Tifa rises to wakefulness slowly, gradually, like swimming up from the bottom of a very deep lake. She realizes, after a long minute of hazy half-pleasure, that the mattress beneath her hip is firm and cradling at the same time, that the pillow she is lying on is warm and soft and rises and falls in such a way as to tell her that it isn't a pillow at all, and the hazy pleasure comes from the way an all-too-familiar hand is stroking up and down her spine, soft and slow, over and over again, tracing patterns she thinks might be hiding some deeper meaning.
It's the first time she can ever remember Tseng being awake before she was, and the first time she can ever remember sleeping entirely through the night when he was sharing her bed, and the thought of Tseng and wakefulness makes her realize that they aren't sharing her bed, and after a minute (in which Tseng's touch shifts from her back to her hair, combing gently through it) she remembers last night, and a vial of purple liquid that tasted worse than anything she'd ever drunk before, and she thinks, head still muzzy, oh. So, he was right about the not dreaming.
"Shhh," Tseng says, his voice still deep and lazy with sleep. "I can feel you starting to tense up. It's okay. We're the only ones in here, and we have at least half an hour before we have to be awake."
"Didn't dream," she says. Or tries, to, at least; her mouth tastes like something died in it, and it's dry enough that her tongue feels like twice its normal size.
"I asked you to let me give you something to make sure you wouldn't," he says. There's nothing in his voice that even hints at irritation at having to remind her. "You agreed. It's why your mouth feels like a desert right now; the stuff does that enough on its own, but when it's combined with a potion, it's even worse. If you don't mind me moving, there's a glass of water for the dryness and a peppermint candy for the taste, just out of my reach, waiting for you."
"Mmm," Tifa says. Part of her still feels like it's teetering on the boundary between sleep and consciousness; she summons all her energy and manages to roll away from Tseng, onto her side. It feels like the same amount of effort she'd use to run around the edge of all of Midgar. Dimly, she thinks that she should probably be worried about that, but she can't quite muster up the energy.
Next to her, the bed shifts, dips, and a minute later, Tseng's hand returns to her back. "Can you sit up?" he asks, carefully. "Or do you need a hand?"
Concentrating on his voice brings her slightly more into focus; she lifts one arm, letting it flop against the bed in a position to brace herself against the mattress (dear Shiva this mattress is nicer than anything she's ever slept on). Once she's got her elbow up, her palm flat against the mattress, she concentrates really hard on opening her eyes. The world is still there when she does, at least. (The bedroom is prettier than it was last night; the morning sunlight catches the grain of the wood, the flecks in the paper of the screens that line it.) "Gimme 'minute," she says. It comes out a little more clearly, at least.
Tseng laughs, softly. "Take your time. The hangover from that shit is pretty intense, but it'll clear in about twenty minutes. Faster if you have something to eat."
"Mmm," Tifa says again. Dimly, she is aware that the back of her head feels empty, unsettled, in a way she's never felt before. Usually, she wakes fairly quickly, and forgets what she dreamed, although not that she dreamed, as soon as she opens her eyes; today, it feels as though the part of her head that holds those dreams is still asleep, yearning for release somehow. It's a very disconcerting feeling. She's glad for the night without dreaming, especially after the ones she'd woken from the night before (and that had been before she'd ripped off the bandage she'd applied over those memories), but it isn't something she'd like to do often. Or ever again, really.
Tseng sits at her back, one hand (it must be the hand that isn't holding the glass of water) stroking her hair again. She concentrates on the feel of it, on the way her bladder is uncomfortably full, on the way her breath feels as it rises and falls in her chest, willing herself into presence in her body. (It's not always a comfortable body. But it's hers.)
Eventually, in what could be two minutes or two hours later, she feels like she's there enough to attempt to sit up. Her arm buckles the first time she tries to put her weight on it, tries to push herself up to sitting, but the second time succeeds, and she gets one knee underneath her, and Tseng slides his hand underneath the side that was on the bed to give her a boost just when she thinks she might fall over again.
"I feel like I got hit by a truck," she says, once she's more-or-less upright.
Tseng winces, just a little. "Ah. Yes. Well, I may have forgotten to mention how you'd feel the morning after. If it makes you feel any better, though, I've been using that stuff on and off for about fourteen years now, and I've come to the conclusion that the hangover is a good idea. It keeps you from relying on it too often." He hands her the glass of water, making sure to keep his hand on it until she has both of her hands around it, and even then he keeps his hovering as she drinks.
The water tastes good. She holds the first mouthful in her mouth, swishing it around for a long minute, and she can practically feel it seeping back into her tissues as she swallows. "It's okay," she finally says, after she's finished half the glass. "You were probably right about me needing it." Now that she's upright, the fog is starting to clear, a little bit at least, and she's conscious of having gotten eight full hours of sleep for the first time in ... a really long time.
"Here," Tseng says. He turns back to the nightstand. The morning sunlight catches his hair, diffuse through the paper screens -- there aren't any windows, but the sunlight is strong even through the filter -- and makes dappled patterns in its depth. She catches herself watching the highlights and shadows like she used to watch clouds in the spring sky when she was younger. He presses a small something into her hand; the peppermint candy he'd mentioned, she realizes. She brings it to her mouth. The clear sharp taste of it dispels some more of the funk.
"Bathroom," she says, after another minute or hour or lifetime, once she thinks she has a chance of making her way there without falling over.
Tseng carefully hides a smile. (The fact that he is smiling at her, that he is amused by her rather than worried, goes a long way to easing the fears of a body that won't quite do what she wants for it to do; he would not be so amused if her reaction were anything out of the ordinary.) "Over there," he says, pointing with his chin to where a sliding screen stands mostly open. "Your bag is sitting just inside it. I didn't want to go looking to see if you'd remembered your toiletries, so there's an extra toothbrush next to the sink. If you'd like to take a shower now, feel free; holler if you can't figure out the controls. We don't have time for a run --"
She thinks, looking at the way his eyes flick away from hers quickly and then back again, that it's true they don't have time for a run, but even if they had, he wouldn't have let her do it. Well, that's fair enough, up here at least. "--But if you'd like to wait until after your kata for the shower, I do have the third bedroom in here set up as a dojo. The mere thought of kata right now is probably making your head spin, but really, you've got about another five minutes before the worst of it wears off, and once you can stand up without wanting to fall down, you'll be much better off if you get moving as much as you possibly can, to metabolize the last of it."
Tifa is beginning to see the point where she'll be able to believe him, on the horizon at least; the last of the fog is starting to burn off the surface of her mind, and her muscles no longer feel like they're quite as full of syrup. And anyway, she's done her kata every morning, without fail, through far worse than this, from the moment she got back up out of her deathbed, even when Dr. Ellis was hovering at her side and hollering at her. "Yeah," she agrees, finishing the last of the water, sticking the peppermint candy under her tongue so she doesn't have to talk around it. "Partner me? Unless you have a dummy."
"I do," Tseng says. "But I would be pleased to serve as your partner anyway."
That makes her smile, and then he is helping her out of the bed and falling courteously back to let her make the trek under her own power, and she's three-quarters of the way to the bathroom before she realizes she's naked. She wonders if he undressed her last night, or if she did it at some point. She wouldn't have thought she'd have been willing to sleep naked, not with other people in the apartment at the time she'd fallen asleep, but maybe a part of her had realized that Rufus wasn't 'other people'. Or maybe she'd just not wanted to sleep in clothes. Not after all that remembering.
Her backpack is right where he said it would be; she fishes her toiletries bag out of it, finds her toothbrush, realizes she forgot to pack her toothpaste. Well, Tseng's is right there. She brushes her teeth, drinks another two glasses of water, uses the toilet, washes her face, and the chill of the water against her skin is enough to shake the rest of the haze. She's feeling almost human again when she comes back out of the bathroom, still naked, and looks around for the clothes she'd been wearing last night; they'll do for a workout. She finds them on the nightstand next to her bed, right where she would've looked for them first thing if she'd been the one to wake before Tseng. She's pulling them on when he pads softly back out of what must be a walk-in closet on the other side of the room, wearing workout clothes of his own -- hakama pants and nothing else -- and in the process of pulling his hair back and securing it with a length of leather lace.
"You look as though you've nearly summited the evolutionary ladder again," he says, smiling at her, but his smile papers over a slight bit of worry that hadn't been there before. Worry that she might remember last night, she thinks, and blame him for his part in it. Worry that she might see something she doesn't want to see, today, and blame him for his part in bringing it about.
So she crosses the room and nestles herself up against him, wrapping her arms around his waist and pressing her cheek against his naked chest, and he holds himself startled and aloof for a few terrifying seconds before his arms close around her and he rests his chin on the top of her head. He breathes out, short and sharp.
"It's okay," Tifa says. She isn't speaking about the drug hangover. He'll know she isn't. "I -- Whatever's over there waiting for me to stumble into? It's okay. It isn't my Nibelheim. I know that. I'm ready for it. I won't like it, but I'm ready for it. I'm not going to blame you for it."
Tseng breathes out again, and his arms tighten around her. (It isn't comfortable, not exactly -- her shoulders are bruised, and there's a ring of corresponding bruises around her left bicep, from where he and Rufus were holding on to her last night, that even the Potion she'd taken last night couldn't erase entirely -- but she doesn't let her discomfort show, because achy or not, it feels good at the same time.) He doesn't say anything else. She doesn't either.
It's a long, long minute before he finally pulls back. "Okay," he says, then picks a hair elastic up from the bedside table and hands it to her for her to braid her hair with. "Come on. It's seven-fifteen, and we have to be dressed and out the door in no more than an hour and a half."
Tseng's dojo is, like the rest of his apartment, walled in paper screens and floored with tatami mats, with extra padding for the floor, rolled up and stowed, for times when a bout might need some extra protection. One wall is lined with mirrors; it makes sense. (Zangan had always told her it was easier to practice in front of a mirror, to watch your form, to watch the way your body moves and correct any flaws before they become deep-set into practice and muscle memory. She's never been able to bring herself to do it, even if she'd been able to find mirrors in the size necessary.) She turns her back on them as soon as she realizes what she's seeing. Tseng raises an eyebrow at her, but he's never asked why she doesn't like looking at herself in mirrors, and she thinks he never will. (It's nothing too private, nothing too personal. She just never looks quite like the way she thinks she should look, inside her head.)
