Top Guide (In This Town)

Chapter Nineteen

She led the way up and along the gentle slope toward the rockface and the waterfall, hobbling only slightly, while the rest of the mismatched party finished disembarking.

Vincent caught up with her first, and she smiled up at him. His eyebrows asked a question over distressed red eyes, and she nodded.

Reached up and patted his forearm, through the gauntlet, then stumbled, as her bad leg hit a dip in the dirt that had lain hidden under the grass. Vincent smoothly held the arm in place under her hand, effortless support.

"Thanks," she said, only a little shortly, instead of swearing, because she was a lady, even if she defined that word more weirdly the older she got. She kept hanging onto his arm. It helped, and it wasn't going to slow either of them down significantly in the event of an attack.

Cloud caught up then, with the general faint disarray of someone who had thrown dignity aside to jog up a hill. Tifa grinned at him. There was something reassuring about having them on either side of her—more than the boost of being around friends, or the relative security of being flanked by allies while injured. It felt right. This was how they had come here the first time, together, walking three abreast.

Cloud broke that formation almost at once, though, and got in her way somewhat, jogging another few steps up hill to twist around and walk backwards, frowning down at her. Not an angry look—it was, again, his problem-solving frown; he used it on malfunctioning motorbikes and unfamiliar materia.

It was even cuter on him at this age. Even printed with stark shadows by the colorless floodlights coming off the helicopter—she had seen his face in too many darknesses for that alone to make it look alien or strange.

Tifa hoped he wasn't going to try to fit the conversation they badly needed to have into the approximately forty seconds it was probably going to take Sephiroth to catch up.

Hidden from the sight of everyone downhill by the interposition of Tifa's body, Cloud opened his hand to reveal the gleam of a Potion.

Just an ordinary one, the kind you could get in any specialty shop for about the cost of a week's groceries. It wouldn't fully heal mortal wounds, except maybe on a small child. But.

Tifa lifted her hand away from Vincent's arm, using the motion as cover for lifting the little bottle out of Cloud's palm as her hand went past, and brought both her arms in, as though crossing them, though the X her wrists formed across her cleavage wasn't any natural gesture in any culture she knew of. Never mind, from the rear she could be clasping her hands together, the way Aerith liked to. "I'm okay, I'm okay," she said, and winked, and tucked the medicine down out of sight between her breasts. There was no way to drink it right now without being obvious, and thereby wasting Cloud's efforts at stealth, but now she had it.

Honestly the way things were going so far, she might need it to get someone back from the brink of death before she found a chance to fix her leg. Either way, this was an improvement on no gear at all.

She really missed having storage options other than her bra. She was getting that knapsack back before they left this valley, even if she had to grab it out of the helicopter at a dead run, while everybody tried to kill her.

Maybe she should plan to knock Tseng out and steal the helicopter, if this went badly. How hard could it really be to fly on a spinning eggbeater? Scarlet used to make really moronic robots that could do it. Mostly.

Once she got close enough she found the cavern with no trouble, even in the dark of night, at the very edge of the helicopter's range of illumination. The tunnel mouth was wide and obvious, if you slipped up to the waterfall at the right angle—not overgrown, for little grew here but the grass, and not hidden away, because its makers had had no need to make it subtle, when it was so hard to come to this place at all.

Tifa had looked down on this lake from the air, with better lighting and more leisure than the helicopter had afforded today. It was round, almost perfectly, and the mountains encircled it. It must be a crater. Had Meteor fallen here, that dark day depicted in the murals at the Temple, when the Ancients had called it upon themselves, and locked the Black Materia away afterward, regretting?

Reeve thought not. He said the underwater tunnel that led to this place seemed to be some sort of former lava tube, that this was not a place where the sky had fallen, but where a mountain had exploded. Reeve had consulted scientists whose specialty was the movement of the earth to reach this conclusion, but Tifa didn't trust the opinions of scientists terribly much.

After all, they were awfully authoritative about lava tubes for being baffled by the existence of a strange lake well above sea level that never emptied, even though everything about fluid dynamics—as Reeve had once taken great and drunken pains to demonstrate with a lot of straws and pewter cups one night at the Heaven—dictated that it should have drained out into the ocean as soon as the underwater passage opened, leaving too little water to fill the lake to its brim, let alone to spill over the caldera's southern lip, in the second waterfall that made the main source of both the River Ripple and the River Running.

