A/N: Next chapter ought to be out in July, as it's nearly finished too; feel free to shower with helpful abuse in order to get it done. I am clawing to get my life back on track, and that includes this, and I live in hope that some of you are still interested out there in space. I humbly ask apology; the world got in the way.

PS. Send cookies.

But That Was In Another Country

vi. here is the evening

When I think about it now I guess nobody had a plan - not a real plan, not then; it wasn't like the Heartless were lead by anything like Sephiroth and his Ye Olde Bande of Coughing Clones were lead by anyone, no corporation to smash like Shinra, nobody to aim for. Back then it was simple. Kill Sephiroth, stop Meteor. It is pretty hard to get confused with those instructions, even if you are being lead by an amnesiac with a military obsession for sweatervests, it was what we wanted. There were other wants mixed up in there, like Wutai, like Aerith, like the Planet, but all roads lead back to Sephiroth and a big space rock.

We were all running crazy. Which is probably why, just like back then, we found ourselves with Cloud Strife heading up our column, leading us through the dry airless dark, carrying Reeve on a tarp stretcher, Barret coming up behind so he could strafe every time a pack of Heartless popped! in midair and came joyously galumping out and ricocheting off rocks in their eagerness to munch on us. Tifa strapped Marlene to her back so that she couldn't be grabbed every time our little straggling line was ambushed, and it was me dragging the makeshift stretcher and bumping the Dear Leader on every single rock from there to the Junon City, yearning for my lost and abandoned love so many miles from my position: my boobytrapped chest full of materia that I had left in the false bottom under my bed with my childhood diary and Mister Tootles, my stuffed elephant. Knight of the Round had been set jauntily in Mister Tootles' arms, as was appropriate.

In fact, all around, we only had a handful of materia that wasn't already junctioned in our weapons: rifling through everybody's pockets we only found two crappy Fires so shiny and new you could basically only light matches with them or make the Heartless a little warm, a decent Restore I had hidden in my underpants, the crappy health-to-magic materia that still irritated me just by existing, a mastered Ice, and -- drumroll -- in Reeve's pockets? A Chocobo Lure.

(Thanks, Reeve. Thank you for your Chocobo Lure. Thanks.)

Of course, he was so high by that point that he didn't give half a damn what we found in his pockets. Barret had set what he could of his leg, but it hadn't been a clean break. It had been a messy break. The splintered pile of his thigh had been strapped down and splinted and every so often Tifa would stop and give him an injection, sweating with having to do it so quickly and fumbling with the needle, strap pulled tight across the other arm and searching frantically for the vein. Generally there was no vein. Reeve's veins had filed for abuse and escaped. Eventually she had said "Goddamnit," and started fumbling with his pants and at that point I turned my virginal eyes away, because Tifa giving Reeve shots in the ass was not something I could ever unsee. What with his ass and our six whole materia (including the mighty awe of Chocobo Lure) and Marlene and our snail's pace through a landscape we didn't know any more, and being attacked every five minutes, we weren't making a hell of a lot of progress. Junon should've been four hours away, on foot. At the first twenty-four we weren't anywhere, getting nowhere fast, scrabbling like rats.

The first night we stopped. We had to stop. We were bleeding and exhausted and Marlene wept all the way, just continuously cried, and nobody could settle her or calm her down. It was actually Captain Crazy of the Nuts Brigade who figured out the only way we could rest - deep in the forest and kicking out at the tree roots, where the ground sharply sunk down into a depression in the earth, suddenly leaving the head of the column and approaching me and sticking his hands in my pockets.

"RAPE," I said. "NO CONSENT. Oh Gawd get him off of me I do not want to have his baby."

"You've got a baby fixation," said Tifa, with the ghost of a smile.

The sticking had turned to rummaging. "Less talking, lady. More saving."

"Here," said Cloud, and he pored over the materia -- came up with the cool yellow marble of the mastered Ice, scuffing his foot around the perimeter of the depression. He spat, as though for luck or as the ritual start of some mystical process, and then he literally iced around the area - set up a frosted hanging curtain from tree to tree, in that space only about ten foot square, froze the magic overhead so that it was wall and ceiling and sealed with a thick rime of frost. Our breath started to mist in that space as, in a casual afterthought, he punched through the surface as an airhole so that we would not all die in a pile on each other.

"You're doing a fake Vincent," I said. My breath came in large, wet puffs, like ghosts. "You're getting rid of our body heat."

"Yeah, I heard of dat." Barret. "S'called fuckin' hypothermia, Strife. No use in hidin' when we're all damn dead."

"Risk death by ice," said his Royal Batshit, "or go face definite death by everything else."

"You rememberin' we gotta little girl here?" he snapped back hotly. "She can't survive this shit! You, me, we coulda done it, but Reeve's in a bad way and Yuffie ain't much bigger than our Marlene!"

"I am touched," I said. "Touched and offended."

It was Tifa who was silent; Tifa who, with nervous fingers, opened up the packs and started pulling out every single scrap of clothing we'd jammed in there, every single thing that was made of fabric. My teeth were starting to chatter at this point, and Barret took Marlene down from the cradle (where she looked extremely pissed off) and just stuck her wholesale in his shirt like it was a pouch - then she just peeked her little dark head out from his neckline and looked even more pissed off, though warmer. It was nearly totally dark, the kind of dark where you can't see in front of your face, and Tiff threw down a couple of the snap-lights which gave off light but not heat and they just kind of sat there glowing neurotically and not doing a hell of a lot. I think she was just frantic with gladness that Cloud was actually doing something constructive for once, had had an idea that didn't involve standing in front of the bugs and letting them chomp us as we had resigned and fatalistic looks on our faces, which had been the entirety of his ideas before. We clumped together in the blankets with the snaplights and it was a huddle with me in the middle -- me and Marlene and Reeve, who slipped in and out of consciousness, and when he was conscious gave five minutes of animated mumbling before breaking into pain. Barret and Cloud bookended us and Barret and Tifa warmed themselves by having a rousing argument about where Tifa went in the grouping; and Cloud would've just sat outside and gone blue unless he was shoved in there bodily, blanket around his shoulders and his head, eyes half-closed with his eyelashes all frosted up.

