Archive of Our Own ^beta

"One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible."

- Mary Oliver, The Journey.

The shadows a warm wind made in the leaves waved hello to Barret as he stepped out of the door, humming an old slow dancing tune that used to seep out of all the bars in Wall Market. The languid drawl of a sax solo turned reedy when breathed through the nose, weaving its way around the trunks of trees a long way from pools of flickering neon and dark corners. “Hey, Barret!”, said the counterpoint. Garlan the glass-blower ambled along the sun-dappled path, safety glasses stuck up on his forehead. Barret waved with his good hand and turned a corner around a tall cedar to a “How's it hanging, Barret?” from Wymer. He raised the leather suitcase and the smaller pink one with a smile and in from the right came Kyrie, with a “'Sup, Barret?” and a wink and nothing hidden in her pockets, for once. She'd worn out the knees of her long socks digging in the dirt with the rest of them and stood cross-legged against a stack of spring greens, talking to Dani the poet who read to them around a drunken bonfire in the summer about the kneeled who would yield. She saved her words and threw him a nod and a thumbs up, then onto Don the baker, who fed them all while they laid the foundations. Barret hailed him hello and turned again, into Zeb the old watchmaker, cocking his flat cap with a smile no colder for the cracks around it. “Where'ra ya headed off to, Barret?” he said, pointing to the suitcase and the little pink box of damned good luck that travelled with Marlene out of Midgar and into the unknown. Barret told him, and wished him a good weekend, and went on his way.

The schoolhouse stood apart from the rest of the village, quieter and tucked away between tall oaks where only the birds would disturb the kids at their books. Three buildings made circles around their trunks, linked by rope bridges and lit by sunlight pouring through the canopy as a stream babbled by with a song in its heart, too. When the swarm of shrill voices arrived, it didn't come pouring out of the stilted structure, but followed the flow of the water out of the deeper, denser woods. A long line of chattering little people with books under their arms and mud on their boots advanced, Folia and her fond smile a tall flower guiding them from the centre. They carried fronds of fern in their chubby hands – and weren't afraid to use them. Tickling noses, standing wide in a defensive stance to parry an opponent's soft swipe. Barret leaned against one sturdy trunk and smirked. The stubby Corel ferns that grew to spite the will of the gods out of the side of the mountain made sharper weapons with their burs, and never bent so easy in grabbing hands.

Marlene came along towards the rear, standing as tall as his waist and bopping the boy beside her on the head. He braced his knees, opened his arms ready to receive her as she hurtled towards him – but she only offered a flutter of her fingers, sauntering past the stream with a regal wave to the class as she broke from the line. A rousing chorus of well-wishes for the trip went up behind her. “Hi, daddy,” she said, hugging his waist and kicking the last of the mud from her feet.

“Lookin' sharp, kid, matchin' your shoes and your suitcase like that,” he said, stroking her hair. “You taken 'em far, Folia?”

She stood before them with the scent of the forest woven into the coils of her hair, one hand on her hip in a dress the green of the rushes. “”It's such a beautiful day, I thought I'd take the children to see the tadpoles hatching in the pond. How many did you count, Marlene?”

“Twelve!”

Folia nodded. “Of course, you're already taking quite the journey, and we'll all miss you. Is this your first time going across the sea?”

She shook her head. “Daddy told me I was born in Corel, but I don't remember it.”

“You'll have to see if being there jogs your memory. I've never made it over to the west myself.” She turned to Barret as the flow of kids in pond-splattered boots split off into tributaries on their way home behind her. “I think Marlene had something she wanted to tell you.”

“Oh, right!” She stepped to the side and in front of him, arms open wide. “I can read all of Mr. Owl's Tea Party by myself now!”

“Well, ain't that somethin' to celebrate? I know it's always been your favourite, so how's it hold up now you're readin' it yourself?”

Marlene frowned and twisted one foot behind her on the ground. “It's funny. The story started off the same, except it never said Mr. Owl had a big gun instead of a wing, and the bad men with the axes weren't there, either. He just invited all the mice to his house for tea and cake. He never said,” and she deepened her voice to gravel, stamping a foot in time with her words, “get your scrawny asses outta my woods before I blow this place sky high!”

