“Daddy?” Aeris called from outside. “It’s me, Daddy. I’m home. Some stuff happened.”
He opened the door hesitantly. “Oh good, Aeris, I was worried– Zachary! You’re all right?” Aeris spun and saw Zack coming up behind her, two more people in the alley behind him.
Zack hesitated for a minute, then shrugged. “I don’t really know.”
Gast looked past him then. “What’s going on? Veld? And who’s…” Even having heard from Sephiroth that Hojo was alive, Gast’s voice died in his throat when he set eyes on the man.
“Hello, Professor,” Hojo said with a nod.
Aeris looked back at all of them, glaring. “I said I wanted to be alone.”
“No,” Veld corrected. “You said you needed to think. You didn’t specify where you were going or that you wanted to do it by yourself.”
“You’re all insufferable. I can’t believe I have to help you people save the Planet.”
“Is that what we’re here for?” Zack asked her.
“Well, yeah. What did you think?” she responded.
He shrugged. “Beat the heck out of Lucrecia, maybe?”
“The Planet loves irony, Zack, she plots these patterns out nice and straight and watches them all collide. Slowing in her orbit for traffic accidents.”
“Don’t talk about her like that!” Aeris shouted.
Gast could see porch lights going on behind them and heads appearing in windows. “Maybe you had all better come inside,” he said, opening the door. Hojo waited for everyone else to file in before following.
He looked Gast in the eye as he passed. Gast shook his head sadly.
“They told you I was dead and you believed it?” Hojo asked.
“They did, and you looked it, and quite honestly… quite honestly, I could believe them. I could see you experimenting on yourself.”
Hojo shook his head. “You’re right, I was close, I’d thought about doing it to myself. That’s not why I’m disappointed, not at all, no. I’m much more hurt that you thought I’d fucked it up that badly.” Hojo brushed past him and into the kitchen where everyone else had gathered. He looked briefly at the occupied chairs and then pulled his hair out of the way before hopping up onto a counter to sit.
Gast shivered and turned to the strange group that had convened in his kitchen. “Why are you all here? I hope you’ll tell me that much. What happened to Sephiroth?”
“He’s infected,” Aeris said. “With the Crisis.”
“What does that mean?” Veld asked.
“Jenova, the Crisis, was an alien that came to this planet a long time ago.” Aeris spoke in a faraway voice, not looking at anyone. She was obviously listening to something not in the room. “She made the crater up north. She killed most of the Cetra with some kind of disease and the planet made Weapons to protect itself from her… but the Cetra were the ones who bound Jenova in the ice. She was frozen and helpless until she was released.” She relaxed, sighing heavily, when she was done. She hadn’t realized how tense she was.
“Hojo and I discovered her body early in my career,” Gast picked up the narrative, and though he tried to look at his daughter, his eyes kept darting back to the former scientist hunched over his counter. “We assumed Jenova was the first perfectly-preserved Cetra specimen to ever be discovered – or at least we wanted her to be. Of course we had no idea what we were looking for in the first place. We dug her out and brought her back. When we established the auxiliary lab in Nibelheim for Hojo to do theoretical research while I stayed in Midgar to work with SOLDIER, he was assigned to observe and record the specimen. I met Ifalna while you were out there, Hojo, and she told me about the Crisis and about –”
Veld’s PHS rang. He stepped into the living room as he flipped it open.
“Ifalna?” Hojo asked before Gast could continue.
“A Cetra. My wife.”
Hojo looked at Aeris, raising an eyebrow. She nodded to him, “The voice.”
“Interesting,” Hojo answered.
“What?” Gast asked, hating the feeling of being out of the loop. Who was this man who’d been left for dead twenty-five years and showed up again knowing his daughter better than he did? This was a far cry from the relentlessly logical scientist he’d known.
“Apparently the voice the planet uses is your wife.” Hojo smiled thoughtfully. “You have better taste than I thought.”
“Thank you… I think,” Gast answered, shaken, as he stared at at Hojo. Hojo was watching Aeris, and the girl was worrying over her father.
Zack broke the silence. “So, um, your wife was telling you stuff?”
“Oh, right,” Gast recovered, “yes, she told me about what the Crisis had done to the Cetra and said I had to put her back right away, before she woke up and threatened the planet again.”
“This was all after…” Hojo said, shaking his head.
“Yes,” Gast nodded. “So I had her taken back up north to Bone Village and left, the site abandoned on the pretense that some horribly contagious disease had been uncovered.”
“Did Mom suggest that?” Aeris asked.
Gast blinked. “Yes. Why?”
“It’s true, is all. But it sounds like a cover up. That’s so like Mom.”
“I suppose that is the sort of thing she’d come up with,” he considered. “But the question is where Lucrecia got her hands on some to begin with.”
