Tifa could think of a dozen things she'd rather be doing right now. If she stretched herself , she could probably think of two dozen. She was waiting for the Turks instead, and watching Kalm trying to go about its business; everyone was clustered in groups, refugees, Kalm citizens, Wutaian refugees, and all looking suspiciously at each other. Soldiers had broken up a brawl earlier.
The nuns called in their children, and Barret and Marlene went back to the gatehouse for dinner. Yuffie and Nanaki raced by, Yuffie carrying a few small fish; Nanaki's muzzle was soaked. It was a good thing he could feed himself; Kalm couldn't have fed him for more than a day. Kalm wasn't going to be able to feed most of these people much longer. Vincent had disappeared after talking to her, but whatever he did, it wasn't her problem. Yuffie probably was, even if the brat insisted otherwise; she'd been disappearing for hours at a time and was either smug or angry when she showed up again.
Rude wasn't with the Turks when they finally came out. Reeve looked tired, Elena alert, and Reno sauntered along as if this was Midgar. Tifa moved, and both Turks caught the motion; Elena nodded, and apparently told the other two to go on ahead.
"Vincent talked to you?"
"Yes. What do you know?"
She could see the Turk weighing what, if anything to say. She'd finally decided to just ask directly, as if she had a right to know, after discarding everything else. Elena nodded. "Fine. Come on."
The direct approach paid off after all. She should use it more often.
She'd been expecting Reno and Rude to leave trails of dirty coffee cups, cheap pastry wrappers and burnt-out cigarettes everywhere; the ashtrays and the wastebaskets were empty, and no coffee cups in sight. Elena walked over to one of the desks, sorted out some papers, and handed them to Tifa. She leaned on the desk while Tifa read them, then took them back when she was done. Not that she was likely to need to read them again; the words were burned into her brain like dragon-fire. Hindsight put all the pieces together, but she'd had no reason to think about it then, and quite a few to dismiss it out of hand.
"How long has it been?" She wouldn't ask 'are you sure?', and she couldn't get anything else through her closed-up throat.
The blonde shook her head. "There aren't any dates, but I think it was while I was in hospital after the ... incident ... at the Temple of the Ancients."
They never had figured out where Elena had gone, or what had happened to her afterward; Tifa decided she didn't care and tried to figure out the timing. She'd been captured when they tried to rescue Aeris, and then she'd been in that Junon hospital. Otherwise, in towns she'd always shared a room with Aeris and Yuffie, and then just Yuffie; Yuffie slept so lightly she sometimes complained about Tifa turning over. Hojo would have had a hard time finding them in the wilderness, much less doing whatever he'd done.
"Junon," she said slowly. She'd been sick after that, not before, and she'd been unconscious for a long time.
Elena nodded. "Hojo wouldn't take a chance on you being able to fight back."
"Yes," she said, her throat still closing up on other questions. " Did you - your eyes. You got Mako treatments?"
"Yeah," the Turk said. "Not up to SOLDIER level, but I got them."
"I got drenched in Lifestream, but I'm not sure it helped," she said. "The second time, when Lifestream rose, was better." Too much information, and she didn't trust the Turk that far. "I'd better go," she said, before the Turks could come looking for Elena.
"Rude's looking for someone to get rid of it," Elena said, locking the door behind her. "You might want to talk to him."
Her face probably gave away a lot more than she wanted it to; she mumbled something and escaped before Rude met up with Elena. She wanted to explain this to Rude about as much as she wanted to explain it to Cloud.
It was late, and everyone was probably hungry, hanging around the house waiting for her to cook. Again. Well, maybe Yuffie had cooked those fish; she usually did cook what she caught, then Cid would be complaining that the fish were half-raw, and Yuffie would tell him to go catch his own fish. It was too bad there wasn't a pizzeria in Kalm, or a restaurant other than the overcrowded pub. There wasn't that much food in the house, though Barret was with Marlene and Miss Elmyra, and Vincent didn't eat much.
