Chapter 15
Elena wasn't sure what to make of the key chain Aeris gifted her on emerging from the amusement park. In their limited time, she and Tifa had still managed to win a handful of charms and two small plushies, one of which was designated for Yuffie and the other given into Barret's keeping for his daughter.
A plastic key chain was nothing much, but Aeris had winked as she handed it over, as if she meant something by giving her the cactuar in particular. Elena sat in the ropeway car examining it. The moogle had gone to Wedge and the little yellow chocobo to Jessie. Was Aeris trying to say she was prickly...?
She stuck it on her keys and shoved it into her pocket. It didn't matter.
"Where even is Gongaga?" Jessie was asking. "Is it near here?"
"Not exactly," said Barret. "You gotta head south a good ways, an' a lot o' that's desert."
"So that's not a trek we wanna be making on foot," Wedge concluded.
Tifa shook her head. "I don't think North Corel's going to have much to offer us."
Everyone fell silent. Elena leaned back in her seat, watching out the window as North Corel grew nearer. A dusty trash camp built at the end of the road leading to the ropeway, beggars making a nuisance of themselves to people who were just trying to take a vacation.
Shinra had promised to take care of them, too. With a bullet to the head, if need be.
"They probably won't be great off-road vehicles," Elena spoke up, not taking her eyes from the window, "but there should be plenty of cars in Gold Saucer's parking lot."
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw all of them turn to stare at her.
"...are you suggesting we steal one?" Jessie asked. She didn't sound opposed to the idea.
"Unless you want to go all the way back to Costa del Sol for a rental," said Elena.
Barret scratched his head. "Ain't too big on stealin' from regular folk... but maybe we scope 'em out to see if anybody's advertisin' a great love of Shinra. Gotta be some employees in there."
As they disembarked from the ropeway, Yuffie was perched on the roof of the ticket booth, gesturing at them frantically. Elena tensed for another confrontation with Sephiroth, but--
"The Shinra're here!" Yuffie hissed.
Before anyone could respond, footsteps sounded on the steps leading up to the station, the shadows of several men stretching out ahead of them. Rude stepped into view, accompanied by four infantrymen.
The two groups stared at each other. Elena locked eyes with Rude, and she hesitated.
Tifa reacted first, charging in and kicking the rifle out of one soldier's grasp before he could raise it. Grabbing the weapon, she swung it at Rude, who caught it and dragged her aside.
Barret opened fire, hitting one of the other soldiers. The remaining two finally got their wits about them and returned fire, and everyone scrambled for cover. AVALANCHE followed Yuffie in ducking behind the ticket booth, while the Shinra jumped off the platform, ducking behind the big sign for Gold Saucer.
Elena only realized Aeris had tugged her with them behind the ticket booth when the other woman let go her arm. Her own instincts were confused; she hadn't trained to be on this side of things.
"There's another staircase over there," Wedge pointed out, drawing their attention to the far side of the platform, which faced out into the desert.
"Are you talking about running?" Yuffie asked. "We outnumber them!"
"You're the one who was waving your arms at us," said Wedge.
"Yeah, so you wouldn't get jumped!" Yuffie peeked through the glass of the ticket booth and then unleashed a Bolt spell on their opponents.
"You know, there's no way they came on foot," said Jessie. "A military vehicle's even better, right?"
"What if there are more of them?" Aeris asked.
Elena drew a breath. "They wouldn't have back-up standing by for a Turk on a simple info-gathering mission."
"I only heard one vehicle approaching," Red put in.
Barret, still firing around the side of the booth, let out a whoop as he scored a hit on another soldier. The fire coming at them sounded like just a single rifle now.
Elena grit her teeth. This was what she'd chosen, there was no going back. She took a quick glance herself and lashed out with a Fire spell. The gunshots went quiet.
"Now!" said Barret. "Let's go!"
They broke cover, and as they charged down the steps, Elena tore her gaze from the infantrymen lying on the ground, their comrades crouching over them. In her determination not to care, she missed Rude stepping forward until his arm made contact with her chest. He slammed her into the ground, and the breath went out of her.
Dimly she heard shouting, a burst of gunfire. Someone else's arm got under her, helping her up. Tifa. She glanced back to see Barret and Wedge covering their retreat.