“That… may be my fault,” Hojo said quietly. “I was experimenting with her as well as observing. I had some blood samples from her in storage when I was… yes. So this is my sin. The planet really is a bitch with a sense of humor.”
“So… do you think they’re headed for the body? Like, they’re gonna dig it up?” Zack asked, ignoring Hojo’s question.
“What does she want?” Gast asked, shaking his head. None of it made sense to him.
“It doesn’t matter what she wants,” Veld came back in, snapping the PHS shut. “Power, control, or a nice cup of tea. We were on the verge of arresting her for attempted murder. She’s already infected two SOLDIERs and on her way out of town, Reno and Rude intercepted her. Reno was badly injured and he’s showing signs of this infection, too. Nobody messes with my kids.”
“If this can be spread, we need to take her out fast,” Zack said, grateful to be able to switch into discussing tactics. This was ground he did feel comfortable on. “So she’s going north. They’ll probably take a boat from Kalm. Get us a helicopter, Veld, and we can beat them to the Village. What kind of backup will we have?”
“For the time being, you’ll have me,” Veld said. “Until we figure out how she’s spreading this, we can’t risk sending in a whole unit of SOLDIERs.”
Zack let his mouth hang open for only a minute before closing it and nodding. “Fine, so there’s you and there’s me. If you give enough fire from the helicopter…”
“You’re taking me as well,” Hojo spoke matter-of-factly.
“No offense, but you couldn’t shoot for shit up there,” Veld noted.
“I won’t be shooting.”
“What’s that supposed to–” Veld started, but Zack cut him off.
“I saw him in the basement. He’ll be fine. He comes.”
Veld crossed his arms over his chest, unhappy at having lost control of the situation.
“I’m going too,” Aeris said quietly.
“What?” Gast shouted. “No. No. Going to get your boyfriend is one thing–”
“Boyfriend?” Zack blinked, but Gast continued talking over him.
“–but going on a military operation is something else entirely. No.”
“But Daddy! I have to!” she complained. “The Planet said I have to and Mom said and I need to! I really do! And I know how to fight, you know I do, and if it gets bad, Zack will take care of me!”
“I will?”
She glared at him.
“Um. I guess I will.”
“‘I guess’ is not the most reassuring thing to hear from a SOLDIER,” Gast pointed out.
“I agree with your father,” Veld said. “This isn’t going to be clean or easy.”
“I’m not stupid and I’m not a kid!” Aeris shouted. She realized that a whiny, tantrum-throwing kid was exactly what she sounded like and stopped. She took a deep breath and collected her thoughts.
“Look. I’ve been thinking about what Mister Hojo said in the lab and he’s right. I know the planet’s not all happy and nice but this whole fighting thing isn’t simple or nice either. Sephiroth and Dadjy are sick! They need help, not just getting beat up, and I don’t think any of you guys is going to deal with that.”
“I was– I mean– We could deal with that,” Zack sputtered.
“How?” she demanded.
“Um… I dunno,” he admitted.
“Sephiroth is practically your best friend in the world and you’re about to run off and beat the heck out of him without a plan! Listen to yourself!” Aeris shouted.
Zack sighed and rubbed the back of his neck, then looked up at Gast. “She’s right.”
“I don’t care if she’s right. I have to put my daughter’s safety first,” Gast answered.
“But what if she can heal them so we don’t have to fight them? Honestly, they pretty much kicked our asses back in the lab,” Zack said. “I dunno that we could take them even with more planning and surprise on our side.”
“It’s not about saving Sephiroth,” Veld pointed out. “The security of Midgar is at stake, and possibly the planet. And you are still, technically, a Shinra employee.”
“Oh, like Shinra gives a damn about the planet,” Gast snapped.
“Shinra does care,” Veld said with a smirk. “Dead people don’t pay taxes, and a creepy alien space army could threaten Shinra’s control.”
Gast buried his face in his hands.
When he looked up, Ifalna was standing behind Aeris, hands on her daughter’s shoulders. He glanced around quickly. Veld and Zack were discussing tactics again, and Aeris’s head was down. She didn’t seem to notice.
Gast looked at his wife pleadingly, but she only nodded. He wanted to say something, anything, had been waiting to see her again since her death, but nothing came to his lips. Though she didn’t speak, it was obvious what she was telling him. Aeris had to go.
He nodded back to her, slowly, and closed his eyes. He could find no peace in the decision, however.
A hand laid on his shoulder made him jump. Ifalna was gone, and the hand belonged to his former student. He looked up at Hojo, ignoring the eyes and claws, looking for the man he had known. As a young man, he’d been a brat and a prima donna, too smart for his own good and insufferable to work with. That was why Gast had given him the lab in Nibelheim in the first place; it made his own life simpler.
