Where We Went Right
July 2024
Barret stared uncomprehending as Dyne edged back towards the ravine. Under the desert sun, the chain of Eleanor's pendant was hot against his fingers.
"Dyne...?"
Dyne spread his arms, and Barret's heart plummeted ahead of what was about to happen. He tried to shove himself forward, his body heavy and slow. "Dyne!"
Tifa shot past him. She grabbed Dyne's arm, his momentum lurched her forward. Barret's feet pounded the ground and he hooked his arm around her waist, pulling back, steadying her. She held on. He held on.
Together they hauled Dyne back up over the edge, and they sat beside his sprawled form for a long minute, panting.
Barret stared down into the ravine, a drop like the one where he'd lost Dyne four years ago. It must have taken Dyne such an effort to make it back to the village with his injuries, it was no wonder he'd never really left it again. Like Barret, he must have dragged his hope here with him, but unlike Barret, he'd come back too late to find anything.
But he was still alive. They were both still alive.
Dyne was crying silently. "Why...?"
"You wanted us to raise Marlene knowing she could've met you but you decided to jump off a cliff instead?" Tifa demanded. "How dare you."
Dyne said nothing. Tifa scrubbed the back of her hand across her face, got to her feet, and looked to Barret. He gave her a nod, because it was all he had right now. She returned it and walked off. Cloud and Aeris met her, checking on her, throwing anxious glances his way.
Red, Yuffie, and that weird cat still lingered near the edge of the junk yard. Barret had asked them all to hang back to keep from crowding Dyne. He wasn't sure when Tifa had moved, but he was glad she hadn't listened.
He looked back at Dyne. "...you heard her. You were gonna make me lie to your daughter 'bout what happened to you?" He dropped the pendant down heavy atop Dyne's chest. "You give this to her yourself. I ain't doin' it for you."
"Barret... I can't."
Barret reached over and felt for the release catch on Dyne's gun arm. Found it in the same place as his. They were the same.
"I know you think you ain't fit to be anything to her," he said, feeling the weight of the weapon in his hand, a weight he'd grown accustomed to carrying. "I've done things, too, man... If it weren't for Marlene, might've wound up just like you."
Dyne closed his eyes. "What good's it gonna do now, Barret?"
Barret set Dyne's gun arm aside and planted his hand firmly on Dyne's shoulder. "I dunno what to do now, but I ain't givin' up on you."
"I'm a lost cause."
"Oh yeah? Kinda have a thing for those."
Dyne looked up at him, and there was a glimmer of his old friend in that glance. Dyne didn't smile, didn't say anything, but for a minute Barret thought he remembered.
"How 'bout we start by gettin' the hell outta here?" Barret proposed. When he got to his feet, Dyne accepted his hand up. Barret wasn't letting go this time.
Chocobo races being the way to earn your freedom was just another sign of how batshit wrong this whole place was. It wasn't any kind of justice to throw people down here on a whim and only let them out if they won a rigged game. It made Barret's blood boil all over again, but he wasn't in a position to do anything about it.
Maybe one day, he'd find a way to fix things so Corel wasn't a dumping ground for the forgotten. Corel deserved that from him. Today, he'd at least get Dyne out of it.
As long as Cloud won that fucking stupid race.
He sat outside on the steps leading up to Mr. Coates' trailer, watching Dyne, who sat some distance away under the shade of the massive pipeline that pumped in Mako to Gold Saucer. Mako all the way from the reactor Barret had helped to build. He had to wonder if this had been Shinra's plan from the start. Gold Saucer was a lot more lucrative than supporting the livelihoods of a bunch of old coal miners.
The door opened behind him. Tifa's sneakers appeared on the step beside him, and then she sat down. He knew from the weight of her silence that she had something to say, but she didn't know how to say it.
"...don't know how to thank you," Barret said, though he knew it wasn't the answer to her unspoken question.
Tifa shook her head. "You don't have to. I just... It wasn't supposed to end that way."
"Still, I'm grateful. What you did back there... You bought me a second chance with him."
Tifa flashed him a brief smile, but she looked away again, tucking her hair back behind her ear. She did that when she was uneasy, and he thought he knew the cause.
"...you know we can't leave 'im here," he said.
"I know," she said. "I just... I'm worried. When you first told us about him, I thought he'd be like us. But..."
"He is like us," Barret insisted. "He ain't any different."
Tifa glanced at him. "You think so?"
Barret nodded. "Maybe not like us, now, but you remember how you felt when you first got to Midgar? After they burned Nibelheim, an' Corel... Neither of us was in a good place. But we had each other, an' Marlene."