Cid was chain-smoking and pretending to read an old magazine; the house smelled strongly of cigarettes, less strongly of Nanaki, and not at all of cooking. Cloud was rummaging through the kitchenette, and no one else was around.
"Missed all the shouting," he said, setting down an onion next to the salt and pepper.
Tifa sat down at the table and sighed, glad for the distraction. "What happened?"
Cloud opened the refrigerator. "Cid pissed Yuffie off, Nanaki tried to calm 'em down, and then Yuffie took off. Dunno if Nanaki went after her or just took off."
Tifa frowned and interpreted that to mean that Cid had expected to be served and Yuffie had gotten pissed instead of just blowing him off. Nanaki had probably just wanted some peace and quiet. "That figures."
"Eggs and butter," Cloud said, taking them out. "Even I can make scrambled eggs. Want some?"
She almost got up to do it herself, and then decided that she was tired, and didn't have to. "Sure."
Cid stomped out of the house and slammed the door behind him. Cloud shrugged, dug out a skillet and some plates. He chopped up the onion and sauteed it before adding the eggs, and made some toast. The eggs turned out a bit drier and saltier than she liked, but pretty good.
"I didn't know you could cook," she said. "This is pretty good."
"Mom taught me some easy things," he said. "Been a while."
That clogged up her throat as much as Hojo's experiment was doing. "I miss my father," she said, out of nowhere. "I keep wanting to ask him for advice, or about something, even though it's been so long." Even though there wasn't anything he could tell her about this; Hojo was entirely outside anything her father had known. And she was a coward, because she couldn't force herself to tell Cloud.
Cloud looked down at his empty plate. "Yeah. I want to tell Mom I'm OK. She always worried."
She'd never been all that sure what had happened to Cloud's father. He'd just gone away, like a lot of men in the war, and never come back. Cloud never talked about him. "I guess ... I guess they've all gone back to the Planet now. Finally." This was almost worse than Hojo. She'd never seen the faces of the shambling things in cloaks, even the one in the reconstructed version of her house, and sometimes they shuffled through her nightmares. "What ... what do you want to do now, Cloud?"
He blinked, and thought about that for a while. "I ... might go back to the Saucer, and race chocobos. What about you?"
She had absolutely no idea; she hadn't thought at all about what she'd do after everything was over. "Maybe a vacation," she said. "Go somewhere where I don't have to do anything at all, like Costa del Sol."
"Guess we take a lot of care and feeding," Cloud said.
Tifa felt her face burning. "Oh, that's not what I meant," she said, reaching for the dishes, even though it was entirely true.
He shook head. "Don't worry about it," he said. "Dishes'll hold, Tifa. You look beat."
"I guess so," she said. "Sorry I got depressing, Cloud. I guess I'll turn in early." She escaped up the stairs before he could say anything else. Or before she could say anything else.
She didn't sleep for a long time, her mind refusing to shut down and offering up ever-more-disastrous scenarios about telling Cloud. Once she did sleep, it was uneasy and restless, broken by the soft click of the door closing. She recognized Yuffie's footsteps and was falling asleep again when she heard the potion bottle pop open.
"What did you do?" Tifa asked groggily, propping herself up on an elbow. Yuffie didn't waste potion on minor injuries.
"S'nothing," Yuffie said. "Go back to sleep."
She sat up anyway, but couldn't make much out in the darkness. Yuffie was rubbing her leg. "You okay?"
"It's nothing," Yuffie snapped.
"Fine!" Tifa lay back down, rolled over so her back was to Yuffie, and tried to go back to sleep. Eventually, well after Yuffie was asleep, she did.
* * * * *
The old walls were about the only empty part of town, mostly because they were in lousy shape and hard to climb. Reeve leaned on them, catching in his breath in his aching chest; his cracked ribs weren't healing as fast as he'd like. Too many people, too many refugees, he was probably lucky there hadn't been an outbreak of disease yet. It hadn't been that long, though; it only felt like months. The Turks were dealing with the over-loaded military, Avalanche was doing Planet only knew what, and he was ... breathing.