"Five minute warmup?" is all he asks, instead, and she nods and begins stretching even as he does too.
She concentrates on her shoulders, on shaking out the knots and the tension, on loosening up the spots that still ache from his hands, and she knows he sees her doing it; his eyes track her motion, and there's an obscure bit of guilt lurking there. Still, once she's done limbering up, she feels almost completely human again, the part of her brain that was still trying to dream even once she had awakened slipping quietly into sync with the rest of her mind. She finishes her stretches by tucking the hem of her tank top into her sweatpants in the front, tucking the end of her braid into her sweatpants in the back, and Tseng watches her with interest from where he's sitting on the floor, back to the wall, with his knees butterflied out to the side and his chest curled over his feet.
He's never seen her do this before, but there's something about this morning that makes her want to show off. Carefully, she picks up each of her feet in turn, rotating the ankles, then bounces in place to test the spring and give of the floor. It's not bad; it feels as though it was specially installed, as though there's more underneath than just the tatami. It's much better than the grass behind her bar, actually, and she does this there often enough. She comes over to stand in front of him, close enough that he has to tilt his head back to look up at her but not so close as to risk kicking him in the head, and when he looks up at her with a question in his face, she grins at him (he's startled into returning it) and moves.
Tifa taught herself tumbling as a lark, as a child, even before Zangan had seen her potential and first started teaching her. (It's part of why he did, she thinks; he was passing through, and he'd seen her working through the physics behind what she would later learn to call a back handspring, all by herself, and he'd gone straight to her parents and asked -- begged -- to be allowed to stay for a year and teach her everything he could.) She's horribly out of practice -- she only lets herself play when she feels she's done enough work to warrant it. Still, the room isn't long enough for anything truly impressive. She'd run out of room before she worked up anywhere near enough momentum.
So instead she just crouches, bending at the knees and through the hips and waist, and throws herself backwards: back handspring, back handspring, check the position of the wall as she flips, and she has just enough room, and just enough momentum, for a tucked back flip without risking putting a foot through the screen. She lands -- not as gracefully as she'd like, but her ankles don't wobble, at least -- and rolls forward into a front tuck one-and-a-half flip, straight into a somersault landing, to shed some of the kinetic energy she'd gathered, lest she roll backward and fall on her ass.
She's glad she took the extra time to stretch her shoulders, she thinks, as she finishes the roll and winds up sitting, legs splayed out in a vee in front of her, about four or five feet away from Tseng's astonished look. Otherwise, that probably would have hurt.
The look on Tseng's face is gratifyingly impressed. "If that's what a full night's sleep will allow you to do," he finally says, "remind me to drug you more often." The look turns thoughtful, after another second. "How much of that could you teach me?"
It isn't the question Tifa's expecting, but it should have been. Of course Tseng would see the potential in the skill she'd just demonstrated; half the times she can best him, when they are sparring, are because she's thrown the classic forms out the window and relied on kinetic memory and instinct to match his moves, and for all that she hasn't thought of herself as a tumbler for years, it was the skill she'd graved into her muscles before she'd learned the Wutaian forms. No doubt she's beaten him once or twice with a throw or a kick that has its origins in a handspring or a front flip.
She narrows her eyes, studying his body as he rises from the last of his stretches, evaluating the way she knows he can move. "It depends," she finally says, and the look on Tseng's face tells her it's the answer he was expecting, though not hoping for. "Teach you, most of it. Teach you in such a way that you'd be able to integrate it into your fighting?" She shrugs. "It all comes down to how much you can make yourself break form in the midst of a match. I'm guessing that you could; I don't think there's much you couldn't do if you put your mind to it. Whether or not you could without breaking everything for six months while you readjusted? That's what I don't know."
"Ah," Tseng says, after doing her the courtesy of thinking about her answer for a minute. "Best not for now, then. There's a saying about old dogs and new tricks that likely applies."
He's barely ten years older than she is, Tifa knows, but he started learning far earlier than she did, and trained in a school far harsher than Zangan's gentle corrections. So -- "Later," she agrees, tacit promise that there will be a later, and holds up her hands for him to help her to her feet. She doesn't need the boost, but she thinks he probably wants to give it.
Once they are both standing, Tseng lets go of her wrists and bows to her; she catches the gesture half a heartbeat too late, and her returning bow is just slightly out of sync. "Two-person kata, this morning, I think," he says, once he's straightened up. "As much as I enjoy getting a chance to spar with you..."
He trails off, leaving the ending -- we can't exactly afford the possibility of further injury, today of all days -- unspoken. Tifa nods, trying hard not to think about what, precisely, the next few hours will bring once they leave this sanctuary. She knows what he means; Zangan taught her the forms both single and double, and Tseng has reminded her, with nothing but the motion of his body, during the mornings they've done this before. "You lead," she says. She isn't secure enough in her memory to be the one who takes the more active role.
The two-person kata they both know are a series of moves that would not be out of place in an actual sparring match, simply choreographed and telegraphed in advance, more ritual than anything else. They dance through the steps, one after another, and Tifa watches the way Tseng's muscles bend and flex, and she thinks again, even as he whirls in place and throws up one arm to block a punch he knew was coming only because it was next in sequence, of how beautiful he is when he's in motion.
The last time they did this, he broke off halfway through the third kata and slapped her across the shoulders to correct her form; today she concentrates on keeping her spine straight, her hips balanced, and either he doesn't find any fault in her corrected positioning or he doesn't want to take the time necessary to offer the instruction. (She'd snapped back a protest, last time, that her form was perfectly fine, thank you, and it was hard to keep her spine balanced the way classical form said she should when she was trying to cope with her Shiva-damned tits getting in the way, and he'd lost five minutes to laughing so hard he'd caught a case of the hiccups before walking her through the moves at half speed to see what compromises she could make.) They make it through the first six before she bobbles a move, not because she can't do it but because she can't remember what comes next, and he drops out of form as soon as she does and bows to her again. (This time she catches it more quickly.)
"Feel better?" Tseng asks, once he straightens up. He looks her over with a weather eye, and she thinks he's looking to see how ready she is to face the day to come.
She's as ready as she's ever going to be. "Much," she says. "Come on. It's probably easiest if you just show me how the shower works."
How the shower is intended to work, apparently, is as a prelude to a long, hot soak in the chest-high wooden bathtub that's next to it; one is meant to sit down on the teak-wood stool and soap and rinse oneself clean, holding the shower nozzle that detaches from the wall, then transfer into the tub and linger there. They only have time for the shower. Tseng catches her giving the tub a wistful look as she's holding the spray upside-down to blast the underside of her hair with it. (The water pressure is heavenly, and the pipes don't bang at all.) "When we come back," he says, "you can have as long a soak as you want."
"I'll hold you to that," she says, and hands him the showerhead.
Once clean and dry, Tseng blow-dries his hair (and, after a raised-eyebrow request for permission, hers as well); his gets brushed out until it's shining, and once he's done, he brushes out hers as well, then pulls it up into a bun so tight it makes her scalp tingle. Tifa doesn't question his choice of hairstyle for her, just moves automatically to her backpack to pick out clothes, then stops at Tseng's raised hand. "Reno delivered your wardrobe," he says, moving over to open his closet door again and reveal a pile of bags heaped against the wall. "You get to keep your underwear."
Tifa stares at the pile in dismay. It's more clothing than she'd be able to wear in a month, even if she changed three times a day. "Sweet Shiva suffering," she says. "Did he buy out the store?"
Tseng laughs at that. "He bought everything in three different sizes, just in case, since there won't be enough time to have them tailored and he couldn't be positive he got your size right." And Tifa knows that he lives in a different world than she does, she's had her nose rubbed in it a dozen times at least in the last day, but somehow that hits her in a part she hasn't braced herself against yet: the idea that Reno could produce her an entire wardrobe in what would be the middle of the night in the slums, the idea that they have money enough to burn to buy three of everything in the hopes that one would fit, the idea that of course if they had more time they would have fitted the clothes directly to her. He's got his back to her, at least; she struggles for control over her face and must have achieved it by the time he turns back, because he doesn't look at her like there's something wrong. "He says this is most likely to fit; here."
The fabric he hands her is like a sin. It rubs against the calluses on her hands, until she's almost afraid she's going to snag it just by touching. He shakes out the pieces, one by one: first, a high-necked and sleeveless top, white and silken, that is only a fraction of an inch too large across her breasts but fits against her skin everywhere else. Pants next, in a soft charcoal grey and made out of the finest, lightest wool she's ever touched. They fit her like a glove, cupping her thighs and her hips, hitting her waist precisely, ending just beneath the ankle, but despite how they cling, when she turns away from Tseng and snaps a head-height roundhouse kick at the air, they move with her, without constricting her motion in the least.
Over it all goes a suit jacket, tailored to be slightly loose through the bust and then pull in at the waist before flaring out again and ending just below her hips, in the same charcoal grey as the pants. Looking at it as Tseng holds it up for her, Tifa thinks there's no way it's going to fit, but she slides her arms into the sleeves and Tseng tugs and adjusts until suddenly, it does. She's always hated the way jackets pull across her shoulders -- she is incredibly broad-shouldered for a woman, and her winter coats have always had to come from the men's section of the thrift shop -- but this one moves with her too, cradling her shoulders instead of binding them, and she knows she could probably have worn this ensemble in the dojo and fought in it for half an hour without once finding it too constrictive.
The only way it could all fit her better would be if it had been tailored straight to her body, and Tifa closes her eyes and breathes, deeply, lest she say something unconscionable. (Reno was only trying his best, helping her the best way he knows how. It shouldn't make her want to hunt him down and punch him.)
When she turns around for Tseng's inspection, though, he's looking at her thoughtfully, and she thinks she might not have managed to conceal her thoughts well enough. All he does is meet her eyes and smile a bit ruefully, though. "It's the same clothing line we get our suits from," he says. "Even the women's jackets are cut to conceal whatever you're carrying. You'll find a few extra pockets on the inside to stash whatever you'd like in."
