They were not in good shape when he got to them.

They had been chained to the wall, so that they could sort of sit with their arms above them but neither stand nor lie down. Elena slumped in unconsciousness; she was covered in blood, and through the blood he could see the blotches of burn marks on her fair skin. Tseng was awake, sort of—his eyes glassy slits—and it looked like he had been mostly roughed up with something blunt. He was badly bruised, holding himself like maybe he had internal injuries, and there was something peculiar about the angle of his left leg.

To his credit, it looked as though he'd been working on his restraints for as long as Vincent had been distracting his torturers. But the bolts held securely to the wall, and he hadn't made much progress.

The bronze claw was awkward at best, monstrous at worse, but it did have its uses. Tseng was still trying to focus through the haze of pain when Vincent crossed the room in three long strides, gripped the manacles, and tore them clean out of the wall. He contracted his claws, and the metal squealed and popped free of Tseng's wrists.

". . . What are you . . . ?" Tseng asked, his voice bloody-raw and hoarse.

"Later. Here," Vincent said, popping the seal on a potion and passing it to Tseng. Tseng's gaze slid to Elena, but he didn't try to be the hero. He knocked it back, his eyes closing as it took effect.

"They will be back at any time, and I cannot handle all three of them at once," Vincent said. The potion must have helped, because Tseng's gaze was clearer—it was evident that he was feeling a great deal of pain, but he was making consistent eye contact now, and the glassiness had faded. "We need to move quickly."

"I doubt—" Tseng's voice cracked, and he swallowed before continuing "—that Elena is in very good shape."

Vincent glanced at her again, and said, "No."

"I'm not going without her," Tseng said. He said it quietly, in his damaged voice, but firmly. So much so that Vincent wondered whether the two of them were involved, or at least sleeping together. But—no. No, that wasn't quite it, was it?

And that more than anything took Vincent back, because he'd had a partner, once, a lifetime ago. And he hadn't been sleeping with her—hadn't even been tempted to—but he never would have left her to be tortured. Because that was what your partner was, was the person you could trust with your life, even if you trusted no one. The world could go hang, the company would sell you out if the price was good enough, but your partner would chew through a mile of thorns to save you, just because they were your partner.

When had he forgotten that?

"I wasn't planning on leaving either of you with them," he said, which was the truth. Had either of them been in unmoveably bad condition, he would have killed them. A bullet to the head was a far better fate than a slow death by torture; he had spent enough time in Hojo's hands to know that. But he didn't think either of them was that far gone, or at least not yet.

Tseng nodded briskly, and then winced like that had been a bad idea. Probably they'd hit him in the head, then, although probably they hadn't hit him in the head too hard, not if they wanted information out of him . . . .

He wrenched her manacles out of the wall first, then brushed the materia in the butt of Death Penalty. The first hit of Cure was just enough to bring her out of unconsciousness. Not much happened with the gashes on her skin, which led Vincent to believe that the bulk of the magic was occupied with handling internal injuries. Elena made a low, agonized noise, but the first coherent words she said—before she even opened her eyes—were "Fuck you, you bastards, I'm not talking." Her voice was as hoarse as Tseng's. Then her eyelashes fluttered, and she said, "Oh."

"Can you stand?" he asked.

She licked her cracked lips. ". . . I don't think so," she admitted. "I'm . . . pretty faint." No wonder—she was still bleeding openly from some of the gashes. He hit her with another round of Cure, and she shuddered as the largest of the gashes began to close. "You're not a hallucination," she said.

"No. Can you stand now?"

"I think so." She pushed herself to her knees, and then grabbed his arm to haul herself upright. She was unsteady—unsurprising, with the amount of blood she'd lost—and Tseng's leg was definitely broken. Vincent hit him with a dose of Cure, in the hopes of stabilizing his leg enough for travel, but there wasn't time for more—the remnants could be back at any moment.

He thought briefly of provoking a transformation. Any of his demons could have carried them easily. But with the smell of blood and burnt flesh heavy in the air, he wasn't sure he trusted even Galian, with whom he had coexisted longest, let alone the more unpredictable of his demons.

"I can't carry you both," he said. "Can you walk, with help?"

Tseng closed his eyes and nodded. Elena said, "I think so."

It took a long time to get out. Twice he had to leave them, circle around the base and create a diversion to lead the remnants astray. In an open fight, they would lose, and badly; it was important to keep the remnants running in confused circles, far from Tseng and Elena.

The Galian Beast was useful there—no one could make a diversion like a half-ton of fur and claws and appetite, and he could give it a rare opportunity to run wild. When he was sure he'd captured their attention, he returned to his own shape and slid back to where he'd left Tseng and Elena.

They were making slow progress—extremely slow, step by uncomfortable step, because Tseng couldn't put his weight on one leg, and Elena was still dizzy from bloodloss. He hooked Tseng's left arm and Elena's right arm over his shoulders, and half-dragged, half-carried them to safety.

Things got a lot more complicated once the initial problems of how-to-escape-the-remnants and how-to-get-back-to-his-home-alive were solved.