One of the entries on Reeve's long, long list of things for the WRO scientists to look into once the world stopped trying to end and gave them some breathing room was the source of the waterfall above the cavern entrance, that fed the lake. That was a lot of water, after all. Tifa found the whole volcano story very suspicious.

It wasn't like this was the only crater on the Planet, though. Even besides Jenova's old landing site in the North. The Bottomless Pit near Junon was pretty weird, too. Maybe that was where the first Meteorfall had happened.

Sephiroth's long legs had eaten up the grassy slope easily, and he joined Tifa's party just within range of the waterfall's spray only moments after they halted. Zack Fair jogged up seconds after that, not out of breath but faintly aggrieved at having been left behind and forced to rush.

Tifa glanced away behind him; Tseng waited beside the helicopter. Probably for the best.

The SOLDIERs studied the shadowed, spray-slick opening with disfavor. You had to duck in close beside the waterfall to reach the entryway, and the last few steps were a narrow path of wet stone over a long drop, before the tunnel closed in. The barest grey edge of the helicopter's lights reached them here, supplementing the faint dusting of the narrow moon and stars from overhead, and making the tunnel mouth yawn all the more with inky black by contrast.

"Someone lives here?" Fair asked.

Tifa tucked her hair behind one ear. "Sort of."

She didn't actually know even that, she was realizing uncomfortably. The main evidence she had that Dr. Crescent was here now was that the woman didn't seem to have aged since she was thirty, and hadn't been reported anywhere else on the Planet in the years since her last known act, which was giving birth. It was possible she'd only retired here some time later, after Nibelheim burned.

Not likely, the way she'd spoken of Sephiroth—as though he were still the infant she'd left behind and seen only in dreams, when at Shinra's height there had been no one on the Planet who didn't know his name.

But maybe she'd just been a normal hermit until near the end, and there would be nothing in this cave to justify their journey.

If that happened, she'd deal with it then. There were still options.

There were always options.

She turned to Sephiroth and gestured grandly toward the entrance. She raised her voice to be heard over the thundering of the falls. "After you!"

Sephiroth's expression was very flat.

"See, now he thinks it's a trap," said Zack Fair, after a few seconds passed. Not quite as loudly as Tifa had, but loud enough to make out over the waterfall.

"Ladies first," asserted Sephiroth, as blandly as he could while projecting over the noise. Which was actually very bland, but with an edge to it that she suspected wasn't all volume.

Tifa snorted, and then glared at Sephiroth for making her nearly laugh. It had even been something like an intentional joke. "I don't mind going first," she said, because there'd never been anything dangerous in this cave before, and Sephiroth could stab her almost as easily from the front as from behind, assuming he could magically summon his sword to him at all, "but I sort of thought you'd want to be sure I didn't get access to the place before you did."

Sephiroth frowned, and now she half wished she hadn't said anything, because she'd obviously made him conflicted.

At this rate they'd still be standing here at dawn. Which at least would make the whole thing seem slightly less spooky to the scaredy-SOLDIERs, she hoped.

"Vincent," she suggested, twisting to look up at him, "why don't you go first?" He deserved to be the first to set foot inside here, after all. Crescent might be Sephiroth's mother, but Vincent still had more personal stake in this visit than anyone.

"No," interjected Sephiroth firmly, certain of this as he had not been about Tifa; apparently considering Vincent a more dangerous unknown quantity than herself, though Tifa didn't know whether that was because he hadn't been broadcasting his opinions and goals the way she had and was therefore less predictable, or for some more insulting reason.

Like thinking Vincent might be able to set an actually dangerous ambush.

She squinted, running numbers. Personnel management was closer to her wheelhouse than grand strategy. She could make this work. "Okay…"

"I'll go!" volunteered Fair.

"No," said Sephiroth again, in an even weirder tone than before.

Fair rolled his eyes. "General, it's not a trap. Why would it be a trap, after all this?"

"'All this' could have been to draw us to this very specific trap," Sephiroth replied drily.