Tifa makes herself nod. "Thank Reno for me," she says. Even her voice doesn't sound like her own anymore.
"Thank him yourself," Tseng says. "He's piloting the chopper for us." He studies her for another moment, and she thinks she can see approval lurking there, mingled with a curious regret. Then he's turning away and heading back into the closet. She can hear rustling, and jangling, and no more than two minutes later he's coming back, wearing suit pants and dress shirt, with a holster slung over it all, buttoning up his cuffs. (There's a pistol in the holster, and she's pretty sure there's another at the small of his back and one at his ankle.) "Forgot to ask," he says. "Heels or flats?"
Of course Reno's personal shopping service includes shoes. She doesn't doubt they'll fit just as well.
"Heels, if they're more than an inch wide," she says, because she can't scream. "Flats, otherwise."
Tseng nods. "Boots okay? Leather uppers, three-inch heels -- Reno said he thought you'd probably feel better if you were closer to eye level --" And she will, and she knows it, and she can't decide whether to love Reno or hate him for thinking of it, for knowing her (knowing a woman's mind) so well. "--But they're platform heels, two inches or so wide, and he said he specifically tried them on -- in his size, not yours, obviously -- to make sure the balance was good enough."
"Yeah," Tifa says. Breathes. "That's fine."
Tseng looks like he's about to say something else, but whatever it is, he doesn't. He just turns around and heads back into the closet, and when he comes back out a few minutes later, he's perfectly buttoned up in the navy suit that's the uniform of his profession, and he's holding a shoebox in one hand and a pair of thin dress socks in the other.
The boots fit perfectly. By that point she isn't even surprised. She slips them back off again once she's tried them on, before she stands back up, holding them in her hands so she doesn't mar the tatami mats with her soles.
From there, it's only a few minutes for Tseng to haul out two brand-new-looking tiny suitcases, fill one with what are apparently now her clothes and one with his, adding their toiletries to the top and zippering them up, his motions brisk and familiar. "We'll grab breakfast on the way," he says. "Coffee shop in the lobby of Rufus's building. Do you get airsick at all?"
Tifa closes her eyes. "I don't know," she says. "I've never flown before." (She'd known this was going to be difficult. Dammit, she'd known. But they haven't even left yet.)
She catches, just as she opens her eyes again, the very tail end of a wince. "Right. Sorry." Tseng crosses the room, his body language changing, the efficient motions of a man preparing for a mission sliding away until at last it is her lover standing in front of her again, no matter what clothes they each might be wearing. He reaches out and cups her cheek in his hand. "I'm trying to remember," he says, softly. "Kick me if I forget. When I forget."
Tifa tries, and fails, to keep from turning her head into his touch and breathing in the scent of his aftershave that still lingers on his palms. "I'm trying not to freak out," she says.
"And you're doing an admirable job of it," Tseng says. (She'd think he was tactfully exaggerating, were he not so careful never to lie to her.) "If it's any consolation, it fits the part you're playing. Rufus's PAs tend towards shell-shock for at least the first few days."
Tifa doesn't particularly want to think about that. "Let's just -- get this over with," she says, turning away. "Or at least get started. Before I lose my nerve."
Tseng doesn't say anything to that, just picks up a suitcase in each hand and leads her out of the apartment and down the elevator. She's expecting to return to the lobby level entrance they came in the night before, but instead he punches the button for one of the sub-basements; the elevator doors open to a garage. The car he leads her to is dark and nondescript, but she thinks it's probably hiding as many secrets as he is. He opens the passenger door for her before she can reach for the handle, and she flushes and concentrates on seating herself without falling over in the boots she's wearing. (Unfair. The boots fit even better than the shoes she wears for a night's service; she stopped noticing the heels thirty seconds after she put them on.)
The ride over to Rufus's building is short and silent, and before Tifa can even think to ask why they're driving instead of walking or taking the train, Tseng is flashing his ID and scanning his keycard at a security gate and pulling into another garage.
The coffee shop in the lobby, once they get up there, has a line that stretches at least twenty people deep, even this early on a Sunday morning. She's prepared to wait, no matter how much the push and crush of people distresses her, but Tseng drops the suitcases, and her, next to a pillar that affords a perfect sightline of everything and everyone. "Hang on," he says, and disappears into the crowd before she can say anything. She bites back the protest, sets her shoulders against the pillar's curve, and watches him make his way through the crowd and up to the counter without waiting in line at all.
The crowd of people parts for him, she notices. So swiftly and smoothly it's like no individual member of the crowd has actively decided to move. Tseng walks up to the counter, catches the eye of one of the teenagers manning it, and exchanges a few brief words. Then he turns and comes back.
"Come on," he says, picking their suitcases back up. She grits her teeth against the question; she will not allow herself to trail behind him asking why every thirty seconds like a fucking two-year-old. Something must show in her face, though, or in the lines of her shoulders -- she's going to have to hope that Tseng is the only one up here who can read her that well -- because he adds, sounding completely casual, "One of the runners will deliver breakfast and coffee up to Rufus's suite in five minutes or so, as soon as our order is ready."
Tifa bites back the comment; she's already realizing that if she balks at every single display of thoughtless, unconscious privilege, she will be protesting every thirty seconds. At least. Seeing Tseng in his native environment is more than a little disconcerting; she'd noted, from the very beginning, how he (and Reno, and Rude) interacted with the world, with the other patrons of the bar, as though they owned everything around them, but down in Lower Seven, she'd taken it for the arrogance of the plate-dweller. Here, though, that arrogance is just as prevalent, even among the people of the plate. (Among the most elite of the people of the plate; she has no doubt that this building is where those who are among Shinra's most powerful live.)
"Lead the way," she says, instead.
Tseng nods and picks up both the suitcases again. (She thinks that perhaps she should offer to be the one carrying them, if she is to be the personal assistant, but she knows him well enough to know that he wouldn't surrender them up to her.) "This way," he says, and leads her over to a bank of elevators.
The small knot of people waiting step away from them both as Tseng checks the button to make sure it's pushed; it's the same instinctive, unconscious crowd-motion she'd seen from the line at the coffee counter, and Tifa fights the urge to follow. Then, second-guessing herself, she does take a step away from Tseng, watching him cautiously, trying to figure out if the role she's playing would be clinging to him as a guide or as wary of him as the others apparently are. She hasn't made up her mind by the time the elevator comes and Tseng bows her into it, but she tries to (at the very least) school her face into looking like she's done this a hundred times before.
Nobody else follows them into the car; no one says anything, but there's a distinct, if wordless, impression of yeah, I'll just take the next one coming from everyone who's waiting. Tseng hits the door-close button, swipes his keycard, and hits the button for the sixty-fourth (top) floor as soon as they're in; he doesn't seem to expect any other passengers either. The elevator slides into motion, swift and smooth; he leans against the side wall. Casually, neither face nor tone changing, he says, in Wutaian: "The eye in the sky is watching; have care from now onward." His eyes flick up over her head, into the corner, so quickly she wouldn't have noticed unless she'd been watching.
Tifa hadn't thought about cameras, but it makes sense. She leans against the back wall of the elevator as casually as he's leaning against the side; from there she can see where his eyes had directed her to look, out of the corner of her eye. It takes her a good twenty seconds to realize what she's looking for; only the lens of the camera is visible, and it blends into the trim against the ceiling so flawlessly she isn't even quite sure she's identified the actual camera, and not the elaborate and decorative facets. She isn't sure if he chose Wutaian because the cameras have audio pickup as well as visual, and her persona would have no reason to know Wutaian, so she can't answer; she just looks back at him and nods, fractionally enough that she hopes any observers will miss it.
The little smile he gives her says she picked the right choice. "Please do tell me if there's anything else I can do to help you adapt to your new role and position, Ms. Walker," he says, which is as good as confirming that yes, they are being listened to, or possibly listened to, as well as being watched. It takes her a minute to remember who 'Ms. Walker' is supposed to be, until she remembers the name on the ID card they'd had made for her (the card itself is in one of the inside pockets of her jacket; Tseng made sure she'd remembered it before they left the apartment). She'll have to spend a few hours reminding herself that -- for the next week or so, at least -- she'll need to answer to 'Miki' as though it were her own name.
It's hard to figure out precisely what she should be saying, should be doing -- she hasn't had a whole lot of time to figure out what others would expect to see, and she's never been very good at acting -- so she decides the best way to play it is as herself, only a touch meeker, a touch more demure. "Thank you," she says, and -- remembering the looks the people in the lobby had given him, remembering the way everyone seems to view him with such mingled awe and fear -- she adds, "Sir."
(It's almost worth it for the look on his face, quickly beaten down: part hysterical amusement, part abject horror.)
The elevator doors open before Tseng can say anything further; he gestures her to precede him again, which she does, but he takes the lead as soon as they exit, since she has no idea where they're going. There aren't a whole lot of choices, though: the hallway they exit onto is short, maybe five feet on either side, with a pair of doors at the end of each side and nothing more. There's one additional door next to the elevator bank -- stairwell, probably -- and one heavier door at the far end of the hallway, and that's it. The carpet is rich and plush, a thick burgundy; the walls are a neutral cream. None of the doors have numbers on them.
Tseng leads her to the hallway on the left and the door on the right before she can look much more closely. There's a keycard reader in the place of a conventional lock -- come to think of it, she hasn't once seen a key-controlled lock yet, Above -- but Tseng ignores it; he turns the door handle and it opens without hesitation, which makes him sigh and roll his eyes. "Knock, knock," he calls, as he pushes the door open with one hand and steps aside, still holding it, gesturing for Tifa to enter first. She does, swallowing back her protest at his holding the door for her, which he never does Below; she can't decide if the change is due to the roles they're both playing, or the manners he usually adopts (with women or with everyone) Above and holds back Below because they would stand out.
The room the door opens upon is ... stunning, really. There isn't another possible word for it.
