Tseng's voice is cool and controlled, but Tifa knows it -- from long familiarity -- as the control he uses to cover up true anger. (Or fear.) "What is she saying, then, Rufus, if you're such an expert all of a sudden?"

Rufus looks back at her. In that look, in that instant, it's as though they've fallen back into the connection -- the communion -- they had in the backyard of her bar that morning, where they could read each other so thoroughly each of them knew what the other was about to do before it happened, on a level so basic and elemental as to be nearly unconscious. She meets those ice-blue eyes fearlessly, and she can read him, and she knows he can read her, and there's a part of her that's screaming but the rest doesn't mind it at all.

He's asking her for permission, asking her to let him be the one to break the news to Tseng -- telling her, wordlessly, things will go over so much more smoothly if he is the one to break her news to Tseng, to spell out explicitly the decisions she's been making implicit for at least the last five minutes. Tifa nods, slowly. "Go ahead," she tells him. "I'll tell you if you get it wrong."

Rufus inclines his head to her, one grave and earnest salute, before transfering his attention back to Tseng. "The lady didn't just tell us she was starting the rebellion you've been waiting for her to start," Rufus says. "The lady just told us she wants in on ours."

Hearing it said out loud like that, Tifa realizes a weight on her chest -- a weight that's been on her chest for a long, long time -- has just taken wings and flown away. Because: yes. That's exactly what she's saying, and if anyone had told her, two days ago, she would be saying anything even remotely like it she would have called them deluded. Or worse. But for two years she has carried the weight, the knowledge she alone holds truth and proof of Shinra's perfidity, sleeping underneath her heart like a stone, and for years she's known she's honor-bound to do something about it someday, and for years she's been telling herself not yet, not now, not ready, not until -- and hating herself for it. (Not brave enough, not strong enough, not committed enough --)

It's out in the open now. And for all that Rufus Shinra is the last person in the world whom she'd expect to ease her conscience, it doesn't change the fact that for the first time in two years, she honestly believes she's stopped running away from the truth. She's being given the chance to help set things right. She isn't naïve enough to believe it will be easy, or there'll be no danger, or that Rufus's idea of what the world should look like is anywhere even remotely in the same neighborhood as her own. But she believes he's honest and genuine about wanting things to change, and she believes he's just as sickened by Shinra's abuses as she is, and even though he's offered her no guarantees -- has been scrupulously careful not to -- she believes he'll move heaven and earth to keep her from being hurt further.

Tseng is staring at her. She wonders what her face must look like right now. "Tifa --"

Tifa crosses the living room on jubilant feet, taking his face between her palms and leaning down to kiss him. (He's stiff and shocked beneath her lips for a heartbeat -- two -- before softening. She can hear, behind her, Rufus chuckling.) "Yes," she says, pulling back but not releasing him, meeting his eyes and putting every scrap of sincerity she can summon in her gaze.

Tseng breathes out, hard and heavy. His eyes search her face. "If you -- if we --"

She lifts one hand to rest her fingers on his lips, the same gesture she always uses when they stray too close to topics best left undisturbed. "I know," she says. "No promises. It's all right."

Then she lets go of him entirely, turns around, and settles herself back down on the couch at his side. "Okay," she says. "I've got the rest of a story to tell. And then you two can brief me on everything you can."

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