fic: eir's tomorrow (ff7) - ch.6, part 1/2

[jukeboxhound_backup]

Slightly revised version.  Short explanation here.

Eir's Tomorrow
Chapter 6 (part 1/2)

Author: jukeboxhound 
Co-conspirator/beta: artimusdin 

FF7 || R || Sephiroth/Cloud || chapter: 11,700 words
The Planet isn't willing to let death take away its greatest weapon. If Cloud can't save the past, then he'll be damned to watch history repeat itself.

6.

Sephiroth dreamed. A field of flowers stretched on forever under a white sky that seemed to press down on him with the sheer emptiness of its expanse. He turned in a circle, wondering what he should be expecting, when he found himself facing a young woman that seemed familiar on a level he couldn't explain.

"Hi," she chirped at him.

"…Hello."

Her eyes crinkled at him in good humor. "Don't worry, you're not crazy."

That wasn't what Sephiroth had been concerned about, but it was nice to know anyway.

"You're thinking about Cloud."

Sephiroth jerked. "What?"

Her smile was sad, her eyes as green as his Mastered Curaga. "You think about him all the time, ever since you were left alone."

"You don't know what you're talking about," he snarled. It took a moment for him to tamp the sudden rush of anger down into a hard ball of ice in his heart. "Cloud was nothing more than the desperation of a foolish child turned into a hallucination by the mako."

The young woman reached up to put her hands on either side of Sephiroth's face. He held himself very still, waiting for her to drop the innocent act.

Her palms were warm.

"Please don't be angry at him," she whispered. "If he'd had a choice, he never would've left you."

Her words struck something inside him that had been scarred over and left to atrophy since he was a child and lost everyone he'd cared about in a single hour. He wanted to break her, wanted to snap her neck for daring to be so bold with him –

But the green of her eyes was expanding and taking up his vision, pulling him down. It was like falling down a well without hitting stone or water, and he could have fallen forever except there was a soft warmth wrapping around him, bringing him close in an embrace that he could instantly recognize.

"Sephiroth," breathed Cloud's voice, sounding shocked and happy and nervous all at once. Sephiroth's dream had become a confusion of color and sensation – there was skyblue and sunshineyellow and creampale tied together with possessiveness and mako and things too complicated for Sephiroth to put a name to. So long as he reminded himself that this was just a coping mechanism for his brain when neuroceptor response during the sleep cycle intensified, he was able to push away the old hurt and lose himself in his angel's presence.

...

When his body finally stopped retching bile, Cloud flushed the toilet and leaned against the long counter of sinks. It was too early for anyone else to be awake, so he didn't have to think about an explanation for why he'd woken up and rushed to the bathrooms to dry-heave his entire digestive system to the porcelain gods.

It probably had something to do with dreaming about Sephiroth (which he often did anyway, even when in Hojo's labs years and years ago) as well as the Planet's innate revulsion for the general. His dream had felt too real, and he'd recognized that particular taste of copper-acid-bittersweet that tended to follow Aeris' touch from the Lifestream.

…Aeris.

The knowledge that she was alive and healthy and living in her church, being watched over by the Turks, still made him smile inanely. For once something had gone right, an important something; if he'd failed in everything else, then at least he had so far managed to do right by her. But her touch in his dreams begged the question: what did she know? Had the Planet managed another miracle, or had it just taken her form because it was familiar to its human WEAPON? Was Cloud just setting himself up for a fall?

Unfortunately cadets didn't have leave to go under the Plate for some time and after his conversation with Commander Gysahl, Cloud was reluctant to risk getting court-martialed so soon.

When his head stopped spinning, he glanced up into the scratched mirror and had to smile grimly. The pastiness of his skin and the bruised shadows under his eyes made him look like hell; he could already anticipate Sergeant Tokka's malicious commentary. With the taste of bile still strong in his mouth, he started making a mental list that included finding a way to get in contact with Vincent. He hadn't seen the former Turk for over a month, since he'd managed to bully his way into the recruiter's office, and the lack of information was making him twitchy.

He also needed to figure out what he was going to do about having First Tsurugi built, he thought, as he left the bathroom and walked silently down the hall back to his dorm. The problem was that all six blades had components taken from the fallen WEAPONs and the Ultima blade itself, and he didn't think the Planet was about to give up five of its WEAPONs because he wanted his sword back.

The bed had gone cold in his absence. Cloud hardly noticed as he curled up beneath the blanket and stared unseeingly at a dark wall, fingers curling around his mother's necklace, knowing he was unlikely to get any sleep before reveille.