It's large -- larger than the entirety of the Seventh Heaven, and then some -- and for a minute she thinks it's a single-room apartment, before she realizes that despite the furniture being arranged to divide the room into separate functional areas, there's no bed or sleeping area. Which means this is only part of the space that Rufus lives in. The floors are hardwood, an incredible golden blonde that she's never seen before; the walls are the same cream as the outside hallway. The ceiling is fifteen, twenty feet above her. The furnishings, what she can see, are all stainless steel and polished glass. There aren't any windows; she adds up sightlines and angles and realizes that the apartment is likely an L shape, curled around the edges and the corner of the building, which tells her that the outside walls must belong to other rooms.
There's a spotless galley-style kitchen and island counter directly in front of her, just past a couch and two chairs arranged to face each other; to her left, bookcases packed full of more books than she's ever seen in her life stretch all the way to the ceiling, a ladder (the same steel and chrome as everything else) fitted up against the shelves on wheels and a track left negligently in front of the third section over, and there's a haphazard stack of books piled every-which-way next to it on the floor, with several volumes on the ladder itself. In the L formed by the bookcases is a desk, easily the size of two doors laid side-to-side, that holds three computer monitors (the center one on a small stand to lift it; the other two to either side) and a laptop plugged into them. That half-circle of technology is the only space on the desk not occupied by utter chaos: papers, books, coffee mugs, an ashtray placed where someone sitting in the chair in front of the laptop could reach it without thinking twice. The chair has a perfect view of the door.
The desk, and its contents, are the only sign that anyone lives here, that this room isn't a showplace model. Everything else is spotless, impersonal; even the artwork on the walls, the occasional piece of sculpture on a table or counter, have the feel of things that are only there because they are expected. The desk is where someone lives.
Rufus is sitting in the desk chair, caught halfway through the motion of stabbing his cigarette out in the ashtray. (His other hand isn't visible; she is certain it had reached for some weapon or another when the door opened, until he could identify who was entering.) He looks nothing like the man she met two days ago. He's wearing well-pressed white linen, and his hair is slicked back, not a strand out of place. The severity of the hairstyle should make him look younger, his cheekbones standing out in sharp relief, his eyes the focus of his entire face. It doesn't: it makes him look older, slick and polished and just as impersonal as the chrome and steel around him. He looks like a weapon; the play of the light across his face is like the play of the light across a blade's edge.
Then he smiles. It transforms his face, and for an instant she can see the same humanity she'd seen in him last night, the humanity that had made her accept how wrong she'd been in her evaluation of him. (Which is the lie, the posture, the pretense? This, or then? She's desperately afraid that neither of them is. Or both.)
"Good morning," he says. He pushes himself up from the chair -- it goes skidding backwards, heedless of possible damage to that gorgeous floor -- and comes over to stand in front of her, maybe two arms-lengths' distant. The look he gives her is dispassionate, assessing; it sweeps from her face down her body, lingers on her shoes, and then rises back up again. She'd expect to feel objectified, depersonalized, the way she always does when a man is scrutinizing her body that closely, but somehow, from him, the perusal lacks any hint of the sexual. He's evaluating her like he would a work of art, studying the false face she's presenting.
Finally he nods. "Good," he says. Tifa suppresses a wash of relief, of pleasure, at passing his wordless test, and then snarls at herself for feeling it. (She can't not. She already knows that Rufus's standards are incredibly high, and that very few people meet them; to be one of them is to be a part of a rare minority, and she can't help how it makes her feel.)
Behind her, Tseng has shut the door, sometime during the extended inspection; now, he moves over to the (closest) nook of chairs and couches and throws himself down onto the couch like he belongs here. (Of course he does; he's probably here five times a week.) "Morning, kiddo," Tseng says. "Coffee delivery's on the way. I told them to bring up a pastry tray, too."
Rufus nods, absently; he's still studying Tifa. "I ate already, but coffee is always good," he says, his tone distracted. Then, inspection apparently complete, he turns back to his desk and gathers up several ... somethings off of it. (They're technology. That's about all Tifa can tell.)
When he turns back again, he's lost a bit of the severity, the piercing assessment, and she can see hints of the man who slouched in Tseng's chair, in jeans and a t-shirt, with one leg hooked up and over the chair's arm. (Only hints, though. He wears his suit like it's a second skin, like it's a part of him, and she thinks he might be more used to suit and tie than he is to jeans and t-shirt. If this is the clothing he usually wears, it's no wonder Tseng hadn't worried more about him being identified in the slums; there's only the faintest resemblance.)
"Here," Rufus says, handing the first of the items to Tifa. She takes it and looks: now that she has it in her hand, she can tell it's a cell phone like the one she left behind underneath the bar in the Heaven, only far slimmer and more compact. She slips it into her jacket pocket without opening it; she'll figure out how to work it later. The next thing Rufus hands her is a tiny bit of plastic and rubber, shaped like a C or a distorted comma, with what looks like a microphone on one end and a speaker of some sort on the other. She looks up at him, and the question must be written on her face, because he gives her a quick and almost boyish grin. "Wireless earpiece. So you don't have to fuss around with trying to find the damn phone to answer it. Here, let me."
He holds out his hand for her to hand it back to him, which she does; he steps close, telegraphing every move as carefully as he has all along, and fits it (gently) against the shell of her ear, settling the bud so that it almost, but not quite, fits into the entrance of her ear canal. His touch is impersonal, clinical. This close, she can smell his soap or aftershave, something spicy and rich without being cloying. He adjusts the clip against the cartilage of her ear, and it pinches for half a second, feeling utterly alien, before he takes his hand away and the pinch turns to nothing more than a slight pressure. Within thirty seconds, she's forgotten she's wearing it.
(He's wearing one too, she realizes. It's very nearly the color of his skin; it blends so well she hadn't noticed.)
Apparently satisfied, he steps back and hands her the last thing he'd picked up. Tifa can't make hide nor hair of what it might be: it's a device that's maybe four inches wide by two and a half inches tall, perhaps half an inch deep, and it nestles comfortably into the palm of her hand. Most of the front is taken up by what looks like a screen, and there's a button at the bottom of it, presumably to turn it on. That's about all the guesses she can make about its function.
"That's your tablet," Rufus says. "It's the one thing no self-respecting PA would ever be seen without. I'll show you the basics of how to use it on the chopper ride over, or Tseng will, but for now, just know that you're never seen without it, that you start to get twitchy if it's out of your reach for more than five minutes, and you spend a lot of time poking at the screen and frowning."
That's useful information -- perhaps the first bit of useful information she's received on how to play this -- and for Rufus to be so forthcoming with instruction means that they probably aren't being observed here. (Or if they are, Rufus doesn't know about it. But she has the feeling Rufus always knows when they're on stage.) It gives her enough boldness to say, "What else should I know? To make this work best."
She's careful to phrase her question so that if she's wrong and they are still being watched or recorded, she won't give too much away. Rufus only laughs, though. "Play it like -- you're a little nervous, you want to do a good job, but you aren't quite sure yet what doing a good job entails. You're used to not being noticed -- a good PA is unobtrusive, no, invisible, until his or her charge needs her, at which point she steps in with the information he or she needs before he knows he needs it. I'm thinking, you're fresh out of university, you applied to the secretarial pool a month or so ago, so you're not really used to Shinra corporate culture yet, and I plucked you out of the general pool because you tested out at the tops of the aptitude scales but hadn't learned any bad habits yet for me to train out of you. That'll give me an excuse to keep telling you what I expect from you -- which will let me tell you what to do next without it looking too suspicious. We shouldn't need to do that too much today, anyone we deal with won't know anything about what's normal, but still, never too soon to start."
Tifa nods. The details are soaking in, helping her build the picture of what she needs to show to the world around her, and she's shit at acting but she thinks she can do this. "So -- basically, I'm the person who tells you where to be and when, tells you what you're doing when you get there, reminds you when it's time to leave, keeps track of the things you're going to forget, and reminds you to do the little things like eat and sleep."
That makes Tseng laugh. "That last is an impossible task, but other than that, yes," he says. "If you chase two steps behind him at every opportunity and wave the tablet around like you're trying to prove to him that yes, his schedule does say he's supposed to be meeting with Palmer and Heidegger right about now no matter if he's nose-deep in coding something, you'll have ninety percent of it down."
Rufus snorts. "Shut up, you. But, yes. The best PAs are invisible when they're not needed, and utterly and terrifyingly competent when they are needed. I've never met a long-term PA who didn't think that her charge wasn't incapable of tying his shoes without her giving explicit instructions. It would take you a few weeks to really hit your stride and get to that point, but that's where you're headed."
Tifa nods, slowly. "I can do that," she agrees. She starts to slide the tablet into the same jacket pocket she put the cell phone in, then reconsiders; she thinks about Rufus's words, considers where in this outfit she'd stow something she felt naked without, and slides it into her right pants pocket. Her hand naturally comes to rest over it when she's standing at ease with her hands at her sides, and it feels right. She can see, when she looks up, the edges of Rufus's lips tipped up, the smile something very like approval.
Whatever he might say is interrupted by a knock on the door. Both Tseng and Rufus tense automatically at it, then relax; it must be the coffee delivery. Tseng starts to get up to go answer the door, but impulse and the character Tifa's already starting to build in her mind has her waving him back to seated. "I think the PA answers the door," she says, in an undertone just loud enough to carry to their ears and not loud enough to carry beyond. It makes Tseng laugh, and Rufus look thoughtful.
She wipes her palms on her pants (as unobtrusively as she can) and goes to answer the door, telling herself as she does that she is Miki Walker, recent university graduate, who has just started a job as the personal assistant to the second most powerful man in the world, and she is utterly and completely determined to not fuck it up. (It's not too far a stretch. She's got the same determination, even if it's for completely different reasons. She is deep in the heart of enemy territory, and she knows bone-deep that she can place her faith in Tseng as a guide -- and is starting to become cautiously confident of Rufus -- and she is painfully, wholly sure that if she makes a mistake, the consequences could range from disaster to death. For her, or for all of them.)
The door, when she opens it, reveals a young man in his late teens, early twenties, who is pushing a small wheeled cart upon which is a tray of pastry, an oversized carafe (presumably of coffee) with empty mugs next to it, and three disposable paper cups with fancy plastic lids. Each of the lids has cryptic glyphs, that might be letters if she squints, written on it in grease pen. The kid looks confused when he sees her. "Ah, delivery for Vice-President Shinra?" he says, his tone making it a question.