Folia wheezed and clapped a hand over her mouth as Barret choked, fumbling at the back of his neck. “Well,” he said, “that's the thing with stories, Marlene. They grow and they change dependin' on who's doin' the tellin'. When you're older, you're gonna make some of your own, too.”

He raised his hand to the case around his neck that held the camera, one thumb flailing uselessly at the magnetised clasp. Dipshit . A serrated voice nestled in behind his ear, sour with whiskey and smokes and scorn. You got two of 'em again now, remember? Barret blinked twice and lifted the metal hand to hold the case in place until he worked it free. “A little to the left, both of you,” he said as the screen settled. Aperture a little too wide, smudging the schoolhouse into fog – the last photo he took caught a little yellow finch that stopped to chill a while on the sill of the living room window, preening and posing as Barret moved into position slowly. He moved the shutter speed down and down and down some more, to let those beautiful sunbeams contrast and illuminate the space the school took up. “And smile!”

Folia put one hand on a gurning Marlene's shoulder, the other holding the fern across her chest. Barret pressed the shutter and held them there forever, glowing with youth and afternoon.

“I won't keep you from your boat,” said Folia, slinging a straining leather bag across her shoulder. “I have twice as much lesson planning to do now Elena's elsewhere as well. Hmm. Maybe I'll see if Dani is free to help this evening. Have fun on your travels, all three of you!”

He waved and returned the camera to its holding bay – with both hands. See? You're gettin' it. Dyne wasn't far away, smelling as acrid and sulphurous as the smoke that wreathed Junon the day they took the city back. Elena, of course she had to mention Elena. Barret took Marlene's hand in his, the good one, led her along the winding path towards the tram and away from the crowd that roared for blood. Dyne was with them that day, too, whispering in his ear like a whiskey-soused old barfly sliding half-off a stool and begging for company for the night, urging his finger towards the trigger as Elena sobbed on her knees and called out for a mama she still believed was buried under what remained of Midgar. The cry followed her to the woods where they set up the village, kicking its heels just the same. It echoed through the trees on quiet nights, superimposed itself on her words when she spoke with her eyes on the floor.

Bertha was waiting back home, safe and sound in a chest in the hallway under a stack of picture books. She'd had two nights on the town since he threw the hunk of metal to the ground in front of the wailing Turk, and not a one since he asked for two hands to clap and cook and entwine his fingers with others. Why not take it? It suits ya. Dyne had taken a seat on the stair that creaked when Barret made to leave, nodding to the chest and its gleaming new lock and flicking ash onto the polished floorboards. Ain't I your bestest bud? I never lied to ya. I told you puttin' cranberry in the chili for the cook-off was a damn fool's idea. On your weddin' day, fixin' you up, y'asked me if that red cummerbund made you look fat, and what did I say, huh?

Barret slammed the door on him and marched out into the light, Marlene beside him with a skip in her step. Elena had taken herself to an island several seas away, watching blossom rain from the skies and mountains rise higher than any tower Shinra could've dreamed of. She wouldn't have time to cry with Yuffie dragging her around, demanding a sparring match in the pagoda and talking both her ears off about the best tea crops in the world.

Marlene gave a tighter tug on his hand, skipping over puddles painted with the colours of the trees. “What kind of stories did you like when you were a kid? Did they change when you got older, like you said?”

“Oh, you bet.” Barret chuckled softly. “Where I'm from and where you're from, where we're goin', everybody knew about the lantern men livin' under the mountain.”

Her eyes widened and he leaned in, lowering his voice. “Little green fellas who made their homes in the mines, way deep down in the ground. They wove themselves robes outta whatever weeds grew in the earth and on quiet nights, you wait by the mouth of a cave, you might just hear 'em sharpenin' their knives to make a meal outta any unfortunate adventurers got lost in the caverns. 'You kids do as your mama and your papa tell you, else Master Tonberry's gonna come to your room at night and make you his slave down there in the damp and dark!'” At one time he would've hoisted her onto his shoulder and tickled her sides until she squealed, but her friends were close by and watching. “We all remembered those stories when it was our turn to go down the mine, and you bet our supervisors did, too. 'Don't be slackin', boys! The lantern man's down there honin' his steel, and he makes himself a meal outta slowpokes!'”

