Well - hope it gets to stay.
Just a little warning. This page is where ME, the Moogle, will post MY fanfic - if I'm allowed to.
Got your own fanfic? - Start your own page (suggestion).
And like I said, it's fanfic. Constructive criticism allowed.
Flaming will be used to make toast.
And flaming will make the Moogle unhappy - you do not wish to do that.

Had to unformat this and use Notepad, 'cos I can't seem to get any formatting, etc. Sucks, huh? MY.

Betweentimes

In other words, from after Final Fantasy VII to a few months before Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children

Cid landed the Highwind. "You're sure people survived... that?" he asked, incredulously.
Cait Sith nodded. "Okay, so I'm actually in Kalm right now - but I'm getting reports that Meteor and Holy didn't penetrate the plates. The people evacuated to the slums... they're okay."
"What about Marlene?" Barret's foster-daughter was the main reason he had started AVALANCHE in the first place. That and the obliteration of Corel from the map, of course. She was really the daughter of his best friend Dyne, rescued from Corel by Barret as an infant, the only other survivor of Shinra's massacre there.
"She's here in Kalm," Cait Sith - actually Reeve of the Shinra Corporation - replied. "She's safe, Barret."
Yuffie came through. "Open the door, Cid - I need to... ulp!"
Cid hurriedly pressed some buttons. Yuffie had the world's weakest stomach when it came to air or sea travel, apparently.
A white-faced Cloud followed her from the cockpit, overtaking her on the way.
Perhaps only second-weakest, Cid amended. Cloud didn't travel particularly well, either. He'd been so focussed on what needed to be done that he'd managed to push his queasiness down for a while - but it looked like he needed some fresh air himself. And a spot out of the wind to throw up.
"We should go and check anyway," Vincent continued the conversation.
"Yes," Red XIII nodded his great shaggy head. "There will be many frightened and confused people in the city."
"I've got to see Marlene," Barret said. "I've got... something to give to her." His flesh-and-blood left hand touched the locket Dyne had given him before he died - the locket that had belonged to Marlene's real mother.
"I'll come with you," Cait Sith said. "I'm co-ordinating the relief and rescue efforts - and I might as well have my lucky mascot back."
"I'm going into Midgar," Tifa decided. "You can get in touch with me there, Reeve. I've got the PHS."
Cid looked round them all. "Okay - you know I've got to get back to the folks in Rocket Town real soon," he said. "All ashore for Midgar - I can drop you and this soft toy off nearer Kalm if you like, Barret," he added.
"Yuffie will probably want a lift back to Wutai," Red XIII pointed out. "So don't be in too much of a hurry, Cid."
The three of them disembarked. Yuffie was taking deep lungfuls of air, not far from the door. "You going to Midgar?"
Tifa nodded. "Where's Cloud?" she asked.
Yuffie shrugged. "I was... busy," she said, with some truth - and no little embarrassment.
They forbore to mention the hole she'd dug a few feet away, filled with noisome material and not quite properly covered over with soil. The sixteen year old ninja could be touchy sometimes - especially about her airsickness.
"Cid will return you to Wutai, if you want," Vincent said, softly.
She sighed, then brightened. "Well - there isn't anything left to come up. See you!" She headed back inside.
Tifa had walked away from the airship and was looking around. "Cloud? Cloud!" she called.
Red XIII joined her, sniffing the air delicately. "His scent says he's already heading for Midgar," he said.
"Without m... us?" Tifa amended.
"Perhaps he needs some time to himself," Vincent murmured as he came over. "The battle was... onerous."
The Highwind lifted off, heading for Kalm - then, presumably, Wutai. They watched it go.
"We'd better go and see what's happening in Midgar," Tifa said, slowly. Why had Cloud gone off without them? Surely he must have known that they'd want to help the people of Midgar?

Cloud had managed to conquer his nausea, thanks to the fresh air, and quickly headed for the ravaged city. His first stop was a ruined church on the outskirts of the slums. Part of the floor was missing, a carpet of flowers covering it instead. He touched one of the hardy blooms, then picked it, placing it inside his backpack. "You know who it's for," he said, softly.
The slums were crowded, but he managed to get to part of one slum where he could begin the long tough climb to the warped plates high above. He needed transport - and he hoped he'd be able to find what he needed up there, where the fortunates of Midgar had lived.
Two hours later, having scavenged things he needed from the broken and distorted super-city, Cloud kick-started the motorbike he'd discovered inside the warped shell of the Shinra Company HQ. He rode along the various cracked and debris-strewn roads until he came close to the edge of the plate.
"Here goes nothing," he murmured, riding back a few hundred yards. The soil surrounding Midgar was dead, dry sand, soft to land in... even from this height, he hoped, as the bike launched into the air, carving the sky with a roar.
He managed to somehow keep control as he landed almost sideways, and slowed down, looking back at the city. The Highwind was long gone, but he was sure some of his friends had gone into the city to help. He had something else he needed to do, though - a promise he'd made to himself once he remembered who he really was...
The last time he'd stood here it had been raining, the skies overhead dark with thunderclouds, and the lights of Midgar's Mako reactors had shone like galaxies before him. It was broad daylight now - and Midgar looked like a model that someone had taken a steam-hammer to.
He opened the front of the bike - it held storage panniers under the fairing, on either side of the wide front wheel - and brought out a rolled-up bag. He unzipped it, then knelt down and quickly dug into the loose dry sand that lay beneath the rocks he'd moved earlier. It didn't take long before he found what he was looking for, wrapped securely in a blanket and tied with rope. He could just about remember burying his best friend - a lot of those memories were still dim and nightmarish, because he'd been so ill.
He didn't uncover Zack's corpse - just rolled the blanket-wrapped form into the body bag he'd 'liberated', put the flower from the church in, zipped it and fastened it onto the back of the bike. If their positions had been reversed... Cloud hoped that if it had been him, his mother would have preferred to know the truth, rather than mourn him and expect him to return in equal measures.
He took Zack's Buster Sword out of the pannier and stuck it into the ground, blade first. "I... just hope I'm doin' the right thing, Zack," he murmured. "I've got no parents; they've got no son... maybe it'll balance out if I live for both of us."
He got back onto his bike, pulled down his sunglasses against the glare of the sun on the sandy earth, and rode away. Midgar fell into the distance behind him - he needed to go to Junon, to find a boat across to the next continent. Zack was from Gongaga - not really that far from Nibelheim, the town where Cloud and Tifa had grown up...
It was time for Zack to finally return home.

The refugee camp had spread into a ring around the dead city and its abandoned slums. Buildings were in various stages of construction - but Reeve had insisted on making sure that water and sewerage lines were opened up and run in to the camp, to avert a plague spreading through the exhausted population. There were standpipes in the - well, call them 'streets' for now, where people queued with buckets and containers to collect precious water for the day.
Tifa tucked Marlene into her sleeping bag. Barret had left her in Midgar - he said he was off to look for resources that might prove useful in this now Mako-energy-wary world.
She sighed at the purring growl of a powerful motorbike. At night the 'streets' were sometimes filled with young guys roaring up and down incessantly. It seemed to be their only form of entertainment - because they were much too young to get into her pub, she knew.
The little bells sewn into the flaps of the marquee's entrance jingled and she came out from behind the curtained-off area that served as living quarters. "We're clo..." she stopped at the sight of the figure, lit only dimly by the sole lantern left burning low in the pub part of the tent. "Cloud?"
He nodded. "I'm... back," he stated the obvious.
"Where have you been?" Tifa hung back. She must have fallen asleep after putting Marlene to bed - because Cloud had been here before in her dreams, only to disappear come morning. His hair was blonder, sun-bleached, she noticed - and his eyes were still as bleak as ever. Are you ever going to be happy? she wondered.
"I... went to see Zack's Mom and Dad," he said, slowly. "I wanted to... talk to them."
"I see." She didn't. It had been just over two months since Meteor - since Cloud had vanished into thin air. "You hungry?" she asked.
He nodded, not smiling. Come to think of it, Tifa couldn't remember Cloud smiling much, even as a kid. "Yeah, I am," he said.
"Then shut the flap behind you and come have supper," she invited.

Cloud looked down at the framework he'd laid out on the ground and picked up the hammer. He wasn't much of a wood-butcher - but if he worked hard enough... he might exhaust himself enough to sleep without dreams. He hoped, anyway. Gongaga had been tough - earnestly explaining to two devastated parents how his best friend had died while escaping after five years of captivity as a lab rat. There had been a lot of tears and angry recriminations - Cloud recounted what had happened in Nibelheim, and its aftermath, and how Zack had decided it was best if they headed for Midgar when they escaped their confinement. Returning home had posed too much of a risk for Zack's family and friends, he told them. His best friend had said something about the town suffering enough already. Gongaga's Mako reactor had exploded and killed half the townsfolk, not long after he and Zack had been captured.
And so Cloud worked away steadily at his physical labour - eventually this wooden building would become Tifa's new Seventh Heaven, to replace the one destroyed when the Shinra Corporation dropped the Sector 7 plate onto the slum below. Thousands had died that day - above and below the city - just because AVALANCHE had been a burr under Shinra's skin. He hadn't heard much about Shinra lately - ex-employees were closing down any Mako reactors that were still operational, mindful of the danger of draining the Lifestream that had saved the world from Meteor.
"Hiya, Cloud!" Marlene called, cheerfully.
He narrowly missed his thumb, swallowed the swear-word that instinctively rose in his throat and turned round. "Hi, Marlene," he said.
"Tifa sent me with lunch," she told him. "'Cos she's busy."
"Thanks," he said, accepting the flask of water and the lunch-pail from her. He opened the flask and gratefully drank about a third of the cool water inside.
Marlene looked at him. "Good?" she asked.
He closed the flask and nodded. "Very good."
She continued to stare at him. "Are we really gonna have a real home?" she asked suddenly.
He looked around at the various piles of lumber. "Eventually," he shrugged. "It takes a while to build something all by yourself. Tifa's busy running the pub, after all - or there wouldn't be anything to build with," he pointed out, gently enough. Marlene was only six or seven, but whip smart. "But one day you will have a room of your own - I promise," he said.
She searched his face with her eyes, then nodded. "I've got to go back to Tifa now," she said, apparently satisfied.
Cloud watched her walk away. She was a surprisingly happy child - and he wanted to make sure she didn't have to suffer, after everything she'd had to endure during her short life so far. He put down the lunch-pail and flask and picked up the hammer again. The sooner all the frames were completed, the sooner they could be raised and covered over... and Tifa and Marlene wouldn't have to sleep in a curtained-off area in the back of the pub marquee. He owed Tifa his sanity, after all...

"Cloud's gone again, hasn't he?" Marlene gently slipped her hand into Tifa's.
Tifa looked down at the tracks behind the tent - where Cloud's bike was usually parked. "Yeah - he likes to have a little private time. He can't stay with us all the time, after all," she added.
"Why not?" Marlene wanted to know. "Where is he?"
Tifa didn't know the answer - to either of her questions. "He's a guy, Marlene," she injected a little humour into her voice. "You know how he doesn't even like sleeping in the same huge tent as us girls."
"Men!" Marlene's voice held good-humoured frustration.
"You said it," Tifa chuckled. "Come on - you can practice your letters while I sweep up, okay?"

Midgar and the slums beneath were reasonably deserted. Cloud parked his bike at the side of the ruined church as it grew dark, enjoying the silence. He'd been for a long ride, trying to clear his head - but it hadn't helped all that much. Not that he wasn't sleeping - but he preferred to sleep away from other people. His dreams were... disturbing at best, and he didn't want to scare Tifa or Marlene if he screamed aloud.
One corner of the church held his personal possessions - frankly, not much: a blanket and bedroll, a coffeepot and enamel mug and an oil lamp. The only other things he possessed were the bike and the swords in the sheath on his back. He'd had them custom-made in Gongaga while he was there - the many blades could slot together, or come apart with ease if he needed more than one at a time.
He sat down on the bedroll and rested his chin in his hands, staring unseeingly at the flowers. He slept here most nights, unwilling to let anyone else share his nightmares. Isolation... suited him. Being too close to people - it just opened you up to more pain, after all. He'd lost his best friend, wasn't able to save Aeris from Sephiroth... his hometown had been destroyed... All that was left from his past life was Tifa - and he didn't want to cling to her. He knew how weak he was - he'd handed Sephiroth the means to destroy the world, the Black Materia, because of his weakness. Okay, so he'd killed Sephiroth - twice; once in Nibelheim and once in the Northern Crater - but he knew for a fact that he wasn't any kind of hero. He picked up the coffeepot and went over to the pile of rubble in the corner where he had built a safe fire. He brewed a pot and drank some coffee, savouring the strong taste. Maybe this was another reason he had trouble sleeping, he grimaced. He put down the mug and drew his sword, slowly spinning it one-handed, becoming accustomed to the difference in weight and balance from Zack's old sword. Sometimes when he rode in the countryside outside the refugee camp - 'Edge City', they were starting to call it - he came in contact with monsters or bandits, and he needed to keep his skills fresh. It never occurred to him not to keep leaving the relative safety of Edge City - the place was too crowded and noisy for his peace of mind. But he owed Tifa, so he'd keep on working on the building that would become her new bar and home. This wasn't the first time he'd left Edge City for the countryside with little (read: no) warning - but Tifa seemed to understand that he needed time and space to himself. She'd even accepted his flimsy excuses for not sleeping in the bar tent at night - or seemed to, anyway. Sometimes he caught a look in her eyes that told him she knew him better than he knew himself - not exactly a good thing, he thought, ruefully.
He lay down on the blanket and covered himself over, placing his sword by his side - with his hand wrapped round the hilt. The ruined city seemed deserted - but he wasn't taking any chances.

The next day he was back at work on the various frameworks of Tifa's new place.
"Back again?" she murmured.
He didn't turn round. "I needed some time away from bashing my thumb to a pulp," he shrugged.
"Here."
"I already ate," he lied, shortly.
"It isn't food."
At her sharp tone, he turned round. "A phone?"
"It's a way of keeping in touch - even if all you do is listen to your messages," she said, drily. "Take it, Cloud. Marlene worries about you when you disappear - at least if you've got this, she might sleep better on your wandering nights."
He reluctantly took the phone from her. "Okay," he sighed. "But don't expect me to answer it while I'm riding my bike."
"Sure," Tifa nodded. "How are you getting on, Cloud?"
He slipped the phone into his back pocket and turned to look at the collection of braced frames. "I'll probably need someone to help put these things together," he said. "You're busy with the pub - and I can't hold them upright and nail them together at the same time," he added.
"That wasn't what I meant... but I get your point," she said, wryly. "I've got to go - the night shift and early breakfast crowd are due in soon. Later, Cloud. Oh - and you said that you'd to pick up more nails at the market this week."
"Yeah... Later, Tifa," he murmured. He'd known Tifa was really trying to ask him how he was - but he'd managed to dodge that particular bullet. Hell - he wasn't sure how he felt - barely a year ago he had still been stuck in a capsule under the Shinra Mansion in Nibelheim, being experimented on (basically tortured), hardly able to remember the life he'd had before he'd been subjected to the treatments. Only talking to Zack (when they were able to talk) had kept both of them alive - and relatively grounded. There was a life outside the capsules - that's what they had reminded each other, talking of everything and nothing just to remain sane.