"...I guess you're right. If I hadn't found people to lean on, if I'd just been stuck in a place like this with nothing but my anger..."
"So we're gonna help 'im. We been here, an' we both got out. He can, too."
Tifa was quiet for a moment, and then she leaned into his shoulder. "Yeah. He can."
Maybe she was just humoring him. She hadn't known Dyne before, and what he'd said about Marlene had to scare her. It scared him, too. But he also remembered what it felt like to stare into that pit of despair and just think the whole world would be better if everything ended.
Not wanting Marlene to end with the world had been the first thing to stop him. He thought that was the same reason Dyne had tried to throw himself into that ravine: so he wouldn't hurt her. Even if there was some perverse thing inside of him that wanted her to die, there was something just a little bit stronger that wanted to make sure he never followed through.
If that was the first step, then he was still alive now to take the next. Little by little, they'd haul him back from that pit.
Their new buggy got them out of the desert before nightfall. Barret didn't love the thing--it felt like hush money to him, so they'd keep quiet about what Dio had put them through--but it was damn useful. Maybe they'd finally catch up to Sephiroth.
Barret filled Dyne in on the way, introducing him to the others, telling him about their mission. He couldn't tell if Dyne was even listening. He stared into the distance somewhere over Barret's shoulder, and said nothing.
Barret took first watch that night, and watched as Dyne's world-weariness finally dragged him into sleep. It was probably the closest to peace he got, a taste of the oblivion he craved.
But hadn't he hung on for something? For four years, he'd held on in that place. He'd become its boss, somehow. Maybe it was a position he'd had to scrape and claw for, maybe he'd claimed it by virtue of being the only one who'd stayed in Corel. But he'd held onto that, too.
For what? Dyne may have dreamt of vengeance, but it didn't seem like any sort of plan. It was ugly, when Barret thought about it. Lording over a bunch of criminals in the shell of his old home. Maybe they were just bodies to populate his waking nightmare. People he didn't give a damn about, but people who wouldn't leave.
Barret turned over the next watch to Cloud, but it took him a long time to get to sleep.
The next day's travel carried them south of the river and to the village of Gongaga, where the Turks were waiting. It wasn't exactly the rematch Barret would've hoped for, and afterwards there were a lot of uneasy glances at Dyne, as if he could've tipped off the Shinra. Barret shut that down fast.
"Probably that jackass Dio," he reasoned. "It was his damn suggestion to come here."
"Maybe," Cloud sighed. "Guess we'll just have to be more careful."
They continued on into the village, passing a graveyard on the approach. Dyne hung back, staring at the headstones. Barret joined him.
Corel had had a proper graveyard before the fire, lost now to the sands. On a different day when they'd been much younger men, the two of them had stood there long after everyone else had gone, staring at the headstone bearing Barret's father's name. Dyne had slipped his hand into his. It was one of those moments they'd never spoken of after Dyne met Eleanor. Just kid stuff, Barret had thought then.
Barret wanted to reach for his hand now, but he stood to Dyne's left, his gun-arm between them. A replacement for the hand that had let him go.
"......the dates're all the same," Dyne remarked.
Barret looked. He was right; every one of these people had died three years ago. He had a few guesses as to how, but only one as to who was responsible.
"C'mon," he said. "Let's catch up with the others."
Once they did, they didn't really need to ask for the story. From the village proper, they could see the reactor in the distance, a dark ruin surrounded by a corona of barren earth. They didn't need to ask the story, but Barret spoke with some of the villagers anyway, and it was a familiar one. Shinra had promised them a good life, too, and wound up destroying it without a second thought.
"How many times've they done this, Barret?" Dyne asked as they stood at the overlook. Nearby was the crumbling foundation of an old house, debris that lingered even after three years.
"...this makes four I know about," said Barret, sequencing them in his mind. Nibelheim, Corel, Gongaga, Sector 7. "Four towns that got ruined 'cause o' Shinra's own damn negligence an' greed. Probably more we never heard of."
"An' you want me to believe... what? That we can make somethin' o' this?"
"You heard the rest o' the story. These folks outlawed Mako. There ain't no Shinra here."
Dyne shook his head, staring at the ruined reactor. "It's sittin' right fuckin' there. It greeted us when we came in."
"An' we made 'em turn tail an' run," Barret declared.
"You call that a victory?" Dyne asked, throwing him a skeptical glance. "They ain't dead. There ain't less Shinra in the world. It's everywhere, the same shit happening over an' over, an' nobody gives a damn. You ever even heard of Gongaga before now?"