All in all it was pretty freaking surreal. When we did it later and the novelty of being a Yuffiesicle was off I would lie there among the bodies and I would remember the snowfields near Icicle Town, the village in line for the Most Unoriginal Name, when we used to have to camp out in just all that blinding snow and go red from the reflection off the white, and make a fire at night with all the wood we were hauling around. (Know what? Icicle Town was horrible, and that was horrible, and I can't even remember why we were there other than the fact that Cloud had discovered he liked to pose sexily on a snowboard.)

"Six hours," said Tifa. In the snaplight dark her face was illuminated green, eyes squinting with the cold, smarting her skin. It was so cold it hurt to breathe, but outside the makeshift icehouse it was silent, no frantic greasy pop!s that heralded another snack attack. "We can have six hours."

That was how the first day went.

At the middle of the third day, Reeve ran out of drugs.

Normally I would have just called that no big deal, since an unconscious and slightly moany Reeve Tuesti did not usually excite or distract me, but it turned out that an unconscious and slightly moany Reeve Tuesti without drugs was a screaming Reeve Tuesti who lapsed into shock and convulsions. It probably wasn't just the broken leg, even if at that point it might've been a birthday gift to amputate the thing for him, because his brain was still chocobo soup after being connected to a Cait Sith who died -- I mean, hell, I don't know how that works, nobody told me how it works, he never got a chance to tell me how it works. I guess he had been more careful when Cait Sith was about to get squashed getting the Black Materia. It wasn't like he didn't have seventeen million robot suits scattered around, because I guess he had wasted most of his twenties peppering them over the continent. Anyway. What was important was that Reeve was dying; was that we'd been ambushed like nineteen times; was that we were nowhere any closer to Junon, no smell of the sea, all around us a blackened and alien landscape that wasn't quite the outskirts of Junon City any more. It wasn't just the little black fleas getting at us any more: little behatted Heartless had started their adorably cute and terrifyingly nasty attacks. Barret called them the Reds, Yellows and Blues, because he had no imagination whatsoever.

"He's slowing us down," said Cloud Strife, who had been doing so well up until that point.

Tifa's teeth chattered; we were locked in another ice hut, mainly to try to figure out what to do with Reeve than for any hope of a nice nap, Marlene all buttoned up in her shirt instead due to the incomparable warming powers of her cleavage. Marls at that point was seriously going to grow up with a syndrome. "We're taking him with us," she said. "We are. Taking. Him. With. Us."

(Tifa Lockhart: Perfectly Gritted Teeth, just like Grandma.)

"I hope you don't mean that we're taking his dead body with us," sez me, "because I have seen this before, he'll stick his tongue out and froth for a while and then he'll start to breathe heavy, then his eyes will pop and he'll -- "

As though to kindly illustrate my point, Reeve started to hyperventilate. Both Barret and Tifa looked pretty wild around the eyes, as they were used to being mental health nurses, not real health nurses, and it was no good trying to shake Restore at our Dear President -- all it would do would be to fuse his unset, shattered bones with his meat, clot and screw around with the wounds already inside him, do nothing for the pain. If it just healed his leg and made him a cripple that would've been fine, but healing materia was indiscriminate. It would have simply killed him.

"Hold it," said Barret, and he stood up and shook off the blankets from our little huddle; he took his massive heavy gun-arm and belted at the ice-wall until it gave, breaking a hole for him to go through, stepping out before anyone could do anything. Held down by Marlene, Tifa couldn't do anything; she just hollered "Barret!" as Marlene shrilled Papa, Papa, and as counterpoint to this Cloud kindly and lovingly sealed over where Barret had just left.

Those were great days.

"Goddamn you, Barret Wallace," muttered Tifa in our huddle, with a pale face and red chapped cheeks from cold, "goddamn you."

"He'll come back," I said, "it's Barret, he always comes back, he's like, he's like a bad gil piece -- "

"Keep quiet," said Cloud, who was in our huddle, tightening it up like he'd closed over the hole that our gunner had left from. We'd only wasted one snap-light because it wasn't quite night, but his mako-blue eyes glowed in the half-dark, luminous and that strange green-blue like the depths of an iceberg. He wasn't quite a leader who struck fear down with his comforting presence. He was more like a leader who you knew looked at every single member of the group and noted down who would be best to eat if the push came to shove, and sometimes I wondered if we'd end up just eating Reeve, since Barret had like all this gross gristly muscle and I was way too skinny to devour despite my tender youth. "Conserve your heat."

The sixteen long minutes between Barret's leaving and Barret's coming back felt neverending; I spent the entire time with my eyes fixed at a point just above Cloud's nose as he sat, unblinking, unmoving, counting all the lines on his pale flaking lips, the smudges beneath his eyes. He was getting a little stubbly, fine transparent fuzz on his chin and his cheeks. He would probably just look crazier with a beard, like some guy out in a cabin in the hills waving his sword and swearing that the end times were near. Marlene dozed off, but when the ice hut shook as something heavy whacked at the side, she woke up from whatever unpleasant dreams she was having and shrieked.

It was just Barret (and the slow exhalation of Tifa's breath when she saw his arm emerge through the battered whole was a bit like a prayer), and he had brought back Presents.

"Loco weed?" she said, relief turning to bewilderment, "you brought back loco weed?"

"This is loco weed territory," said Barret, letting all of it tumble green and slightly sticky from his jacket, "and hell, it's better than goddamn nothin', ain't no pain relief unless you want us to bop him over his damn fool head."

"But it's loco weed -- "

"You want him crazy or you want him dead, woman?"

I was interested to see if, once he took it, he would do what chocobos did after they accidentally ate loco weed, which was spin around in lazy endless circles until they fell over -- but after they put some under his tongue all he did was stop convulsing, face greyish but his breath coming back to normal, lucid enough after ten or so minutes to take little sips of water from the bottles that we had. Reeve responded well to crazy drugs. Then again, he'd been taking them for years. I have my unscientific suspicions about what the hell his brain drug to control Cait Sith had been. Then again I could be totally wrong and it was probably, like, hyper-potions and sugar water, and he was just nuts and schizophrenic to begin with.

After that Reeve was hilarious.