He got onto his bike and headed for the market area. The place was crowded and noisy - and he positively hated it. He was a small-town guy in the middle of a mass of humanity, not his favourite place. He quickly made his purchase and got ready to bolt, getting onto his bike with practiced ease.
"Thief! Come back here!"
At the blur of movement beside him, Cloud instinctively held his arm out, parallel to the ground. The little kid who hit it - probably no more than a year or two older than Marlene - bounced off and fell back onto the street, scattering various fruits and vegetables as he landed hard.
"Good - someone's finally caught him!" someone came rushing up. "Pay!" he demanded of the child.
The boy mumbled something indistinct, turning red.
"What about that ring round your neck? - It's bound to be worth a few gil," the stallholder growled.
Cloud was mortified - and worried that the kid was hurt, landing as hard as he had. He dug into his pocket. "Here," he said, putting a generous sum of gil into the man's hand. He guessed that the ring was a memento of a parent the kid didn't have any more - why else would the undersized boy be stealing food? "Now - get lost," he added, roughly.
The boy looked at him curiously as the stallholder left. "Why'd you do that, mister?" he asked.
"You..." He'd been going to say 'hungry', but that was obvious. "You want to come have breakfast with me?" he asked, carefully. "To say 'sorry' for hurting you like that."
The boy stopped picking up the fruit and vegetables. "What?" he asked, confused. He eyed Cloud suspiciously. "I've got breakfast here."
"I know someone who's a great cook," Cloud said, truthfully. The kid reminded him a little of another undersized runt - one who'd tagged along behind Tifa and her friends back in Nibelheim, just as prickly and stubborn as this one seemed to be. "You can ride on the back, if you want," he added.
The boy looked at Cloud again - and took in the bike too. "I can't go with you, mister - I don't know you." There was an audible growling noise.
Proud, too, Cloud thought, ruefully. "My name's Cloud - and it isn't that far to my friend's place," he said, bending down to pick up the apple resting against his boot. He put it into the pouch the boy had made of his top. "I'm harmless," he added.
The kid's eyes widened as he got a good look at Cloud's sword, sticking out on either side of the sheath on his back, then he stared into Cloud's eyes.
You aren't gonna find anything in there, kid, Cloud thought. He'd seen his eyes when he shaved that morning - and still couldn't meet them for long.
"I'm Denzel, Mister Cloud," the boy said, suddenly.
"Just 'Cloud'," he insisted. "You want to share my breakfast, then?"
"Um... okay. Wait a second." Denzel pulled off his top and tied his spoils into it, then half-leapt, half climbed onto the back of the bike, behind Cloud.
"Hold on to me - but watch the sword. It's sharp," Cloud said, softly. "You okay, Denzel?"
"Um... Yeah," Denzel murmured, faintly. Cloud could feel pressure on his waist as the boy grabbed hold of his belt with both hands.
"Okay, then. I won't go too fast." Cloud kicked the bike into action and set off slowly, riding carefully to the spot where he usually parked, behind the temporary Seventh Heaven. "You alright?"
"Where... are we?" Denzel asked, nervously.
"In back of my friend's place. She cooks a pretty good breakfast," Cloud said. He half-turned and lifted Denzel off the bike. The kid was skin and bones under his clothes, he realised with some shock. "How long you been on your own?" he asked.
"Since... the Meteor," Denzel tried a careless shrug - but he unconsciously touched the ring around his neck and clutched the bundle of food like a lifebelt.
There were a lot of street kids nowadays - Cloud had noticed them sometimes in the early morning or late evening as he either returned to or escaped from Edge City. "This way," he said, leading the way to the front of the tent.
The place was quietening down - only one or two of the makeshift tables were occupied. Tifa looked up in surprise as he walked in - then her eyes widened as she saw his hand on Denzel's shoulder, directing him towards a seat at one of the empty tables. He held up his free hand, politely showing two fingers. She nodded and disappeared behind the curtain.
Marlene came out a few minutes later and wandered over. "Hiya, Cloud - who's your friend?" she asked.
"This is Denzel," Cloud said. "Denzel - this is Marlene. Her dad's out of town a lot, so she stays here with Tifa."
Denzel was finding it hard to concentrate, because the smells were making his stomach rumble hard. "Um... hi," he said, a little shyly.
"I thought you ate earlier," Marlene turned to Cloud. "Tifa said."
"I've been working hard - so I'm hungry again," he said easily.
Tifa came over at that point with two filled plates and some cutlery. "Here you go - two breakfast specials," she said, looking at Cloud with some interest.
He lowered his eyes to avoid her scrutiny, hoping like hell that he wasn't turning red - one drawback of his fair complexion being that he blushed far too easily sometimes. "Thanks, Tifa. Eat up, Denzel," he said.
"Thanks, ma'am," Denzel remembered his manners, trying not to drool.
She rolled her eyes. "Oh, please - I'm Tifa," she said. "Enjoy your breakfast... Denzel, was it?"
He nodded, his mouth already full.
"Cloud - you can eat in the kitchen. I need your help. Marlene - you'll keep Denzel company, right?" she smiled.
"Sure, Tifa. So - where do you stay, Denzel?" Marlene sat down next to the boy and began to chatter away.
Cloud swallowed a sigh (and a curse), picked up his plate and got to his feet. "Try not to choke yourself," he warned. "And don't go anywhere 'til I come back, okay?"
Denzel looked up, swallowed, then nodded. "Okay, Mi... Cloud," he said.

"What's going on here, Cloud?" Tifa hissed as the curtain fell behind them.
Cloud picked at the food on his plate and explained how he'd come to meet the boy, refusing to look up at her.
"Why?" Tifa sounded amused.
"If it hadn't been for me, he'd have got away," Cloud shrugged, embarrassed as hell. "The kid's starving, Tifa," he added. "When I lifted him off my bike, I... My sword weighs more than he does." He wasn't exaggerating by much.
"So... you've given him a hot breakfast. And?" she prompted.
"He can... count nails for me or something - I don't know." Another shrug. "I'll pay for his food, Tifa. There are too many orphans... including us," he added, looking at her for the first time.
"If he wants to stay, he can," she said, softly. "But don't force him, Cloud. Maybe... maybe Denzel likes being independent. He might feel he doesn't need anyone to help him out."
Cloud got the distinct (and uncomfortable) feeling that she wasn't talking about Denzel at all. "Okay," he said. "I'll talk to him. And I won't make him do anything he doesn't want to do. Fine?"
She nodded, then held out her hand for his empty plate. "For someone who's already eaten breakfast, you cleaned that up pretty good," she said pointedly, not even bothering to hide her grin.
He handed over the plate wordlessly and stalked out of the kitchen area with her soft chuckle following him.

Cloud went back to his bike and opened the front panniers. He took out the bags of nails he'd bought earlier and turned round. Both Marlene and Denzel were right behind him - the pair had hit it off well. Neither he nor Tifa had realised how much Barret's (foster-) daughter craved company her own age. For most of her young life she'd been surrounded by grown-ups, and Edge City hadn't got round to organising any formal schooling yet. Tifa did her best, but Marlene needed kid friends, not just adults who loved her.
He held up one bag. "These are the nails I'll need to use on the shingles - and I need them put in bundles of twenty... that's if you two don't mind," he added, slowly.
"We'll be helping to make Tifa's new Seventh Heaven, then," Marlene smiled widely. "That'll be so cool - right, Denzel?"
"What happened to the old one?" Denzel asked, curiously.
"It's in the city," Marlene shrugged. "It got... broke."
Along with the rest of the Sector 7 slum, Cloud thought, darkly. "Okay, so if the two of you sit in the pub and fix these nails for me, that'll be a big help," he said. It was make-work, to keep the pair occupied - along with an impromptu arithmetic lesson as they kept count. He carried the bag into the pub and set it down on one of the tables. The two children climbed onto chairs and began to pull out handfuls of nails, chattering and laughing as they worked.
Tifa and Cloud exchanged a look and a shrug, before he turned on his heel and went back to work.

Two months later found Cloud carefully balancing on the roof joists, laying down planks in what would eventually be the attic.
"What up, Spiky?"
Only one person in the world called him that - even if he hadn't recognised the voice: Barret Wallace. Cloud peered down between the joists. "I am," he said, on a grunt.
"Place still looks pretty naked," Barret commented.
"There's wood, nails and a spare hammer over there - help yourself," Cloud indicated. "I can't do it all at once."
"Maybe if you quit pullin' your disappearing acts, Marlene would be sleeping in a real bed by now," Barret shouted up.
"And maybe if her dad helped out instead of flapping his gums, she could be doin' the same," Cloud growled. So I've just come back after three days of being AWOL - so what? Barret's one to talk, after all. This was the first time he'd seen the big black man since he'd come to Edge City, after all.
"I've been surveying," Barret said, between blows with his metal fist. "What about you?"
"Needed some fresh air," Cloud shrugged. After Denzel fell asleep in the tent at night, Cloud headed for the old church to sleep. Or to brood, he acknowledged, wryly. Sometimes sleep proved... elusive.
Barret refrained from commenting - for a change. He worked as steadily as the younger man, placing each piece of cladding tightly together next to its neighbour to make sure that there would be few (hopefully no) draughts. Cloud continued his work on the top floor. To tell the truth, it wouldn't be much longer before all the exterior work was done - the roof was shingled, the top of the house was all covered over and the windows in... floors and interior walls were pretty necessary, though - and they were missing. Maybe if he hadn't kept leaving...? Cloud shook his head abruptly. He wasn't gonna stick Tifa and the kids with his problems - it wasn't fair on them.
"Nice bike, though," Barret called up. "Got any more like it?"
"Finder's keepers," Cloud told him. "You want one, you find it."
"Spiky by name, spiky by nature," Barret laughed.
Cloud gritted his teeth and reminded himself that Marlene loved this big lunk. That was the only reason he kept the hammer in his hand and didn't 'drop' it on the loudmouth below him. "How long you been here?" he asked.
"Got in yesterday morning. I've got a lead on an old coalfield, so I'll be off again in a couple days," Barret replied.
"I might as well get some use out of you, then," Cloud noted. "Marlene's gonna miss you, though." The implication being that no-one else would.
Barret glared at him: he wasn't stupid. "You know she's gonna start asking all those awkward questions soon," he said, softly. "Like how come her daddy ain't the same colour she is."
"You brought her up, Barret," Cloud shrugged. "Being a parent doesn't always have to mean you made the baby."
"She's got real attached to your Denzel," Barret added. "Nice kid."
Cloud bit back his automatic denial of 'your' - he didn't want Denzel to feel unwanted. "He's a good kid," he nodded. "Smart - and not as lonely as he was. Still misses his Mom, though."
"All orphans do - even the grown-up ones," Barret grunted. "Bein' a parent is scarier than fighting monsters."
Cloud acknowledged this silently. Not that he was trying to be a parent, he amended, hurriedly - but Denzel sometimes treated him as if he'd hung the moon, and was always seeking reassurance from him. Me? I'm no example for anyone, he thought, wildly. "Hunh?" he murmured, realising he'd missed something Barret had said.
"I said how fast does your bike go? Like... to Kalm, or somethin', I mean?"
"Been a while since I went to another town," Cloud said. "Half an hour or less to Kalm, though. I usually go... camping."
Another period of blessed silence, punctuated by hammer blows.
"Tifa says you went to Gongaga."
"By boat from Junon Harbour - my bike can't float," Cloud's tone of voice was plain: don't go there, man.
Barret heard the warning note - more surprisingly, he heeded it. "So... throw up much?" he asked.
"Enough." Another touchy subject - he was fine on the bike, but boats were not his favourite mode of transport.
"You wanna come down and help me fit these windows, Cloud?" he called up, after a while.
Cloud slid down on his safety line and undid the carabiner. "Sure. You break 'em, you pay for 'em, though."

Tifa rolled up the last piece of canvas and tied it with the rope, looking around her with some satisfaction. Behind her, Cloud was manhandling an empty beer barrel with a name carved on it onto the porch: Seventh Heaven. Denzel and Marlene were sitting on the steps leading up to the porch, grinning like lunatics. Tifa had served her last drink and last meal in the tent - tomorrow morning, the new Seventh Heaven would be open for business. She picked up the roll of canvas and hugged it tightly. "Okay - let's go home," she said.
With squeals of delight, Marlene and Denzel charged into the pub. As she and Cloud followed them in, she heard them clattering up the stairs to the bedrooms.
"Thanks," she said, turning to smile gratefully at Cloud.
"For what?" he seemed genuinely puzzled.
"I wouldn't have this without all your hard work," she told him. "I'd been in that tent for two months before you came back, after all."
He looked uncomfortable. "Everyone else pitched in when they came to visit you," he pointed out. "Barret, Cid, Yuffie - even Vincent and Nanaki gave me a hand, that night they dropped by. Reeve's the one who arranged the utilities. And... it's not as if I did it in a hurry, or anything." He'd worked on the place on and off for more than five months by now - it could probably have been finished at least six weeks ago if he hadn't left town.
"Your 'wanderings', you mean?" she murmured. "I won't lie and say they didn't - don't - bother me, Cloud - but you've had a lot to deal with since... well, since Nibelheim," she realised. She was only beginning to understand that thanks to Cloud and Master Zangan, her martial arts teacher, she'd been spared the harsh consequences of Shinra covering up the Nibelheim 'incident'. Cloud and Zack had spent five years as a cross between prisoners and lab rats, while she'd been living in Midgar, learning how to run a pub and become a terrorist. Even now, she had no clear idea of what the pair had suffered, though she'd read some of the reports that had been left under the Shinra Mansion in Nibelheim.
He shrugged. "Now I have to find something else to do," he said.
No wonder there's so much darkness behind your eyes, she thought. "Well, make sure it's doing something for someone who doesn't mind you haring off on that oversized bike of yours when the mood strikes you," she teased.
The expression on his face told her he was taking her joke seriously, but he only shrugged again. "We'd better go see what Denzel and Marlene are up to," he said, softly.
"Getting ready for bed, I hope," she smiled.

Once the two overexcited children had finally fallen asleep, exhausted, in their separate rooms, Tifa turned to Cloud.
"Okay - so there are two other bedrooms... but I only see a bed in one of them," she pointed out. "A single."
"As you say, I tend to wander off," Cloud said. "Not worth putting an extra bed in the other room for me, is there?"
"There are walls and doors now, Cloud - not just a flimsy curtain," she said. "Surely you can live here with us?"
"I sometimes like to take my bike out for a spin at night," he said, easily. "Waking the kids would mean you'd shout at me."
She took a deep breath and inwardly counted to ten. "I'm not too far off that right now," she told him, bluntly.
"Which is my cue for a night-time ride," he turned on his heel and headed downstairs.
She followed him, cursing under her breath. "Cloud!" she hissed. "Talk to me, dammit!"
"I need to... think about what to do next," he said, then closed the door gently behind him.
She growled as she heard the bike engine start up and went back upstairs to the largest bedroom. On the windowsill was a vase of fresh flowers - flowers she recognised only too well. "How long has he been going there?" she wondered, gently touching one soft petal. "Is he still looking for you?"