Marlene gasped, as soft as a falling leaf with a hint of trepidation behind it. “Did you ever see one?”

“Not in the mines.” He led her over the little humpbacked bridge, leaving the stream's gentle, sun-splashed song behind them. “But you think about 'em the first time they lower you into that pit, let me tell ya. The earth swallowin' the whole thirty of us like a hungry thing. Our eyes ain't made to see in the dark, and under the ground, they'll fill in all the blanks with any scary thing your mind can think up.”

Dyne nudged his shoulder on the first day, pickaxe slung at a jaunty angle over shoulders slim in residual boyhood, from which hung overalls worn by countless burrowers before him. His cheeks stuck out when he smiled, already anointed with smears of coal dust. “Y'ever scare yerself, thinkin' what might be right around the corner?”

He paused, dropping her hand a moment to reach for the camera. Two larks stood playing sentinel on the railing of the bridge, combing one another's feathers best they could, chirruping at playful pecks and ruffling their wings in a show of might. He froze them with the sun on the water behind, and carried on. “'Course, by the time I was old enough to do it myself, planetology came on a long way. Turns out what we useta think was lantern light was just the lifestream pokin' through. Still, there's one hell of a lot of metal down a mine. What's in the books don't mean nothin' when you hear what sounds like a knife gettin' sharp.”

Marlene frowned. “But you told me you fought a tonberry when you were going around the world to stop Meteor.” She pursed her lips and stared up at him. “Were you lying?”

He placed the metal hand on his chest below the camera and gasped. “I'd never lie to you, baby! Turns out we were all a little wrong. It wasn't 'til the folks from the Gold Saucer – and I'll take you some day, promise I will – but they went and built that ropeway into the desert, and took all the critters they found down the mine for their battle arena, and it turns out tonberries were real after all.” He nodded towards the community centre as the front door slid open. “Why don't you ask Cloud and Tifa right now?”

Tifa was the first down the steps, bright and bold in a shirt striped with green and white and red hanging loose over her cutoffs. “Hold up!” she called, paper bag in her hand as she trotted across the decking. “I have a conference call to take in a minute, but I made something for you two!”

She was sixteen, one hundred pounds soaking wet and two inches shorter when Barret first made his way to Midgar like a fucking tourist, asking for directions as if the slums had streets you could name. There she was, a beautiful girl dressed for a hot day under the heart of the machine, bent over nailing a plank back into a rotting veranda. She didn't see the silent, circling sharks, hungry mouths wrenched into leering grins over suits and ties – topsiders come down to make easy prey of slum girls left on their own. Barret flexed his arm, cocking and loading the hunk of metal bolted onto him, heavy and dragging as he took one slow step and then another towards the vultures.

And he stopped, frozen in place, keeping a safe distance from the pyrotechnic display of fists and feet that exploded from the skinny girl crouched on the steps.

“Shinra dogs,” she sneered to the groaning heap left on the dirty ground. “You think you can take what you want from us because you have a good salary and a seat on the train home?” She dusted herself down, picked up her hammer, and it was only Barret's shadow that crossed her door the day after.

“I put together a little something for you to eat on the way into town,” she said, bending to ruffle Marlene's hair. “Since it's the right season, and I know someone who loves my kumquat jam so much!”

Tifa stood up straight and smiled, bigger in the shoulders than when took Barret under her wing in that sludge pile of misery, a foot shorter than him with a shadow taller than anyone's. She built up that bright oasis of colourful cocktails from dead and dried-up ground, and she did it again in a forest under the Junon mountains with Barret behind her. A week, a month, a year went by, and house after house sprang up like mushrooms fed by fat raindrops.

All this dry wood , said Dyne, slouching against the wall by the entrance and flicking his lighter with a sharp click, click, click. It's only gonna take a spark , he said in the same hissing whisper he put in Barret's ear every day they felled and sawed and hammered and healed. Do it, 'fore you let some suit with gil for eyes get here and do it for ya.