Aeris had run ahead, past piles of junk that passed for wares, their owners fled for cover at the sounds of fighting. A military truck was parked just where the dusty street came to an end. Aeris hauled open the door and yelped in surprise to find the driver still inside. Before he could react, Red leapt on him. Yuffie helped Aeris pull him out of the vehicle as the rest of them caught up.
"Who knows how to drive?" Aeris asked, braid whipping around her as she turned.
"I'll do it," Wedge volunteered, climbing up. They all piled in, with Tifa helping Elena up into the rear of the truck. Aeris joined them, letting Yuffie sit up in the cab with Wedge.
As Wedge pulled the truck around, Rude came back into view, standing in the street behind them. Elena watched him recede out of sight, breathing slow against the pang in her chest.
He'd singled her out, and she knew it. AVALANCHE did outnumber him, there was no way he could've stopped them, but he'd wanted her to know she was a traitor.
It stung. She hadn't had much time to get to know any of them, but she'd felt a kind of affinity with Rude in particular. Reno had all the military poise of a hedgehog pie, but she thought Rude had been recruited out of the ranks like she had. Only, he'd probably distinguished himself through active service rather than top-notch academy scores. Still, she thought they would've worked well together.
They were never going to work together.
"You okay?" Aeris asked her, and Elena finally tore her gaze away from the road behind them to look at her. Aeris wasn't the only one watching her in concern, though Barret was at least pretending not to.
"Yeah," she said, though she couldn't help a wince as she tried to straighten up and pain shot through her ribs.
"Should we stop and get Yuffie?" Tifa asked.
But Aeris shook her head. "I've got this," she said, and a moment later, Elena felt the warmth of a healing spell wash over her. She couldn't quite tell if something felt different about it, or if she was just feeling weird because of the entire situation.
"...thanks," she managed.
"Well," Jessie said, letting out a breath. "I guess that worked out okay."
"...we were worried when we saw Sephiroth leave," Red spoke up from his corner of the truck. "But he didn't attack you?"
Tifa shook her head, and Barret added, "He said he's lookin' for somethin' called the 'Keystone.' Don't suppose you've heard of it?"
Red's tail swished, and he shook his head. "Do we have a lead on where to look?"
"Not sure exactly. The guy he talked to said he was headed for Gongaga, which's where one of his old SOLDIER buddies at Nibelheim was from. Hard to say if it's one or the other, or just throwin' people off his trail."
"Rude's going to find the same lead," Elena put in. "And... it doesn't seem like Sephiroth wants Shinra off his trail."
"That was Rude?" Tifa asked, and Elena nodded, glancing away again.
"There is one other thing..." said Red. "I don't know what to make of it, but when Sephiroth passed by...... He smelled like the monster from the cargo ship."
They all looked at him, frowning in confusion.
"You sure?" Barret wondered.
"Sephiroth might've been the one to set the monster loose, right?" said Jessie. "Could you have picked up his scent instead?"
But Red shook his head slowly. "I don't think so."
Barret scratched his head. "The fuck's that mean if they smell the same? Sephiroth doesn't smell human?"
"Um," said Aeris.
"If I must put it in those terms," said Red, "then Aeris does smell human. I don't know why he doesn't, or what it means."
"...maybe the experiment that made him didn't go exactly right?" Jessie suggested.
Barret leaned his head back against the cab of the truck. "I'm really startin' to hope this Zack guy ain't dead, an' maybe he's got a few more answers."
"I hope we can get there first," said Tifa. "I don't know how Sephiroth is getting around, but he beat us to Gold Saucer."
Jessie scrunched up her face. "Why is it hard to imagine that guy driving...?"
"He probably had a million people he could order to drive 'im around, back when," said Barret. "Never even had to learn."
Elena closed her eyes against their attempts at levity and the jostle of the truck. They'd turned off the road, headed south into the Corel Desert.
So Sephiroth wasn't looking for the Promised Land, she thought. Shinra would follow all the clues he'd left them as though that was where they'd lead, but it wasn't. That was stupid, wasn't it? They didn't have any idea where they were headed, or how to get there. Was the Promised Land even what they thought it was?
She wondered if Tseng already suspected it. Letting Aeris go meant Shinra wouldn't have a second opinion; they'd have to accept whatever Sephiroth led them to. Did Tseng want them to fail?