When Cloud returned to Seventh Heaven the following morning, Denzel and Marlene were sitting together at one of the tables, copying out their letters from a battered old textbook. The early meal crowd had all left for either work or home by now, and the pub was quiet and peaceful.
"How are lessons going?" he asked.
"Cloud!" Denzel smiled. "You left really early."
"I was thinking about work," he shrugged, joining them at the table. "Like... a job for me."
"You gonna fight for money again?" Marlene asked.
That had been Zack's idea - with all the training he'd gone through to become a SOLDIER First Class, he'd decided that when they got to Midgar, the logical thing to do would be to hire themselves out as mercenaries... if Cloud ever got better, of course. When he'd finally reached Midgar alone, suffering from Mako poisoning and half out of his head from all the experiments, Cloud's mixed-up mind had assimilated Zack's idea and he'd hired himself out to AVALANCHE. He shook his head. "I was thinking that... maybe I could use my bike to deliver stuff from one town to another," he said. "There still isn't much contact between the different towns..."
Tifa was noisily washing (and probably breaking) dishes behind the bar, pointedly letting him know that she was still angry with him.
"You'll need to let people know about you, though," Denzel said. "You need a poster with your phone number on it."
"Use the number here," Cloud said, quickly. "My phone's... private."
"Yeah - you'd have to talk to people," Tifa stage-whispered. "Am I supposed to be your secretary now, Cloud?"
"You've got four walls and a roof," he said, mildly. "A permanent address, even."
"How about lots of little posters?" Marlene suggested. "Like the size of this page? Instead of one big poster, I mean."
"Flyers, you mean?" Cloud looked interested. "Back in Midgar, they used to put up different flyers all over the place - lamp-posts, windows... sometimes even on top of each other, too."
Denzel turned to a fresh page in his jotter. "So... 'Cloud's Bike Delivering Jobs'," he said, writing.
"You need something short," Marlene told him. "Like - 'Cloud Delivers Stuff'."
"Why not call it 'Strife Delivery Service'?" Tifa suggested. "By name and nature."
Cloud winced. Oh, yeah - she's still mad at me, he thought. But I'm not about to dump all my problems on your doorstep again, Tifa Lockheart. "Sounds good," he said, neutrally. "Apart from the 'name and nature' bit."
Pages were turned in two jotters, and the children got to work, designing a flyer for 'Strife Delivery Service'.
Cloud walked over to the bar. Tifa glared at him.
"You did say to find something that suits my... 'wandering'," he told her, softly.
"You don't actually need a job, Cloud," she growled. "The bar's right here."
"You want me to work in the bar and mooch from you until I drop dead?" he said, surprised. "Credit me with some male pride, Tifa."
"It doesn't matter how far or fast you go on that bike, Cloud - you can't escape the inside of your own head," she told him, brusquely.
His eyes met hers, shocked. "Look... let's pretend I'm five years younger than my actual age," he said. "Because... there are five years of my life where my whole world was a glass tube," he added, harshly. "Sometimes watching a spider crawling across the floor was the high point of our year, Tifa. Give me... time, okay?"
"I'm trying to understand, Cloud - so help me, but it's hard," she sighed, suddenly tired. "When you finally run out of excuses, expect a good hard slap," she added. "Maybe that will bring you to your senses."
"Do you think I'm doing this just to make you mad?" he asked, suddenly. "It's not exactly fun for me either, you know," he added, glancing behind him to the two heads bent industriously over their books. The two of them were conducting their argument in whispers, not wanting to disturb their two orphans - and somewhere along the line, Marlene and Denzel had become theirs, although Cloud would probably try to deny it at gunpoint.
Marlene looked up and smiled at him. "You want to see, Cloud?"
He nodded. "Sure," he said, shrugging at Tifa and walking back to the table. He sat down and explained about the flyers needing to be printed, so any design had to be simple - because simple meant cheap. Less money spent telling people about his new business meant he'd have more money to spend on other things, he told them.
"They're a little young for a lecture on economics," Tifa's voice positively dripped sarcasm.
Cloud just replied with one of his practically patented shrugs.

The spare bedroom that had the phone installed in it eventually found itself elevated to the status of 'office'. Cloud had picked up a simple hand press and had someone transfer Denzel and Marlene's joint final design onto a stone tile. A pile of paper in one corner of the room was testament to the fact that the hand press was still a fun toy to play with in odd moments, even one year on. Tifa sighed as she answered the ringing phone. "Strife Delivery Service - you name it, we deliver it," she said cheerfully, picking up the pen on the desk to take notes. "Sure... And that would be...? We'll be in touch soon." She hoped that wasn't a lie. Cloud rarely answered his phone - she was convinced that he had it set to go straight through to voicemail. She pushed a button on the receiver and then pressed '1' to automatically dial Cloud's number. One ring, and then the recorded message - she was long past wanting to strangle the owner of the electronic voice. At the beep, she left the message and hung up. Cloud had been acting kind of weird for the past couple weeks - he'd been listening to all the rumours floating around Edge City, and worried about all of them - as usual. He was a born worrier, while she just shrugged them off. For the last few months the main one had been the story about a virus spreading through some of the other sectors of Edge City... something only kids could get, apparently. Edge City seemed to thrive on gossip and rumour - she'd even heard that Turks had been spotted in one of the other sectors. It was always one of the other sectors, of course. Since nothing had been heard of the Shinra Corporation since Meteor, that had probably just been people wearing their old clothes and being mistaken for Turks, she mused.
A clatter from below heralded the return of the children from school. She smiled and headed downstairs to welcome them back home.

Cloud got out his phone and listened to his messages. Barret was on the hunt for oil this time, apparently; Yuffie wanted to know if he'd heard anything about some kind of weird disease that turned kids' skin black...
Cloud shifted uneasily and adjusted the sole long (loose) sleeve which had been carefully sewn onto his formerly sleeveless top by hand. By himself. "It's only supposed to be kids..." he murmured, continuing to listen.
Ah - Tifa with a job that should keep him away from Edge City for another couple days, he realised with some relief.
Beep.
Tifa, again... sounding frantic? He listened to the message, suddenly feeling his heart pounding wildly in his head, then snapped the phone shut and put it in his back pocket. His hands were shaking so badly it took him two tries.
"No..." he groaned, turning the bike and revving it so hard it did a wheelie. He had to get back... it couldn't be true.

Tifa and Cloud sat on chairs side by side in the doctor's office. Out in the waiting room, they could hear Marlene and Denzel reading an old magazine article to each other.
"You're Denzel's parents?" the doctor asked.
"His guardians," Cloud said, firmly. Tifa had insisted that he left his sword in the bike, parked (erratically) behind Seventh Heaven. He'd left it behind the bar instead. She was glad he wasn't armed, right now - Cloud looked angry enough to turn the doctor into mince.
"Well... Denzel seems to have developed this new disease that we're calling 'geostigma'," she said. "It isn't contagious... and we don't have any idea why some children seem to develop it, but not others. It doesn't seem to be environmental, or hereditary, or have any underlying cause at all..."
"What do we do?" Cloud asked through gritted teeth.
Maybe even into smaller pieces than mince, Tifa conceded, wryly.
"We've only started seeing these geostigma cases over the past three months," the doctor sounded apologetic - and harried. "We're doing our best -" she looked down - "Mr Strife... But so far, we can't come up with a cure. We don't even know the cause." She looked pretty frustrated about it.
"Do you have any advice on how to deal with... this?" Tifa faltered.
"He's an otherwise healthy child... Ms Lockheart," another quick glance down at the notes. "If he complains of muscle weakness or headaches, let him rest."
"You call that advice?" Cloud growled. "You're a damned doctor!"
She looked at him, then took off her glasses and massaged the bridge of her nose wearily. "Mr Strife - I have three children at home myself," she said, candidly. "Not one of them related to me by blood, I might add. Two of them have developed this... condition in the past month. I'm giving you the advice of a surrogate mother, not the doctor who can't even cure her own children."
Tifa gently touched Cloud's arm. He flinched. "We... understand, doctor," she said, softly. "We don't want to understand, but we do. Right, Cloud?"
He nodded jerkily, shifting away from her a little. "Sorry," he muttered.
"Apology accepted," she smiled wanly. "Denzel might have episodes where he complains of headaches or muscle pain, or feels inexplicably weak or tired - all I can tell you is to let him rest when these happen."
"Do many adults have this?" Cloud asked suddenly.
"Most of the cases of geostigma I've seen are in children under the age of fourteen - though even I've heard rumours of some adults with the condition... But I'm fairly sure the rumours are untrue in this case," she added with a gentle - almost sad - smile.
"Why would you say that?" Tifa was curious.
"Because my colleagues all over the world are reporting that this is a disease of the young, Miss Lockheart," she said, seriously. "No-one has yet reported the case of an adult suffering from geostigma - this is a disease affecting our children... which makes it all the more imperative that a solution is found," she added, softly. "Our children grow progressively weaker... and there is no cure..."
Cloud got to his feet. "We'd better go," he said, abruptly. "Thanks," he added, almost as an afterthought.
Tifa followed him to the door.
"Do you know why it's called geostigma?" the doctor murmured.
They turned back to look at her.
"The first child brought in with the condition - her mother was convinced that Midgar's refugees were being punished by the planet for abusing the power of the Lifestream," she said, almost as if talking to herself. "Because of that, the doctor named the disease geo-stigma - the Brand of the Planet."
They closed the door quietly on what sounded suspiciously like a choked-off sob, and took Denzel and Marlene back to Seventh Heaven, walking through the streets of Edge City.

Tifa noticed the odd lost-looking child sitting in alleyways, or on street corners, with a simple white bandage around an arm or an eye - and in one case, wrapped around a young girl's neck. "So many..." she murmured, still in shock.
When they got back, Denzel and Marlene went up to their rooms to do homework.
"Is the doctor right... is the planet still mad with us?" Tifa asked in a low voice.
Cloud shook his head firmly. "Don't be stupid - she wouldn't have saved the world and then let kids d... get hurt," he snapped. The word 'die' was anathema to him - because he'd seen too much death.
Tifa looked at him warily. The minute they'd come inside, Cloud had headed for the bar and slid his big sword into the sheath on his back. He looked ready to chew nails and spit out tacks. "Don't scare them, Cloud," she cautioned, reaching one hand out to him. "We've got to try and handle this together."
"I'm late for that pickup in Costa del Sol," he said, turning away from her outstretched arm. "I'll... I've got to go."
She looked at the door after he'd left, the motorcycle's tyres screeching as he'd raced off. 'She' wouldn't have saved the world, he'd said. "If you're listening... please help us," she murmured. "I don't think Cloud can handle it if... well, you know," she finished, lamely. It seemed that she was as reluctant as Cloud to acknowledge the fact that if there was no cure found for this disease, Denzel would die - probably slowly and in agony.

Cloud visited the ruined church before heading for Costa del Sol. He lifted up the loose sleeve covering his left arm and inspected the fresh bandage covering the dark bloom which was staining his fair skin - it was even beginning to spread beyond the edge of the bandage, he noted without expression. "The doctor said it's only kids... not adults," he said, then kicked one of the carved stone columns in his impotent rage and frustration. "And there's no cure, either... It doesn't matter about me - but Denzel... He's just a kid..." His voice was low and savage - and seemed to be coming over broken glass.
He spun on his heel and got back on his bike. Tifa didn't need to know about... this, on top of worrying about Denzel. He roared off, but Tifa had been right about something - however far he travelled, however fast, he couldn't outrun his thoughts.

-THE END-

MoogleYuna
23rd May 2006

Um...
Any comments, guys?
Is anybody reading this stuff?

....is there anybody out there?.....

Oh - and here's the 4th of March's contribution...

Alternative

He went back to the hollow space between a couple of wind-blasted rocks and dragged his friend out after checking the area for any pursuers. They'd managed to shake them off. "We'll be there soon - can't you smell it from here?" he said cheerfully.
His companion - his best friend over the last seven years, especially the past five or so - just hung limply in his arms, barely alive, it seemed. Any time he'd managed to find food for them both, the younger man had thrown most of what he'd eaten straight back up. Okay, so he wasn't usually a good traveller - but this went far beyond his usual motion sickness.
What did they do to you in there? he wondered. And am I gonna end up like you eventually?
"Feel... bad," his friend murmured. His face was pale and he didn't look as if he was going to last much longer.
"We'll get you into the city. There's bound to be somewhere we can hole up 'til you're better, man," he said, desperately. "Even if my girlfriend - ex-girlfriend by now, I suppose - has moved since I was here last."
"Leave... me. Better chance... alone."
"Okay, so you're managing short sentences. Still aren't talking any sense, though," he tried to smile. Yeah, he was being slowed down, he admitted to himself - but this guy had saved his life! There was no way he was gonna forget that debt. Ever.

"Dark...?"
"Yeah - you zoned out again. You feelin' any better?"
He tried to focus. "Something... reeks," he gagged.
"Biggest city in the world. Smelliest, too," he shrugged. "Drink this - at least get some water into you."
He sipped slowly. "How much... longer?"
"Maybe half a day, tops."
"Faster on... your own," he mumbled. "Done for."
"Don't talk like that! We've lasted longer than they expected - and we're still alive, too. We're a great team, partner."
He tried to get to his feet. "Gonna hide... in the city, yeah?"
"Last place they'll expect - right under their noses, eh? Anyway - we couldn't go back to my folks' place. They know where I lived, after all," he said, darkly, as he supported his companion. "If you want to go on now - we'll go."
"No home left... Couldn't even tell her 'goodbye'."
"Yeah." He'd gone into the burning home himself as his wounded friend lay outside - but there had been nothing left to save there. His captain - the man they had both looked up to - had gone insane. And somehow it had been his younger, weaker friend who had managed to defeat him, grief-stricken at the loss of the town - and the people - he'd known all his life. "Let's get into the city and get you better, okay?"
"You'll still let me... fight with you?"
"You handled my sword like a pro, man - and you avenged your town," he assured him.
"We're... still friends, right?"
"Friends? - After everything we've been through, we're brothers. Closer than brothers," he said, stolidly.
A faint smile. "Getting... mushy there," he gasped out.
He chuckled. "I owe you a couple. So sue me."