Right. Breathing. In between trying to figure out what he was supposed to do with all those refugees. The weather wasn't making the situation worse, so far. From here, it looked like there was plenty of land, but it had been drained too, and didn't produce as much food as it should. The eastern half of the continent, over the mountains, was a better bet; there'd never been much more than small farming towns, and no Mako reactors because there weren't people to make a profit. Getting anyone from Midgar to settle down farming was going to be ... difficult, even more so than housing, tools or logistics. The Highwind wasn't moored anywhere in sight, and he realized he'd forgotten to ask Cid about Junon.
Someone stomped up behind him; he turned, rather surprised to see Cloud.
"Reeve." The other man leaned against the wall, facing Kalm. "What are you doing?"
"Trying to think. You?"
"About the same." He shook his head. "Too crowded around here."
"You know anywhere to move them?"
"Nibelheim's empty," Cloud said flatly.
Reeve blinked, and supposed he shouldn't be surprised Cloud didn't want to go back. "I guess it is," he said. "They wouldn't know about ..."
"I never want to see the place again. Ask Tifa if she does."
Reeve doubted Tifa would want to, either. It would hold a fair number of people. "I'll do that. They have to move soon or there's going to be war."
Cloud shrugged in a fashion that clearly suggested he didn't think it was his problem. He could leave on the Highwind any time he wanted. "Vincent said you've got information from Hojo."
"It's a mess," Reeve said, wondering what, if anything Tifa had said. Elena had told him that morning she'd shown her the relevant documents. "But yes, I have quite a bit of information."
"On me? Zack?"
He'd been so focused on Elena's problem that he hadn't even thought to look. "Nothing I've seen yet." Hojo might have destroyed that data, if it was old; on the other hand, Hojo had hated throwing anything potentially useful away. There might be information about Vincent buried in those files somewhere, which cast a new light on his determination to see them himself.
"Figures."
Reeve wasn't sure if he hadn't expected Reeve to look or if he hadn't expected there to be any information. There wasn't anything to say about it, and he went back to wondering what to do with all those people. Tifa came around the corner; Reeve excused himself and went back down, where someone from the mayor's office was much too glad to see him.
* * * * *
She'd gotten much too winded climbing up to the top of the walls, but it was quieter up here, and the wind was a relief from the stuffy air below. Yuffie had been gone when she woke up, hough there was an ugly smear of blood on her sheets. Everyone else was gone, and someone, miraculously, had done the dishes from last night. She'd decided to go for a walk. She hadn't expected to see Cloud up here, but he'd probably wanted to get away from all the people below. Reeve hurriedly excused himself and left; Tifa took his place looking out from the walls.
"You want to go back to Nibelheim?"
"No. Was Reeve asking?"
"I said something."
Nothing she wanted was in Nibelheim; her memories were in her head and heart, and everything there was fake now, except the mansion and the reactor. Neither of them spoke for a while, and then she forced the words past her suddenly-clogged throat. "I've been sick lately, you know?"
Cloud frowned. "Yeah."
"....Reeve told me the other day that Hojo had been using Elena in an experiment," she said. "That ... there was another subject mentioned in the papers." She was glad she wasn't looking at him; even out of the corner of her eye, she could see him stiffen. She forced the words out in a rush, before she could freeze up altogether and not finish. "She had hallucinations when the Rocket hit Meteor, like I did. I asked her last night what she knew, and she showed me some documents they stole from Hojo. He implanted an embryo in her, after they got her back from the Temple. She doesn't know what it is."
He sounded like she'd punched him. It wasn't that different from how she felt. "You think ..."
"Yes," she said. "Not for sure. I guess something else happened, why she's sure. But ... same symptoms, and everything."
Tifa couldn't look at him. She wasn't sure whether she was more afraid she'd be able to tell what he was thinking, or that she wouldn't. The silence had stretched so far that she thought he was going to leave when he reached over to touch her hand.
"What do you want to do?"
She tried not to cry out of pure relief. "I don't know. It's ... I only just found out. Why me?"
Another silence, shorter than the first. "You were in reach."
Tifa nodded and turned her face into the breeze.