Barret took the package from Tifa's hand. “Thanks.” He nodded to Cloud, on his way down the steps in a crop top and shorts he'd swear on mama Wallace's memory were Tifa's once. “Was plannin' on pickin' up somethin' in the city while we wait for Aunt Elmyra to get done savin' the world, but there ain't no bakery in Junon does better than that crusty bread you make.”

A conflict crossed Marlene's face, her eyes flitting between the sandwich bag and him. “No fire noodles?”

“No fire noodles today, honey,” he said, wincing. “We gotta share a bathroom with a lotta other people on that boat, and we don't all got guts of steel like you.” Barret scarfed down a bowl of those evil red worms on a beer-drenched night in the summer and spent the next morning glued to the shitter with Bahamut breathing holy fire out of his asshole – but not Marlene, who cleaned her plate and asked for more and remembered to say excuse me when she burped.

“Considerate.” Cloud took his place by Tifa's side, a hand on one hip and a grave look on his face. “You know we're just a phone call away while you're out there, right?”

Barret smiled softly, at his best friend who held himself loosely in his sun-bronzed skin. “I gotcha.” He then straightened his shoulders and put out his chest. “Say, once they're done with all they're buildin' over there, you gotta come over with us some day! Now we got time, I wanna show alla y'all the view from the top of that mountain on a good morning.”

Tifa nodded. “We'd love to.”

Cloud took a step forward and put one hand on Barret's arm above the metal fixing. “Come see us when you get back, alright? Show us the photos.” Same old Cloud, really – still grinding out a sentiment in the smallest number of words he could.

Barret's smiled deepened, even as he crossed his arms and raised one eyebrow. “Sayin' you're fond of me?”

Cloud's mouth ticked up at one corner, only for a second, a gesture lost on anyone who didn't know him well. He leaned back, a hand on his hip. “Just want to be sure you'll make it back in one piece, that's all. A lot of scary high places up there in the mountains.”

“I like high places,” said Marlene. “I like being able to see.”

“Well,” Barret said, “that's 'cause you always were much, much braver than your big ol' dumb dad.” He squeezed her shoulder and took a step back, swinging the suitcase. “We better get movin' soon, but first, speakin' of this old thing...” He opened the case again, lens cap off, nodding towards the stairs. “You two, line up now.”

Cloud shook his head. “You don't have enough of us already?”

But he moved to the steps all the same, his arm around Tifa's waist and his head resting on top of hers. “In this exact spot, too, I think,” she said.

Barret shrugged. “Better light this time.” He set a slower shutter speed in the shadow of the community centre, everything they built together contained under one roof of turquoise glass, where behind amber-coloured windows a group of village kids played pool with the deadly intent of hungry coyotes. The sun spotlit Cloud and Tifa from the right-hand side, their white smiles and the gleam in their eyes.

He took his first photo of them on a shitty disposable camera pulled out of the bombed front of a Junon drugstore. Cid had a hand on its underside holding it steady as he framed the shot, one of the red banners torn and falling to the ground in a frame of buckled crane metal. Under it stood Cloud and Tifa dressed in bits and pieces of Shinra uniform with the insignia torn away, dirty and sweating and bleeding here and there but alive and breathing in the sweet, clean air of victory. It stayed behind glass on the wall of the bar, fuzzy from swirling dust, the first picture taken in a free world.

They never did pick a symbol to replace those Shinra logos with, no banner to unite under, not even a name for the village. The planet provided, as ever, giving them blossoms and trees and trellises of ivy to shelter beneath instead.

***

“Will it be cold in the mountains?” Marlene pressed against his side as they waited for her photos to load, passing under a line of saplings that stood to attention in welcoming a tram full of newcomers to a reborn Junon. “Uncle Cid told me it gets really cold in high up places. He says it's all about the attitude that makes the air act different.”

“Altitude, sweetheart,” he said, kissing the top of her head. “Where Corel is, 'bout halfway up the taller mountains, it ain't too bad this time of year. We'll wanna get a fire goin' and curl up tight once the night draws in, though.”