(After using Ultima against Sephiroth he hadn't been able to hold the sword without feeling the man's blood running down his arms and under his gloves; it had been reborn in First Tsurugi as the main blade that supported the other five and he refused to let his mother's superstitious mysticism interpret that as anything more than a simple fact.)

He'd only seen Sephiroth once since he'd come to Midgar. The day of the recruits' welcoming ceremony in which they'd been forced through several hours of pompous speeches and ShinRa's posturing, the general had addressed the crowd very briefly before leaving. Maybe the brevity of his speech was because Sephiroth hated public speaking, or maybe because ShinRa didn't want the public to realize how socially awkward the man was, but either way it was always good to show off the prize weapon and remind the recruits of their tiny impossible dreams.

Cloud hadn't heard a word of any of it, honestly. The smooth voice had resurrected all the tangled, complicated issues that he'd managed to beat down into a dull aching knot that could be mostly ignored, or at least endured, for the last fourteen years. Then it had come back, choking him with the sudden intensity, making him so absurdly grateful that the visor of his helmet kept some small barrier between himself and (childgodmine) Sephiroth. With his brain so unexpectedly scattered, his body had locked itself into petrified motionlessness.

He wasn't really sure what he would have done if he had been able to move. All things considered, it was probably for the better.

...

Daylight never reached the slums under the Plate, leaving them in a gloomy, subterranean underworld. The grey half-light was beginning to deepen to a true twilight before Vincent received any sort of contact.

The boy Vincent had originally followed into the refugee neighborhoods sauntered casually through the rusted gates of Sector Four, dressed in a ragged mix of Wutaian clothes and western castoffs that were turned dull brown by a uniform layer of filth. His slanted eyes flickered briefly over Vincent before he continued ever-so-calmly slouching towards Wall Market.

Allowing some minutes to pass, Vincent finally roused himself from where he sat on a crate against the wall with a beggar's cup. The Turk had had many years to learn patience, but hours of sitting in the same position under several layers of greasy blankets, salvaged from a dumpster, was now making his bones creak with protest as he stood. He trailed after the boy, pausing now and then to vary the distance between them and to murmur hoarse pleas at the wealthier-looking people he passed.

The thought of the image he'd been projecting for the last few days twisted Vincent's lips with dark humor.

"Oh, excuse me!"

The gentle voice made Vincent look up from under his unwashed hair. He managed to limit his surprise at seeing Aeris to a slow blink.

Smiling, the young girl held out her basket. "I'm sorry, I really should watch where I'm going. Will you take a flower? On the house."

"…Thank you," he rasped, accepting a yellow blossom with his human hand, and her smile broadened into something as bright and rare as her merchandise.

"It's amazing how the smallest things can make such a difference, isn't it?" She winked at him and disappeared into the shifting crowd, leaving Vincent staring after her. He tucked the flower into a buttonhole in his shirt, casting one more glance in the direction she'd left, and bowed his shoulders once more into someone under the weight of the world.

The boy hadn't gone far, had stopped to chat with one of the shopkeepers. Keeping to the shadows and moving his lips as though speaking to himself (no one ever goes near the homeless and the obviously crazy ones, their footsteps just quicken and their eyes slide nervously away), Vincent watched the exchange grow more heated. It appeared that the shopkeeper was refusing to sell anything to the kid, and from what he could read on the man's mouth it was because the street-rat was too obviously foreign.

(It might be true that anyone under the Plate was a piss-poor scavenger, but that just made them fight more viciously over the scraps.)

Idle philosophical thoughts on hypocrisy, fear, and desperation weren't enough to make the Turk drop his guard. The skin on the back of his neck tightened at the same time the three demonic entities in his head snarled like wildcats, and Vincent was already dropping low and turning under the blow that would have otherwise crushed his skull against the wall, Death Penalty materializing in his hand.

He looked up at his assailant from the cowl of his dirtied cloak, gun pressed against a narrow ribcage. Somehow he failed to be surprised that he – no, she – had dark slanted eyes and the grace of formal training. Without any change in expression, she tugged the last section of her sanjiegun from the wall, leaving a long, narrow dent in the rusted metal.

"Follow."

The Wutaian made the accented word into a sharp command, waiting patiently for Vincent to lower his own weapon. Then she was moving, retreating several paces before slipping through a previously unseen narrow alley squeezed between the high Sector wall and a dilapidated brick building. He followed, automatically keeping a distance beyond the reach of her segmented staff. The deep shadows and overall shadiness of the place kept anyone in the Market from noticing them, or at least caring.