"...no," Barret admitted. Maybe Shinra had promised them that, too: that a reactor would put their town on the map. Instead it had almost wiped it out.
"I heard what they said about Corel," Dyne went on. "Blamed the reactor an' the town both on some 'rebel faction' that never fucking existed. An' people bought it, even though enough of us survived they could've fuckin' asked us. Nobody bothered. The world didn't give a shit because it wasn't their problem."
"Ain't everybody like that," Barret insisted. "There's folks, you tell 'em what happened, an' they care hard."
Dyne jerked his head over his shoulder towards Yuffie, the nearest of his comrades about in the village. "You mean your little band? You found half a dozen folks who give a damn an' you think that's enough to make a change?"
"I think it's a damn sight better than actin' like everything's already over."
Dyne only frowned. His fingers brushed over the empty gun port grafted into his left arm, like he was missing the weight of it. There was a railing between them and the cliff's edge, but Barret kept an eye on how close he got to it.
"...you didn't used to be like this, man," he said softly.
"Yeah," said Dyne. "An' then the whole village voted against me. I thought we could hold out against the Shinra, then, an' you proved me wrong."
"You weren't wrong. We could have."
"But we didn't."
"...I'm sorry."
Dyne lifted the empty gun port, and then let it drop. "Is that why you're doin' all this? You think if you stand up to them now it'll make up for not doin' it when it mattered?"
Barret shook his head. "No. Ain't no makin' up for that. I just..." He glanced down at his own gun arm. "At first, I just wanted to get back at 'em. It was easier than hatin' myself. Now... Maybe I just wanna make sure folks know they oughtta stand up to Shinra. An' maybe most of 'em don't listen any more than I listened to you, back then. But I wanna believe not everybody's as stupid as me."
Dyne stared out at the reactor for a long moment. At last he said, "Guess a lot o' people'd have to be pretty damn stupid, for nobody to listen."
It was something, Barret thought, heartened. "Yeah," he said.
Dyne glanced at him. "It ain't gonna be enough. But you were always the optimist."
Barret just shrugged, offering him a grin. Maybe Dyne couldn't see it, but it was one more tiny step for him to acknowledge that Barret might get through to someone. And maybe it was the optimist in him that thought that someone could be Dyne, but there it was.
Climbing the steps up to the gate to Cosmo Canyon, Barret's heart swelled with anticipation and regret both. He'd always wanted to see this place, but most of the people he'd wanted to see it with hadn't made it here. What did he owe to them in coming here? Contrition? Or would they want him to make the most of it in their stead?
He glanced at Dyne, who made the climb mechanically. He only took his eyes off his feet when Red bounded past them, and Barret took the opportunity to nudge him with an elbow, nodding ahead.
"How 'bout this place?"
Dyne's gaze steadied on the settlement ahead, taking it in, but Barret couldn't tell what he made of it.
Red--or Nanaki, apparently--got them past the gatekeeper, but he didn't stick around to guide them, and Barret couldn't blame him. He didn't know how long the big cat had been trapped in Hojo's care, but it was probably a homecoming a while in the making.
They were short on leads, so they weren't in any rush anyway. Barret wandered the village with Dyne, drinking it in even as his companion failed to show any interest. So this was the birthplace of planetology...
Barret eventually wound his way up to the observatory overlooking the village, finding Red and a few of the others conversing with the oldest man he'd ever seen. When Bugenhagen invited them to see his machine, Barret knew his expression gave his eagerness away, but he glanced at Dyne. There wasn't room for all of them, and not once over the past few days had they left Dyne on his own.
"Go ahead," said Dyne, with a shrug.
It was Tifa who put a hand on his arm, recognizing his concern. "I'll keep him company."
"You sure, Teef?"
"Mm-hm. I can see it later."
Barret hesitated, but she was right; Aeris and Cait Sith were still in the village, and they'd probably want to see it later for themselves. And maybe it'd do Dyne some good to spend more time with the others. Barret knew Tifa would try to talk to him.
"Thanks," he said, and headed on inside.
There were things in Bugenhagen's demonstration that he'd heard before, and things he hadn't. Shinra suppressed the study of planetology, so it'd been hard to come by more than scraps in Midgar. Barret had understood that Mako was the lifeblood of the Planet and that it wasn't infinite, but he didn't know the ebb and flow of the Lifestream.
He watched the holographic people dissolve into glittering lines of light and dance across the surface of the Planet, forming new life elsewhere. A lot of people still believed they'd be reunited with their loved ones when they died, but Barret wondered if Myrna had already moved on from the Lifestream into something new. Some tree somewhere might embody his Myrna's heart, reaching for the sun and dreaming of growing tall, a part of the world again.