It took sleep, food, and several rounds with his mastered Cure materia before either Tseng or Elena was in any fit state to talk. He didn't spend much time the house, which was really only his by dint of squatter's rights; many places had been abandoned after the disasters of the year of Meteor, and he used it as a home base and a place to store his few possessions and that was it. So he had nothing to offer them but soup from a packet that was mostly salt, but they sucked it down like it was ambrosia; and he had nowhere to offer them to sleep but a pair of dusty, creaky camp cots, but they fell immediately asleep.

He spent most of an hour trying to kick the place into some semblance of shape almost without thinking about it. When he did think about it, he felt foolish. It wasn't as if they were guests, or friends, or even really acquaintances. Most of the little time he'd spent in company with either of them, he been trying to kill or maim or at least inconvenience them, and while he didn't carry the grudge that Barret—or even Tifa—did, they weren't people he had any reason to be trying to impress.

Which raised the question of why he had gone so far out of his way, and into considerable danger, to rescue them.

His instinctual response was that he wouldn't have left a rodent he was vaguely fond of to the mercy of those monsters, let alone people, however he felt about them.

(But he wasn't really, truly, one hundred percent sure that was true. Or, perhaps, it was true, but it wasn't the entirety of the truth.)

He occupied himself for the rest of the day making actual food—there were some elderly onions and half-sprouted potatoes in the house's cellar, and his marksmanship was more than adequate for shooting a rabbit to go in the pot—which occupied his attention sufficiently to keep it off more questionable topics. He healed them twice more while they slept, watching with dim satisfaction as Tseng's leg knit itself together and Elena's gashes shrank, closed, and healed over. There was no more odd bubbling in her breath, and after the first round Tseng stopped sleeping half-curled on his side as if protecting an injured abdomen.

When they woke, he brought them bowls of the watery stew, silently, and they both ate with rapt fascination, as though the food were excellent rather than bland and rather full of gristle—well, they had surely not been fed while they were being tortured, and healing, even when aided by materia, often engendered an appetite.

Then Tseng put his spoon down in his bowl, carefully, and said, "Why did you come for us?"

"I didn't expect any objections," Vincent said, hedging and well aware that he was doing it.

"It's not an objection," Tseng said, deceptively mild. "Just a question." Elena didn't say anything, but she set her bowl aside and looked at him. Her eyes were unyielding dark and difficult to read—nothing like as difficult to read as Tseng's expression, but still a world more difficult than it would have been to read her two years prior.

"I would not happily leave anyone to the fate that awaited you with them," he said, which was more true. They looked at each other, and he was reminded, almost violently, of a thousand similar glances that had passed between himself and his own partner, when he had a partner, when he was a Turk. When you worked closely with someone for a while, you could learn to communicate with the tiniest signals—the angle of a raised eyebrow, the corners of your lips slightly compressed—so that you didn't even necessarily know you were doing it but could convey quite complex messages to one another. Plus, it unnerved everyone else, and added to the Turk mystique, which was in and of itself useful. He and Tala could come to consensus as to how to handle a particular target without exchanging a word, once upon a time.

Once upon a time, in another life, a world ago —

"You went to a lot of trouble over us," Elena said finally. Not quite contradicting him, but leading him along. Well, he knew that game, and he wasn't going to play it. He wasn't a Turk anymore. They had no hold over him. He made a noncommittal noise, and turned abruptly to go.

Behind him, he heard Elena complain, "I feel naked without a gun." Tseng said something he couldn't quite make out and she laughed.

And it took him back so much that he almost shouted 'If any of my guns go missing, I'll hunt you down,' as if she were Tala or Jon and not a stranger whose only connection to him was that she wore the same uniform he had worn thirty years prior.

He would be glad when they were gone.

In the end he gave them guns, and justified it to himself that it made no sense to go to the trouble of rescuing and healing them only to let them be killed anyway outside his doorstep. At any rate, they were his worst guns.

"Thank you," she said.

He said nothing. Her mouth turned up at one corner, a knowing smirk that made him itch with annoyance.

"You hate it that you still feel something," she said, "don't you? About the Turks."

"Don't pretend you know me," he said, cold, low.

"I don't," she said. "But we are what we are."

"What I was was not what you are now," he said, and to his own ears his voice was deadly poison. "When I was a Turk, we kept our full names, we didn't skulk nearly as much, we never did anything like dropping the plate on Sector Seven—"

"But you wore the suit, and you did terrible things in the name of the company, and you killed, and you would have died for one another," she said.

He sighed. He felt suddenly very old, very weary. "What are you trying to prove to me, Elena?"

"Nothing," she said after a moment. "Nothing. But you're the oldest Turk still living. I'm the youngest. And here we are."

He felt a little tremor when she said that. Damn. Damn her. Damn them both.

"That's all," she said. "Thank you for the gun." And then she holstered it, and went to join Tseng, who was checking their store of ammunition.

He stood for a long time, watching them go, two slim shapes in blue, until even his sharp eyes could not make them out anymore.