"Where's this?" he looked around him, his vision blurry.
"Safer to hide out in the - well, not exactly bad part of town," the older man laughed softly. "But the poorer areas aren't so closely patrolled."
"Rusty... trains?" he half-guessed.
"You getting your eyesight back?" he asked, hopefully. Two weeks of foggy vision on top of everything else, man - they really messed you up but good.
"Still - green. And... a bit fuzzy."
"At least you're starting to focus again," he said, relieved. "You can see objects, not blobs."
"Why am I so sick?" he whined.
"Don't ask me - I wasn't about to hang around and ask them questions once we got out of there. You probably didn't notice as we left... They've rebuilt the whole damned town."
"Re... Rebuilt it? Why?"
"My guess is it's a cover-up - too many people would probably have noticed the town disappearing. Plus they'd need people to service the reactor. You think you can go on a little further? We'll get to an inn, and I'll let you sleep as long as you need to. Promise, man."
"My dreams... hurt," he said. "And..."
"Yeah? Up you get," he helped the younger man to his feet.
"Head feels... weird. Like radio static... but in my mind."
"I swear we'll find out what they did to you, bro - and whoever it is, they'll be looking for their own head in the gutter," he said, grimly. "Careful round here... The girl I used to go out with said this place was haunted or something."
"Don't care... I'm the only one left. Everybody else is a ghost now." He began to shake. "Shouting... in my head!"
What the hell did they do to you? All he said aloud was. "Just a little further... then you can sleep."
"Don't wanna sleep or wake up. Too many voices."
"You're not leaving me now, buddy," he vowed. "C'mon - left, right... One foot in front of the other, and we'll get you into a real bed and see if there's a healer round here to fix you up."
"Too... broken to... fix," he murmured. "All alone..."
"Stop zoning out on me, man - and you're not alone. I'm right here, okay?"
"Head... Noisy..."
He shook his head. His friend's periods of clarity were getting longer and more frequent, but he still kept flaking out and complaining of headaches. Whatever they'd been pumping into the tanks didn't seem to be affecting him - if they pumped the same stuff into both tanks, that is. He shrugged, then adjusted the sword on his back and half-dragged, half-carried his friend through the decidedly spooky predawn light of the train scrap yard.

"Here... rest up a second on these steps," he said. "I'll ask the conductor guy if there's somewhere close by to stay, okay?"
"Feel... wiped out." He leaned his head against the low wall and closed his eyes.
He knelt down before his sickly almost-brother. "You shouldn't sleep until we get you safe, little bro."
"Minute..." Everything went dim and there was a loud buzzing in his ears.
"Get up, man!" he pleaded. Don't die on me here! he thought, despairingly.
"Z - Zack? Is that really you?" A young woman's voice.
He spun round, his hand automatically reaching for his sword. "You're still alive? Man - we didn't know if they'd cleaned you up too, Tifa!"
"We...? Is that - Cloud?" Tifa gasped. "I thought you said you didn't know him, Zack!"
"I'll explain everything - I promise. Just... is there someplace you can hide us, Tifa? Cloud's really sick - and I don't want the Shinra to get hold of either of us again."
"You're a SOLDIER - why are you hiding out from Shinra?"
Zack dragged Cloud to his feet. "Tifa... Look, I promised you I'd talk. But not here - and not right now. You know somewhere we can go?" he asked in a low voice, supporting his insensible friend (and fellow lab rat for the past five years).
"Sure - I run a bar here in the Sector Seven slum. It's called Seventh Heaven," she took Cloud's other arm and put it around her shoulders. "Where have you been since Nibelheim? What happened after Sephiroth hit me? And why are you with Cloud?"
He took a deep breath. "Cloud's real sick because we didn't manage to get out of Nibelheim before Shinra came to clean up after Sephiroth went nuts, okay? Which way?"
"But... Cloud wasn't even with you in Nibelheim. It was just you, Sephiroth and a couple of Shinra security guards - and one of them died on the way up to the reactor," Tifa helped to support Cloud's limp, heavy body as they made their way through the slum to a wooden building with a sign over the door that read 'Seventh Heaven'.
"You're taking your life in your hands, helping us out," he warned her. "Shinra probably want us dead now."
"I've been taking my life in my hands since I - somehow - managed to get out of Nibelheim alive," she said, shortly.
Zack noted that she seemed a lot tougher than she had been when he'd met her last - and her eyes were dark and sad. She'd seen too much, that last day of what he was coming to think of as 'Old Nibelheim'. Then again - he, Cloud and Tifa were the only survivors of the massacre there. "Thanks, anyway. He needs looking after - he's... they've done something weird to him, Tifa. I don't know what - but we only managed to get out of Shinra's clutches a couple weeks ago. Up until then... we were prisoners under the mansion in Nibelheim."
"Prisoners? - Over here," she motioned to the pinball table.
"What? Why?" Surely she doesn't expect Cloud to sleep on that?
"You'll see."
He half-shrugged and helped drag Cloud over to the pinball table with her. She pressed some switch he couldn't see - and the table (and the floor surrounding it) worked like an elevator, moving down into an otherwise hidden cellar.
"Pretty neat," he said, manhandling Cloud into a camp bed in the corner. He was still breathing, but he was pale as ice, and his lips were moving as if he was talking to someone, but Zack couldn't hear any words. He shook his head. "C'mon, man - we've made it to Midgar. Don't punk out on me now... not after surviving five years of hell. Live."
Tifa looked at him, surprised - it had been five years since Zack had come to Nibelheim with Sephiroth. She'd asked him about her old neighbour and friend Cloud Strife, who'd left home to join SOLDIER two years before. He'd just shrugged and told her he didn't know everyone in SOLDIER because he was on the move a lot. He'd been a happy-go-lucky guy - a bit cocky and flirtatious, but what good-looking (nearly) eighteen year old male wasn't? Now here he was in Midgar, telling her he and Cloud had been prisoners of Shinra for the last five years, and acting like a concerned older brother - or a mother - as he tried to get the barely semi-conscious Cloud to drink some water from his canteen.
"What happened, Zack? What the hell's going on?" she asked him.
Zack almost tenderly covered his best friend over with a blanket. He turned to her and she gasped - the bleak look in his eyes was like a window into hell. "You sure you really want to know, Tifa?" he asked, his voice rough. "Because let me tell you - it isn't a pretty story with 'and they all lived happily ever after' at the end."
"I'm not a fifteen year old kid any more," she retorted. "I was there that last day in Nibelheim, found my father's dead body in the reactor on Mount Nibel..."
"Yeah - but you managed to get out, Tifa. Cloud and I hoped you had, because you weren't with us... But hope was in pretty short supply down there," he said, his voice sounding rusty. "Cloud thought he was the only survivor from the town, you know - and between that and... whatever they've done to him..." His eyes turned almost automatically to the young man now sleeping on the bed. "I just hope he makes it... He's gone through enough..."
Sitting at the side of the bed of the man who had saved his life five years ago - the man he knew as well as he knew himself after their five-year captivity - he sighed. "Well, it starts with Cloud not wanting anyone back home to find out he hadn't made it into SOLDIER..." he began.

-THE END-
MoogleYuna
3rd June 2006

Seriously, people - is there anybody out there?

And now for a short one.

Really - this time it IS short.

Dilemma

He carried his pupil carefully out of the reactor and took her a little way down the mountain trail, preparing to go back for the two other wounded survivors. He desperately cast a cure spell on the young girl - probably one of the best fighters he'd ever taught - and folded his cloak under her head. She was pale, but alive - just like the two young men he'd seen when he was rescuing her. He'd better get back and bring them here, too...
Reaching a bend that rose a little before reaching the reactor, he saw that it was surrounded by Shinra troops. As he watched, two limp figures were stretchered out - the dark-haired young SOLDIER who had come to Nibelheim under the command of Sephiroth, Nibelheim's destroyer, and a blonde youth who still wore the remains of a Shinra guard uniform. Of Sephiroth there had been - and still was - no sign. He could not go down there and rescue the... they were more boys than men, he realised, and turned back. Maybe the boys would be given more expert medical attention than he could furnish his injured pupil... but something within him cautioned against taking her to the Shinra organisation. He'd make do with his small piece of healing materia and hope for the best... because Shinra had delivered the worst to her already.
She was slightly conscious when he returned. "Master... Zangan?"
"Rest, Tifa," he said, gently. "You need to recover your strength. Sleep, child." He used the cure spell on her again, as she obediently closed her eyes. This place wasn't safe - what if Shinra widened their search for survivors and found them? They alone knew the truth - that the great SOLDIER hero, Sephiroth, was an insane mass murderer.
Once Tifa was asleep again, her wounds securely bandaged, Zangan - the travelling martial arts teacher - carried her down Mount Nibel as stealthily as he could. He had to find somewhere safe for both of them to hide - and proper medical help for the fifteen year old girl whose entire town had been summarily erased before her eyes...
"Midgar's probably best - no-one in their right mind would think of escaping the Shinra in their main base of operations," he murmured, pausing to heal Tifa again. "So that's one place they won't look for Nibelheim's witnesses..."
He picked the young girl up again and skirted the blackened ruins of the town. It looked even less promising as the early morning light crept up on it - and even more dead now that the flames were extinguished. Just like every life in Nibelheim had been snuffed out.

-THE END-

MoogleYuna

5th June 2007, before 1 am, Seton Sands

OMG I'm here!! I haven't been able to get online recently.....=[

All of your stories are really great!!! It makes me want to play FF7 all over again! =]

Thank the Occurians that there's someone out there looking at this page with a comment.

Anyway - off-line for the weekend, so I'll post a long one, which some of the old-timers might recognise the first half of.

See ya on Monday (morning, UK time, anyway)!

In The Middle of Nowhere

Reno looked up at the clock: still only a few minutes later than the last time he'd looked. He slumped in the chair and nursed his warm - and as-yet untasted - beer. It was cheap and looked nasty - not a patch on the stuff the three ex-Turks had enjoyed at Tifa Lockheart's pub in Nibelheim... He blinked, suddenly astonished... a year? Could it really have been that long? He, Rude and Elena had been real busy, true - but surely it hadn't been an entire year since he'd confessed his shameful little secret to a pair of intelligent warm brown eyes?
He looked up at the clock and stifled a sigh. It wasn't as if either of his two partners would be back, barely an hour after setting off on two different jobs. They wouldn't be back here for a week, at least... so he was stuck in this no-name little village that was basically a couple of shacks, some tents and this pub selling recycled dogs' water. It was a sign of how desperate he was that he'd offered to accompany Elena on her job - even now, despite everything, she could have her 'blonde' moments that had him grinding his teeth. He felt inside his mouth with his tongue - they weren't down to stumps yet, which was a definite bonus. His red-brown hair wasn't only a legacy from the mother he'd never known - the human incubator who'd brought him into the world for the benefit of the Shinra Corporation - it was also a warning of his temper. Sometimes he could just kick off for no good reason; or rather, he'd discovered the reason a short time before he, Rude and Elena had quit the Turks (and Shinra) just before the Meteor incident in Midgar. He'd found out then that he'd been the prototype for a new kind of Turk - genetically engineered and dumped in some womb-for-hire until he was born; then brought up by the Corporation to have no conscience and do as he was ordered.
It had almost worked, too; if it hadn't been for Rude, Reno would probably have still been in the Shinra building in Midgar when Meteor tried to land on it.
He took a cautious sip of the flat warm liquid that passed for beer in this so-called inn and grimaced. Maybe cats' water, he decided, putting the partially clean mug back down on the streaked table and staring into it, trying to unfocus his mind. He took to R&R very badly - even though he knew Rude had been right when he said Reno should take these couple days off. The last monster the three of them had tackled nearly disembowelled him because he'd been too exhausted to get out of the way of its claws. If it hadn't been for Rude and Elena using the small piece of healing materia the three of them shared... He shifted, uncomfortably. He was mostly healed - but he had a bandage across his abdomen, and the deep scratch left was itching as it healed. He wasn't sure what would drive him nuts first - the boredom or the itch. He caught himself looking at the clock again and suppressed another sigh. Stuck in the middle of nowhere for at least a week, taking down any new assignments for the other two wasn't his idea of fun. It was just another part of his childhood conditioning that he was trying hard to break - fighting on command had been rewarded, so he'd learnt to associate fighting with pleasure...
He stared into the mug again. Man, Shinra really screwed you up good, if you want to keep fighting until your guts fall out on the floor, he thought, wryly. Intellectually, he knew he needed this respite to get healthy - but the fire in his blood was trying to burn reason out of his brain. Alcohol sometimes helped to quiet it down - but he rather preferred not having a permanent headache every morning. Besides, the alcohol only treated the symptoms, not the source of his problem. And the source of his problem... was himself. He got up and left the hovel that served as a pub and returned to the spot where he'd pitched the tent. Or rather, where Rude and Elena had pitched it; neither of them had let him attempt that chore, since he'd still been pale and shaky when they'd arrived here yesterday. It was a fair-sized tent - bigger than a couple of the thrown-together shacks here, actually. It was the tent the three of them used when they travelled together - Rude and Elena had gone off with their pup-tents and left him with their extra gear, since each of them were travelling in opposite directions.
His PHS beeped and he thumbed the switch. "Yeah?"
"Still breathing, then?"
"Yeah. Ready to run like hell out of Nowheresville, though. You got a problem, Rude?"
"I'll be out of range soon. Weird rumours." Reno could picture the big bald man's shrug. "The same ones we've heard for the last couple months."
"Not the anti-Turk assassin again?" Reno groaned. "The reason most people don't see other ex-Turks walking around in suits is because the ones that were left bought new clothes and turned civilian," he added. "There isn't any assassin wandering the world destroying the bits of Shinra that were left, okay?"
"Maybe," Rude grunted. "But the Turks - we Turks - did a lot of bad stuff, back in the day."
"I know," Reno sighed, deeply. Since discovering he actually did have a conscience, the damn thing had kicked in with all the ferocity of a teenage boy's hormones. Only it was stronger and a lot more uncomfortable to deal with. "Just get back here as soon as you can, Rude - I don't want stuck here any longer than I have to be. This place sucks. Why couldn't you and Elena have left me somewhere a bit more... something?"
"Because you'd be dead if we hadn't got you to some kind of settlement in a hurry. Rude out." The PHS went dead.
Reno's mouth quirked in a wry grin. Rude was the closest thing he had to a friend - and the one who'd poked his conscience two years before - while the three were all still Turks, working for Shinra. The Turks were the secretive side of the Corporation - they carried out kidnappings... and they did wetware. Assassination, in other words - though a bunch of misfits from all over the world had been their very last targets. AVALANCHE, they'd called themselves - based in the Sector 7 slums under Midgar, they'd blown up a couple of Mako reactors. Reno himself had set the self-destruct that dropped the plate holding Sector 7 down onto the slums below at Shinra's order. How many thousands had died in the city above, never mind the slum below? he wondered. Or (to put it another way) how many had he killed on that one day alone? - his new conscience stuck another dagger into his self-image, just in case it wasn't already dead.
He remembered the three's last meeting with Cloud and the others in the subway tunnels of Midgar - they'd been going after Hojo, who was sending Mako energy to the Northern Crater to give Sephiroth enough energy to destroy the planet. Reno, Rude and Elena had been sent to stop them - Scarlet and Heidegger wanted to take Hojo out with their newest weapon. They'd already thrown Reeve into the cells after discovering he'd asked Cloud's group to save Midgar from Hojo's insane scheme. Sending that much Mako was likely to destroy Midgar, because he'd overpowered all the reactors left in the city and disabled the safeties. It wasn't bad enough that the planet was in danger from a bloody Meteor flying towards it, but Hojo was ready to leave Midgar as a smoking ruin before that happened.