Invisible when she's not needed; utterly and terrifyingly competent when she is. "Yes," Tifa says, her voice controlled but with a faint touch of warmth to it. "I'm Miki Walker, his new PA. You can --" Oh, Shiva, what would they do, does she take the cart from him or does she let him in to make the delivery? She makes a split-second decision, continues without (she hopes) an appreciable pause. "--Come in and set up."
She holds the door open for him, and it must be the right thing, because he wheels the cart in and straight over to the coffee table in the nook Tseng is sitting at like he's done it a thousand times before. In only a few seconds, he's transfered the pastry tray, the carafe, and the mugs to the table; he hands one of the paper cups to Tseng, and one to Rufus. (He doesn't meet either of their eyes, she notices.) The third cup stays on the cart; when the kid wheels it back, he stops at her. "This must be yours," he says, and hands her the cup. His fingers meet hers when she takes it, and she's startled to find them lingering there for a minute, pressing against hers -- encouragement? The way he looks at her, with both Tseng and Rufus at his back, makes her think that yes, it is; he gives her a large smile and a tiny wink, saying (she thinks) it's gonna be okay; good luck; welcome.
"Thank you," Tifa says -- startled, by the moment of kindness, into putting a little more emotion in it than she probably should, but it only makes the kid's grin widen. (She wonders what's motivating him: is it that he sees a pretty woman and wants to flirt, or is it some mysterious unstated camaraderie among Shinra service staff?)
"No problem, Ms Walker," the kid says, cheerfully. "If you want a pickup of the leftovers, just call down, someone will come up for them."
"We'll be leaving in fifteen minutes or so," Tseng says, from where he's leaning forward and already picking through the pastry tray, napkin in hand. "Leave the cart; we'll put it in the hallway when we go. Send someone up for it in an hour or so."
The smile falls off the kid's face, but he nods, turning back to Tseng. "All right, sir," he says. "Have a good day."
Tifa remembers herself just in time to walk him over to the door, open it for him, shut it behind him. (She's cautiously pleased at her first appearance in front of someone who doesn't know the game; then again, she's had lots of practice interacting with people, and can usually manage to make them see whatever they're expecting to see from her, as long as she's not trying to play a specific role.) The coffee cup in her hand is warm, but not unpleasantly so; she sniffs at it as she walks back over to where Tseng and Rufus are sitting. It smells like coffee, with something else added. She takes a cautious sip, and nearly moans. It's the best coffee she's ever tasted, by miles, and there's some sweet syrup added in addition to what must be steamed milk.
"I got you my favorite," Tseng says, seeing her face. "Caramel and white chocolate macchiato."
"Minus the four additional packets of sugar," Rufus adds. He's picked out a cinnamon-and-sugar-dusted pastry, despite his claims to have already eaten, and is demolishing it neatly over a napkin. He eats with the brief, economical motions of someone who habitually wears white.
The drink is sweeter than she usually likes, especially this early in the morning -- she can't imagine what it tastes like with four extra sugars, but then again, she's been aware of Tseng's sweet tooth for a while -- but it's good nonetheless. She settles herself down -- briefly debating where to sit, but Tseng takes the question out of her hands by snagging her around the waist with one arm, the way he usually does, and nudging her down to sit at her side -- and debates breakfast for a few minutes, before choosing a corn muffin as the least likely to cause problems if she does turn out to suffer from airsickness after all.
"What's the news?" Tseng asks, while she's concentrating on not getting crumbs everywhere. "I didn't get a chance to check my email this morning."
Whatever Rufus is thinking of, it makes him snort. "Heidegger's bleating about UrbDev's budget again, and trying to push through that Department of Engineering he and Palmer have been trying to do for the past decade. With Palmer in charge, of course. Blah blah, Reeve's department is clearly overworked, blah blah, spin off some of the more taxing responsibilities --"
"To Palmer?" Tseng snorts as well. "Because he handled the last set of responsibilities so well. Did Reeve reply, or is he doing the dignified-silence thing again?"
They keep going, bantering names and positions and departments back and forth. Tifa listens as carefully as she can, in between bites of muffin and sips of coffee, trying to get things (people) straight. They seem to have forgotten she's here, or at least decided that they can speak freely in front of her. It's interesting, actually, how freely they seem to speak in front of her. Even when Rufus was giving her Shinra's secrets on Friday night, last night, it wasn't this detailed; she has the sense that if she only understood what they were saying, she would be receiving enough information to destroy something.
(But they're committed to destroying and re-forging it anyway, aren't they? It's odd, so odd, to think that she has finally found the anti-Shinra rebellion she has been looking for, the one controlled by logic and practicality in the way no slum group truly is, in the hands of the man who will one day be that company's face. In a way, though, she supposes it makes sense. Rufus is Shinra, in a way she knows she will never understand even if she observes him for months, years, and she knows without having to be told that his father's excesses and abuses strike deeply at the heart of what Rufus considers his.)
So, for all that she barely understands what's going on -- they aren't stopping to gloss things for her, and she doesn't dare interrupt to ask for them to -- Tifa assigns a corner of her mind to taking notes, memorizing names and facts and bits of strategy. She doesn't doubt she will, at one point, have the background necessary to draw conclusions about what she is hearing. They appear to have decided she is to be trusted with the keys to the kingdom (perhaps literally, if her keycard can be used to open doors in the Shinra building itself); she will not betray that trust without specifically revoking her implicit parole, but there is nothing preventing her from listening.
The discussion takes her through the entire muffin and coffee; despite his protests of having already eaten, Rufus finishes the cinnamon bun and a blueberry muffin, along with his coffee, before pouring himself a refill from the carafe, taking Tifa and Tseng's empty cups and refilling them as well, all without pausing. They've moved on to discussing a proposal from Scarlet (from context it must be the woman in charge of weapons development, the only woman on the Shinra executive board, about whom Tifa knows next to nothing; Tseng is optimistic about whatever latest thing she has proposed while Rufus is more skeptical) when Tifa catches, just at the edge of her hearing, a soft buzz. Tseng slips a hand into his inner jacket pocket and pulls out his cell phone, flipping it open and squinting at it. (She has long since suspected he needs reading glasses.)
"Reno just got clearance," Tseng says, flipping the phone closed again and returning it to his jacket. "Saddle up."
Tifa stands up and starts tidying the remains of their breakfast onto the single tray. (She can't help it; she is a waitress at heart and is fundamentally incapable of leaving dishes strewn without attempting to bus them.) Rufus rescues the carafe of coffee before she can whisk it away and tops off all three cups. It's only the work of a minute to transfer all the detritus onto the cart and push it out into the hallway when they leave. Tifa tries to leave things neatly stacked, so whomever is sent to fetch it won't have trouble.
The helipad is, apparently, on the roof immediately above them; the elevators don't go that far, so they have to take the stairs. Tseng lets her carry her own suitcase this time, although she's not sure if it's due to the role she's playing or simply because his other hand is taken up with his coffee. She wonders for a minute if she's supposed to carry Rufus's as well as her own, in which case she'll have to leave her own coffee behind -- which would be a sin, even though she doesn't actually need coffee this morning to wake up; even the plain coffee is better than anything she's ever had before -- but Rufus hefts the suitcase up from where it had been sitting next to the couch with no sign that carrying it himself is anything out of the ordinary. He unplugs his laptop from its dock before they go, coiling the power cord up and shoving it in his pocket (where it utterly ruins the line of his suit, but she doesn't think he cares) and tucking the laptop itself under his arm. It slides precariously until he bends his elbow in more tightly, and she bites back a protest at how cavalierly he's treating it. (The cost of that machine would buy produce for the Heaven for six months at least, even at slum prices.)
The conversation between Rufus and Tseng continues, desultorily, as they make their way up the stairs, but Tifa observes (with the part of her brain that is listening for cues) that the tone of it has changed. In Rufus's apartment, they spoke like generals planning a campaign. Here, without much change in the nature of the conversation itself, it manages to sound like idle gossip, used to pass the time.
When they step out onto the roof, the wind would be whipping Tifa's hair if Tseng hadn't fastened it back into a bun that morning, and the noise is fearsome. The noise comes from the blades of the helicopter waiting for them, Reno waving from the cockpit and looking the same as he always does; the wind comes from the fact they are higher up than Tifa has ever been in her entire life. It's too loud for conversation. She watches as Rufus and Tseng switch to some deeply-coded language of gestures and facial expressions, performed around the coffee cups they're both still waving, and follows along at the three-step-remove from Rufus she's already beginning to resent having to adopt.
Tseng is the first into the helicopter's passenger compartment; he stows his suitcase behind the front-facing rear seat, then reaches down for Rufus's first, Tifa's second. That done, he climbs over the bulkhead between the two bucket seats of the rear-facing front seat and settles down into the copilot's chair. Rufus leaps up into the passenger compartment as well, throwing his laptop negligently on the seat that faces him, then reaches a hand down to offer Tifa a boost. She admits she could use it -- the step is a fierce one, and she is not as tall as she would like -- but still, the casual grace with which he grasps not her hand but her elbow and lifts her in what just misses being a dead-lift just plain rankles.
Dear Shiva, this damn thing really is loud. She's beginning to think she'll have a headache as fierce as any she's ever had after a long and driving weekend of service by the time they arrive, full night's sleep or no.
But as soon as she's seated (and harnesses herself in, following Rufus's lead, after Rufus leans over her and pulls the sliding door shut) Rufus gestures to behind her, where a set of -- headphones? -- are hanging on a hook over her shoulder. She picks them up and puts them on, mirroring his move, and the minute they settle over her ears, about sixty percent of the noise cuts out. (They don't even press too uncomfortably against the cell phone headset she's still wearing.) "Better, hm?" Rufus says. His voice comes through the headphones, and she realizes they're radio receivers as well as ear protection. To enable conversation on the flight, she supposes.
"Much," Tifa agrees, after following Rufus's cue and fumbling with the headset to pull down the microphone attached to one side.
From where she's sitting, she can't quite see Tseng or Reno in anything other than one-quarter profile, but Tseng's voice sounds amused as he joins the conversation. "The radio channel's encrypted; we can speak safely. Reno, are we clear?"