He thought she'd like that.
Beautiful as it was, the demonstration left them sobered. This was a process Shinra was interrupting, slowly destroying. Not really that slowly. Barret was more sure than ever that Shinra had to be stopped, but he was less sure of the methods. His methods had been short-sighted, gotten people killed. He wasn't sure Dyne was wrong that half a dozen people weren't enough to change things. Not yet, anyway.
Tifa was waiting outside with Dyne, and the two of them stood from Bugenhagen's table. If they'd talked, the conversation hadn't lasted long enough to be interrupted. Tifa offered Barret a cautious smile, but she turned when Yuffie started up telling her what they'd seen. The rest of them filed out of the observatory, leaving Barret alone with Dyne.
"...she's a sweet girl," Dyne remarked.
"Yeah, she's a good friend," Barret agreed, and then he realized there was more to Dyne's tone. "Oh, come on, man."
"She said you were raisin' Marlene together."
"That don't mean we're together! Hell, you oughtta know."
"You must've at least thought about it," said Dyne, glancing out the door where she'd disappeared.
Barret shook his head. "Ain't had much time to think about stuff like that."
"Too busy savin' the Planet? Even that old man doesn't think you can do it."
"That's your takeaway?"
Dyne slumped back against the table, looking down at his arms. "It all seems so... pointless. I don't know what I'm doin' here. I don't know why you brought me here."
Why had he brought Dyne here? They couldn't have left him behind, but Barret wondered if bringing him along on this journey was really the best thing to do. He wanted to think it could be good for him, being around people who had purpose and a drive to change. But maybe it was too much, too soon. Maybe Dyne would be better off if Barret peeled off and stayed here with him for a while. He wished he were sure about anything he was doing.
"...maybe Bugenhagen ain't sure we can save the Planet," he said, "but if we give up, it definitely won't be saved. If there's a chance... you gotta take it." He looked steadily at Dyne. "I wanted that chance with you. Even knowin' you had to hate my guts, when I found out you were at Corel... I wanted to make things right."
"What if there ain't no makin' things right? What if I'm just... broken?"
"D'you still hate my guts?"
"...dunno," Dyne admitted. "I been thinkin' about what you said before. It's easier hatin' you. Thinkin'... if only we hadn't been best friends, maybe I wouldn't've let you drag me along into it. The rest o' you be damned, maybe I could've said fuck Shinra's reactor an' taken my family someplace else. I wouldn't've gotten Eleanor killed, an'... Marlene'd know me. She'd know her mom."
Barret shook his head. "I know I got my share o' the blame, but it sure as hell wasn't your fault."
"Not my fault... Barret, I left her!" Dyne's voice broke. "I left her to go up to that damn reactor, an' she died alone."
His expression crumpled, pain breaking through the numbness that hadn't let him feel it. Barret took a step closer, and when Dyne didn't move away, Barret folded his arm around the other man. "I know," he said. "I know."
If only they hadn't left the village that day. If only they'd been there when the troops came.
But that was before they'd turned their bodies into weapons, before grief had hardened them into men who could kill. Was there anything the men they'd been then could have done? They hadn't faced down Scarlet and her men. They'd watched the village headman die, and they'd run.
"All this time..." Dyne mumbled into his shoulder. "Part o' me wants to go to her. But I didn't think I could face her."
"I thought about it, too," Barret said. "Joinin' Myrna. But... I don't think they'd want that. I think maybe... when the Shinra showed up, they were glad we weren't there, 'cause it meant we survived. I know that's how I woulda felt."
"Survived for what, Barret? Eleanor... she wouldn't've wanted vengeance. An' that's all I got."
Barret drew back, keeping a firm grip on Dyne's arm. "It ain't all you got, awright? Might take you some time to see it, but... You got me. An' you got Marlene. One day you're gonna meet her. You're gonna see how her smile lights up her whole face, an' you're gonna know it's worth tryin' anything to turn this world around."
"...forgot how damn charismatic you could be," said Dyne.
Barret grinned softly. "Hope that means I'm gettin' through."
Dyne shook his head. "I don't know. You say you been where I am, but I look at you an'..."
"Took me a while to get here," said Barret.
He motioned for Dyne to follow, and the two of them left Bugenhagen's living space to go up onto the terrace that ringed the dome of the observatory. The sun was setting, bathing the canyon below in warm light. The heat of this place reminded him of Corel, but it was so much more alive.
"...you ever get up to the camp at North Corel?" Barret asked Dyne.
"Yeah. Didn't stick around."