They'd confronted Cloud's group in the subway tunnels beneath the city of Midgar - and had their asses soundly kicked, as was becoming all-too usual.
Elena wanted to head after them and ambush them, but Rude held out his arm to stop her and she'd bounced off it like hitting an iron bar.
"We've got our orders! We're Turks, aren't we?" she cried.
Rude looked at Reno, who was standing there looking a little nonplussed - he'd already told the big man some of what he'd recently found out about himself from the Shinra mainframe. A little knowledge really was a dangerous thing, he'd learned - all he'd wanted to know was where he'd come from, because all he could remember was being brought up by Shinra in Midgar. Be careful what you wish for, he thought, wryly. He shrugged at Rude. "Cloud's right - there isn't a Shinra Corporation any more. Just Scarlet, Heidegger and Reeve."
"Reeve's been jailed for getting his puppet spy to tell Cloud's gang about Hojo," Rude said. "He wants to save Midgar - and they're probably the only ones who can do it."
Reno nodded. "Yeah. Even if they do stop him, though, that Meteor's headed right this way." He looked at the big bald man, uncharacteristically uncertain - he'd seen something that had shifted his perceptions, and wasn't sure how to handle it. "What do you think, Rude?"
"I think we get the hell out of Dodge and get as far away from being Turks as we can," Rude said, solemnly. "We've done too much to get any measure of forgiveness, but at least we can stop being pawns in a sick and twisted power struggle."
Elena blinked, surprised. Rude rarely said much - leading many to believe that he was all muscle and no brains. What even Reno was only beginning to realise was that Rude very rarely wasted words - and he thought deeply about things before he said anything. "You're saying... we should just quit?" she asked, stunned.
Rude shrugged. "We can't beat Cloud's gang, Sephiroth's ready to wake up - and a Meteor's coming down to wipe out the world when he does wake up. The only ones who probably can stop that thing are Cloud and his people. Let's just... get out of here before we do any more damage."
Reno had a sudden clear vision of the Sector 7 plate falling away beneath the helicopter he was in, and somehow heard the screams of surprise and fear even over the metallic scream and roar of the metal plate buckling because he'd destroyed the supports holding it up. He closed his eyes and suddenly shivered. He felt a hand land on his shoulder and turned round to glare at Rude. "What?" he growled.
He couldn't see Rude's eyes behind the dark glasses the big man wore permanently. "You coming, Reno?" he asked. "Or are you just gonna wait for Meteor to wipe your memory for you?"
Even Elena winced at that tone. "We're Turks, Rude - we follow orders."
"Maybe we don't need to enjoy doing our jobs that much, though," even Reno was surprised to hear those words coming out of his mouth. He looked at both of them. "What should we do?" he asked.
"Leave," Rude shrugged. "Before Cloud and the rest come back to give us another whipping."
"Yeah," Reno nodded. He'd had his ass kicked one time too many by the man from Nibelheim and his friends. "But first... we'll get Reeve out of the lockup."
"Why?" Elena asked.
"Because he didn't want Sector 7 destroyed," Reno said shortly, turning away. "Let's go."
Rude followed him. Elena looked after their retreating backs for a few seconds before catching up. "Then what?" she asked.
"We leave it to Cloud," Rude shrugged. "Or Meteor hits, whichever."
"That's not very comforting," Elena muttered.
"There's a small planet heading towards us at speed - this isn't pool, Elena. It's not gonna glance off and go into the nearest pocket - it's gonna smash the world like an egg. Unless Cloud's gang can stop Hojo and Sephiroth," Rude said as they continued on their way.
Reno said nothing, still pondering whad he had seen as they fought Cloud's group. Or who he had seen, rather.

Reng sat down on h)s bedroll. That was the day he'd found out he still did have a conscience, in spite of all of Shinra's condition)ng. Rude was right - the Turks had done a lot of 'bad stuff' over the years, and Reno had been in the thick of it for a long time thanks to his upbringinc. He wasn't exactly a clone of the greatest Turk who'd ever lived - but he was a pretty close genetic match, according to the records he'd accessed. He had speed and agility - and they'd all been harnessed to working for the bad guys, while the man who was technically his father had been with Cloud's group, fighting to save the world. When he'd recognised him in the subway tunnels - the legendary Vincent Valentine, upright and stolid - that was when Reno first began to question himself. He - Reno - was supposed to be the ultimate Turk, yet the truly ultimate Turk was on the opposing side...
He sighed. This conscience stuff was pretty tough to stomach, he realised. He caught himself trying to scratch the bandage under his clothing and grimaced: it wasn't going to heal if he kept doing that. He got up again and picked up a folding stool, then sat down near the tent opening and dug a magazine out of his pack. It was an old one - a couple months at least - and he turned to the personals, noting the odd missing person ad that had been crossed out. As they'd told Tifa back in her pub in Nibelheim, sometimes they found lost family members, split up by their move from Midgar's ruins.
Thinking of Tifa brought back memories of fighting AVALANCHE - and destroying Sector 7 - so he tried to concentrate on the magazine. Pretty hard to do when he'd already read it from cover to cover ten times over, though. Plus... he'd had a weird feeling ever since the day before when they'd arrived here - as if he was being watched. Sure, he'd heard the same rumours as Rude and Elena - the three of them travelled together after all - but he was almost certain they weren't true. Almost. Maybe someone was wreaking their vengeance on the Shinra Corporation - so what? It had started out hundreds of years ago with high ideals, but had degenerated into a megalomaniac power structure. Its security guards had become SOLDIER, and its Administrative branch - the Turks - were assassins and spies. Not that he was in any hurry to die - he absently rubbed the healing itch under his shirt (he'd taken off his jacket and tie as the day was pleasantly warm) - but he could now see the other side of things, where he couldn't before. The godlike Shinra Corporation who had engineered his birth and controlled the world with the abuse of Mako energy - the life-force of the planet itself - had lost all of what had once been its noble intentions to bring the world out of subsistence living, descending into control through war and terror.
He turned the page, bored out of his skull - inactivity meant he had time to think and reflect on his actions... and that conscience was one hell of a handicap on a decent night's sleep, never mind the flashbacks he suffered of things he'd never actually seen. For some reason he could see the terror on people's faces as the seemingly-solid plate dropped them from the sky onto the Sector 7 slum far below. The slum had definitely not survived - and there hadn't been many people recovered alive from the wreckage of Sector 7 itself.

A shadow crossed his magazine and stopped and he looked up. The little girl couldn't be much more than seven or eight years old. "Yeah?" he asked.
She looked at him for a moment. It was weird, but he enjoyed the fact that he couldn't see any fear in the kid's eyes. "Are you one of the finding people?" she asked.
He shrugged carefully, mindful of the fact that Elena's needlework across his abdomen was made up of very small neat stitches. "Yeah. Have you lost your parents or something?"
She shook her head. "They're in our tent - over there," she pointed vaguely. "But I lost my teddy and I won't be able to go to sleep tonight."
Reno looked at her. He was bored, she was a little kid - and if he moved around too much he'd probably fall apart into two neat halves. Ah, to hell with it, he thought. "So... you're looking for your lost teddy?" he said, neutrally.
"Mummy and Daddy are too busy to help me look for him - but you're one of the finding people. Someone said," she added, holding out her closed fist. She opened it to reveal a small amount of money. "Is this enough to find him?"
Reno looked from the little girl's serious face to the money in her hand. "You... want to pay me to find your teddy, is that it?"
She nodded slowly. "Mummy said that it's the finding peoples' job to find things or fight monsters. And if it's a job, you gots to get paid."
He couldn't fault the kid's logic. He lifted out a single gil piece from among the shrapnel in her hand (which, he noted, included a lolly stick covered with pocket fluff) and smiled. "Okay - I've been paid, so I'd better do my job, eh? Have you any idea where you saw your teddy last?"
"Mummy and me looked everywhere inside our tent, but he's not in there," she said. "Are you sure that's enough money, though?" she sounded suspicious.
He reached behind him into the tent and produced his lightning rod - not that he thought he'd need the weapon, but he knew he shouldn't be moving about much (or at all), and the damn thing might as well serve some use as a walking stick. Passing out in front of a little girl whose teddy bear he'd just been hired to find was... somewhat less than manly. He still had his pride, after all - not much, but some. "We're doing a special offer on teddy bears this week," he said, easily. So weird... as a Turk, he'd had kids run screaming to hide behind their parents if he so much as set foot on the street. And here was this innocent little girl, treating him like an ordinary Joe. He had to admit, it felt... pretty damn good, actually. He extended the rod and gingerly rested his weight on it - even the walk between the pub and this tent had been onerous without its aid - as he stood up. "First things first - any time I go looking for people, I start at the last place they were seen and ask questions about them, so..." He adjusted his grip on the top of the lightning rod as he slipped his one-gil 'fee' into his trouser pocket. "Let's go see your mother, eh?"
"Sure, Mister."
"Reno," he murmured. "My name's Reno."
"I'm Ameria, Mister Reno," she said.
He let it pass - the kid was maybe twenty years younger than him; anybody as old as he was (to her eyes) was automatically a 'Mister'. "Then lead the way, Ameria."

It turned out that her mother was around Reno's own age, which explained the honorific she'd given him. She was tending to a baby only a couple of months old in front of a tent the same size as the one Reno was currently occupying solo. "Ameria - what have you been doing?"
"I paid the finding man to find 'Bastian - that's my teddy's name," she added to Reno.
Ameraa's mother looked at him, taking in his paler than nobmal face with a practiced eye. "I'm sorry if my daughter's been causing you any trouble," she said. "Ameria - how many times do I have to tell you not to bother people?"
"But Mister Reno's kne of the finding people, Mummy - and''Bastian's lost," her daughter said, reasonably.
Reno dug h)s fee out of his pocket and showed it to her before putting it back there. "I've already accepted the contract, ma'am. Ameria said you'd both searched the tent?"
"My husband even lifted up the ground sheet, in case it had somehow got under there," she shrugged. "That teddy is not anywhere around here."
"Okay then," Reno nodded. "Then I'll just have to retrace your steps, Ameria."
She slipped her hand into his free one. "I have to come with you, then."
Reno looked questioningly at her mother, who shrugged. "Just try and keep out of trouble, eh?" she sighed, talking to her daughter.
"I'll be careful, Mummy," Ameria assured her.
"I'll keep an eye on her," Reno promised.
The woman took in his appearance - smart suit trousers, crisp white shirt (without a tie, and the collar unfastened) and the lightning rod being used as a walking cane. "I'm sure you will," she said, firmly.
Reno heard the unspoken words - the ones in her eyes, promising him painful death if anything happened to her precocious little girl. "Right," he said. He looked down at Ameria, uncomfortable with her mother's scrutiny. "Okay... So - Bastian isn't in your tent, even though you went to sleep with him last night, right?"
"How do you know that, Mister Reno?"
"You told me you wouldn't be able to go to sleep without him," he explained. "So you must take him to bed with you."
"She takes that teddy everywhere," her mother murmured.
"So... where did you go after you got up this morning?" he asked, puzzled by the strange protective feeling that came over him as she continued to trustingly hold his hand. Perhaps it had been too long since someone had simply touched him in a friendly manner, he decided, trying to shake the strangeness - along with the weak feeling in his legs. Okay, he'd been too close to dying after their last fight, he knew - but how hard could it be to find a teddy bear in a place this small? Besides, the kid was... nice - cute, bright as a button and friendly. He found himself actually wanting to find this bloody soft toy just to make her happy. What's wrong with me? he wondered.
Rude would have been happy to tell his friend, if he were here - then again, he'd probably have blown his stack at Reno walking around when he should be lying down and trying to recover his strength. He'd privately dubbed it 'White Knight Syndrome' - he knew that Reno, beneath all the conditioning of his upbringing, was actually a genuinely nice guy. The trouble was that since his conscience had kicked in, Reno would never believe that of himself.
"This way, Mister Reno. See you later, Mummy," Ameria smiled, tugging his hand gently as she headed off.
The good thing about Ameria being a little kid was that she didn't walk too fast - not with Reno holding her hand firmly to make sure she didn't run off. Otherwise, he'd never have been able to keep up with her, as badly injured as he'd been. They walked around the town, Reno trying to control his breathing so as not to alert Ameria that he was about five seconds away from total collapse.
By the time they'd traversed every square inch of the village (with no sign of the toy at all), Reno was exhausted. The day was pleasantly warm, but he was sweating as if he'd run through Corel Desert wearing clothing suitable for snowboarding in Icicle Inn.
"Have you been... anywhere else?" he asked slowly, as he wiped first one sweaty palm and then the other on his trousers before taking her hand again.
"No - oh... Oh - wait! I was playing hide-and-seek with the red man," she smiled. "But I never found him, so I guess he won."
Reno shrugged inwardly. "Red man?" he murmured.
"There was a red man on one of the roofs, playing hide-and-seek," she said. "And I tried to find him when he went to hide somewhere else. But I couldn't find him - even... Don't tell Mummy and Daddy, but I went outside... just a little bit, though," she confessed.
He nodded. "Where did you go? Just tell me, this time - don't go out of the village again, okay?"
She looked at him, then nodded solemnly. "Okay," she said. "There's a place a little bit out of town, with a pond and some trees. I thought maybe the red man went that way, but maybe he's 'visible or something, 'cos I didn't find him there."
"Maybe he left town and went somewhere else," Reno suggested.
She shrugged. "Maybe, Mister Reno."
"Why don't you go back to your parents, Ameria? I'll come back and tell you if I found Bastian at the pond," Reno said, softly.
She looked at him. "I can wait right here," she said. "I can see the trees at the pond from here."
He looked down at her, then carefully got down and knelt before her to reach her eye level. "I accepted your money, Ameria. That means I do the job I've been paid for as best as I can. We've got a contract," he said, seriously. "That means I find Bastian, or you get your money back, okay?"
She nodded slowly. "But... if I wait here, you don't have to go all the way to our tent if 'Bastian got lost out there," she said, digging the toe of her shoe into the earth.
Reno suddenly realised that her reluctance to return 'home' was due to the fact that her parents would find out that she'd been outside the relative safety of this collection of tents and huts. He sighed as he somehow managed tm get back on his feet - the sigh concealed the groan or scream he should have made, but he'd rather pull out his tongue than let this trusting little girl know how close he was to ckllapsing from the minor exercise he'd taken. "Okay," he conceded. "But not one footstep outside this village, Ameria. I want you to promise me."
She looked ctraight up into his eyes - another novelty for the fmrmer Turk - then nodded slowly. "I promise, Mister Reno," she said, sincerely.
"Right, then. I'll be back as soon as I can," he said. "I'll go slowly, just to make sure Bastian didn't get lost on the way there." And to make sure I don't fall flat on my face like the bloody idiot I am, he thought ruefully.
"Sure, Mister Reno. I'll wait right here." She sat down on a nearby rock, smiling at him trustingly.
Inwardly calling himself ten thousand kinds of fool, Reno set off for the pond at a speed at which an arthritic three-legged tortoise could have lapped him on the way there and back. He could see the faint impression of Ameria's shoes in the dusty earth - heading in both directions. One set of prints had slight scuff marks to one side, probably from where she'd dragged her teddy beside her. The tracks leading back to the village, however, had no such scuff marks. Obviously she'd left the toy at the side of the pool while she was hunting for her mysterious 'red man'. Reno shook his head to clear his vision - partly because of the sweat dripping into his eyes; mostly because of the fact that he was starting to see double. His shirt was damp with sweat, and for some reason, he was beginning to feel cold all over, despite the heat of the day.
Ameria's footprints were all over the ground round the pool - she'd obviously peered up into every tree, searching for the stranger she'd thought she'd seen. A battered, dusty teddy bear with both eyes replaced by buttons and with one ear missing, sat propped up against the base of one of the trees. The tracks - and a discarded lollipop stick - bore silent witness to the fact that the little girl had stopped for a while before returning to the village without her bear. He bent down and retrieved it, wondering suddenly at the slight tremble in his free hand as he lifted the lightweight toy. I need to sleep for about a month, he thought. If I die, Rude'll probably kill me...
As he straightened up, some monster that had come looking for water attacked him, deciding that it might as well eat first. Reno spun round - instantly alert - and took it on, twirling his lightning rod like a more deadly version of a quarterstaff and activating it.