"Gimme -- aw come on you zolom-blowing son of a syphilitic chocobo -- I did too file that flight plan --" Reno flips a few more switches, then bangs on something that looks like it might be a radio, pushing buttons with a quick snap of the wrist. "Five, four, three -- okay, there we go. Mornin', Tif', you look killer, clothes fit okay?"
Tifa bites her lip. "Yes, thank you," she says. (She will not let Reno suspect how much it bothered her this morning. Bothers her still.)
"Mmm," Reno says. He turns his head, looks at her, and she has to blink, because she thinks he might be able to see how much it bothered her anyway. He looks serious, and a little sad, and far too knowing, and she doesn't have any idea what it all might mean. Then he grins, and it passes and he's just Reno again, sloppy and genial. "Everybody's harnessed in, yeah?" he asks, instead.
"We're clear back here," Rufus says. (Thankfully, he seems to have missed the whole exchange.) "Ready when you are."
"A'ight," Reno says. "Hang on to your hats, ladies and gentlemen and Turks," and with that, he flips one more switch and pulls back on the stick he's gripping and they're in the air.
Flying, Tifa discovers, approximately two minutes later, is the best thing ever.
It takes two minutes to discover this, because the first two minutes are utter misery; the helicopter lifts, then plunges off the side of the building, before rising again and swooping dizzily through the buildings that surround them. Tifa catches herself clinging to the edges of the seat and watching the coffee cup she'd placed in the holder next to her to make sure it doesn't spill all over everything. (She's not sure what she'll do if it starts to, but it's better to worry about the coffee than worry about where the fuck she left her stomach.)
Next to her, Rufus reaches out a hand to steady both cups of coffee. "Reno!" he yells, loudly enough that she can hear it both in her headset and through it. "If I've told you once --" (The effect is ruined by the fact that he's clearly trying not to laugh. That makes Tifa relax a little; if Rufus is laughing, they're not about to crash.)
"Yeah, yeah," Reno calls back, unrepentant. "The thermals are shit this time of day! I gotta roll with 'em if you don't want to burn all our fuel fighting 'em!" But a few seconds later, the pitch and yaw of the helicopter evens out. They rise again, smoothly and swiftly, and Tifa finds herself with her face pressed up against the glass, just staring.
There's a whole world down there.
From this far up, the people below are nothing more than blobs, and the cars look like tiny toys. She can see the entirety of Midgar spread out underneath her, like an architect's model, like a child's toyset. From this far up, she can't see any of the misery of the slums, any of the overbearing excess of the plate; all she can see is Midgar, dressed in her finest, early-morning sunlight glinting off the struts and edges of the plate and reflecting upwards to the heavens like a prayer.
Tifa doesn't know how long she stays there, staring, before she remembers that she's not alone; Midgar has long since disappeared in the distance, though, and she is watching the green of the grass beneath (so much more vivid, so much more bright than she'd remembered) and the peaks of the mountains they're approaching. Dimly, she realizes there's been a conversation going on in her ears while she watched, Tseng briefing Reno about something or other, but she hasn't heard a word of it.
Feeling obscurely guilty -- she didn't come along to gape out the window like a child while the adults plotted and planned around her -- she makes herself sit back in her seat, folding her hands in her lap as demurely as she can and making herself turn her head away from the window. (It doesn't quite help; turning her head simply brings the front window -- windshield? -- into view, and she catches herself being captivated by the sight of the clouds swirling and parting in front of and around them. But it helps.)
Too much to hope her abstraction hasn't been noticed; Rufus is watching her. When he sees her attention has returned from its flight of fancy, he gives her a smile. It's utterly unlike any smile she's seen from him yet -- the man has a vocabulary of expressions so wide she already knows it would take her months or years to learn them all -- but it's just as beautiful as the others: she thinks, looking at him, that this smile is delight in her delight, a touch of pride, a thread of quiet joy that he is here to see her fascination, that he could offer her that moment of beauty.
As she looks at him, feeling helpless in the face of that delight and joy, he reaches up a hand to cover the microphone attached to the headset, leaning in and pitching his voice so that she can hear him and neither of the other two can. "There are moments that make it all worth it," he says. "Flying brings a good quarter of them. If you ask, later, Reno can take you up solo and teach you how to drive her."
He's trying to give her a gift, she thinks, in the best way he knows how. It isn't his fault that his words bring yet another stab of realization: when this is over, she will either be dead (or wish she were) or she will return to the life she's built for herself down in the slums, away from all this power and the rarefied heights of Upper Central. For the first time, she truly realizes something she hadn't quite let herself believe yet: this experience will change (is changing) her, hopefully not beyond all recognition.
Hard upon the heels of that realization comes another: when this is over, depending on how it ends, one of the most powerful men in the world will owe her a favor. The thought of what that might mean for her, for her life, makes her dizzy and light-headed in a way that being thousands of feet in the air doesn't.
Rufus must see whatever her face is showing, because the smile slowly fades from his face, to be replaced by a rueful look she's already starting to become familiar with. (Tifa makes herself smile back at him, before his smile fades entirely. She doesn't want him to look too closely at her, and besides, his smile is too beautiful for her to want it to disappear completely.) "We're carrying our fuel for the whole trip," he says, briskly, letting his hand fall and going back to speaking on the shared channel, "but we'll have to stop at Costa del Sol to refill the tanks. The way Reno flies, that's about five hours from here. Why don't I get you up to speed on the tech skills you'd be expected to have?"
Tifa nods, even as Reno's saying, "Hey, chief, on the way back, we're gonna stop at Costa del Sol for a day or two so's I can shack out on the beach and let pretty girls bring me frozen drinks with umbrellas in 'em, yeah?"
"You've used all your vacation days for the year already," Tseng says, dryly, while Rufus stretches one arm to reach behind the seat where their gear is stowed and fish around until he surfaces with a tablet of his own, identical to the one he handed Tifa half an hour ago. "And next year. And possibly some of Rude's vacation days for this year."
"You never let me have any fun," Reno gripes. "Tif', you're on my side, right? When was the last time you got a vacation? We could share an umbrella. I won't even grope you too much when I put the sunscreen on ya."
Tifa holds up her hands, even though neither Reno nor Tseng can see her. "Leave me out of this," she says. "I just got here. I don't know enough to know whose side I should be taking yet."
(That gets her three simultaneous answers: "Mine, yo." "Tseng's." "Not Reno's." She can't help but laugh. She wonders if that was Reno's goal in the first place.)
Reno and Tseng go back to talking -- Tifa keeps one ear open for the first five minutes, realizes they're discussing some arcane quirk of Shinra budgetary regulation (and how to best work around it), and lets herself block it out -- while Rufus gestures for her to take out her own tablet (or rather, the one that she's been given to carry; she holds no illusions that she will be allowed to keep it once this is all over) and demonstrates how to turn it on. "It's a touch screen, with an on-screen keyboard," Rufus starts, "although you can plug in an external keyboard if you have to do too much data entry on it. If your fingers are too callused and it doesn't consistently recognize when you touch it, we can dig up a stylus for you to use -- I have to do that half the time if I've been on the shooting range too much lately. Okay. See this icon? That's the scheduling program. Yours is already calibrated to sync to two calendars, yours and mine --"
Learning how to use the tablet takes the first hour and a half of the flight, although she has the basics down within five minutes (it's a remarkably intuitive device to use). Rufus spends the longest amount of time on the email program and its various quirks and foibles; apparently she is to have access to his email inbox and is authorized to delete, forward, and reply to mail with impunity if it's something he doesn't actually need to handle personally. ("Half the company has started to realize that if they want to get anything done, or get anyone to actually make a decision, carbon-copying me is the fastest way to get whoever's dragging their heels to shit or get off the pot. So, the email hits my inbox, half an hour passes, there's a flurry of more email, and the next thing you know, whatever problem they had has been solved and they don't need me anymore, except the email is still there taking up space. I'll give you the list of things that I absolutely have to see and the things I don't give a fuck about; you triage.")
Once again, she's surprised -- stunned -- at how she is being given access to more information than anyone sane would give someone who has flat-out said she would like to work to overthrow the very institution she's pretending to be employed by. She wonders if this is an expression of trust or a complicated and multi-layered test. (Or maybe Rufus is just that hard up for competent help, the way he says he is, and even two days of her half-trained pretense at assistantship will be better than whatever he's dealing with.)
After she's gotten the crash course in operating the tablet -- she realizes, based on the way Rufus has slipped into talking about things, that he's expecting (subconsciously or otherwise) that she will have his email and calendar open constantly, scanning through all new messages and meeting invitations as they come in and alerting him of the critical ones immediately, and she wonders if he even remembers that she's mostly playing the role as a cover story and not actually as a job she intends to keep -- Rufus clicks his tablet off and slides it into a pocket inside his suit jacket. (She catches the tiniest glimpse of a leather shoulder holster, underneath the vest he's wearing under the jacket, and wonders how much of his elaborately layered costume is due to needing a place to conceal enough weaponry to feel secure.) "Now," he says. "Step two: the laptop."
With the example of how to work the tablet fresh in her mind, figuring out the laptop isn't as challenging as Tifa expected it to be. Rufus shows her how to work the desktop version of the email client -- it has more features, most of which he is scornful about ("It's utter shit, I just ssh straight to the mail server and access my inbox through the command line, but for you it'll be easier if you pop the spool straight down to the client", and she nods to disguise the fact that she understood maybe one word in ten of that sentence), but thankfully most of them can be ignored. That done, he shows her how to work the WorldNet browser, in order to look up information when she needs it. (The helicopter apparently has WorldNet access. She's not sure how, but she's only heard of the WorldNet from overhearing things in the Heaven, and it's always seemed like magic to her in the first place, so she doesn't wonder.) The final step, after that, is learning how to search Shinra's internal network, which apparently replicates most of the information available on the WorldNet and extends it even further.
"Here, you try," Rufus finally says, tipping the laptop from the center console (where he's been typing and mousing, and she's been watching) into her lap. She clutches at it frantically when it threatens to keep sliding over the too-slick pants she's wearing. He doesn't say anything at her sudden panic (oh Shiva what if I drop it what if I break it what if I make it stop working), but the corners of his lips tip up slightly anyway.