Barret nodded. He'd wondered before if they might have run into each other if he'd just stayed a while longer, but he hadn't had any inkling then that Dyne might still be alive. He hadn't known there was anything to wait for.
"I was there for a while," he said. "Didn't wanna be, just... didn't have no place else to go. Folks there hated my guts, too, but I had Marlene, so they didn't run me off or nothin'. Marlene was what got me from one day to the next. Hell of a lot o' work, takin' care of a baby."
"...I remember."
"Yeah. I hated... that it was me an' not you." It should've been Dyne. What would they look like now if it'd been Dyne instead of him? "Anyway, I was there for a while, 'til this guy came through, from Cosmo Canyon. It was the first time I'd heard o' planetology, or anything like that. I talked to 'im a bit, an'... guess it gave me direction."
"So you set out to save the Planet?" Dyne wondered.
Barret shrugged. "It was an excuse, at first. 'bout all I had in me back then was vengeance, same as you. But it's got a better ring to it if you can say you're fightin' to save somethin'. I made it to Midgar, an' that talk started resonatin' with folks. First Tifa, then... Jessie, Biggs, Wedge..."
Dyne glanced at him. "...they ain't part o' your group now," he observed.
"No. They died tryin' to stop Shinra from wipin' out Sector 7. I promised 'em we'd all come here one day an' celebrate together, but now..."
Dyne leaned his forearms on the railing, looking out over the canyon. "So you invited the Shinra in an' you got people killed, an' then you fought 'em an' you still got people killed." Despite his words, somehow it didn't sound like a reproach.
"You can't think it's the same," said Barret.
"...no. Kinda envy them, gettin' to go out fightin'. Might've thought it made a difference."
"It did. We didn't save Sector 7, but we bought it time. More folks woulda died if it weren't for them."
They stood in silence. It was true, wasn't it? Barret didn't want to think their deaths had been in vain. He might've gotten them killed, but their actions, their choices, had meant something.
"......Marlene'd be dead, if it weren't for you, wouldn't she?" Dyne said at last.
Barret looked over at him. "...somebody else might've found her, but... probably."
"Don't think I can give a damn about your Planet," Dyne admitted. "But Marlene... I don't want her to go through any o' the shit we've been through."
"Me neither. So we gotta try."
"Where is she now? Who's lookin' after her?"
Dyne hadn't asked before, and out of a lingering caution, Barret hadn't volunteered it. He wondered if Dyne had avoided asking for the same reason.
"She's with Elmyra," he answered. "Aeris's mom."
"An' we can trust her?"
Barret huffed in amusement. "She's a good woman. Took Aeris in as a kid an' kept her safe from the Shinra as long as she could. Talked down Turks an' everything."
"Fuck. All right."
Barret sobered. They were a long way from Elmyra, and Marlene. "I wanna promise you we'll go an' see 'em together," he said. "But hell, I've made a lotta promises I couldn't keep."
Dyne shook his head. "I don't want you makin' that promise anyway. I ain't fit to see her now."
"Dyne..."
"I ain't, but I wanna be. I think I wanna be."
Barret relaxed. "All right." He looked out over the canyon. The sun had slipped beneath the horizon, and the sky was deepening into purple.
The cautious touch of Dyne's hand surprised him. He opened his hand and let Dyne's questing fingers slip between his own. For another moment longer, neither of them spoke.
"...never promised each other anything, back then," said Dyne, "but... still felt like I broke it."
"I never thought of it that way," Barret said.
"How'd you think of it?"
"...just figured Eleanor was a hell of a lot prettier."
Dyne snorted, his first show of genuine amusement. "Well, she was. But I shouldn't've done it like that."
Barret shrugged. "It doesn't matter now."
"Guess not. I just been thinkin' about it. How things were so... simple, back then. I didn't have words for what we had, but it was easy. Now... I don't understand anything."
"I'm still me," Barret offered. Too much had happened to make that simple or easy, but it was at least familiar. "For what that's worth."
"Couple days ago, I woulda called that shit luck," said Dyne.
"An' now?"
"...feels like you rememberin' who I used to be's got me rememberin', too. I still feel like... a shadow. But I remember the man who cast it."
"He was a good man," said Barret.
Dyne nodded. "I wanna stick around you a while longer. Maybe some of him'll come back."
Barret gave Dyne's hand the lightest squeeze. "From where I'm standin', feels like some of 'im already has."
Dyne didn't refute it, and he didn't pull away. They watched the rest of the sunset light give way to darkness, but in the village below, the torches stood out brighter in the dark, lighting the way back down.