Vincent did manage to catch the eye of the boy he'd followed, who shot him a smirk before continuing his argument with the unaware shopkeeper.

After ducking some protruding pipes he was beckoned through a door and up a grimy stairwell that came out into a large, square room. The plaster on the walls was peeling away from the corroded brick beneath, and the only furniture was a few chairs around a table on the bare hardwood floor. Several Wutaians stood along the walls, watching silently, while a middle-aged man (warrior, Vincent corrected himself, seeing the scar that bisected one of the man's eyes) sat at the table. His hands were folded, weaponless, on the table.

"Hello," said the older fighter calmly, speaking with careful annunciation and only the barest of an accent. "Please, sit down. I promise you that my men will not act unless I say so."

Taking the offered chair would mean sacrificing some of his advantage, but he wasn't really in a position to argue. Vincent pushed back his hood and politely sat down.

A few moments passed in which both men regarded one another silently. Then the Wutaian said, "Your disguise is very…thorough."

It was, even down to the unwashed smell. Vincent inclined his head vaguely. "Thank you."

There was a brief flicker of amusement before the conversation turned somber. "We have been watching you, and we know you are not just a delivery man. Why are you so interested in our neighborhoods?"

"Perhaps it's merely curiosity."

Dark eyes narrowed ever so slightly.

"Times are changing," Vincent murmured. The people lining the walls shifted with varying degrees of anger at his vague reply, as though they thought he was mocking them.

The warrior that faced him, however, was as still as a snake. "Indeed they are. For instance, I do not imagine myself or any of my people would have expected to see a Turk trailing after defenseless teenage boys."

Vincent very carefully didn't allow himself to react. Mentally, on the other hand, he was chiding himself for not having had the foresight to realize that everything about him, from the way he moved to his self-control, practically reeked of Turk training to those who knew what to look for.

"I was once a Turk," he admitted, because there was no use denying it, "but not any longer."

"Oh?"

He didn't respond to the probing tone of that one word. After a moment, the woman that had guided him there hissed, "Once a Turk, always a Turk."

"Once a fool, always a fool."

The older warrior laughed aloud at Vincent's mild retort. "You are a smart one, young man. But smart men are often the most dangerous, and you freely admit to having been a Turk, even if you claim not to be one now. So, what are we to do?"

"I bear no ill will towards any of your people." Despite its softness, Vincent's voice was undeniably firm. "I've no interest in war or cultural politics."

"And yet that is what the winds of the future speak of nowadays. ShinRa has conquered most of the known world. It has destroyed the tribes and clans it could not subjugate. Wutai is the last hope of a free world – and you say you have no interest? Either you are truly still one of ShinRa's trained dogs, or you are more of a fool than you know."

The pain of remembering a time when he really had been a naïve, reckless fool stabbed through his heart. Reaching into his cloak, Vincent pulled out the paper crow that the old woman Yoshida had given him and set it on the scratched table. Then he held the man's eyes and said, "I was killed for my foolishness. My only purpose now is to kill the people responsible in turn. Your war, your politics…the only difference between those and the past are the names involved."

There was no need to mention Cloud, or Sephiroth, or even Hojo. As the fighter picked up the paper crow and slowly turned it in his callused fingers, he no doubt believed Vincent to be just one of the many people ruined by ShinRa, Wutaian and easterner alike, albeit with more training. And like any good commander, he would also know that soldiers driven by personal goals were often the most effective, though also the most likely to go berserk.

"You disguised yourself as a homeless man," the warrior said suddenly, looking as old as any battle-weary general, "and yet for many of my people, that disguise has become their reality. Our homeland has been conquered by gaijin, our temples desecrated for their material wealth, our traditions dismissed as primitive nonsense. We are dragons that have been chained to the earth, diminished into cringing shadows scraping for survival."

The restlessness of the few fighters standing around the room was a nearly tangible presence, thick as the heaviness of an approaching storm. Vincent didn't look away from the warrior, who in turn was staring at the folded paper as if waiting for it to come alive and give him answers to such suffering.

But it didn't, and he shook off the brooding melancholy with a sudden piercing stare at the Turk. "For now I believe our goals to be similar enough to work together. ShinRa's regular army is laughable, but they have the advantage with their SOLDIERs and resources. As a Turk, your help would be invaluable.

"In return, my people will help you with whatever you might need in tracking down your enemies. Within reason, of course."