She nodded and held up the camera for both of them. The rocking and rumbling of the tram never deterred her from turning the focus ring with utmost concentration as Barret's metal hand made a makeshift tripod, aimed out of the window at the flashes of lowland country passing by. On the screen she scrolled through shots of their fellow passengers bathed in low afternoon light, smiling down at the girl in the pink frock who asked without a moment's hesitation to take their picture and looked them in the eye the whole time, explaining the rule of thirds and how longer exposure drew more light into the little box she brandished.

“This one went and saved the best for last, I say,” said Barret. The greenery in the foreground blurred in motion, and a lone tree on a hillock made a single stoic point of clarity. Its spring's head of leaves caught fire in the fading light, as the villagers who tilled the fields headed home for a catch-up and cold beer.

The tram left them in the shadow of the command centre, under a roof patterned with leaping dolphins in the undulating hues of the sea. Last time he stood below that waveless surface Elmyra kissed his cheek and put him on the journey home, and just the touch of her hand melted the layer of rime that still clung to his skin after months making wind power in the far north. She had pictures to show him, too, of Corel in a new spring where the sun awakened the mountain fern and things were being built again – thanks in no little part to the expertise a certain master of materia shared with them the year before. He smiled as he took Marlene's hand again and led her through wide streets bereft of road markings where no cars roved, framed by cascades of flowering vines and merry market stalls. Elmyra's green fingertips had touched every part of the city, left a little Cetra magic down every dirty alley she walked at the start of it all, and some of those sparks still danced on his skin, too. The town was lit in amber the first evening, when she took his hand and marched him through the streets she helped to shape, back to her place without a second's hesitation. Not until her clothes came off and she covered her chest with her palms, like he was meant to be surprised she didn't have the body of a twenty-year-old beauty queen under there. He stepped closer and took her hands in his and she placed them on his arm, over the rough and cratered band where skin met metal.

Remember when you first stepped offa the boat ? Dyne walked beside him, flanking Marlene's right-hand side with a cigarette dangling from his lip and a sneering look up at the balconies high above them, dripping with leaves and fronds from hanging baskets. You took one look up at how high those buildings are, the Shinra logos hung up like steaks for dryin', and oh how you swore you'd turn the lot of into a bigger pile o' rubble than Corel ever was, all on your lonesome.

The doors of the Centre pressed shut behind them, leaving Dyne to skulk outside. Barret took a seat beside Marlene on the couch in the island in the middle of the pond in the foyer, where he'd sat not so long ago with the glass swan clouding in his sweaty palm. A knot in his stomach, rehearsing his lines, working up the nerve to go upstairs to Elmyra like he was asking her to be his prom date and maybe go make out behind the old air raid bunker after hours. The little bird spent a month swimming in his pocket, clinking against the metal of his hand, hidden when she came over for dinner. Never the right time. She was busy, she wouldn't want the interruption, and maybe that night by the lake under Meteor's eye wasn't something she wanted to remember.

“I don't know if I should be offended that no-one noticed we slipped away for two hours at the party last year,” El said over wine at Cloud and Tifa's, after they broke the news to no surprise from anyone save poor old Vincent. The only person happier was Marlene, who had the camera again and crouched at the edge of the little island, trying to capture the koi on their circular travels. He sat back, eyes on the stairway still empty of Elmyra. Just a few minutes and he'd be in her arms again.

“Howdy, Barret! And you, Marlene.” There was Matthias, coffee in one hand and a stack of papers under the other arm. A weedy kid with stringy hair and square glasses twice the size of his eyes – no-one would ever look at him and think he'd been the one to drive across a plain shaken by Diamond Weapon's footprints to save Elmyra and Marlene. “You're putting coffee, cocoa, and ice cream in the same cup?”

“You're just mad you didn't think of it first.” There was Priya stood at the vending machine, pointing to a stack the size of her head, a mountain of swirling white slowly melting over the sides. “Hi, Barret. Hi, kiddo.”

“Gonna down that whole thing at five in the afternoon?” Barret shook his head. “What'd I tell you that day we were fittin' the panels in the roof of the community centre, huh? When you got the shakes at the top of that ladder?”

She shrugged and tossed her hair back behind her shoulder. “It's only my fourth today.”