Tifa sighed. She could point out that she honestly wasn't that complicated, but they'd only have her word for it so it wouldn't help. "Look," she said, with a throat already getting tired of half-shouting, "if we're going to debate this, let's not do it standing around here." Someone was going to call Sephiroth by name any second now, and then Lucrecia might overhear and have an aneurysm and die before they could talk to her.

She jerked a hand at the waterfall. "It's loud. And my leg hurts," she said, looking judgmentally at Sephiroth, who had chosen to leave giant cracks through every bone in it after splintering them horribly, because he was a terrible person. "If we're going to have a protracted argument about…cave entering etiquette, I demand a chair."

"That's fair," declared Zack Fair, scooped her up in his arms, and folded her over his shoulder.

Luckily for her she was conscious, so she could make a point of straightening up by bracing her hands against his shoulder blade, right below his stupid bulky SOLDIER pauldron around which her stomach was currently being bent, so her bum wasn't left sticking straight up in the air with the skirt riding up, as he bounded back down the hill again.

It was a shorter trip downhill, on longer, unbroken legs, and without the limited amount of meandering Tifa had indulged in on the way up.

She put up with being manhandled, mostly because he actually managed to successfully baby her aching leg, well supported against the solidity of his chest, and also because, as she watched, everyone but Vincent trailed the two of them back toward the helicopter, so she was getting what she'd asked for.

And maybe a little bit because he'd picked her up like a fellow soldier, the way Barret would have done, rather than like a princess or a child. That deserved not being elbowed in the ear.

Tifa waved at the receding cluster of everyone else over Zack's shoulder. Cloud waved back.

Why was he so cute. Not fair.

SOLDIER Fair carried her into the circle of the helicopter's lights, and stretched up to set her carefully in the copilot's seat, sideways, facing out at him through the open door. Not much harm she could do from here when the machine wasn't in flight, she guessed. And it kept her out of reach of wherever he'd stowed her knapsack. Tseng behind her made her neck prickle. She tried to ignore it.

She dragged her eyes across them, as the hideously mismatched non-team gathered below her on the grass, and ended on Sephiroth.

"Alright. Debate. You don't trust Vincent not to set an ambush, apparently?"

Sephiroth shrugged. It was the tiniest motion, but amplified by the great silver bulk of his left pauldron so it was easy to see.

"Okay, you don't trust anyone with anything."

He shrugged again, this time Tifa thought more agreeably. Or she might just be imagining things.

"Do you want to go first? Assuming there's not an ambush?"

"I don't actually care. I just want to ascertain the existence of this supposed expert, and I assure you if no useful revelations are forthcoming I will have reached the end of my patience with your games, Miss Lockhart."

Expert. Right. Well, she hadn't lied. There was that.

"Maybe I really should go in first," Tifa reflected. "Alone. I'll call you in when it's a good time."

Sephiroth shot her a deeply unimpressed look. "And give you the chance to arrange whatever you like, and conspire with anyone who happens to be there? I think not."

And yes, if she got the opportunity to contaminate the source before he got to her, Lucrecia would read as less trustworthy to him. But she wasn't sure that wasn't worth it. "I just don't want either of you shocked to death," she said. "If the other SOLDIER and the Turk come in to vouch that I didn't conspire or set booby traps and you wait outside—"

"No," Sephiroth cut her off. Tifa scowled at the lack of manners—even the crazy bird-horde man living in a cave hadn't interrupted her, and yes her friends interrupted her all the time, especially Yuffie and Barret, but that was different, because of friendship.

But she couldn't exactly blame the dratted man for being sick of being left out of things. Fair had said that no one telling anyone anything was half of the problem with Shinra, and that was certainly an overstatement—secrecy was a sliver of the problem with Shinra—but for him to have gotten that impression it must be a pretty large and evident problem from the inside. And there was Hojo.

"Fine," she acceded, because she was technically his prisoner and couldn't stop him anyway. "We'll go in first together, then. You and me. Boots on the ground. But…put on a mask or something, so you're less immediately recognizable?"