"Of course," Vincent said, and the man sitting across the table patiently gave him a moment to think it all over. The Turk was confident enough in his own abilities to consider it not worth the risk to enlist Wutaian help. He'd been slowly familiarizing himself with the current day's technology, technology that would have seemed like a pipe-dream merely twenty or thirty years ago, and he had managed to penetrate ShinRa's outermost security within just these last few years of being in Midgar. But at the same time, there was a reason that even Turks worked in pairs, and he couldn't deny that an extra set of hands or eyes could often prove the difference between life and death.

And as for the Wutaians themselves? Vincent carefully looked around the room from beneath his hair. The refugees met his gaze with either careful ambiguity, hidden hope, or open hostility. None looked away.

As though seeing the decision in his face, the older warrior nodded briefly. "We will be in contact with you."

None of the refugees moved as the Turk stood. Vincent was halfway to the door when the commander spoke again. "The crow is a herald of death and war. What do you think of that?"

"That it merely proves me to be human. Nothing more."

...

Loneliness was something that had followed Elfreda throughout life like her own shadow, a subtle, insidious curse that she'd learned to deal with or risk going crazy. Crazier. The birth of her precious baby boy had made her feel like they were two of a kind, but now that Cloud had left her to go to the city she found the loneliness creeping back over her with a vengeance.

She had two weapons, however, that she hadn't possessed before. One was Fenrir, who seemed to understand that an important member of the pack was missing and tended to cling closely to her nowadays, lonely in his own right. She had only let a hand fall to feel a cold nose or thick fur.

The second was knowledge: knowledge of her son, of his extraordinary soul.

My Lady Frigg has blessed me, she acknowledged for the thousandth time since that painful, torturous birth that nearly took the lives of both mother and newborn. She's blessed me more than I ever thought possible.

But Elfreda wasn't stupid. She'd learned that such precious gifts always came with a high price, but just as she would never trade the scant few months she'd had with Cloud's father and the following heartache, she would gladly pay whatever it was that had given her Nebel, her son.

Summer was fading into winter, bypassing autumn for the steadily worsening storms so characteristic of the region. By then the fire that had consumed the ShinRa mansion was gone, everything reduced to ash and black, skeletal remains that crumbled under the wind or a firm touch. Anything still usable had already been salvaged by the time the rains began, so she was surprised on an overcast day to hear a knock on the door.

Expecting to see Brunhild, as the healer was the only person who visited her on a semi-regular basis, Elfreda was caught flatfooted at seeing one of the village's young men on the step.

"Hello, Aldric," she managed after a moment in which he seemed just as awkward as she. "Did you rip your cloak again?" The boy really was the clumsiest thing while out fishing or gathering firewood, Elfreda had repaired a fair number of his clothes over the years in return for some of his mother's tasty soda bread.

He flushed a little. "Uh, no, Missus Strife. Mayor Lockhart's sent for you." He puffed up his chest a little, evidently proud to be considered one of the 'big boys' and trusted to be given errands by the mayor himself. Maybe Tifa would even stop thinking about martial arts for once and look in his direction! Unfortunately for him, this honor was entirely lost on the eccentric woman.

"Oh dear," she sighed, "will you tell John that I'll be along in a bit? I've a new blanket in the works for Brunhild, I swear her boys never seem to grow up and stop tearing up the old ones – "

Aldric opened and closed his mouth a few times in surprise. "I was told to get you straight away, no dawdling for nothin'."

By now Fenrir had lumbered out of the old cloth scraps that served as a nest by the warm hearth and made his way to the door, peering out from behind Elfreda's skirts with grey eyes glowing like the sun behind rain-heavy clouds. The Nibel wolf's ears slanted back a bit, and that alone was enough to make Aldric stammer.

"P-please, ma'am, he's w-waitin' with the others at the m-mansion."

"The mansion? What on earth is he wanting to do with anything up there?" Elfreda sighed. "Fine, go tell him that I'll be there as soon as I can find my boots. If you've chewed them up, Fenrir, I'll swat your tail."

Aldric took off as soon as the door was closed, thankful that he hadn't had to wait for the crazy lady and her son's freakish monster. "Them Strifes ain't good business," his pa always said while his mum nodded along. "Backwards, the lot of them. Won't have nothin' to do with good ol' science, always having truck with that superstitious bullshit instead."