“You tell Reeve he's a bad influence on you kids.”

Marlene tore herself away from the movements of the fish and looked at him with big, glassy doe eyes. “Daddy...”

“You can try the cocoa and the ice cream but no coffee this late in the day, alright? We can't be bouncin' off the walls when there's folks in the next cabin wantin' their beauty sleep.”

A stirring of air blew ripples across the surface of pond, shattering Marlene's reflection where she sat. Dyne hitched himself onto the arm of the couch, breathing stale smoke into air fragrant with climbers and hibiscus and staring at coffee he'd never taste again. You never brought me with you here before, he said, and let out a long, low whistle. Look at it, hell, smell it. Air-con, things growin' everywhere, floors you can see that no-good face in... He lounged back and cackled. Sit here long enough watchin' the fish, a man could forget he ever learned what people roastin' smells like.

“Aunt Elmyra!”

She stood on the landing in a white dress tumbling with poppies, the early evening sun lighting a halo in the hair swept up on top of her head. Her kitten heels clip-clopped a little faster when she saw Marlene, leaping over the pond and dashing towards the foot of the stairs and into her arms. Elmyra laughed and crouched on the floor to hold her tight, a suitcase and wide-brimmed straw hat clutched in one hand.

Her smile softened as she stood. She wore the same look lying back in his bath, whichever night it was she persuaded him to make the trip. Lounging under a pile of vanilla-scented bubbles and sipping light citrus wine, talking office gossip while Barret shaved in his fade, there was something in the way her clothes looked at home on the floor made the mountain seem a little less far away.

“You always got good ideas,” he'd said, sat on the edge of the tub and running his fingers over the damp ends of her hair. “Seein' things for what they are, keepin' it practical. It's why I got with you, that workin' woman's brain of yours.” He chuckled. “That and your legs.”

He got a wisp of vanilla foam flicked onto the end of his nose for that. “Besides,” she said, “you won't even recognise Corel now they're using what I've passed on.” She kissed him, and some tension fell away from his shoulders. That's right. It was the night he came home from Doctor Park's practice with Dyne hot on his heels the whole time, without a single fuck to give that Barret had a dinner to prepare. But when she came in on the tram El noticed the little quivers in his voice, and she sat him down, and he didn't have to worry about the house or the meal that night.

“Hope you packed somethin' else to put on your feet when we go scrabblin' up and down the hills,” he said, pulling her in and kissing her forehead.

“My boots are in here,” she said, holding her suitcase out to the side. “I've been before, or don't you remember?” She sighed, then laughed and shook her head. “It's silly. But when I was a little girl, probably the same age as you, Marlene – I used to think of myself walking on the deck of a cruise ship, wearing a white dress and a straw hat and looking out at the water, not knowing what was over the horizon.”

Barret laughed softly. “Never too late,” he said, guiding her out of that jewel-coloured hallway where a bone-dry world learned to live again.

Marlene glanced from side to side and frowned. “Is Uncle Reeve here?”

“He's a little tied up today, honey,” she said, motioning them towards the exit and the streets beyond. “Probably planning a three-floor food fight now that I'm going away.”

Probably gettin' a catnap in his office, sleepin' off a hangover, Barret didn't say, following behind them. He took Reeve out on the town some five nights after he came back from the north and didn't make it out of bed until the following afternoon. That man put away whiskey like a cactus with something to forget – not that Barret didn't hold his own, with Dyne taking up the stool on his right-hand side making promises that the wind farm would be toppled in weeks and the people of the little town on the snow plains left cold and lightless.

“I'm so glad you came to re-gale me with tales from the frontier,” Reeve said as he scrolled through the photos, snickering and knocking his glass against Barret's.

Barret grinned over the quiet chattering of ice cubes. “Came together real fast thanks to that team bein' so happy to be there. Gotta say, they work with a lotta gust-o.”

“Sounds like the entire project was a breeze.” Reeve's smile dropped when he found Vincent stood on an outcropping near the construction site, hair and cloak lifted high by the mountain wind.

Barret shook his head and took the camera back. “When're the two of you gonna stop actin' the fool and dancin' around it, huh?”