Elena sure as hell wasn't doing any of this for him, but it made her wonder whether he saw the problems, too, and it was just too late for him to get out. He'd watch it crumble from the inside, and Elena didn't know him well enough to say whether he'd jump ship at the last minute. But that wasn't her problem.
She was with a different group of idiots who didn't know where they were heading. At least they weren't claiming otherwise.
The interior of the truck soon grew oppressive moving through the desert in the afternoon heat. Elena pulled off her tie and peeled out of her uniform jacket, but it only helped so much. It was different from muggy summers in Midgar; instead of feeling like she was swimming through her own sweat, the dry air baked all the moisture out of her. Everyone got very quiet and still, as though doing as little as possible would slow the effects.
When the sun finally went down, they were still somewhere in the middle of nowhere, parched earth stretching to the distant ridgeline of the Corel Mountains.
Barret rapped on the glass separating them from the cab, and Wedge stopped the truck. They made camp in the falling twilight, recovering some of their energy with the dropping temperature even as Barret warned against how cold it would get when night set in. For the moment, Elena didn't care.
There was enough scrub brush around to build a fire, and Tifa cooked them up some dinner. Elena had to admit she was pretty good at turning nothing much into something palatable, but she missed the days of real food. When she'd joined up with them in Junon, she hadn't planned on it being for the long haul. She should've treated herself to one last fancy meal before consigning herself to a life of protein bars and sleeping in the dirt.
As the others fell to chatting around their campfire, Elena noticed Aeris wasn't participating. She just sat staring skyward, completely entranced.
"Haven't you ever seen stars before?" Elena asked her.
Aeris didn't even glance at her. "Didn't you read my file? You knew about my mom."
"There was a note about her in the mission briefing. 'Presumed dead but unconfirmed. Retrieval of body low priority.'"
Aeris held her gaze steady on the sky, frowning faintly.
"...sorry," Elena said. "I guess that's pretty insensitive."
"...it's okay."
"Is it?"
"Well... I'm used to it," Aeris amended.
"...anyway, I didn't go reading your file," Elena said. "I just knew you were an Ancient and they'd been keeping tabs on you for a while."
"'Just,'" Aeris repeated, shaking her head. "Everyone here knew my secret before they ever met me. It kind of feels like..."
"Like what?"
Aeris said nothing for a long moment. "I don't know. It doesn't matter."
Elena hadn't really thought about it as a secret. It was something Shinra had always known about her, after all. But if Shinra's reaction to knowing was seeking to possess her, then maybe it shouldn't have been any surprise that Aeris preferred to keep it to herself. Even if AVALANCHE treated her like a person, they'd sought her out for the exact same reasons.
"...you wish you could've had a blank slate?" Elena suggested.
"Mm. But, nobody would've come to rescue some flower seller from the slums."
"This lot might have," Elena offered her. "They heard we took you in, and they wanted to meet you."
Aeris finally looked over at her. "Really?"
"Well, they thought you must've been dangerous, for Turks to come after you."
"I could be dangerous!"
Elena looked her over skeptically. "Sure you could."
"I don't have my staff."
"You know how to use a staff?"
"Well enough to clock Reno where it hurts," Aeris said, miming a low strike with her hands, and Elena laughed. "You know, I like you," Aeris went on. "I think you're my favorite Turk."
Elena rolled her eyes. "You're just saying that because I'm not with Shinra anymore."
"Maybe! But that's kind of a big deal."
"...yeah, I guess it is."
Aeris shifted, turning a little more towards her. "It probably feels... like kind of a crazy thing to do," she said. "Not just leaving, but going against them. It always seemed like they had all the power in the world."
Elena shook her head. Maybe that was where Aeris was coming from, but... "It's not that," she said. "I really...... I mean, I always thought they were doing such incredible things."
"Really?"
"Well, look at Midgar," she said, gesturing as if to conjure its image in the air above them, city lights instead of stars. "People don't think about it, but that's an incredible feat of engineering. All the calculations for how much weight it could support and in what configuration. Roadways, waterways, and the entire electrical grid for each plate were mapped out before construction even began. There's nothing half-assed or jury-rigged about it."
Aeris wrinkled her nose. "It doesn't seem so grand when you're living underneath it."
"People aren't really supposed to be down there."
"Mm, so they should just move onto the plate, right? Is Shinra gonna pay for that?"