"I have always thought that Elena was the perfect height for a woman," he slurred, being dragged along in the stretcher behind me as we went once more into the darkness, "not too tall, not too short. She had brown eyes. Having brown eyes is a good thing to have when you have blonde hair. It is unexpected. I mean, look at Scaaarlet. Scarlet had blue eyes and she was the biggest skank in the department. Elena had brown eyes and was sweet like the sweetest aaangel. Why did she like Tseng. Tseng... was... a... bore. My poor Elena. Poor poor Elena."

"This is the funniest thing I have ever seen," I said reverently in the first three hours, just to remind everybody of how, in fact, extremely funny it was. He pitched his voice into a low, baritone growl, a sort of thunderous monotone doom-and-gloom prophecy voice, and tended to draw out his vowels for no apparent reason than that it amused him. "I feel so privileged to have, like, been present for this."

"I would have tapped dat," said Reeve. "I would have smote dat like an unmerciful WEAPON."

"Too much info, brutha," said Barret. "Too much info."

"There's still time for us to date, I am considering this." Though I still carried the head, Marlene's daddy had picked up the other end of the stretcher so that Marls could sit on Reeve's feet and ride along too; she had rebelled against being strapped to people's backs, being a grown-up woman too dignified for such things, and our plan of attack was that if ambushed we immediately surrounded the stretcher. "I am finding you more attractive than ever, even if you are like forty-nine and old and you have a big nose."

"Don't encourage him, Yuffie," said Tifa wearily, trudging in front of me. "He needs his rest."

"I'm encouraging him? I'm not encouraging him. I don't think he's hearing a word I say -- "

"I can hear eeeevery woooord that comes out your moooouth," pronounced Reeve with slow, ponderous difficulty, "and you are jaaaaailbait."

"I love you. I love you, I love you so much."

"Elena's dead now," he said, changing angle so quickly I pretty much got whiplash. "She died under my command. I take full responsibility at the inquest into her killing. My incompetency lead to the Turks' demise and the fall of my empire: I plead guilty."

(This was less hilarious.)

"Get some shut-eye, Captain President," I said, hauling him up behind me, my wrists aggravated after hours and hours of carrying him in an awkward position. My shoulders hurt. "You are kind of going into being a downer now."

"I have never seen two people who loved each other more than Reno and Rude," continued Reeve, in his sad Vincent Valentine monotone.

"Now this is getting suspicious and gross."

"Don't think I didn't think the exact same thoooooought, Yuffie Kisaragi. Or is that 'Kisaragi Yuffie'. I don't care. Who cares? Not me. I do not care. You are toooo yoooung to understand looove. Love that is naked, or otherwise -- "

"Oh my Gawd. Okay, now you can feel free to shut up."

He did, though possibly just because he was tired of talking more than he listened to my commands. We continued on in silence, which was peaceful if less interesting, or at least less terrifying than peering into the drug-addled portions of his brain. After a little while he presently said, "One one one, six two eight, five alpha one," and lapsed into silence again, which was kind of bizarre. I think I have never become alcoholic or into drugs simply because of Reeve and his loco weed and his injections, and the secret fear that I would be even worse if I stuffed them down my attractive ninja gullet. Whatever works. There's a lot of things I don't do because of Reeve; I don't look at the insides of clocks. Who wants to look at the insides of clocks? Clocks kind of creep my shit out, and it doesn't matter what the time is any more because Leon knows exactly what time it is (always too late, that's great Leon) and I'm pretty sure you calculate time by when we last had breakfast, and none of it works.

There's a lot I don't do because of Reeve.

At the end of the third day we heard the sea. We thought that the crashing of the black tide was pretty much salvation.

Junon City was a lost city. It was a crappy shell of a city back during the Sephiroth years, a military city with most of its manpower all gone as Shinra scrambled to do whatever it was doing back then, which to me all seemed like mainly pissing in the wind and not doing anything other than building really big guns. Like guns the size of a city. Not that I am not allowing that guns the size of a city have a kind of style you don't often get, but they'd taken away the Sister Ray long ago and dropped it on Midgar and made Junon look kind of naked and embarrassed. Anyway, it was crappy back then; and it was undeniably worse now.

We sat on the clifftops that sharply dropped down into the city -- the coastline was fogged up with thick, ashy mist, the enormous cradle that had used to hold the barrel lost somewhere out to sea. The salt-encrusted gunmetal grey of it, covered in comforting seagull shit, was black and dark now, lurching out of the cliff and then abruptly lost in the fog. The tower where it sat wasn't visible to us, either, out to the north and the dark where we sat on the peninnsula. Below us, Junon still burnt.

The smoke from the fire had been lost in the close neverending dark, but we could see it now; the reek had hit us a few hours before we made the climb up top of the hill, of wood burning, of steel and plastic, and as you looked down below every so often a muffled boom in the red glare of crumbling buildings announced that something else had exploded. Junon had been built in tiers, in the huddled arms of the cannon frame, and some of the tiers had collapsed in themselves and choked up the serried ranks of skyscrapers with rubble. For a long while we huddled up there unmolested with Cloud on his belly looking down into the wreck with some binoculars, unmoved by every new dull thud and boomf, and I sat next to Marlene as she ate an energy bar and with small-girl delicacy picked out every single raisin.

"Back in the ol' AVALANCHE days," her daddy said lowly, right next to me, "way back then, they were some mean motherfuckers; real mean, real war mean, befo' my time. I saw this clip once -- one of 'em ran into a Shinra branch building, just some bank or some shit, they didn't care jes' so long as it had the logo -- packed to the fuckin' gills with, with explosives an' shit, shrapnel. Didn't make it too far 'fore he pulled his trigger and the buildin' came down, whole street came down, shit! We jes' used to set bombs, blow up the stations, they wanted to blow up the whole damn world. Y'see the cameras on that street in the clip -- nobody left, like there was nobody left on the Planet, hell! God damn mess."

"Worse than this?" I said.

Barret fixed the smoking city down below with a long, level look, hefted his gun-arm to a more comfy position in a flurry of tiny clinks. Eventually he said, "Those little piss-streak bombers di'n't know shit."

(Marlene finished picking out the unwanted raisins and, with a flick of her skirt, dumped them all over the side. They tumbled down into the rocks below like pebbles, too light to make a sound.)

"East side's taken," said Cloud, never looking away from the binoculars. The heat reached us up here, drying us out until we were sweating bullets, rubbing smuts out of our faces as we watched the gulf. "Airship moorings gone, elevator's gone. The city was shut-in to the Heartless, high walls and shadows... would've been easy pickings. The mako'll keep it burning for months."