Not that she was sure that would help. Sephiroth had probably come across as different from other SOLDIERs on whatever weird psychic bandwidth Jenova tapped into, even when he was still alive, and considering the weird dreams she'd referenced while rambling the last time Tifa personally had been here, his actual mother might possibly have some kind of special psychic bond to him. Via his evil alien monster mother.

This was such a bad idea. Too bad she had no better ones.

Sephiroth stared at her for a second, then dipped his head very slightly in agreement and turned in wordless expectation to Tseng, who swung himself up out of the pilot's seat to rummage in an overhead compartment for a few seconds, and produced a long quilted cloak with a deep hood, all thickly insulated fluorescent orange synthetics, clearly intended as survival gear in case of a crash.

He slid between the two seats out of the cockpit and waked down the ramp, rather than opening the small door beside the pilot's seat and coming around the nose, which was interesting. It gave Tifa slightly less of a window alone in the helicopter in which to hypothetically lunge over and steal it, though personally she doubted even someone who knew what they were doing could get the thing airborne before the SOLDIERs could pile in again to restrain her.

And they had ranged attacks, anyway.

Sephiroth contemplated the survival garment for just under two seconds before reaching out—his arms were absurdly long; she'd unconsciously expected him to need to step closer to Tseng to reach—taking the thing, and whipping it around his shoulders, where it settled across the sheer bulk of his stupid armor to produce an absolute wall of orange.

The hem would probably have hung around knee level on him if not for the pauldrons, proving one size never could fit all, but due to those it came a few inches short of them. The coat dropped out past that, dark and narrow. His entire body above was a mass of orange fluff, all the way up until a few inches above the cloak closure at his throat, where the fluffy piles of the hood fell away and sleek silver hair abruptly began.

Tifa had to turn away to hold in a fit of giggles, and unfortunately her eyes met Zack Fair's over the hand he had pressed over his mouth, and both of them simultaneously lost control. She doubled up in the softness of her Shinra Company helicopter seat. It felt strange. She'd never laughed all that much, even in the happy times—that was more Aerith's thing. Aerith always had brought out her sense of humor, though—maybe it was Zack reminding her of Aerith?

Or maybe she was just hysterical. "Put," Tifa managed after a few seconds, the violence of her own laughter sending spikes all up and down her bad leg, "put the hood up, Planet, it's not a mask if it only covers you from shoulder to knee."

Sephiroth did not. "Are you quite finished?"

He was asking Fair, mainly, and the SOLDIER mopped his spikes back even though they hadn't actually fallen into his face, and straightened up with his expression stiffly schooled almost serious and said, "Yeah, General. I'm done. Sorry."

Tifa unfolded from her ball of amusement to find Cloud looking somewhat anxious (though whether over Sephiroth's reaction or her sanity she wasn't certain), their mismatched pair of Turks being conspicuously bland, and Sephiroth giving her a very odd look.

"Sorry," she tried, but as it was chased by another giggle she doubted it helped any.

"I cannot decide," said Sephiroth, or rather Sephiroth's head poking out of a giant orange marshmallow, "whether you are afraid of me or not."

"Not when you're wearing that," Tifa decided, and brushed at the front of her skirt even though it hadn't had a chance to get dirty. "It does make for the perfect disguise."

Blandly, he pulled the quilted orange hood up, throwing his face into shadow. This of course failed to make him any more menacing.

Of course, it hadn't actually made him less dangerous.

Tifa felt the laughter die in her, as she looked at him.

She wasn't afraid. Not of him. That was the truth. And that wasn't really because of the orange emergency mantle, or the fact that he'd put it on at her suggestion. Or because he was seemingly human, and to all appearances mostly sane, and had passed up multiple opportunities to murder and torture over the past few days.

She wasn't afraid because fear of monsters had burned out of her a long time ago.

There was nothing left in her that could fear Sephiroth, who was only a worn-out nightmare. All she feared was failing. Was letting everyone down.

All she feared was being left alone in the wreckage again.

"Come on," she said, and dropped, out of her seat and the helicopter at once, took all the weight on her good leg in a maneuver that was already becoming habit, and ignored the pain shivering through the bad one.

She should have taken Tseng's route, she realized, now that it was too late. It would have given her a chance to grab her knapsack. But she needed to keep up her momentum. She couldn't afford to get lost in her doubts, and she couldn't afford to lose the initiative to Sephiroth again.