The metal of the laptop chassis is warm against her thighs. Tifa looks down at it and takes a deep breath. The person you're pretending to be graduated from the University, she tells herself, firmly. She would have been using computers for years already.
The browser window, open to the Shinra internal search engine Rufus had been demonstrating, waits patiently for her to ask it something. Hesitantly, Tifa touches her index finger to the 't' key, and keeps herself from flinching when the 't' appears on the screen. Clumsily, using two fingers, she types her name and presses the button to begin the search. No results found, it tells her.
Rufus doesn't seem surprised at her search. "I had your records wiped when I had your ID made," he says. "Try your alias."
Feeling awkward -- and wondering what records Shinra had on her, for them to have needed to be wiped -- Tifa clicks back to the search window again and types in 'Miki Walker'. The browser thinks for a minute, then spits out a veritable cornucopia of results, mostly pages from Midgar University's student newspaper. She discovers, reading the excerpt from each that the search engine displays, that Miki Walker majored in marketing, that she ran on the women's track team and solidly finished second and third in most of her races, and that she once wrote an editorial in her sophomore year decrying Midgar's post-War economic sanctions against Wutai.
"That last seems a bit out of character," she says, helplessly. "If I'm working for Shinra now, I mean." She has no idea how they possibly could have constructed this much history for her in less than a day. Or how they could have made it appear as though it's always been there. Or what will happen if she runs into someone who should have known 'Miki', if Miki had ever existed, and yet has never seen her before.
"Hm? Oh, the editorial. Tseng wrote that one." (In the cockpit, Tseng -- hearing his name -- turns his head, then looks back when he realizes Rufus wasn't calling for him. The simple, thoughtless motion, the way Tseng automatically looks to make sure Rufus isn't looking to get his attention, makes Tifa want to scream, and she's not sure why.) Rufus grins at the expression on her face. "It's okay. Most of the students at the U spend half their time protesting Shinra policies and then turn around and hire on as soon as they graduate. It's practially expected; you'd look odd if you hadn't had some sort of history. I told you, the alias is solid."
Tifa bites back her response. She's served drinks to dozens, if not hundreds, of Midgar University students. They've always seemed implausibly young to her, kept artificially in the twilight of their childhood and struggling to find some form of self-definition. She's always felt sorry for them, in a way. More than one of them has wound up pouring their hearts out to her, drunkenly, long after the bar itself has closed; whether it's about their fears of disappointing their parents or their hunger to make something better of themselves, to get out of the slums and into the echelons of Shinra that Rufus has never not known, she has heard it all, and felt sorry for them, and offered what small pieces of counsel she could. To Rufus, it's a joke.
She doesn't say any of it. She just clicks the back arrow until the browser displays the plain, unaugmented search window again, then slides her hands under the laptop and moves to set it back on the console between them, for Rufus to go back to his lessons.
He shakes his head, though. "We've got about an hour and a half left until we'll be taking a break. Best thing for you to do is to use the time to get more familiar with typing. Here, I specifically installed a tutorial program -- at best it'll teach you how to touch type, at worst it'll at least help you remember where the keys are for hunt-and-peck." He leans over, brings the program up with a practiced slide of fingers across the touchpad, one that tells her he's been using computers like this one for as long as they've existed. "Let me know if you get stuck."
By the time they land in Costa del Sol, the program has taught Tifa how she is supposed to hold her hands over the keys, and has drilled her in reaching for the most common letters over and over again until she thinks she will see them, glowing as though they're on the screen, behind her eyes when she closes them tonight to sleep. She's managed to engross herself in the task, at least; it takes Reno shutting off the chopper's engine for her to realize they've landed, and she kicks herself for missing the view. (She's never been to Costa del Sol before. Or rather, she's never been to Costa del Sol while she was conscious; she still doesn't know what route her mysterious benefactor may have taken her to Midgar via.)
They've landed on a ground-level, concrete helipad behind an ornate building. "Pit stop," Tseng says -- the first thing he's said in at least an hour, or rather, the first thing Tifa remembers him saying -- unbuckling his seat belt and sliding open the cockpit door. "Reno, you refuel us, then it's your turn. Tifa, you can stretch your legs, or if you have to use the facilities, I can show you --"
"I'm fine," Tifa says. She did have more coffee to drink this morning than she usually does, but it hasn't worked her way through her system yet. "I'll just ..." She trails off, makes a vague hand gesture that indicates getting out and stretching. Tseng nods, unconcerned, and leaves the helicopter, following Rufus into the building they've landed next to; Reno jumps out of the other side of the cockpit and disappears around the side of the helicopter to do mysterious mechanical things to it.
Tifa is left alone inside the helicopter, completely unsupervised. She could steal it and fly away, if she knew how to fly it, if there were enough fuel. She could sneak out the door and blend into the vacationers who are no doubt thronging the streets a few blocks away, melting into the crowds and disappearing to take her chances here; Costa del Sol is a resort town, and resort towns always need qualified help.
She doesn't do either. What she does is shake her legs out -- she isn't used to sitting for this long at once -- and, carefully placing the laptop on the seat across from her and shrugging out of her jacket to lay over it, slide open the door and jump down to the ground.
The heat hits her in the face as she does; it's about twenty degrees warmer than Midgar was, heavy and humid, but there's a brisk breeze and she can smell salt and water and something else, something she's never smelled before, on the air. It must be the smell of ocean. She has to squint against the sun, which is strong and harsh in her eyes, enough to make everything around her look washed out. Sweat begins to prickle in the small of her back, and she's glad that she took off her jacket, even if she'd only intended to conceal the laptop so it would be less of a temptation to any thief walking by. Reno is standing towards the backside of the helicopter, maybe five or six feet away, tipping up a large canister so that it pours into an opening in the helicopter's side. The canister is bright green, a neon-acid color that makes her eyes hurt nearly as much as the sun does, and she doesn't recognize the symbol painted on the side of it.
Reno glances over at her. "Hey, Tif'," he greets her, as genial as he ever is. He's taken off his jacket, too; the tails of his shirt are untucked as always, and the top two buttons of his shirt are open. The goggles he always wears pushed up on his head are actually over his eyes instead of holding up his hair; she's never seen him actually wear them until this moment, but seeing them slowly darken when he turns his head back to his task and his face turns back into the direct sunlight, she realizes that they must at least partially be treated with something that helps to block the sun.
"You lean back into the chopper, there's two drawers under the seat you were in," Reno adds, before she can say anything in response. "Bottom one of the two, closer to the door, there's a couple pair of sunglasses. We'll be here at least twenty while the boss and the chief piss and smoke, an' trust me, you're planning to stay out here while they do, you're gonna want the shades, yeah?"
Tifa turns back, wordlessly, and follows his directions. The sunglasses are precisely where he said they'd be, shoved in the side of a drawer full of what looks like all kinds of different clothing (including, she notices, a few sets of various uniforms, from plain engineer's coveralls, both with the Shinra logo and without, to Army fatigues, with others she doesn't recognize as well). She picks the first pair of glasses that come to hand -- they all look identical anyway -- and puts them on even before shutting the drawer. They oblige her by darkening just like Reno's when she turns back into the sun, and she realizes after a minute that she's stopped squinting and her incipient headache is whispering quietly away. (She wonders if that's why Rude wears his all the time; she'd thought it an attempt to intimidate, to look more frightening to people who couldn't see his eyes, but maybe he's just sensitive to levels of light that normal people wouldn't call bright at all.)
Reno, when she walks back around the helicopter to find him again, is replacing the empty canister in the cargo hatch (at the end of a row of about fifteen or sixteen others) and pulling out the next. He nods when he sees her wearing the glasses. "Good," he says. "You probably got a headache like nobody's business anyway, just dealing with all our shit, last thing you need is sunglare on top of it."
His tone is sympathetic, without holding a hint of pity or coddling, and she hears, in those brisk words, a level of understanding that has been patently absent from both Tseng and Rufus, no matter that they've both been more-or-less trying to remember this is all new and strange to her. That understated empathy fills something inside her Tifa hadn't been aware was empty, and a few things click together all at once. She catches herself blurting out, before she can stop herself, "Which Sector did you come from?"
She bites her tongue the minute the words leave her lips, hoping she hasn't offended him, but all Reno does is grin at her. "Lower Four, you couldn't tell by the accent," he says, and yeah, okay, she's thought more than a few times that she can hear the cadences of Below in his voice, but she'd thought it was an affectation so he could blend a little more easily in the Heaven, make people more likely to forget that he was Reno of the Turks. (It never worked.) "Ma died when I was twelve, m'sisters and I never knew who our fathers were. I was turning tricks and selling smack to support us all when Tseng found me and signed me up, five years later, and it was six, seven months until I stopped thinking it'd all go away the minute I woke up. So, y'know, I got your back with all this."
"Oh," Tifa says, feeling stupid for not having realized, feeling (irrationally, completely) better for knowing.
Reno finishes emptying the second canister into the helicopter's belly and stows it back again. This time, he takes two canisters. "Here, hold this a minute," he says, holding out one of them. "Careful, it's sealed, but you don't want to let it drip on ya, it'll eat through your clothes and at least three layers of skin if it does. And those pants make your ass look fuckin' fabulous, you don't want to lose 'em." He manages, the way he somehow always manages when he compliments her, to make it sound like honest appreciation without a hint of pressure or sleaze. It's one of the things she's always liked best about Reno.
Tifa adjusts her grip on the canister carefully. "Thank you for taking care of the shopping for me," she says. With the new information she's just been handed, she can say it without feeling the same sort of frustration and rage she was feeling this morning; knowing Reno was in the same position she's in now, or close enough, turns his efforts on her behalf from him throwing excessive amounts of money into the task of forcing her to conform to what Shinra would expect her to look like, into him trying to help her feel a little less out of place (in what she's wearing, at least) out of affection, or at the very least, understanding. (The excessive amounts of money are the same, and she's still not comfortable with that, but viewed through this new lens, she can almost see that as a sign of caring as well.)