"Thus goes the cradle of my government," said Reeve dreamily, still on the stretcher, arm-deep in one of the old PHSes that didn't work any more. I'm pretty sure his fingers were stuck in there. Every so often a little spark would rise up from the machinery and die on his jacket-arm with a sad little fss of momentary electricity. It kept him happy and busy and not giving us a running monologue of his life story. He was profoundly stoned. "Thus goes. O unhappy city, your king died long before."

Tifa eased the binoculars away from Sniper Strife's unwilling fingers, laying down beside him and watching the city burn away. Her mouth was no longer the taut line that it had started out as; just resigned, just cold and calm like she was doing some sort of mantra on the inside. Another boomf; from far away there was a terrible metal creak of protest from the gun, a sort of steel groan. I could see her thoughts without her having to voice them. Should have gone south, her white knuckles said. Should have gone to Fort Condor.

"No airships left," she said, more to herself than as a question. "No airships left at all. What about the hydroplanes, or -- "

"All in the hangar did burn," said Reeve tranquilly, "caught on camera, confirmed by my three right hands. All in the hangar is gone."

"We'll never leave by air." (Cloud and Reeve were a little like a duet at that point, though at least Reeve had the excuse that he had neat loco weed in his bloodstream and had started to smoke it wrapped in rice-papers that Barret had found in the supplies, fingers shaking a little as he touched the cylinder to his lips. Cloud's excuse, as ever, was that he was a dick.) "We will never cross the ocean."

"I need to get into the city."

Surprisingly, neither Barret nor Tifa struck this down. They stared into the smoky night and the gunman just fiddled with the compartment on his forearm and reloaded, pulling Marlene back from the edge like a mother hen nudging his chick away from the precipice, as she munched thoughtfully on the rest of her energy bar and made faces at the taste.

"I refuse to believe that there's something down there we can't use," said Tifa.

"Amen," said Barret. "Not with Shinra bein' the paranoid sonsabitches they were, hell! No, we're goin' down, girl, there'll be somethin'. There's always somethin'." His hand strayed across to her shoulder, briefly; just a touch, fumbling a little with her cheek, her hair, so quick that it could have been a flaily accident of hand-placement. He repeated: "There'll be somethin'."

"I pray to a multitude of heathen gods that there will be toilet paper," I said, and that was that, there was no more compelling reason to go.

We were attacked on the way down three and a half times (the last Heartless swarm consisted of two slightly confused-looking Reds, shot down into greasy pops! by Barret's dangerously itchy trigger finger before they could even think about Fire). The city, though, was dead. We hiked around the cliffs down the steep hill that lead to the beaches, the ashy mist plastering our faces with little grey and black bits, stifling and hot. In the end -- after a serious bitchfight between Cloud and Tifa and Barret -- we rappelled down to the upper tier, even Marlene tied to me because I was a freakin' ninja, Reeve harnessed to Cloud because we didn't like him or something. Junon was a death trap; but the foundations outside had been built solid, built to last mako meltdowns and assaults and whatever the Planet could throw at it. Nonetheless, we didn't even try to go on the west side, which was a smouldering shit-heap, and we entered Junon City through an emergency door up top for the guys who had used to fix the air conditioning in the office building.

The west side was the furthest away from the mako plant, which had been down near the shoreline, and the building we were in was dark and dank and smelled like spoiled things but was not melting underneath us. It had been an office building. All the glass in the top floors had exploded in the windows in a million tiny pieces of clear shrapnel, and the air was thick with smoke. The walls looked warped and peculiar, probably because the water sprinkler system had gone off some time before and had dried out. There was still an inch of water in different parts of the building, little surprise fun-lakes, where the pipes had burst.

As we went down the stairs, clawmarks scored deep holes all the way down for two full floors. It was not a place I would have wanted to throw a pizza party.

But there were no Heartless. The city was empty and devoid of them, even if they had been flinging themselves at us enthusiastically in their invisible patrol groups all down the hill. The mako and the fire. Or maybe the fact that the city had a humungous empty gun-cradle about to precariously topple down and squash us all flat, and that only the stupid and the desperate travelled into it. We were desperate. We were also stupid. We were also tired, too, bone-deep tired, and I was a little contact high from Reeve's ceaseless chocobo blunts. I got all excited over the fact that the thirty-third floor yielded a broken-down candy machine and a drinks machine, and as we all piled into a dingy office lounge I spent my time with my arm up the bottom trying to pick the mechanism from inside. Reeve spent his time with the insides of the wall-phone, laid on the couch like a beautiful maiden and getting his fingers stuck inside that instead.

Junon had been a military city. Cloud and Barret sat down with the first-aid kits that had been left on each floor and raided them for the good stuff; some handguns, some bullets, some shitty low-grade Restore materia that nobody had ever used, and mysteriously the world's largest supply of fanny packs. There was no electricity generator, but the water ran (it just didn't run hot). As they happily sorted through pill packs by romantic candlelight we all went to the women's bathrooms, setting up the torches so that we were showering by flashlight. We washed with hand soap all over our bodies in the dark and the water was as cold as the soap was skin-strippingly acid, but some of our natural grease came off and we immediately lost five pounds. Marlene and I stood there, naked and wet and suspicious with only little hand towels to dry us, as Tifa came wearily towards the mirror with a pair of scissors she'd ostensibly stolen from the kit. It was the first time that I had ever seen her naked. It was awe-inspiring, like seeing a mountain up close. (Two mountains.) I felt weirdly unshy, when back in the days I had always changed with you and Tifa in the room under six sheets and in five seconds flat when you two had cavalierly wandered around topless and punched each other and pulled each other's hair in a friendly and, now that I think about it, really lesbian way.

"I don't want to join this club."

"What club, Yuffie?"

"You are naked and coming towards me with implements; I am hella flattered but I decline, I -- holy Da Chao you bounce a lot."

Marlene giggled wildly at this. Tifa made a face at me and stuck out her tongue, which Marlene giggled further at; and in the gloom, illuminated only by the piss-thin little beam of the flashlights, she looked at herself in the mirror and she sighed. I remember how tired she looked, how worn, lips so pale that they looked nude in her face. "I'm doing this for all of us," she warned, "brace yourselves. We can't go on like we've been going on."