“I'm not dancing around anything,” said Reeve, sighing. “He knows where I stand.”

“Gotcha.” He winced as he downed the rest of the fire in his glass. “Sorry.”

“I did have one for you as well, though.” Reeve slipped a hand into his breast pocket and came back with a folded piece of printer paper, and a frown creasing his brow. “It's not very good quality,” he said after a beat. “But it's all I could find on what's left of the Shinra servers.”

The photo was still in his pocket, wrapped up in a pretty gold chain and a tin one flaky with rust. They made it to the door without a sight of Reeve and Marlene's face fell, even as she fought to keep a pout off her face. “I wanted to tell him Cait was going to look after the house while we're gone.”

“Oh no,” said Elmyra, laughing as she held the door. “Does he roll a dice to see which counters get cleaned, too?”

The road to the docks wound down on a path cut into the cliff face, stalls and carts wafting fresh chilli peppers and barbecued fish into the air. Barret's stomach rumbled, and the paper bag full of Tifa's sandwiches seemed awful light as they passed under the shadow of striped awnings. When he walked in a whiskey-soused haze with Reeve the streets had glimmered like sequins, and the whole night seemed to dance. “I'm sorry it's all pixels,” Reeve slurred when the tram made it back to the village and they parted ways. The machine was waiting at home, of course, grabbing a glass of water and telling Barret to sleep well before it went back to acting like a cat and curled up on the sofa. He left Reeve with the promise he did a good job – with the photo, the hand, the houses in the trees, and the safe return of Marlene when they all stood together on a rooftop and watched a new world take form in the aftermath of the battle. But Reeve only shrugged, and maybe the cat should've stayed with him after all, in that little house on the edge of the village.

“Look at her,” said El, leaning in when they reached the docks. Marlene walked a little way ahead, peering into the baskets of glass and wooden jewellery that glimmered like the setting sun on the sea. “I remember when she first came to me, and it took two days for her to even look me in the eye.”

“I can just see her 'bout five years from now,” he said. “Watchin' Tifa knock together somethin' bright and deadly, givin' her those big old eyes tryin' to get a sip.”

Elmyra laughed, her eyes crinkling, all because of something he'd said when the world gave her so many reasons not to. She took Marlene's hand and led her to the gangway, three tickets in her hand and a skip in her step to match the lilt of the mandolins and the rhythm of the boats rocking by the shore. Barret paused and turned back to the tall tower that pierced the sun, the square high in the cliff where Aerith's statue would watch over the smiling faces who walked under it. He took up the camera again, with the city's first lights like fireflies, and hit the trigger.

***

The deck dipped again and they walked past sipping ocean-coloured cocktails from the bar, tourists out of Costa by the sound of them, on their way home from a good long gawk at the crazy people in the stained glass towers who didn't work for profit. Barret sunk forward, elbows propped on his knees, cradling his head. On the same journey out of Junon three years past, it had only been Yuffie's constant retching right in his ear that turned the stomach. The world had narrowed to Rufus Shinra hidden behind the glass of the ship's cabin, flipping his hair and smirking as he mourned how rustic and rudimentary his welcoming ceremony had been. There was no room left to dwell on the rise and swell of the moving body beneath the ship, only a hull of steel banged together by flawed human hands between him and the surging, hungry tide below, longing to suck them down far beyond the reach of the sun.

A giggle drifted in from his right, where Marlene tugged at Elmyra's skirt to lead her to the railing – a railing with big gaps in its rungs, big enough for her to lean over and plunge through into an endless expanse of blue with only the half-circle of the sun on the horizon as a landmark. It cast a net of little lights on the surface of the water that widened as they neared the boat. He swallowed a rising bile, readying the camera. “It's a little early in the year for dolphins,” Elmyra said, but she joined Marlene on lookout anyway as Barret adjusted his focus. The view was smaller and stiller on the screen, passengers silhouetted to indistinguishable archetypes as he fired.