"Well, they could always get jobs with Shinra."
Aeris's expression turned wry. "You remember who you're talking to, right?"
Elena fell silent. There was no way someone like Aeris could ever work for Shinra. Hell, Elena didn't even work for Shinra anymore. For the first time, it occurred to her to wonder about all the things she'd left behind. Her apartment and everything in it, payed for by a Company salary. Would it be swept clean of any sign she'd ever lived there, in preparation for the day when she herself could be successfully erased?
"You can't just tell people how to live their lives," Aeris added quietly. "It might be orderly, but it'd be pretty miserable."
"Maybe," Elena acknowledged. "But a lot of people want that kind of order, and... I think Shinra used to be really good at providing it. They were coming up with all sorts of things that made people's lives better."
"Not anymore?"
Elena looked across the campfire at the others talking and laughing. "...it's one thing to move against people opposing you," she said. "But if the point is to get everybody to adopt the Shinra way of life, then what do you get out of destroying whole towns who've already done that? They're sabotaging themselves. Barret and Tifa aren't backwards hicks who just don't want Mako. Shinra had already won them over. They made AVALANCHE by pulling stupid shit."
"Mmm, and now they've even turned a Turk against them."
Elena frowned at her. "Are you making fun of me?"
Aeris waved her hands. "No, no. I'm agreeing with you. I mean... It's not like Shinra ever did right by me. There are a lot of people they were never going to help. But even the people who used to get something out of it... If there was a time when they were safe, it's in the past."
Elena let the statement lie. She was one of those people, she thought. She'd grown up on the plate, never once doubting. She'd enrolled in Shinra Military Academy, leaping at the chance to do so a year early because of high marks. She'd expected it to lead to great things, to be part of a grand mission.
She and her family had never lived in Sector 7, but they could have. Or AVALANCHE could have been headquartered somewhere else. There were half a million people in that city, and most of them still had absolute faith in Shinra, never considering that tomorrow they could be written off as collateral damage.
Elena didn't know if she'd support AVALANCHE past tearing Shinra down. She didn't have a clear idea of what they wanted to build, and she didn't think they did either. But Shinra was rotten underneath. She didn't know if it always had been, but it was too far gone now for salvaging. Something else would have to take its place.
They were short a bedroll with Aeris in their number, but Tifa and Jessie volunteered to share so she wouldn't freeze to death. They all bedded down close to the fire, and Barret took first watch.
No one tapped Elena to take a shift. She wasn't sure why. Did they still not trust her, or was she getting special treatment because she was the one who'd taken a hit? Maybe it was just an oversight; they hadn't adjusted their usual rotation to include her yet.
She woke to find that Aeris had shifted closer to her in the night, her face inches away. Elena felt her own heating before she quickly rolled onto her back. Stupid. She would've been the one to bring Aeris in if she'd found her first. What was she doing letting her guard down so completely around her 'favorite Turk'?
The sun had just broken the horizon, and the night chill still clung to the earth. Tifa had built up the fire again and sat hunched close to it preparing breakfast, leaving Jessie slumbering in their bedroll. Wedge and Red were up, too, and from his breathing, Elena thought Barret might be awake, but he lay on his back. Yuffie snored softly.
"Hey," Tifa greeted quietly once she noticed Elena. "Sleep okay?"
Elena couldn't tell if she was being teased. "...yeah, I guess," she said cautiously.
But Tifa just nodded. She glanced at Aeris and then Yuffie. "We'll wake them once breakfast is ready."
They got moving as soon as they could. They wouldn't clear the desert before the heat of the day descended, but they wanted to get as far as they could. With a full day's drive ahead of them, this time they took turns. Tifa took over from Wedge after a few hours, and when the fuel gauge tipped dangerously low and Elena showed them the storage compartment where the spare canisters were stored, they let her have a turn at the wheel.
Yuffie sat miserable beside her, occasionally leaning forward to try the radio, but the stations they could catch were more static than sound. It wasn't until the scrub started growing thicker around them, signalling an end to the desert, that one grew clear enough that she left it running. Tinny, old-fashioned fiddle music played through the speakers. Elena didn't much like it, but it masked the sound of Yuffie moaning, so she let it be.
By the time Wedge took over again, the greenery was growing thick enough to give them trouble finding a route for the truck. Aeris made a little sound of dismay whenever they trundled over flowers in their path, and it slowed their progress. But at least it wasn't so unbearably hot.