I let out that silly sound everyone makes when they see another person get hurt -- that kind of hissing through your teeth -- as Tifa scrunched up her hair in one fist and, with the scissors in hand, sawed artlessly through her heavy mass of dark hair and dropped it in the sink abruptly like it was a rat. She chopped at it, the long bits away from her face, and Marlene watched with big eyes as Tifa sat down on one of the nasty plastic office chairs and shivered a little as I finished the rest. We cut it short; her own eyes were dark and luminous and huge as I left her hair cropped like a boy's, that strange chocolate-brown colour that in some lights came out nearly red. Without saying a word she left it to me to gently comb back Marlene's snarls and do the same for her, short dark duck fluff that curled into cowlicks at the back, and the little girl stared in the mirror in numb awe as I ducked down and let Tifa cut off my ends. My hair had been lingering in lank hunks around my shoulderblades. She cut it shorter than I'd ever liked it before, because my hair had a horrible tendency to stand on end when it was short, and also because in my opinion I looked like someone's younger brother hoping desperately for puberty to kick in.

"I'm a boy," said Marlene to the mirror, oddly calm.

"No you're not," soothed Tifa, "no, you are the prettiest girl I have ever seen in my life, and you take that back."

She shook her head mutely. "I am a boy," said Marlene. "My boy name is Dinosaur. I am now Dinosaur."

Dinosaur looked at us placidly as we packed up laughing.

"Well, there are worse names." There was one last grimace as shorthaired Tifa (who somehow managed to look chic and fragile with her new hairstyle, whereas I looked neither chic nor fragile) prodded at the pile of brunette hair we'd left in the sink, which looked like some kind of creeping bathroom monster. Hair also scattered around the sinks, the floor, sticking to us in unlikely and unseemly places. But there would be no more greasy tails down my collar, no more combs getting stuck in Marlene's hair, no more Tifa's ponytail getting everywhere when she did not want it to get everywhere. "Are you sure you don't want to change your mind, Mister 'Dinosaur' Wallace?"

"No, 'cause I already picked it, and no take-backsies."

The Wallace family was a harsh one for take-backsies, obviously. "Well, my boy name is," I said, "is. Is Gordo. I am now Gordo."

"Gordo?"

"Everything is a let-down after 'Dinosaur.' And it's like my dad but with an extra consonant. The R stands for rockin'. What's your boy-name? Reveal your secrets."

Tifa looked in the mirror, down at her bountiful chest, and then in the mirror again as she dried Mar -- Dinosaur's damp little head. "'Unconvincing'," she said.

She had that right.

We were still picking bits of hair as we dressed in gritty clothes and went back to the lounge, taking the flashlights with us, where Marlene waited patiently by her father's shoulder as he packed bullets into a bandolier. Eventually she had to joggle his shoulder and say, "Yo," as he looked up and swore a couple of times. Then he looked up at Tifa and swore another couple of times, and seemed to be satisfied that appropriate male action had been taken. "Marlene," he just said, perplexed. "Mar-lene." ("Papa, my name is Dinosaur.")

As this new boring Wallace family argument raged on I had about five seconds' worth of hope for Cloud as he looked up at me and Marlene and Tifa, fell on Tifa and raised his eyebrows just once: but then he ruined it all by merely saying, "Good," and going back to restuffing our medical satchel. Reeve said nothing at all; he was busy taking the batteries out of the phone and doing what looked like illegal things to them. I'd already tried my cellphone; it wouldn't get any reception, and nor would anyone else's. I snuck out and took Barret's PHS with me hallway even though we'd all sworn blind not to separate, and I held it in the crook of my arm as I silently stole every last roll of toilet paper from each cubicle.

rrrng rrrng rrrng

Vincent never picked up. More importantly neither did Junon Pizza, and Junon Pizza no longer answered its phone at all but just gave me the series of beeps that heralded no connectivity, so my reign of terror and free food had obviously ended. I kept sweeping my hand through my hair to feel the texture -- it was somehow a little prickly now, a bit fuzzy -- and I wrapped my headband around my forehead anyway and I sat in the dark and talked to the silence on the phone. There wasn't even an answering machine or I would have filled it up long ago; I just talked, rambled, caught crazy-ass Clouditis. Soon I would be talking to Vincent out loud in front of everyone else and using lots... of... crazy... pauses, and stroking Reeve's stubble intently as I looked him deeply in the eyes for six hours without blinking. Not that our righteous leader had done that yet, but maybe he would, and I could watch.

"I know this is weird, me still talking to you," I said in the dark. "I know you're not gonna connect and your cellphone probably isn't even on at all or you dropped it in the sea, I don't know what you meant by 'going dark'. I am not hip to your crazy spy lingo, Vinnie. I just wanted to let you know that, that we're out, and I feel really stupid talking to this phone but I also wanted you to know that it kind of makes me feel better. That is the point, making me feel better. I keep on -- I keep on thinking about our last chess game, and I know that in answer number seven I was like 'rook to C15' but I have changed my mind. Anyway, I wanted you to know that my new name is 'Gordo' because 'Dinosaur', um, that was taken, and, uh. I hope you made it to Cosmo Canyon okay because I keep on thinking about you not making it to Cosmo Canyon okay and it ruins my ability to make witty quips and smiles and Gawd I am talking to you like you are my imaginary fucking friend. This is stupid. I feel stupid doing this. I feel more stupid doing this with you."

I hung up with a rattle.

When I brought it back to the living room with my arms also coincidentally piled full of toilet paper (which was disappointingly sandpapery and not at all soft, not like the nice stuff President Shinra had filled his secret bunker with) Reeve's paw shot out and he yanked the PHS away from me slyly without asking first.

"Don't you do that shit," said Barret angrily as he propped himself up, loco weed cigarette hanging out his mouth as he started deftly prying up the back with his everpresent screwdriver. "We only got so many of 'em, Tuesti!"

"You have to let me have it because I am dying slowly but surely, inch by inch," said Reeve, jabbing in our general direction with the cig, "so shut up and stop being such a bitchy bitch bitch about it, AVALANCHE. God, why didn't I get stoned more during high school? I was a scholarship student and I received twenty swirlies a term, fifteen percent more swirlies than other kids. I am so not afraid of the police right now. -- Fuck it, I should have just gotten high all the time instead of studying and rewiring the school security cameras and never getting laid. This PHS is weregild for my lost youth. Anyway, I'm the goddamn President. Did that never mean anything to anyone. Who cares if I never got legally elected by my proper constituency..."