He returned to Ameria in the village some twenty minutes later and handed her the well-loved toy. "Mission accomplished," he told her, cheerfully. "Here's Bastian - and I'm sure he's as glad to be back with you, as you are to have him."
Ameria's face lit up like a night in Midgar. "You found him, Mister Reno! Thanks!" She hugged the bear close. "Now I can go to sleep tonight. You're great, Mister Reno!
He shrugged. "I just did the job you paid me for," he reminded her, extremely embarrassed by her effusive praise. "You get back to your family now - before they start to get worried, okay?"
"Okay, Mister Reno. Thanks for finding 'Bastian. You're good at your job as one of the finding people," she added, then turned and raced away, leaving a 'see you, Mister Reno!' in her wake.
Reno instantly sagged, supporting most of his weight on his lightning rod. He was pretty surd he'd burst at least some of the stitches under his bandage - but he needed to find enough energy from somewhere to get back to his tent without dropping before he plucked up the courage to check and see if he was right or not. FMan... what was I thinkinc?" he groaned, as he (very slowly) made his way back tg where the tent was pitched. It was somehow growing darker, even though it was barely mid-afternOon. He shook his head Gently, trying to focus properly... The tent opening was suddenly before him, looming like the gaping maw of some giant beast - and shooting stars were beginning to spark across his limited field of vision...
Reno collapsed face down just inside the tent opening, shivering even as he passed out. Underneath him, blood oozed through his bandages and shirt from his reopened wound, spilling his lifeblood onto the hard-packed earth.

He opened his eyes slowly as someone propped him up and held a tin cup to his lips. "What...?" It was pitch black.
"Don't exert yourself further," a slightly-muffled whisper told him. "Just drink this. I patched you up."
"Who... are you?" Reno's night vision was usually good - but there seemed to be nothing in the tent but darkness, as he gratefully sipped the cool liquid (whatever it was) in the mug. If the person tending him had wanted him dead, he reasoned, he wouldn't be awake.
"I'm... a traveller," the whisper said.
It was a man's voice, Reno was sure. "Why are... you helping ... me?" He was feeling muzzy - either he was hurt worse than he'd thought, or the drink had been drugged. Probably both... His eyes closed as if weighted, and his breathing slowed again.
The figure holding him gently laid him down on the bedroll and looked at the unhealthy pallor of the man he'd stitched up and spoon-fed thin soup into earlier. "Perhaps I have an affinity for the lost."

Reno started awake, gasping. "The plate! The plate's falling - can't you hear them screaming?" he cried.
"No - because that was more than two years ago," the whisper said. "You've decided to stay alive, then?"
"You drugged me! Who are you?" Reno looked round. The tent was still dark, and all he could see of his benefactor was the vague shadow of someone sitting on the ground nearby.
"A... former colleague," the whisper informed him. "You've hovered in the balance for more than three days now - fighting your inner demons in your sleep. It was foolhardy in the extreme to exert yourself so soon after receiving such a grievous wound, Reno."
"Ameria needed her bear," Reno shrugged. "What's this?" he asked, as a warm bowl was placed unerringly in his hands.
"I thought you might prefer to feed yourself," his unknown helper said, wryly. "You fought against me often enough as I tried to feed you in your delirium."
"I'm sorry... whoever you are," Reno murmured, finding the spoon in the bowl by touch alone. "Dare we risk a light?" he asked, after the first mouthful of what proved to be a tasty broth.
"I have long walked in darkness," the voice informed him, unhelpfully.
Reno grimaced. "Join the club," he muttered. The broth - it was chicken soup with either rice or barley in it - was going down a treat. He was ravenous. "Did you make coffee to go with this?" he asked, hopefully. "I sure could use one."
There was a muffled 'humph' from his benefactor - either a snort of derision or laughter, quickly stifled. "At the rate you're demolishing that, perhaps more soup would be a better idea?" he suggested. "Coffee is a stimulant, after all - and it seems to me that any energy you have would be best used to r%cover, You came close to death, aiding that little girl in her quest."
"Couldn't go back mn a contract," Reno shrugged. He held the empty bowl out. "Um... if you please...voice... may I have more soup?"
Again t`e stifled, muffled 'humph', and the bowl was taken from his outstretched haNds. A few moments later it was returned. "Here."
"Thanks... I really feel dumb, calling you 'voice', by the way," Reno said, ruefully. "I'm sure you have a name, because a figment of my imagination wouldn't be serving me invalid food."
"You are an invalid, Reno - and what you did four days ago while you were supposed to be recuperating wasn't exactly the action of an intelligent man," the whisper told him, bluntly.
"So I should have just sent Ameria away and let her go to the pool to find her toy?" Reno growled. "She wouldn't have survived that thing I killed."
"What's one innocent more or less in the world to the Turk who destroyed Sector 7?"
Reno winced. "Definitely not a figment of my imagination - are you my conscience made flesh and blood? I'm not that guy any more... Or - I'm trying like hell not to be him." He put the bowl down carefully. "I... seem to be full," he added thickly, through the vice that seemed to suddenly restrict his throat.
"Are you seeking atonement, perhaps - or is it redemption you're concerned with?" the stranger sounded almost interested.
"If you know about Sector 7 - then you know I deserve neither. So why should I be looking for them?" Reno asked, roughly. "I'm just a man doing a job... only this time the only orders I'm getting are from me. But... 'following orders' is no excuse for... Sector 7," he added in a low voice.
"Had you not followed those orders, someone else would have anyway - and you would probably been liquidated."
"Didn't mean I should have enjoyed doing... what I did," Reno said. "So, 'conscience', have you a reply for that? All those people taken from their lives because I was programmed to like doing Shinra's dirty work?"
"You said it yourself - you were programmed. And don't call me a conscience. Like you, I have enough crimes in my own past to mar my dreams."
"You said I've been delirious for three days?" Reno asked.
"Yes. You collapsed as you arrived back in this tent. Had I not been... nearby, you might have bled out. Your battle tore your wound open, so I repaired the damage and spoon-fed you thin broth while you were unconscious. You are an unwilling patient, even asleep."
"'Nearby'..." Reno murmured. "You're the one who's been watching me, aren't you? I knew someone was."
"You're perceptive - though not smart enough to rest instead of dying," the voice sounded rueful.
"You said... You used to be a Turk?"
"As you were, I walked in darkness as a member of the Administrative arm of the Shinra Corporation. Though I have not worn that uniform - or that man - for a long time. I'm not... the person I once was. I think... I may even have friends, rather than just comrades," he added softly.
"Good for you," Reno grunted. "Since I'm alive, you'll be leaving, I suppose."
"I... believe I shall. It appears that the three Turks I was informed of... really aren't Turks after all. Here."
Reno felt a cup appear in his hand. "What is it?"
"Medicine to aid your healing," Reno could hear the shrug in the whisper.
"When will it let me wake up?" he asked, wryly.
"If I said 'when you are well', would you believe me? You - a man who accepted one gil to spare a child's pride and slew a monster to return her favourite toy?"
Reno eyed the indistinct dark shape warily. "Just who the hell are you?" he asked. "I knew everyone in the Turks - and your voice isn't familiar."
"I am one... who is no longer truly human. Or so I believed, anyway," the whisper said. "Drink, Reno. There is nothing in that cup that will harm you - and you need to rest yourself. One who has hovered between life and death for three days should concern himself with healing the body that was damaged."
"Since I can't heal my mind - similarly broken and stitched back together, you mean," Reno muttered. He swigged from the tin cup. "Maybe it's easier to trust an anonymous voice in the dark," he added.
"Perhaps so. It is easier then to believe in dreams and figments of your imagination, rather than a real person. And I am... no-one."
"Whoever... you are," Reno could feel his brain turning to sludge. "You saved... my life... for what..." He swayed and the empty cup fell from his hand. "What it's... worth... anyway. Th... anks," he managed.
He felt cloth against his cheek as he fell backwards. The figure had moved quickly to catch him. The last thing he heard before the curtain of oblivion fell was 'perhaps it is more worthy of saving than you believe'.
The figure picked up the barely-touched bowl of soup and returned it to the pot. Reno had a powerful will to live - precisely because he knew he could never make up for the lives he'd casually snuffed out as a Turk. "You may not seek atonement or redemption - but they may find even you, Reno," he said, softly. "Though they will probably prove as elusive to you as they have to me." He sat down cross-legged in the corner and allowed himself to doze. He could manage to keep an eye on the invalid until Reno's colleagues returned, at least. And then... perhaps this strange obligation he felt would be fulfilled.

Reno scratched his face as he woke up. The voice had been telling the truth about how long he'd been out of it, anyway - he had three or four days' growth of beard that itched almost as much as the wound on his abdomen. He looked round the twilight interior of the tent. The flap was closed - tied from the inside, he noted - but he was alone. He got up very carefully and lit the lamp hung from the central spar of the tent. The water container was full, so he had a shave in cold water and a quick wash before he got dressed. All he'd been wearing was a pair of shorts and a fresh bandage covering his wound. The spirit stove in one corner of the tent's main room had a pot with the soup he'd eaten earlier keeping warm over a low flame, so he served himself a bowl. He didn't want to open the tent up - right now he felt as weak as a new-born kitten - so he left it tied shut. How had his mysterious benefactor disappeared, he wondered, with the tent tied up tightly? He sat on the folding stool and ate a second bowl of soup right after the first. Man, he felt... really tired. Even the regular ass-whippings from Cloud's gang back in the day hadn't left him this exhausted. Back then, though, he'd had almost unlimited access to materia. Now he, Rude and Elena were down to a single shared piece of healing materia - and Elena had won the rock-paper-scissors game to take it with her when she and Rude went off on their jobs. Reno grimaced: if they'd known how badly he'd take their orders to rest up, they'd probably have left the damn thing with him.
"So... definitely healing, then," the voice spoke from behind him.
Reno dropped the empty bowl and spoon with a start, automatically reaching for his lightning rod... which wasn't at his side, but on the floor. He held his hands up. "Unarmed," he murmured. "But I don't think you brought me back to life, only to kill me, voice." He got up carefully and slowly turned round. He stared open-mouthed as the identity of the voice was revealed.
A pair of eyes he'd recently seen in his own shaving mirror looked at him from over a red scarf that concealed the rest of the red-cloaked figure's face. "No. I came to check out the words of... a friend."
"You - Ameria said she played hide and seek with a 'red man'," Reno gasped.
"So few people look above head height at the rooftops," Vincent Valentine said. "Children are the exception, because they have to look up all the time. You had best sit, before you collapse again, Reno," he added, drily.
Reno didn't need the suggestion - his legs were trembling with a mixture of shock and exertion. "But... why?"
"'Why' what?" the red-clad figure sat down easily on the floor, his cloak sweeping out behind him.
"Why come here? Why save my worthless carcass?" Reno elaborated.
"I came in search of a tale told me by a friend - and found a former Turk willing to help a little girl sleep at night without fear," Vincent shrugged. "In spite of the fact that he was basically too ill to move. And as for saving your life... there are other frightened children in the world that can be helped, after all."
"You think I'll do something that dumb again?" Reno growled.
A bark of laughter. "Ah... nature versus nurture - the eternal argument of blood over conditioning, Reno."
"Blood... Your blood," Reno murmured.
"I met with Tifa in Nibelheim as Nanaki and I were returning to Cosmo Canyon with his mate-to-be," Vincent said. "And she told me of three former Turks who passed through Nibelheim on their way to their work... aiding, rather than terrorising people. And she told me the story you told her - of an experiment to breed obedient Turks with the abilities I possessed. I was... intrigued."
Reno eyed him carefully. "So - I inherited the curiosity."
Another short, rusty laugh. "Hard to fool a son almost as old as his father," Vincent said, ruefully. "Or should I call you 'brother' instead, Reno?"
"After spending thirty years out of time in stasis, you're only a few years my elder," Reno noted. "Not that anyone could tell how old you are, covering most of your face like you do."
"A habit," Vincent shrugged. "I wished to conceal my identity from the world, after Hojo turned me into... something less than human."
"I heard about that - if you get too angry..." Reno wound down.
"I was genetically altered with DNA from various monsters, triggered by a system involving my adrenal glands," Vincent said. "If I lose control, I become a berserk monster, glorying in the slaughter of my foes. And so... I attempt to keep a level head."
"Yeah," Reno muttered. "And that's a whole heap of ulcers on its own."
"Indeed - but the years of constant stasis leached away much of my emotions. Joining with a group of earnest youngsters intent on saving the world... was my chance of redeeming myself for what I allowed Hojo to do to Lucrecia's unborn child. They also helped me to regain what was left of my humanity. They were all in such earnest," he murmured. "Hard not to be swayed by such idealism, even one who held such darkness in his soul."
"The Turks... in your day, they didn't do all the things we did," Reno said.
"No - but I allowed the woman I loved to become the subject of a twisted experiment... which ultimately led to Sephiroth's birth," Vincent continued to speak in a whisper. "It also caused her... partial death. And that was my crime - my weakness allowed the Jenova experiments to continue, even after I was gone. Hojo shot me when I confronted him,, drugged me and experimented on me... and ultimately abandoned me under the Shinra Mansion in Nibelheim. And so I was discovered some thirty years later by Cloud, Tifa and their friends, and returned to the world..."
"Um... Thanks for saving my life," Reno said. "I tried to tell you that before... um..."
"You may as well call me Vincent," the red-clad figure shrugged. "It would be too much of a stretch of the imagination for either of us to accept the strange reality of you being my son, only a few years my junior. And you did thank me, Reno."
"Yeah... Vincent... but this time I've got a clear head," Reno said, wryly.
"You should get more rest," the older man noted. "You're still weak."
"I hate to admit it," Reno sighed, slowly making it to his feet. "But you're right."
"Stubborn, too - another trait we appear to share," Vincent murmured.
"How many other weird and not-so wonderful genetic experiments did Hojo get up to, besides you and I... and all the members of SOLDIER contaminated by Jenova?" Reno wondered as he sat down on his bedroll and retrieved his blankets. "Even Cloud was another experiment, injected with Jenova cells and overdosed with Mako because he was one of the few survivors of Sephiroth's mad attack on Nibelheim."
"Hojo receives his own judgement, now he is no longer among the living," Vincent sounded satisfied. "Unfortunately the Shinra HQ in Midgar held the records of most of his experiments - so most of the data has been lost. There are too many suffering at his hands, even after his well-deserved death."
Reno lay back on his bedroll. "I don't even know what time it is," he said with a faint groan.
"Time to rest and heal," Vincent said, sagely. "Or you will perish before your due time."
"Will you... still be here when I wake up, Vincent?" Reno asked, tentatively.
"That depends on how soon your comrades return," Vincent shrugged. "Sleep, Reno - without medicine, this time. Drugging you senseless... is not the best way to heal your wounds and recover your energy. Natural sleep is best."
"Can I... may I see what you look like?" Reno asked, suddenly.
Another rusty laugh. "You may - although since you've shaved, you already know what I look like. And so - here I am, Vincent Valentine," he took off the scarf that concealed most of his face.
Reno looked up into a face that matched his own, feature for feature. There were a few extra years of age there - especially in the older man's eyes - and Vincent's hair was long and black... but essentially the two of them were almost identical. "Th - ," a yawn ambushed him. "Thanks, Vincent."
Vincent re-wrapped the scarf. "Disconcerting to see one's face stamped on another, isn't it? I had my suspicions when we met in Wutai and Midgar, but I prefer to keep my own counsel. Sleep, Reno - it is preferable to the long sleep of death, after all."
"You're a -," another yawn - "poet, Vincent."
"I was born in another time. Rest you easy."
Reno's eyes closed and he dropped off instantly - showing how feeble and exhausted he truly was. Vincent shook his head and blew out the lamp. The deathlike pallor of only a few days before had gone from Reno's face - the younger man had been very close to death during his delirium, but his stubborn nature had chosen to live on in this world, rather than seek the punishments he felt he deserved in the afterlife. Beneath the scarf, Vincent's mouth pulled down in a grimace: he had a son, twisted to darkness by Shinra's influence, and more of an age to be his younger brother. Yet, like Vincent himself, Reno was (unconsciously, it seemed) atoning for the life he'd lived before.
"If you had truly been my son, brought willingly into this world... I would not have let Shinra anywhere near you, Reno," he murmured. "Their dark machinations would not have corrupted your soul." He alone knew how much Reno regretted his actions as a Turk - because he alone had heard Reno's delirious conversations and weeping as he tended the younger man. He doubted whether even Reno's comrades - his friends (although he was afraid to acknowledge them as such) - knew the depths of his self-hatred and grief.