They hit the river in the middle of the afternoon, where they came to a stop to puzzle out their next step. The water was too deep here for the truck to ford, and they didn't have a good map of the area, but Barret swore he remembered a bridge. There should have been a road, too, but the desert had swallowed it, and it was hard to say how many miles east or west it might have been.
At last they agreed on splitting up to scout a few miles in either direction. If they couldn't find the road, they'd abandon the truck and swim across, hoofing it the final stretch to Gongaga, but no one really wanted to do that. With the truck, they could probably push on driving past nightfall and reach the village before morning. Going on foot would stretch the journey out for days. They wouldn't beat Sephiroth or Shinra that way.
So Elena left her suit jacket in the truck with her gear and followed Tifa as they set out east along the river. It was only after the other group was well out of earshot that Aeris spoke up.
"Was the girl time on purpose?"
Elena glanced at her, and then at Jessie and Tifa. It was just the four of them, and she hadn't even realized.
Aeris seemed pleased by it, but Elena suppressed a brief shock of panic. She hadn't been in one of these girls-only scenarios since primary school, and the kinds of girls-only conversations they showed in film always seemed so alien and frivolous. Men could be crude, especially in the military, but she knew how to deal with that.
"We're mostly girls anyway," Jessie pointed out. "Not that I think Barret or Wedge are really paying attention."
"Hmm, I noticed that," said Aeris.
"Noticed what?" Tifa asked.
"Are you saying there's nothing going on there?"
Tifa exchanged looks with Jessie, who shrugged. "It'd be news to me," said Tifa.
"I just meant Barret's always so mission-focused," Jessie added. "And Wedge is... you know."
Elena didn't know, but Aeris hummed as though she understood exactly.
"What difference does it make?" Elena said.
"There's nothing wrong with getting to know everybody," said Aeris.
"I don't see how that kind of thing is important."
Aeris fixed her with a knowing smile. "So somebody's definitely single," she said.
Elena snorted and picked up her pace to stride ahead of the lot of them.
"...I don't think we're gonna have much gossip for you," Tifa said from behind her. "We're all single."
"Too busy saving the world?" Aeris wondered.
"Something like that."
"That's too bad. But I guess things have been really hectic... This is kind of a nice break."
"It is nice to stretch our legs," Tifa agreed.
At least that much Elena could agree with, too. It was still hot, but when the breeze picked up, it carried cool across the water. She picked her way along the rocky shore, catching glimpses of fish as their scales caught the sunlight near the river's surface. From time to time birds and other small animals flitted away at their approach. Elena tensed a few times, but these weren't monsters. Even the idea of monsters seemed incongruous. No Shinra, no Mako, no monsters.
After a while, Aeris came skipping up to walk at her side. "Sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to embarrass you."
"I'm not embarrassed," Elena scoffed. "I just think that stuff's a waste of time."
"Doing it, or talking about it?"
"Huh?"
"I mean, do you date and you just don't like to kiss and tell?" Aeris elaborated. "Or are you not into any of it?"
Elena felt her face heating. "I've been on dates," she said. She could count them on one hand, and they'd sucked, but it was enough to be plural.
"Okay. So you're just a private person," Aeris decided.
"...why do you want to talk about it?" Elena asked cautiously.
"I'm just interested in people, I guess! ...and I've never really gotten to do girl talk before."
"Oh." She wasn't entirely sure what to make of that. Aeris acted like someone who didn't have the least bit of trouble making friends. But then, how many people could you really trust when Shinra was always keeping tabs on you?
"All the other Turks I know are guys," Aeris went on. "Was that a pain?"
Elena shrugged. "I wasn't one of them that long. I don't know. Guys can be jerks, but you usually know where you stand."
Aeris smiled at her. "Well, I try not to be subtle. So hopefully you don't have to worry about that."
She'd dropped back to rejoin the others before Elena could fully process that, and she was glad because she was pretty sure she'd gone bright pink. Aeris was interested in people, and she sure seemed particularly interested in whether Elena was available. She ran her fingers over the cactuar charm in her pocket.
Stupid. All of it was really stupid.
And it was only because she was fighting so hard not to glance back at Aeris that Elena was the first to spot the bridge up ahead.