(Barret let him have the PHS if he promised to shut up.)

We decided by vote that we could get five hours' worth of sleep: the lull of being in a building again, with walls and ceilings and floors and no light, was too familiar and comforting to all us molemen. I kept forgetting that just three days ago we'd still been deep below the earth in the Shinra bunker eating bad ham, because time moved differently, sort of a quick-quick-slow. Cloud repeated in an endless monotone "If we stay here, we will die," but seemed a little swayed by Tifa's curt argument to take sleep where we could "fucking get it." (We had all stopped trying not to swear in front of Marleneosaur, even Tifa, because the little girl had taken it upon herself to be our moral compass and give us a pinched, disapproving look every time we said a rude word and sorrowfully gazed at her father every time shit! left his mouth. It probably gave her something to do, anyway.) They stripped the cushions from all of the chairs and sagging smoke-smelling sofas and made a bed in the printer room, because Marls had started coughing fretfully from all of the stuff in the air, and Cloud refused to go in but lay out flat outside the door in what was probably a slightly sweet show of bodyguarding. Or being nuts: he laid the Buster Sword out flat by his right side, between him and the door, hand on the hilt as he closed his eyes and lay like he was dead. I didn't know any more.

I couldn't sleep. I sat in one of the stripped chairs close to Reeve and ate a pile of candy, feeling empty, washed out, like I'd been plunged clean of my insides and filled up with some kind of packing foam. He didn't sleep either. I watched his grazed fingers skim over the insides of the PHS, pry things up with the screwdriver and rewire them again somewhere else (and then pick them up again endlessly and wire them somewhere else, just to prove that he wasn't doing anything useful) and chipping it against little boards on the insides. The loco weed let off a too-sweet, slightly oily smell as it burned.

I remember his stubble, and the cuts on his cheeks; his bleeding fingernails, the uncomfortable arch of his leg propped up on the couch arm. He worked with a flashlight wedged in the cushions above and candles on the floor, flickering and pooling wax on the bit of grille Tifa had stuck them in, fat ivory sticks. I sucked on chocolate-covered mints until the chocolate melted away and left chewy mint bits on my tongue, which I carelessly stuck up in my teeth.

"Are you really dying, Reeve?"

"Dying is just a transitionary process," he said, his fingers never stopping their flight, wire to wire. "You could say we're all going through it at the moment."

"Are you scared?"

"Loco weed, scientifically known as k-tethylamine, inhibits the portion of the brain that normally stimulates fear and adrenaline reactions." A few more wires were teased out with infinite gentleness. "I fear nothing, pain nor death. Sucks to be you, Kisaragi!"

"I'm scared and pathetic. Give me a hit."

He exhaled patiently. "Only Kisaragi would try to bum my drugs," he said. "No. I have built up a tolerance due to taking it six times a day. You would be an agitated mess trying to have sex with the table lamp -- "

" -- grossness -- "

" -- and basically you'd look less cool than me."

I recognised the lyric swing of his voice, the lighter tenor, that he kept slipping in and out of. Sometimes it was Reeve's dry tones; and then there was the other. "That's mondo difficult, Cait."

"Back atcha."

We sat there in the dark as I tried to pick chewy mint bits out of my teeth, sucking hopelessly as he fiddled with his wires. "Do you know," I said after a while, "I have never been drunk. I have never gotten high. I have stolen a lot of stuff, but it was for patriotic reasons, so it doesn't count. I have never been to jail for exposing myself in public. I have never had -- I have never had sex, what's with that. Don't tell anyone but seriously, what's up with that."

"Your personality," said Reeve, and he flipped the contraption in his arms over and began working on the other side. "I don't know. Why you're asking me, I cannot say. -- Say, is this a hamhanded request for me to take your virginity? Don't know about you, but I'm seriously not up to it, Yuffster. Not even if I wanted to, which I'll confide in you that I don't. You look like a boy hooker at the moment. Reno, he carried off 'boy hooker' with style. You just kind of suck."

"This is the worst conversation I have been in," I said, in some awe. "This is the worst conversation, maybe ever, that anyone could ever be in."

"Take my advice." Back to the Shinra department head then, who tossed the stub of his hand-rolled cigarette into the grille, where it tipped sad little ashes to the floor. Both hands free now, he twiddled at the mesh-board of the PHS intently. "Life is short. Life is cheap. Embarrassment beats out regret. We're in transition, Kisaragi; if you have unfinished business in this life I suggest you do it now. Just not to me," he added reflectively, "because I am nearly forty, and therefore more than old enough to be your father, and would go to the bad hell."

"I hope you die a thousand times; maybe a million."

"Life's a bitch, Yuffie, etcetera, etcetera."

I rustled the bag in my lap. "Do you want some peppermint candy? You probably have some major munchies. This is good stuff. It sticks in your teeth and you can't get it out. It's stuck in there maybe forever. When I close my teeth my jaw kind of sticks in a minty-fresh trap of despair way, it's pretty awesome."

"No, but I'm charmed you offered."

"What did you want to do, Reeve?"

For the first time, he stopped working on his mish-mash monster of wires and electronics, the gutted PHS and the gutted clock and whatever else he had amassed, rested his head back on the cushion and sighed. It wasn't a you are so annoying you are harshing my buzz sigh; it was the sigh of someone who had had a very long day, and was a little defeated, the sigh of someone who just wanted to go up to bed and go to sleep and wait for the weekend. "I wanted to rebuild."

(I think that out of all of us, none of us had any really heroic goals; maybe Tifa and Barret had a while back, with AVALANCHE, wanting in their hot and fiery activist hearts to make a difference in their slum. But then things got muddled up for them and they fought now because they'd always fought, they never sat back and let things happen to them. Cloud fought for himself, because himself had been a person he'd never really known anyway, and Vincent fought because he wanted to be forgiven. Cid had fought as a middle-finger to everyone, everywhere, to the stars and the sky, and Red had fought to prove -- prove something, anything. I'd fought for Wutai, and also because I was badass.