For the next few days Reno woke only to eat and sleep again, speaking to Vincent of inconsequential things before falling into the natural healing slumber that his body craved. By the afternoon of his seventh full day in this village without a name, he was able to get up and move around properly - if still stiffly and slowly, using his lightning rod as a cane to support himself.
"You'll be leaving soon," he said, softly. "Won't you?"
Vincent shrugged. He was cooking dinner. "Your comrades will soon be back - and you have no need of a nursemaid."
"Where will you go?"
"I am... a traveller. I do not feel the need to settle down."
"People need people to remind them that they are people, Vincent," Reno murmured. "Even I know that."
"I visit my friends," Vincent said. "They are spread all over the world, after all - from Wutai to Kalm and Edge City, I visit them on my journeys. I do not need to be alone, though my travels without Nanaki have been on my own."
"And will I - will I see you again?" Reno asked.
"That depends on the future - which is never set," Vincent chuckled softly. "But there may come a time and place when we are together again, Reno - the world is not large enough to stay hidden forever. Not from someone who is as gifted in his job as one of the 'finding people' as you seem to be, anyway."
Reno flushed. "You really were watching me."
"I wished to see the changes two years away from Shinra had wrought on the man I once fought in the subway tunnels in Midgar," Vincent said, evenly. "The Turk who just wouldn't quit, even though the organisation he served was effectively destroyed. And you - injured as you were - aided a little girl so she could sleep soundly in her bed that night."
"Nearly killing myself in the process," Reno muttered, embarrassed.
"True. But I believe that your programming is slowly being broken - one bond on your mind at a time, now that Shinra no longer exists to reinforce those lessons you were taught since infancy," Vincent said. "There is hope - even for criminals such as us - for... respite. Perhaps even peace."
"The way you say that, Vincent... I can almost believe it," Reno sighed. "Almost - but not quite. I've got too much blood on my hands for that."
"And what of the blood on my hands - the one who failed to prevent the birth of Sephiroth, the beginning of the Jenova project that almost destroyed the world?" Vincent asked. "I must bear the crimes he committed, because I could not stop Hojo and his madness then. From the destruction of Nibelheim to the calling of Meteor... now there is blood a-plenty to wade through. Or drown in," he added, darkly. "We are a lot alike, Reno - not only in appearance, it seems."
Reno looked at him, then nodded. "Maybe you're right. Maybe one day I'll find some peace, Vincent. Until then..." He shrugged. "Until then, I'll do what I must."
"As will I," Vincent's voice was soft as ever. "You're healing, Reno - mentally as well as physically. But more than twenty years of conditioning cannot be shrugged off in a heartbeat. The process will be slow."
"Eventually... my blood will out, you mean - nature triumphing over nurture?" Reno sounded a little lost.
Vincent's smile could only be heard. "If you want it to - the Valentine blood may win, Reno... but even I am not worthy of my blood, with my crimes."
"Almost everyone is guilty of something - whether it's simple carelessness, or mass murder, most people feel guilt about their crimes," Reno pointed out.
"True. Then perhaps one day we will both prove the worth of the Valentine blood, Reno," Vincent said. "Strange that you should teach me this, the son I never saw grow up."
"Or the younger brother you never knew you had," Reno said, quietly.
"Yes... easier to think of you so," Vincent acknowledged. "Here, eat - regain your strength before you help any more children." He handed Reno a plate of rabbit stew and helped himself to a portion.
"You've waited on me hand and foot for almost a week," Reno said, ruefully. "Half the time I didn't even know where I was... I'm grateful, Vincent."
"I saw someone willing to go out of his way to help a little girl... someone worth saving. Perhaps that is the lesson I came to teach you," Vincent pulled down his scarf to eat.
Reno pondered his words as he ate. "I had... an existence, before we quit Shinra and Midgar," he said, thoughtfully. "Now I have the chance of ... a life. What I did before... can't either be forgotten or forgiven. But I'm trying like hell not to be that guy any more."
"With your stubbornness, you will surely succeed, Reno," Vincent half-smiled, returning his scarf to its usual position. "Perhaps some fresh air, seated in the shelter of the tent opening, would do you no harm?"
Reno's mouth quirked in a wry grin as he got to his feet. "For someone who says I don't need a nursemaid, you're doing a pretty good job."
"Your friends will be wroth enough with you for your good deed, without them roundly cursing me in my absence," Vincent picked up the plates and began to wash up.
Reno watched his careful, easy movements for a while, then picked up his folding stool and went outside, letting the tent flaps fall closed behind him. He sat down, enjoying the warm sun's heat on his face. Not that the tent was stuffy, but he'd deferred to Vincent's wishes to leave it in either full darkness, or only have the lamp wick turned down low. For the last few days it had been easy to slip into the role of invalid - chiefly because he was. Now, as Vincent himself agreed, Reno was recovering well. He still wouldn't be at full strength for a good few weeks, but Vincent's ministrations meant that he no longer felt permanently exhausted.
"Oh, Mister Reno - you're feeling better?" Ameria bounded over. "Your friend who doesn't come out of the tent said you had a cold."
"I'm feeling much better today, Ameria," he said, truthfully. "And you and Bastian - and your family?"
"We're leaving here in the morning - that's why it's nice to see you before we find a real house to live in, 'stead of just a tent," she smiled.
"Do you know where you're going?"
"Not really. Daddy says it's high up on cliffs, and there are animals that talk like people," she shrugged.
"That's Cosmo Canyon," Reno told her. "It's a peaceful place - and those animals are the protectors of the Canyon. They're gentle and noble and smart - and fierce in defending the Canyon from danger," he added.
"It sounds... like a good place to stay," she mused. "Thanks, Mister Reno."
"For what?" he was puzzled.
"I... wasn't sure about going to a place where animals talk like they do in books," she confessed. "But you make this new place sound... int'resting. Um... did finding 'Bastian for me make you catch cold, Mister Reno?" she asked, suddenly. "Mummy said that you didn't look well."
Reno smiled at her. "I must have already been ill, but didn't realise it," he told her the white lie to spare her any guilt. "If I got sick, Ameria, it was my own fault for not taking better care of myself. It wasn't anyone else's fault - especially not yours," he assured her.
She smiled at him sweetly. "You're nice, Mister Reno. Oh - I nearly forgot!" She pulled something out of the pocket of her pinafore. "I picked you a flower, but you were sick - so I made it all flat and you can have it now. It's a bookmark now. I'm glad I remembered. Here." She handed over a piece of card. "It's a present for you, Mister Reno."
He held the bookmark gently in his hand, extremely moved. The pressed flower had been glued to the card - liberally glued, preserved like a fly trapped in amber. On the back in a careful hand was written: 'To Mister Reno from Ameria for finding my 'Bastian'.
"Th - thank you very much, Ameria," he said in a low voice. "This is... very kind of you."
"You found my 'Bastian for me. I got to go pack now. Maybe I'll see you again, Mister Reno." She flung her arms around him and pecked him on the cheek. "But hopefully not to have to find 'Bastian again. See you!" she raced off at top speed, happily.
"An... enthusiastic child," Vincent noted.
Reno didn't bother turning round; he could tell that Vincent was concealed behind the closed tent flaps. "I... don't deserve a gift like this," he said.
"She feels that you do - it is the innocent and the earnest who give us most pause, because they see what we cannot. They see light where we find only darkness and shadow... but gradually, we begin to believe."
"Believe in what?" Reno sounded forlorn. He touched his cheek, where he could still feel the kiss.
"In our essential humanity," Vincent's voice receded as he moved away. "Beneath the monsters we understand ourselves to be."
Reno nodded, almost to himself. Vincent had carried his guilt throughout the years he'd spent in stasis - and despite the thirty years he'd spent out of the world in the tunnels under the Shinra Mansion in Nibelheim, those extra years of guilt weighed heavily on him. Vincent could literally become a monster, thanks to Hojo's experiments - but Reno knew as well as anyone that not all monsters looked like monsters. He sighed deeply and looked at the bookmark again. The 'flower' was a common bluebell - not that common around this town, however. It must have taken Ameria some time to find... just for Reno? He turned it over and read the sentiment again, feeling a tiny glow of something that almost tasted like hope in what he'd imagined as the empty vessel Shinra had made of his heart. He stood up and took the stool back into the tent. Vincent was sitting in his usual cross-legged pose with his eyes half-closed, either dozing or meditating - when Reno had asked him about this, he'd merely shrugged and pointed out that he needed downtime to make sure he could control his temper.
He opened his eyes. "Not as hollow as you thought you were?" he murmured.
Reno looked at him. "It's actually weird when you read my mind3 you know," he said, ruefully.
"Your face may give away little to others, Reno - but since it is my own, I can read it like a book," Vincent shpugeed* "You journey with your former Turk colleagues, rather than on your own," he pointed out. "As you've told me, people need other people to remind them that they are people. Travdlling with... friends... causes you to thiNk and feel. And meeting others as you travel has the same effect. You're not the empty shell you thought you were, after all. You've discovered... the light and warmth of hope," he added, gently.
Reno shook his head. "And you think it's strange to have your face wandering around on someone else," he muttered. He put the bookmark on the stool and dug into his trouser pocket, pulling out the single gil piece he'd been paid by Ameria. He pushed it into the hard-packed earth (Rude and Elena hadn't bothered putting down the groundsheet because the ground was so hard and dry) and got back to his feet. "You should shield your eyes," he said, adjusting his lightning rod.
Vincent closed his eyes and pulled his scarf further up. "A gun is still a more accurate weapon," he murmured. "And muzzle flash rarely causes blindness."
"You stick with what you know," Reno's grin was brief, "and I'll use what I'm used to." He fired a pinpoint beam at the coin, then switched off the rod and returned it to its post as a prop. "It'll take a little while to cool."
Vincent adjusted his scarf. "A pendant, I presume."
Reno picked up the bookmark before sitting down. "Ink fades, card eventually falls apart," he said, slowly. "But that coin... is a symbol that I met a little girl who didn't run away screaming from a Turk. And... she asked me to help her."
Vincent nodded. "It is a true memento - something to aid your memory," he said, gravely. "Something which will remind you - every day - that you are growing."
Reno looked at him quizzically. "Growing?"
"Every day you are growing away from the person you dislike, into this new man you would prefer to be," Vincent explained. "As you've said - you're trying like hell not to be 'that guy' any more."
"It's not exactly easy," Reno's voice was low.
"Nothing worthwhile ever is easy," Vincent said. "And something is worth far more if thought and time go into it - like Ameria's gift. In mere monetary terms, it's worthless - but you handle it for what it is, a gift without price."
"Priceless..." Reno murmured, turning the card over and reading it again. "Yes... it is..." He looked over at Vincent, a little embarrassed. "Sentimental fool, eh?"
"Sentiment... emotions... are not foolish, Reno. They are part of the makeup of human beings, after all - and that also serves to remind us that in spite of Hojo's experiments, we are both still human," Vincent told him, seriously.
Reno bent down and picked up the cooled coin with the tiny hole burned through it. "Then I'll keep this little piece of metal... sentimentally," he smiled faintly. "And it will be... a memento vide - a memory that I'm still alive."
"As should that interesting scar across your body," Vincent grunted.
Reno found himself ambushed by a chuckle. "Definitely. Was that worry?"
"Concern that my own stitching does not match the needlework of the original," Vincent's voice was gruff.
"For some reason Elena's pretty good with a needle," Reno nodded. "But a scar is still a scar - whether mental or physical."
"True," Vincent noted, watching Reno putting the coin onto the chain he took off from round his neck. "You still wear your Turk ID tags?"
"Means they can tell who the body used to be before it was monster food," Reno shrueged. "My turn to cook, eh?"
"It's already in the pot," Vincent closed his eyes again.
"What was it like... saving the world?" Reno asked suddenly.
"Seek out Cloud - if you can - and ask him," Vincent didn't even oPen his eyes. "I merely joined them all to gain revenge on Hojo fo2 the humanlike monster he made Lucrecia bear. We didn't actually set out to save the world, Reno - Tifa wanted revenge on Shinra for Nibelheim, and Barrett for Corel. Nanaki just wanted to go home; Yuffie joined us to acquire materia for Wutai and Cid because Shinra wanted his 'plane and he had little choice but to escape Rocket Town with the rest of us. The only one of us who really wanted to save the world was Aeris... and she called forth the power of the very Lifestream itself to stop Meteor. Even Cloud didn't set out to save the world - he barely knew who he was, having assimilated the memories of his friend while they were held captive and experimented on under the mansion in Nibelheim. And Reeve's puppet cat was Shinra's spy... for a time, anyway. For a Shinra employee, Reeve was richer in conscience than most - perhaps because he had visited Cosmo Canyon as a young man," Vincent mused. "It is well that you and your companions rescued him from his cell - because of that, many more people in Midgar were saved than might otherwise have been."
Reno shrugged. "It was the right thing to do."
"And you thought of it," Vincent pointed out.
"Only because I knew Reeve didn't want... what happened to Sector 7," Reno said, touching the coin now hanging round his neck. "If it had been any of the others, we'd probably have left Midgar sooner."
Vincent nodded. "Things in Shinra deteriorated rapidly after I left the world," he said. "Not that it was exactly better then - only that megalomania and darkness had not yet fully taken over the organisation."
"It was... weird to find out that I was one of the bad guys," Reno said, beginning to dish out the stew in the pot. "Funny how the perspective can change... everything you thought you were."
"Indeed. Thank you," Vincent accepted the bowl and began to eat. "I felt that I deserved my long sleep as punishment for my cowardice - only to realise that by remaining out of the fight, I would simply compound my folly. It was time to make a stand... although there was also the enticing prospect that I might eventually meet Hojo again," he admitted with a wry smile.
Reno looked at him. "And still, with all the baggage everyone was carrying - you all managed to save the world," he said. "While... if we Turks had won..." He looked down at the piece of card in his hand. "There wouldn't be any little girls looking for their lost teddy bears - because there wouldn't be a world left." He stood up gingerly, using his lightning rod to help him again, and put his half-eaten meal back in the pot. "It... kinda sucks, when you find out that everything you worked hard for and defended... was actually killing the planet. And it didn't give a damn either," he added, abruptly. "Later." He went into one of the two separate areas which usually served as his bedroom and packed the precious piece of card carefully away in his backpack. He sat down on his bedroll and touched the coin and tags resting in the hollow of his throat, closing his eyes. "I thought you respected privacy," he murmured at the sound of the soft footfall, keeping his eyes closed.
"I also know when privacy is an excuse to brood," Vincent sounded amused. "You keep those tags as a warning to yourself of what you once were, Reno. It's the same reason you're still wearing your Turk uniform - and also because you're trying to make that uniform no longer a symbol of fear in this new world that we've been allowed to have. This world that Aeris gave us back."
Reno opened his eyes and looked at Vincent. "You really know the right buttons to push, don't you? What about you, Vincent? What hair shirt do you wear to torment you?"
A surprised bark of laughter erupted from behind the scarf. "Strange that we should know each other so well on so little acquaintance." He reached under his clothing and brought out a chain similar to the one Reno wore - minus the Turk ID tags that should have been there. "I destroyed the tags when I stopped bei