"Grab my bag?" she asked Cloud, and he nodded and headed up the ramp to do it without glancing at either SOLDIER for permission. Tifa didn't wait for their opinions, either, but once again started up the hill toward the rush of the waterfall under her own power.

Sephiroth paced her, this time, as though concerned she was trying to get away with something. He didn't seem to suspect about the Potion, so he was probably just being generally paranoid. He was less unsettling in the corner of her vision, swathed in orange quilting, less obviously himself, but she still knew it was him, and still disliked it.

Tifa stopped halfway up the hill to rest her bad leg and let the others catch up, and to see if Sephiroth waited for her. He did.

This was slightly annoying, because she'd wanted to resent his not making allowances for the disability he'd caused her, and had been hoping to get out of his line of sight long enough to take her Potion. If this didn't heal right she would find a way to make him pay, no matter what decisions he made about the future of the world, even if it took replicating some of Yuffie's dirtier tricks.

The ones with Poison would only work if he was human enough not to absorb it as healing, of course. Last time Tifa had seen him poisoned, he hadn't been.

"Hey Sephiroth," she said, standing carefully on one foot on the soft sloping grass under the star-studded sky, as the waterfall roared just ahead. "What's your Elemental affinity?"

He peered down at the top of her head. "Are you a teen magazine reporter now?"

Tifa squinted back up at him. Looking up while standing on one foot always made balancing a little trickier, she'd never been able to figure out why. She couldn't make out much expression by the glow of his eyes, but was fairly sure he didn't make jokes, or at least that if he did, they weren't imaginative enough for this to be one of them.

"Do they actually ask that?"

She'd read exactly one article about the man that wasn't a report of his death (which she'd read all of, somewhat obsessively) and that one had been when she was fifteen, because it was supposed to be an article about SOLDIER and she'd been hoping to see Cloud featured.

They didn't get a lot of news in Nibelheim, and of course by the time she was living in Midgar Sephiroth was dead. She might have destroyed a couple of old newspapers for having his face printed on them, even so. "I'd have guessed they'd stick to the hair."

"There are only so many questions they can ask about…the hair." He sounded vaguely gloomy, which was at least better than overtly self-pitying, or outright derisive. Tifa wasn't sure whether he agreed that his hair was ridiculous or was ignoring her insinuation to that effect. "And even fewer answers that aren't approved advertisements. They have to move on to astrology and other rubbish eventually."

Tifa felt a certain morbid curiosity about Sephiroth's relationship with teen magazines, suddenly, but not enough to pursue that line of conversation. "Elemental affinities aren't all rubbish, though," she argued. "I mean, they're hardly as pronounced for humans as they are for some monsters, but lots of people have a knack for a particular type of magic, things like that."

Aerith, being a casting genius, was best with Restore and Heal magic of course and also Holy and water, which didn't have a lot of application normally, but amazing at everything, while Cloud was a great all-rounder but a natural with Lightning. (And, on the incredibly rare occasions a human could harness it such as through certain Summons, Wind.) Nanaki was less human than either of them so his knack for Fire probably didn't count, but Barret was very good with Earth. Yuffie was a very solid caster with all the Elements, but amazing with Command materia.

"Hm. Well. Fire, then," allowed Sephiroth, and Tifa grimaced, the image of him walking away through a wall of flame painting itself over her vision. She might have guessed.

She had always found herself drawn to Ice and Earth, as an adult who handled materia regularly enough to have patterns, and never been sure whether that was an inborn alignment or an emotional bias toward things that were good for stopping burning.

"But not Poison?" she checked, putting her bad leg back on the ground.

"Of course not Poison."

He sounded annoyed. Tifa was pretty sure if Hojo had an elemental specialty it would be Poison, but Hojo was probably the one who'd taught Sephiroth that Elemental affinities were imaginary unless you were a Marlboro.

"Jenova's elemental affinity is for Poison," she said, starting to walk again. "It's a strong one, because she's not human. If you Poison her it only makes her stronger." And hadn't that been fun to find out.

She didn't check behind her to see what Sephiroth made of this information.