Reeve Tuesti had fought for a dream and for the people, for the future. Out of all of us, his prize was older, more fragile, more ephemeral, and gave him nothing except the chance to roll his sleeves up and get to work. And in his own way he'd been fighting much longer than any of us. You have to be a pretty good person to fight for so long and so hard for other people who just hate on you all the time. Better than you, even: you gave your life in the form of you dying, and I know now that that dying is easy. He gave his life in the form of twenty years of hardcore bureaucracy and written reports.

Also he gave his Chocobo Lure. I still think that's pretty hilarious.)

I woke up from an uncomfortable sleep (naked head syndrome; my neck didn't have anything to warm it) a couple hours later to Reeve's contraption making a whole heap of musical beeping noises. Since I had been pretty convinced that the thing he'd been working on was just something to keep his crazy drugged-up hands occupied so he didn't pull his hair out, I was impressed just that it made crazy beeping noises. I should've had way more faith in his ability to make a computer out of, like, two wires and a lemon. I was still half asleep when Cloud got up from his bed on the carpet and came to deal with the beeps: he kept his sword at the ready as he stood in front of Reeve, the candles all burnt down but one, just a gleaming stick and mako eyes in the darkness.

"... still ready for transmission," Prince Electronics said, in and out of my consciousness, "making their way west for three hours... only four responded, weren't more than six on this continent anyway."

"... what's it..."

"... transmitting, Strife, ... keep your pants on..."

More beeping. At this point I roused myself fully from my beauty rest; Reeve looked like shit on a stick, eyes bloodshot, hands shaking a little as he laid back on the couch and kept his thumb on his machine. He kept on flicking down a little dial that was making rhythmical beeping noises, a pattern of them, his finger on another switch as he stopped and waited for a new succession of interesting beeps. He looked exhausted. He seriously looked nearly dead. Dead but somehow triumphant: he coughed in the darkness, a deep wet racking noise. As more beeping came, he looked exhilarated.

"No way but water," he said.

"Five people can't man that."

"Four robots is a start. Why do you have to be such a whiner."

Cloud did not respond to that. He just said: "It's still in dock?"

"Don't know if it's got juice, buddy, but we can only pull miracles out of my ass every couple hours. This ass is not a magical insta-miracle dispenser."

It was always horrifying watching Cloud going from creepo-style still to all in action, and he did that then. His mako eyes half-closed as he marched over to the flashlights, the packs, pulled up his own and threw me mine straight in the face before making a beeline for the other door. Reeve-Cait just relaxed back, sunken, a little relieved, thumb still intermittently doing the beep orchestra as I fumbled to stand and pull on my socks. I was shoving myself into my boots as well when I heard Barret's holler of "Submarine?" and I mentally prepped myself for hours and hours of underwater vomiting. It was joyous.

"You are the best schizophrenic cat-man-robot that we have ever had," I said, hopping over to Reeve with only one boot on, and I bent down to kiss him full and noisily on the mouth. (He made strangled noises and his eyes flew open and afterwards said weakly 'Oh God, Kisaragi, bad hell,' but I always translated his sad misery as him having a seriously erotic experience. Also all the loco weed he'd done kind of made my lips numb afterwards for half an hour which maybe translated as my first daring to do drugs, so that was an experience perk for my sweet, sweet lovin'.)

Going down in the darkness was kind of an escape. My heart hammered in my chest and I held our Marleneosaur on my back as we went down stairwell after stairwell. The lower we got the warmer it got, and the blazing daylight fire when we got down to street level was also kind of like a celebration; rubble everywhere, Gawd, rubble and the not-far-off crackle and groan of the fire, the sharp smell of mako when it was burning and the heat. I did not give half a clinical shit. It felt like the first reprieve we'd been granted since, since it all started, beautiful wonderful Reeve and his beautiful wonderful submarine, and not one Heartless in sight. The city was dead: there was nothing they cared about. We had a free run picking over the crumbling and caved-in streetways down to the dock area, the tunnels down, and boaty underwater freedom.

We'd tied Reeve to a chair and just dragged him along that way, hefted by Barret and Cloud between, running without being chased as fast as we can to the seafront. As we made our way down the tiers the slow-smoking fire got worse; I put my mouth to my sleeve as my eyes watered, as Marls buried her face in my hair, as we wheezed our way to triumph. It was so ridiculously easy. There was a momentary hiccup as we reached the seafront entrance and tried the keypunch lock over and over and over again, but then Tifa -- drunk on hope and four days of not a lot of sleep -- got a slightly crazed expression in her eyes and kicked the doors in until they were crumpled metal. It was probably the haircut.

The big tunnels down there had always been for the transport vehicles to drive through, to each dock, wide and still with the pilot lights running down each side glowing like little lamps. We were met with the first Cait Sith at the fork of the first tunnel, bouncing out on his Mog: a portion of the Mog had been burnt off and showed the metal frame underneath, pockmarked with scars, which made him look more than a little nightmarish. The Cait sitting on top was singed. The little crown that usually sat on his head was kind of melty.

"Voice recognition: Reeve Tuesti," said our President from his office-chair throne, voice raspy from the smoke. "Password: beta six three, nine nine four."

"Gotcha, Boss," said the Cait Sith, and lead the pack as we filed after him.

"How many of those do you have, Reeve?"

"At this point I can give you an answer which might worry you, Miss Lockhart," he said, with eyes shut, "or I can lie."

The flood-gates for the tunnels were locked, but Cait Sith's gloved fingers ran over them with unnatural swiftness and the mechanism groaned as the doors opened for us. It was like going out the Shinra bunker again, same model, same doors: but this time it was a little less of the crushing despair and a little more of the budding hope. The other three Cait Siths met us waiting in front of the submarine, attentive and whole, and I felt more affection for the sub than I ever had. My heart swelled with fondness and pre-ride nausea watching it sit there in its little lock.

The Cait Siths conferred amongst themselves before opening it up and letting us pile in; it smelled like dusty old air and neglect and I chose to translate this as smelling like Destiny. Barret settled Reeve in the center, where he leant back in his chair in obvious exhaustion, the Caits all working around him in creepy fourfold concert as the sub came to life. Cloud closed the door behind us all with a slightly foreboding clang to shut us all in. As he tightened the lock and activated the seal, three of the Cait Siths moved themselves back to distribute themselves in various parts of the submarine that I did not care about, my main interest being an old trashcan that would be my Friend for the rest of the journey.