He thought about Sephiroth and Dadjy, infected by their mother’s desperation, and about his own daughter. How much of this was his fault? Was fault even the right word to use? What had Hojo called it, his sin?
Gast was surprised to realize that he could also, when he squinted, see the resemblence to Sephiroth in Hojo’s face. He’d never had any reason to doubt that Sephiroth was Vincent’s; the effect was startling.
“We should go,” Hojo said, interrupting Veld and Zack’s planning. “We’ll go see this boy who was attacked. If Aeris can help him, then we’ll bring her.” He looked down at Gast and the older scientist nodded.
Aeris jumped up and ran around the table, hugging him. “Thank you, Daddy! Thank you!”
“Thank me by coming home in one piece,” Gast choked out.
“Come on. We don’t have much time,” Veld instructed. He, Zack, and Hojo filed out the door.
Aeris hesitated. “I love you, Daddy. I’ll be back.”
Then she was gone and the door slammed shut behind her. He watched through the screen until the four of them disappeared into the twilight.
Veld led them to a small house near the northernmost exit from Midgar. On Shinra’s behalf, Rude had commandeered the first floor and had Reno laid out on the couch. Rude was no longer bleeding from an array of cuts and a bullet wound in the shoulder, but neither had he bothered to heal himself; he’d apparently been using up all his materia on his teammate.
Reno’s left eye was clouded-over and useless, even after healing, and the scarring around it would be permanent, Veld knew. Everything else seemed to have knitted up well enough under the cure spells, at least enough to hold him together until they got him to a hospital. It was Reno’s mental state that worried them.
“He has moments of lucidity,” Rude explained tersely, “but he’ll get violent, and start in about ‘protecting Mother’ and then I hit him in the head until he shuts up.”
“You hit him?” Veld asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Only thing that calms him down,” Rude shrugged.
“Please dun hit me agin,” Reno muttered.
“Stop being crazy and I won’t,” Rude replied without looking at him.
Veld frowned. “I don’t need brain-damaged Turks… Well, any more damaged than the lot of you already are.
“Okay, Aeris, this is your show,” Zack said. Looking nervous, the girl stepped forward.
Aeris wasn’t quite sure what she was doing as she laid her hands on his forehead, but she waited for the planet to show her what she had to do. She had a memory suddenly of catching some of the neighborhood boys in the garden playing ball, how they’d run through the flowers to get away when she called her father. Several of the flowers had been crushed and were in pain. She’d spoken to them, and they’d recovered.
Well, Aeris reasoned, if she could talk to the inside of a plant, maybe she could talk to the inside of a person, too. She concentrated on sensing the lifestream that was inside Reno. The feel of it bubbled up angry in her mind, fighting, and she tried to tell it what it was fighting, but the idea seemed too complicated. The lifestream retreated from her.
Desperate and unthinking, she pursued it, her own lifeforce invading Reno’s body. When she felt the Crisis inside him poisoning his lifeforce and twisting his cells, she railed against it.
The Crisis was stopped, and Aeris could almost hear it howl in anger. Reno’s own energy followed the example she’d set, breaking up and pushing aside the invading cells. Now, Aeris thought, he would just need to expell it somehow. How…
Before she could think of it, Reno reflexively turned his head to the side and vomited in Aeris’s lap.
“Eww!” she squealed, jumping up and away from him. “Get it off! Get me a towel!” Zack couldn’t help laughing now that the tension was broken and Aeris began to yell at him for it. It was Hojo who returned from the kitchen with dishtowels so she could clean herself off.
Reno sat up on the couch, looking ill but much better than he had a few minutes before. “Sorry,” he said sheepishly.
“Nicely done, messy but effective. Practicality wins over pretty. Do you know how you did that?” Hojo asked Aeris when she had calmed down. The front of her dress was still damp and rather dingy, but she was trying valiantly to look dignified.
“Yeah, I do. I think I can do it for Sephiroth and Dadjy,” she told him.
Veld had disappeared, and returned with a shirt and a pair of workpants. He handed them to Aeris.
“You want me to wear these?” she asked. “Where did they come from?”
“Comandeered by Shinra,” he smirked. “And I don’t want you distracted by uncomfortable clothing. It’s faster to change yours than train you to make do.”
“Thanks…” she said, without much gratefulness in her voice. She disappeared into the kitchen and came back a few minutes later, wearing the tight pants and too-big shirt. Veld tossed her a coat.
“It gets chilly up north. Come on, helicopter’s waiting for us outside the gates.” As the others left, he looked at Rude. “Get him back to headquarters, let the lab look at him. If there’s anything weird, call me.”
Rude nodded. Veld took another look at Reno’s eye, cursed under his breath, and followed the others.