"Hey, yeah, no prob, you're welcome," Reno says. She can't see his eyes, behind the sun-darkened goggles, but she has the sudden sense he's scrutinizing her. "You're thinking of beating yourself up over the fact that you resented the fuck out of it for at least ten minutes this morning, don't. The boss took me for my first few shopping trips, and I wanted to punch the sanctimonious fuck in the nose at least a dozen times every fitting."
Tifa can feel her lips quirking at the image that produces in her imagination. "I was only pissy at you for about two minutes," she admits. "Mostly, yeah, it was him, them, just..."
She trails off, would wave her hands in midair (were it not for the can she's still holding) to try to convey the sheer disconnect between her and Tseng this morning over the topic of clothing, between her and Rufus and Tseng last night over the topic of food cooked to order and delivered to one's door, between her and Tseng this morning over the thought that of course he wouldn't expect to wait in line and of course their breakfast would be delivered. Reno's nodding, though, and she gets the impression he understands perfectly.
"Oh, yeah," Reno says. "The chief, well, everybody expects him to be used to getting waited on hand and foot, and the fact he'll do things for himself half the time, he gets the chance, yeah, that's enough to shock half the old guard into near heart attacks every time they see him doing it. The boss? Hey, he can tell himself he's an outsider up there just as much as we are --" The casual 'we' makes Tifa simultaneously bristle and warm straight through; she makes a face at herself, inside her head where Reno can't see it, lest he misinterpret. "But yeah, really not as much as he thinks he is. Dunno if you know it, and I'm not supposed to know it either so don't go mentioning to nobody, but back in Wutai? He was a prince, an' I'm not talking metaphorical. He was to Wutai what the chief is to Midgar, is the impression I've got from what little he's said, and he might've walked away from all the shit that comes along with that to come here, but a whole fucking lot of it followed along with him. He's used to breathing that air. Slum rats like you'n'me, we gotta work for it, and it ain't never gonna be natural, right?"
The accent and rhythm of the slums is getting stronger the more Reno talks. He's grinning at her still, inviting her to share the joke (even though it isn't funny, and he knows it isn't funny, but Reno makes everything a joke). Tifa nods, once, slowly. She hadn't known that about Tseng, not consciously, but her complete lack of surprise tells her that her subconscious mind had pieced together the clues a hell of a long time ago: his familiarity with the fighting arts, the upper-caste inflections to his Wutaian speech, his manner of command, his philosophy, his honor, his tendency to divide the people he encounters into obstacles to be removed or allies to be won or fragile things to be protected.
"So," Reno adds, "you keep stubbing your toe on the giant piles of bullshit they haul around like a ten-ton weight and don't even realize they're carrying, you come find me, yeah? I'll remind you it ain't you that's got the problem, it's them."
Tifa catches herself laughing, helplessly. She can't not. "Deal," she says, and Reno puts down the empty canister he's finished with and sticks out his hand to her to seal it. She puts the full canister she's holding down on the ground too, shakes on it, and feels much better.
"Now," Reno says -- and just like that, the topic is over and done with and he's back to looking like he doesn't have a care in the world -- "gimme that canister, an' I'll get it into the beast, an' then, 'scuse me for being pushy about it, you really want to go into the villa and piss before we take off again. Usually we'd stop here long enough for lunch, but the boss didn't mention it, an' I'm gonna guess that means he's in there arranging a picnic basket an' we'll be eating on the go. It's at least four hours to N -- to where we're going, probably more if the mountains got weather today, so you should really stop." He cocks his head. "You want, I'll take you in an' show you, you just wait until the boss an' the chief get back."
Reno's offer makes Tifa identify the subconscious pressures keeping her from not wanting to go inside with Tseng (and Rufus); from the outside at least, the building looks like a mansion, like a luxury resort, and she realizes her desire to stay outside was in no small part a desire to avoid having her nose rubbed in the sort of casual luxury she's been having to confront since she left the Heaven yesterday. Having Reno at her side, though, makes the thought a little bit easier to contemplate. "Yeah," she says. "Yeah, okay. Thanks." Reno nods again, like her responses make perfect sense to him. For all she knows, they might; she wonders how much he sees, remembers again Tseng's comment from last night that when he needs someone placed under surveillance when they don't know they're under surveillance, he uses Reno. "Don't tell him," she adds, abruptly. She knows better than to think Reno will outright lie for her, but she thinks he might be willing to avoid volunteering information. "Them. If you -- I mean, if you aren't directly asked, could you ..."
Reno turns back to face her, his eyebrows going up, so startled that his hand nearly slips where it's holding the canister feeding the belly of the helicopter; he swears and catches it just in time, but even so, three drops fall from the spot where they meet. (Fascinated, and a little bit sickened, Tifa watches the concrete smoke and pit, and suddenly the other pockmarks around them start to make sense.) "Tifa, honey," he says once he's got things back under control, speaking slowly. Tifa can't decide which is more surprising: that he calls her full name, without the slurred elision he usually employs, or that he adds the call-name, which he never has before, and which he manages to make sound affectionate without a hint of sleaze. (It sounds brotherly, she realizes, and -- knowing now what she does about his family -- she wonders if she might be the same age as one of his sisters; she guesses he's a few years older than she is.) "I ain't gonna say a fucking word to anybody. This ain't business, and it ain't something could be dangerous if nobody knew. This is personal, and it's nobody's fucking business but yours, yeah?"
Tifa takes a deep breath, feeling the humidity clogging her lungs, feeling the air thick and heavy against her tongue. Her throat feels tight. "I -- thank you," she says.
Reno nods, once. "Look," he says, abruptly, as the silence stretches out between them again. "It really ain't my place to say, but --"
He pauses, and it takes her a second to realize he's waiting for permission. "Go ahead," she says. (She'd say he would anyway, except she thinks, looking at him, that if she said no, he'd shut up and never speak of it again.)
"The boss hasn't told me anything past the absolute basics," Reno says, slowly, and she gets the impression he's feeling out what he'll say, calculating how he can best say it, not for maximum results but rather, for minimum harm to her. "But, I mean, you'd gotta be stupid not to put two and two together and realize we're headed out to Nibelheim because somebody thinks you might be able to put your finger on something that'd make all this finally start to make sense. I just wanted to say -- I've been there, yeah? Nibelheim, I mean. I was there when they remade it, and it wasn't fucking pretty, an' it's gonna be pretty damn rough on you, and I wanted to let you know that ..." He trails off. "I dunno what I want you to know, really. That I'm really fucking sorry about being part of the team that put it together again. That I'm really fucking sorry it happened in the first place. That I'm really fucking glad you're helping us out despite all of that, 'cause it's been fucking weighing on me for years and I really wanna know what the fuck went down for real and how we can fix things so it can't happen again. That even though I'm glad you're helping, I'm really sorry you gotta go through the process of stirring up all this shit again. You know. Shit like that."
He looks down, realizes that the canister is empty, takes it away and (carefully) snaps the cover back onto it. He picks up the other canister from where he'd left it at his feet and takes them both around the side of the helicopter, stowing them back into the cargo hatch before she can think of anything to say. It's good he does; it gives her a few minutes to gather her composure, to figure out how she's going to react.
Tifa has found more sympathy for her life story in the past two days than she had in the past two years, and it's creeping her out. Johnny had been the first person she'd told what had happened, and Johnny had been devastated for five minutes and then started plotting a way to use it, to turn their tragedy into propaganda and use it to rally people against Shinra's regime. She'd stopped telling people shortly after that, because Johnny wasn't the only one who'd reacted that way. She'd come to expect that sort of tunnel vision from people who heard, the human mind incapable of grasping tragedy without trying to find some meaning from the depths of the tragedy, grasping for something that might redeem it, even a little, even ex post facto.
In the past two days, she has now found three people whose first impulse has been to think of her first. Tseng's helpless wish to stand between her and her memories, Rufus's fierce anger over what has been done to her, and now Reno's quiet apology: all of them are more than she's ever gotten before, and even though she knows all three of them want something from her as well, it somehow doesn't feel like as much pressure as she's gotten in the past from others. She can't figure out what the difference is, not without a hell of a lot more time to sit and think it over; all she knows is that the difference exists.
It doesn't make up for how uncomfortable she's feeling, but still. Reno is trying, they're all trying, and it's more than she's gotten from others. Tifa's ready for him when he comes back around the helicopter, bottle of water in one hand, pouring it over each of his hands in turn and then holding the neck of the bottle in his teeth while he rubs his hands together briskly and then dries them on his pants. "Thank you," she says. It isn't much, but it needs to be said. "I -- Yeah. This whole thing isn't going to be fun, and it isn't going to be easy. But -- For the first time in years, I'm actually starting to believe that there's a chance I might get some justice."
Hearing herself say it, Tifa is startled to realize it's the truth. She wouldn't have thought to put 'justice' and 'Shinra' in the same sentence. She knows Tseng has a sense of honor and a love of justice running through him a mile wide, but Tseng's form of justice is the justice of the sword, of the avenging angel, and she's known for a long time -- perhaps as long as she's known him -- that Tseng's hands are bound by the men who give him his orders. It's Rufus, though, who's come to make her believe that justice might actually be done.
Rufus's justice is colder, she thinks -- colder and harsher and even more edged -- but she thinks she might be all right with that. Tifa doesn't approve of violence, in a way that only someone trained to commit violence can disapprove, but she thinks that if she had the true author of Nibelheim's destruction before her, it wouldn't take much for her to want to tear out his or her throat with her bare hands.
But for now, Reno is smiling at her, mad and merry. "Justice we're good at, us and the chief, yeah?" he says. "Even if you wouldn't think so. Stick with us. We'll get to the bottom of this. An' I'll get in my claim right now, I wanna hold your coat while you kick whoever's behind all this in the nuts."
It makes her laugh. Reno makes her laugh, and she's starting to see the complexities behind his simple facade, and she thinks -- hopes -- that whatever happens, she won't lose the sight of this, the insight into the real men behind the Shinra boogeyman the slums have spent years fearing.
"It's a deal," she says, and in the distance she can spot Tseng and Rufus coming out of the building across from them (both of them in mid-conversation, gesturing sharply, and neither of them talking to each other; she wonders who's on the other end of the phones). "Now come on. You were going to show me the inside of that monstrosity over there. And then we should probably get back on the road."