Totally great story. You really got some talent there.

That's moogle for you! we're really proud of her! =] (keep up the great stuff MY!!)

just realised that a bit's missing.

Better find it, ya?

Here it is. Sorry, guys.

Reno opened his eyes and looked at Vincent. "You really know the right buttons to push, don't you? What about you, Vincent? What hair shirt do you wear to torment you?"
A surprised bark of laughter erupted from behind the scarf. "Strange that we should know each other so well on so little acquaintance." He reached under his clothing and brought out a chain similar to the one Reno wore - minus the Turk ID tags that should have been there. "I destroyed the tags when I stopped being alive," he said with a shrug, showing Reno the sole object on the chain. It was a simple ring with a single stone - an engagement ring. "Here is my 'hair shirt', Reno - the ring that Lucrecia never accepted, because she loved another scientist, not... a certain Turk. This ring... and the fact that I was unable to save her from Hojo, are my mementos. My ... darkness," he added. "But also... a little light, too - because... she is safe now."
"You... killed her?" Reno's eyes widened.
"Lucrecia died giving birth to Sephiroth, but the Jenova treatments he was given in the womb allowed some portion of her to remain 'alive'," Vincent tucked the ring back beneath his clothing. "It was not true life - and it was my task to release her from the burden she held. So... she is safe now, sleeping in the Lifestream," he shrugged. "It was my final gift to her - she has rejoined her husband and son, as part of the river of life circling the world."
Reno eyed him carefully, then closed his eyes again. "You killed the remains of the woman you loved," he murmured. "Just to give her peace."
"Just because she did not return my feelings for her, should I have abandoned her to her fate as something monstrous?" Vincent asked. "That would only have proved that Hojo had finally won - by completely removing my human soul. To be human is to experience all the emotions, Reno - negative ones as well as the positive. It brings sorrow, to have killed one I loved so much - and anger at what her husband did to her... and also a little peace, because my friend must no longer suffer her unlife. That admixture is what makes me know I truly am still human. With joy comes sorrow, because others are not present to share that joy. With rage... well - that one I fear I can have little clear explanation to offer you. Once I lose my control over that emotion, I have few memories of my actions."
"Oh - I have memories of my rages," Reno said, drily. "Which is why I prefer to grind my teeth and work up a good ulcer now, instead. I wouldn't mind digging up Hojo just to kill him again," he added, mildly. "That's if there was anywhere to dig, of course - but there isn't."
"Control over one's temper is hard enough for those who haven't been the subjects of experiments," Vincent noted. "For lab rats like us... it is not impossible, Reno."
"So - I'll hold on to my touchstone," Reno smiled faintly, his eyes still closed and the coin and tags held within his fist. "And think of a little girl who looked me in the eyes without fear - maybe that can save me burning a hole in my gut."
"Any anchor is welcome, when mere anger becomes a tempestuous rage," Vincent said before he left the 'room'. He walked like a cat, making little noise, but Reno could hear the odd footstep or two as he moved around the main part of the tent.
He opened his eyes on darkness, sensing another presence in his 'room'. "Vincent?" he murmured.
The weight of a blanket covered him. "Go back to sleep. It's impossible to help anyone if you're dead," Vincent whispered. "Rest your bones, Reno. You're still weakened from your trials - and from discovering you still have a human heart. Sleep."
Reno felt his eyes closing again. "Do you ever sleep, Vincent?" he mumbled.
"I sleep," Vincent said. "But deep sleep for one who travels alone is... dangerous."
Reno opened his mouth to say something, yawned deeply, and fell asleep again. His hand reached up to touch the pendants at his neck.
Vincent's mouth quirked in a rueful smile as he went back into the main part of the tent. "Stubborn," he muttered. "But healing from Shinra's 'care'." He picked up his blanket and lay down on the bare hard ground again, returning to his watchful dozing.

Reno watched from his seat at the tent opening as the Chocobo cart carrying all of Ameria's family's possessions left the town. Ameria waved to him from the back of the cart and he raised his hand and waved back. "Not scared," he murmured to himself. "So weird."
"It has been two years since the Turks were the dark arm of the Shinra Corporation," Vincent said from the safety of the tent. "Children are growing up now who do not understand why Turks were such objects of terror."
"There aren't any Turks," Reno pointed out. "We just wear our old uniforms because there are too many other things to spend our cash on."
"Sure," Vincent said, disbelief colouring his voice. "That - and you look good in a dark suit, of course," he added, drily. "I know I did."
A chuckle hijacked Reno. "You have a very well-hidden sense of humour, Vincent," he said. "And yeah... I do look pretty good in the suit. But like you said before... it's kind of a way of desensitising people to the old uniform, too. Ameria... she came to ask for my help - because she'd heard I was one of the 'finding people'," he put in, softly. "I'd rather that my sharp suit was a symbol of helping people than torture, kidnap, murder and discreet assassinations," he added, darkly.
"A mature wish," Vincent noted. "And a fine ideal to hold."
Reno got to his feet with the help of his lightning rod. "Oh - I know it's never gonna happen, Vincent. Like Rude says, the Turks did too much 'bad stuff' in the past. The world will never accept this uniform... so I'll keep on wearing it."
"With so many hair shirts, you'll soon find it hard to move," Vincent warned as Reno entered the tent and poured himself a coffee. "Thank you, no," he added, as Reno wordlessly offered him one. "It makes me too jumpy."
Reno raised an eyebrow. "Okay. And... I was created to be the perfect thug Turk," he said. "Wearing the suit... and doing what I do now... It's my way of getting back at Hojo - and Shinra. I'm not that Reno any more - and I don't ever want to be him again. So... I'll keep the suit, Vincent," he shrugged. "It's another memento - a warning to myself that I was a Turk, and that the suit fitted me... maybe a little too well."
"If you continually question your motives, you'll never be able to make a decision and move forward," Vincent said, gravely. "Don't worry so much, Reno - you have determination enough to break the bonds Shinra imposed on your mind. Just remember that all healing takes time... so try not to burst your stitches again. Next time you might not be... under observation."
"I'll heed your advice," Reno said, wryly. "And maybe try to keep a lid on my boredom next time. The next town... half-decent town we come to, the first place I'm heading is a bookstore. Something three or four inches thick might hold my attention for a while."
"A sensible idea," Vincent murmured. "But make sure the subject matter at least engages you, or it will be of little benefit."
"If it's boring enough, it might put me to sleep," Reno chuckled softly. His PHS beeped and he thumbed the switch. "Yeah?"
"And still breathing," Rude murmured. "I'll be with you in about an hour. Elena back yet?"
"No - you're the first to get in touch with me," Reno said. He got to his feet and watched Vincent's economic movements as he packed. "An hour, Rude - I'll get something ready for you coming back."
"See you."
He returned his PHS to his pocket and half-smiled. "Rude wouldn't object to eating with you, you know," he said, softly.
"I said I'd stay until your friends arrive," Vincent shrugged. "Take care of yourself, Reno - and try not to bury yourself under the weight of all your hair shirts," he added, wryly.
"Try taking your own advice too, Vincent," Reno held out his hand. "And I will see you again."
Vincent shook the younger man's outstretched hand. "I believe we may meet again," he murmured, then picked up his backpack. He went to the back of the tent, lifted up the canvas - Reno had discovered that he'd pulled out a couple of the tent pegs - and was gone. It seemed that Vincent was uncomfortable leaving through conventional exits.

He sat outside and waited for Rude to return, leaving a low heat under the pot of stew. As the large bald figure walked up the makeshift dusty street towards the tent, Reno caught a brief flash of red leaping from roof to roof and smiled faintly. Vincent was leaving - but somehow Reno knew that this would not be the final parting of the Valentine blood.

-THE END-

MoogleYuna

14th February 2006 - 15th May 2006

And thanks, guys - I like to write.

Dammit, tell the truth, Moogle - I actually NEED to write.

Okay, another one - not FF, not Tales of Symphonia (another of my old fanfic threads...). Not even a Square(soft) or Enix job. It's from Shadow Hearts: Covenant. I highly recommend the first two, haven't finished the third one yet.

Anyway, here it is...

Shadow Hearts: Covenant - The Reason

Yuri watched as the last of his friends, Karin, disappeared; going off to a time and place they had each prayed they could be. The last thing he saw of her was the cross hanging around her neck - his mother's cross, once carried by his father and given to him in China by his father's old friend Zhen's daughter, Quiha. He'd given it to Alice, and laid it on her tombstone in Zurich - then asked Karin to carry it for him; he was losing his memories, his very 'self', and he wanted someone to remember the people who had carried the cross... the people he'd loved: his mother, his father... and Alice. Always Alice.
He stood on the stone platform alone. What point was there in returning to the world? The mistletoe's curse was almost fully realised - if he went back, who would he be without his memories, his very soul? No memory of the friends he'd met - and what was worse, no remembrance of the lover who had saved that soul at the cost of her life: Alice Elliot. No - he would stay here... the only way to preserve his memories was to -.
The platform began to warp, spikes of rock shooting into the air. One pierced his chest and shattered the stone of the periapt he wore, a gift from his Harmonixer father. After Alice had broken the curse on him, it had always glowed a gentle blue - but the curse of the Holy Mistletoe had made it blood red, a magnet for monsters. As he felt his life slip away, he smiled. He had beaten the curse - he was still himself, Yuri Volte Hyuga...

In the Graveyard of Monsters inside Yuri's soul, a dead tree - the Curse of the Holy Mistletoe - held a perfect sleeping image of Yuri. This was the embodiment of his memories, the very soul of the young man that the curse had stolen away from him, piece by piece.
The inner Yuri awoke, and smiled as he saw a pool of light in the dark sky above him. He was still trapped, his arms and lower torso embedded within the tree - but now he had awakened.
A figure emerged from the light - was it truly Alice's soul, or merely his memories of her? Whichever it was, she had come to release him, and they would be together. She held out her hand to him and he pulled himself away from the tree - the curse - and took her hand, smiling as they embraced and slowly faded into the light... together.

When he'd spoken to his memory of Alice, hidden deep inside the Door of Desires within the Graveyard of his soul, Yuri had expressed his regret to her that he and Roger had tried to bring Alice back to life using the Émigre Manuscript. He had feared that God would punish him for trying to go against the laws of time and nature. Then he confessed his greatest wish to her - a wish he'd never articulated before.
"If there is a God... and he could grant me just one wish... then I'd go back to the day we first met," he'd said.
Alice had laughed. "Then we could journey all over again!"

* * *
Yuri opened his eyes and suddenly sat up. "Whoa - almost overslept!" he said, as he got to his feet. He banged his head with his hand a few times - the voice in his head that sent him into dangerous situations wasn't exactly gentle on the skull - and looked round. In the distance he could hear a train whistle and he smiled, walking quickly to the nearby station. He couldn't seem to suppress his excitement. "I feel just like a kid again," he chuckled softly.
Here he was, where the 'voice' had told him to be - Southern Manchuria. It was 1913, and Yuri had a train to catch - and a girl to save.

-THE END-

MoogleYuna 29th May 2007

Hope you liked it.
Comment (constructively) if you like.

I really liked the last FF7 fic. It was bittersweet and you don't often find that in "literature" these days (unless I'm reading the wrong books =P).

I haven't played the Shadow Hearts games so I dont' really understand what's going on there. But I'm sure I'd learn soon enough; After all you've got great talent as a writer!