"What's our fuel?"

"We have three options," said the first Cait Sith. "They are: Costa del Sol, Costa del Sol, and also Costa del Sol. Pick one. Pick any one."

"Costa del Sol."

"A wise choice!"

Tifa was gently undoing the straps that tied Reeve to the chair, mindful of his splinted leg, and I put Marlene down to settle herself in a chair as Tiff transferred Reeve to one of the slightly comfier squashy station chairs at the front. He smiled at her, nearly drunk with sleep: he beckoned her down and whispered something in her ear before nodding off nearly immediately. He had done his duty.

She had a slightly bizarre look on her face, running one hand through her short fine hair and then running it through again for luck, so I had to ask. "What'd he say?"

The look was turned to me, quizzical, and she shrugged her shoulders. "He told me he was 'adamantly not a pedophile.'"

"He's good people."

"Why are you hugging the trashcan?"

"Why do you think I'm hugging the trashcan?"

"Guess we're headin' to Costa del Sol," said Barret, and with a great sigh he too dropped his pack and settled down in one of the station chairs at the extremely cramped front, leaning on the back of it to look at Cloud. "Let 'er rip, man, c'mon."

Adding to the bizarre and crazy euphoria of the day, the blonde had put his sword down next to the pilot's chair and pulled himself into it and he was looking at Barret with a funny expression. I realised that this was a funny expression because he was actually looking at him with an expression. It was not much of an expression; it was more just a kind of flicker around the mouth.

"Golden shiny wire?" he said.

Barret looked at him as though he had just said toast rockstar buttercup, which would have made exactly as much sense as what Cloud had just said did, and with a little more emphasis in his monotone Cloud repeated "Golden shiny wire," as though talking to a very stupid child. All I knew is that the big dark man stared at him and stared at him and then busted out laughing, low husky velvet laughter like I hadn't heard since back in Kalm, and that Tifa fussing with Marls in her chair had stopped and was looking up as though her heart had stopped.

"Yeah, yeah, Spike," he said, "yeah, this is kinda like that." Then he said: "Asshole."

(I never got that.)

When we got into the ocean everything was dead.

Twenty minutes in, all still and silent in the water, was when it happened: was when the radar started going crazy, blip blip blip blipblipblipbliblibli in a mad cacophony. The submarine lurched as Cloud drove us hard to port, as I threw up for added emphasis in my trashcan, as the lights went down and a klaxon started to wail. It was Tifa who pulled herself steady and stumbled over to the portholes to look, and gave a cry of such wordless horror that it stopped me mid-puke and I went over to see too.

It was not a sea serpent: it was a many-tentacled thing, larger than the Highwind, a crazy jester-striped mess of black and purple and there in the center of the tentacle mass was the symbol we'd seen on some of the others, the bizarre broken heart-sign, waiting for us amiably as it reached out another tentacle out towards the sub. My knees locked, mouth still hot and sticky with bile, as that tentacle came so slowly towards us, as I gripped one of the railings as we swung again and rocked wildly as it glanced against the far side.

We would have died there, genuinely died there, and that was when Cloud took his hands away from the controls: picked up his sword, bizarrely, ready to die there too, because when all that water came rushing in we would be crushed and drowned by the pressure. We'd never used that precious Underwater Materia: it was still sitting with Mister fucking Tootles who I was seriously beginning to resent. I had figured it would have been a good trick for parties or something, I'd never thought it would be useful -- ready for death, Cloud anyway, standing up at the help and braced to not go down with the ship. But far to the left something came in a frenzy of bubbles -- launched itself into the monstrous Heartless wholesale, a huge unnatural contraption of green, easily three times the size of the sub if hilariously miniature compared to the monster.

"You're late," said the ex-SOLDIER, faraway, "and the Planet doesn't care any more."

Tail raised, glowing scarlet at the center like a vengeful heart, Emerald WEAPON attacked. The water boiled around it as it fired glowing gold beam after glowing gold beam at the beast, which pulled away momentarily as though stung, tentacles all curling in on itself as though ready to propel away. The lost guardian jerkily raised its arms, all blue and yellow lights, and fired a volley at the monster that turned one of the tentacles into a goopy black mist of blood and guts. Tifa at this point was screaming "Go, Cloud, just go," and he wouldn't, and hand to my mouth I lurched over at the same time Barret was trying to pick up a sobbing Marlene who'd been flung from her chair and was bleeding from her temple. I spun the wheel away again and we shot forward.

As I looked back the WEAPON had been caught within the mesh of the tentacles, thrashing like a caught chocobo as it fired over and over and over again, endless, with the monster beginning the slow process of categorically pulling it apart. It started with one arm, which came off with an explosion that rocked the submarine again, and then we were forward, forward, forward, away, and I never saw the end of that fight.

I don't think the Planet won it.

Barret had his daughter in his good arm and had just folded himself over her, cradling her as she wept, rocking her in his arms and I could see his shoulders were shaking. "Shhh, baby girl," he was saying, "shhh, honeychile, shhh, darlin' thang, all safe, all gone, fo' ever, always."

"I'm n-not scared," she choked. "I'm a b-boy and, and I-I'm not s-sca-scared."

When Tifa pulled herself away from the porthole I thought she was going to scream at Cloud again, cracking her knuckles over and over like she did when she was afraid, because she was afraid, because Marls hadn't learnt that calling yourself Dinosaur Wallace and being a boy didn't mean you were incapable; I saw that Reeve had been awake the whole time and simply sitting in his chair, the loco weed giving him a strange waiting look on his face, unmoved by the experience, calm. Tifa cracked her knuckles again as Cloud settled himself in the captain's seat again.

"How do we get through this?" It was a whisper, and it was a plea: it was a plea to the man who had once stood and guided us from the helm of the Highwind with Cid, to the man who had once apparently said 'Let's mosey,' with no sense of irony or shame, to the man who had made the thousand slashes, to her best friend. She hadn't asked him of that, of anything, tried to talk to the old Cloud for a very long time, had lost him a while ago. There was nobody else in the room but him, for her. "Where are are we going, what do we do now?"

"We'll travel to die with Her," said Cloud with quiet faith. "She would have wanted that."

She punched him so hard that she knocked him out cold.