Elfreda, meanwhile, grumbled to herself about men with too much money in this town for their own good while she pulled on her boots. (They'd been half-hidden under Fenrir's bedding, one of the heels scored with teeth-marks, and now the wolf was sulking under the kitchen table with a stinging rear end). Walking stick in hand to keep herself from tripping in the thick mud, she set off up the trail towards the ruined mansion with the wolf trailing along behind her, his nose in the scraggly weeds.

Unsurprisingly Mayor Lockhart greeted her with an expression like he was sucking on a lemon. "One of the men found something I thought you should see."

"Unless it's a torn jacket, John, I don't see what I can do that no one else can," replied Elfreda, oblivious to the way his jaw tightened at her failing to call him by title. With Fenrir distracted by rabbits, her bony fingers instead idly toyed with the leather wrapping on her stick. Curious blue eyes looked around the mayor's tall frame to the eerie silhouette of the mansion's charred remains.

"It's a bit more serious than that," he said with forced patience.

"Then why don't you just tell me so I can get back to my sewing?"

Some of the men standing around in their overalls with mud-spattered tools shifted in irritation. Before Lockhart could snap at her, someone stepped forward and gently took Elfreda's elbow.

"This way, if you please, Mrs. Strife."

It took her a moment to place him as the odd Wutaian man that had wandered into Nibelheim some years ago and never left. She thought she remembered Cloud saying that he was practicing with Tifa under the man's tutelage.

"Your name is Zangan, isn't it?" she asked as he led her through the muttering villagers. "Cloud mentioned you. You must be a very nice man, if my dear Nebel was having business with you, and very skilled." She didn't mention that Cloud, who might have been a child in body but was marked by the Norns, didn't need training at all. She didn't want to sound rude.

"Thank you," he smiled at her, and she returned it.

"I don't suppose you know why I'm here? I was just about to make a lovely dumpling stew for myself and Fenrir, Cloud would never forgive me if he came back home to find his companion starved halfway to the grave. Perhaps you'd like to join us? It would be no problem at all, and I always keep a good stock of ale."

"I'm honored by your offer," said Zangan, and used a soft touch on her elbow to make her stop walking, "and I just might take you up on it. However, I think Mayor Lockhart would be displeased if we didn't finish our business here first."

"What – oh!"

Elfreda hadn't been paying much attention as she talked. She was mountain-born and her feet could find footholds in the most treacherous ground instinctively, so it took a few bemused moments for her to realize that she was standing in what looked like a cellar or tunnel below the mansion's skeleton. Zangan had guided her downwards to the center of the room, part of which had collapsed beneath the weight of fire-cracked stone and timber, and they were now staring at the grand centerpiece that dominated the space.

It was an altar.

"Oh," she breathed, completely forgetting the man beside her and the villagers that had followed them down into the caverns. Her skirts rustled softly over the rock floor as she moved forward slowly, reverently, finally kneeling down to run her careworn fingers over the grooves carved into the rock. The markings were deep but faded, suggesting that at one point in time this stone had endured the elements aboveground. Elfreda was sure that it would have been magnificent.

"What is it?" Lockhart called to her from the cellar entrance. Elfreda didn't hear him. She could read the runic writing but the glyphs were more archaic than any she'd seen before, and it didn't help that in some places they had been completely worn away. The stone was cool and smooth beneath her fingertips.

"What is it, Strife? What are we looking at here?" Lockhart repeated testily, and the interruption of her thoughts made Elfreda twitch.

"I'm a heathen, not an Ancient," she replied with an uncharacteristic snap, shooting a glare at him over her shoulder.

No one noticed Zangan hiding a discrete smile. As Lockhart visibly bit back a retort, the Wutaian asked calmly, "I think what everyone would like to know is that the village isn't going to be destroyed by a heretofore unknown materia, Summons, or some other force of magic."

Elfreda glanced around the room, noting that the remains of several coffins sat at the edge of the altar's steps, and almost against her will her eyes were drawn back to the few words she could decipher with relative ease.

Miðgarðr – the human world. And a weapon, though she couldn't make out the exact wording to know what kind. And really, the main question she had at this point was why this relic would be in ShinRa's cellar at all. "Whose coffins are those?"

"They're empty," Zangan answered, as the villagers seemed to content to let him continue the role of peacemaker. Elfreda frowned. She had never agreed with the idea of hiding away a loved one's corpse like a filthy, dishonorable secret, much better to send them to Hel with a purifying bonfire, but it didn't seem right to leave these empty caskets just lying around to rot.

Turning back to the altar, she stared hard at the carvings, but no more understanding magically leapt out to her.

...

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