He'd made the journey in the opposite direction carrying nothing but the ragged clothes on his back, the hunk of metal on his arm, and a tiny pink bundle that wailed in his arms with a voice five times the size of her body. The bottle and formula he picked up in Costa with his ash-smeared gil, too, that she turned her little nose up at until the kindly woman from the cabin next door got sick of the screaming. She showed him how to hold it horizontally and wrapped it in his handkerchief. “It helps if it smells familiar,” she said of a sooty rag that stank of charred meat and gunfire.

Before that day, anything beyond the wheeling of the gulls over the Costa del Sol harbour was only a picture postcard on the other side of an ocean that gave no mercy to those with the hubris to try and commandeer it. No, he'd set his eyes westward, back then. “Cosmo Canyon,” Eleanor said one night as they sat in a circle around the kitchen table, books and reports and sheets of facts and figures blurring into one shining sign pointed to no good. “It's where the study of planetology was born. We should go, all three of us, maybe Myrna too when she's feeling better. They'd know how to make sense of all this, or I hope so, 'cause it's making my head spin.”

He'd kept an observation about the seven empty bottles of wine standing guard over Eleanor's study to himself, but whispered the name of the town hiding its secrets in forbidding cliffs sometimes when the starless nights under the plate grew too dark. He walked into Midgar after a long trek through mountains and over plains that made him taller than the pillars that stretched overhead, stronger than the foundations that tied its people down, his instrument of justice locked and loaded on one arm and Marlene nestled into the shoulder of the other. Under an open sky, far from the ruins, she stood pointing into an even more open ocean like any flicker could be a dolphin in the vast, rolling emptiness around them. Gods, but the world was big. A man could forget it pacing the slums, where every step among those shacks on top of shacks took him one footfall closer to hell. A maze in the dark with whispers and knives at every turn. Just the same as the night the bravest of the Corel boys left through their windows under the cover of a cold winter half-moon, armed with lanterns to seek out Master Tonberry in his lair.

The city was gone now, a pile of rubble being tidied up by those who shaped it. At least Rufus Shinra wasn't so pretty in the aftermath, falling to pieces and burned beyond recognition, just like the tall tower that promised him all the world was his.

A bitter snort came from over his shoulder. You're thinkin' that's a punishment? A body gettin' uglier and losin' some of what it could do before looks like justice to you? Huh. You taken a glance at a mirror lately? Dyne stole on board with no ticket and no reservation, just a wink to the crew as he loped on past unseen. Barret said nothing. It was Red who spoke of justice to a crowd before the podium on the day Junon was reborn, when the gun arm falling to the floor signaled the end of the battle in earnest. Just a kid with his tail between his legs, but he walked forward to voice his teachings. The Turks, Scarlet, Heidegger, what was left of of Rufus, he had them all carted up to the smoking remains of Midgar a week after the revolution, swapping their finery for hazmat suits and hoses as they worked to scrub the reminders of their sins from the mass grave their greed had filled.

And to think , Dyne drawled with sharp-edged relish, that tiger-lookin' pal of yours didn't even think to take you up there with him.

Barret snarled, and a woman in a sheer white dress started at the sound, dropping a little of the blue from her tall glass onto the deck. He mumbled an apology and stood, one foot in front of the other until it took him to the railing and the treacherous maw they floated on, stretching away to the edge of the world. “Looks like Mr. Dolphin got a little homesick and ain't followed us out this far,” he said, clapping a soft hand on Marlene's shoulder.

Elmyra rolled her eyes. “Perhaps there's a new group of spies he's sneaking into the city through the powerlines.”

“I swear on Ifrit's rusty old bangles, El, that's how it went down.”

“I'm sure. I want to believe Cloud riding a dolphin through the air is the truth.” She smiled and a bell tolled from towards the stern. “Sounds like dinner's ready. Marlene! Don't wander off too far in this crowd!”

“You gotta slow down, sweetheart, we're old and we ain't on spry little legs like yours!” She turned back and waited dutifully by the steps down to the dining area, and he leaned in and nudged Elmyra's side, lowering his voice to a husky whisper. “Packed the sailor suit, just so you know. Figured there'd never be a better place for it.”

She laughed then, like she did that first day she found the thing in his closet, that low and dirty laugh that came out late in the evening after a few sips of wine. The long mirror in the pokey inn bathroom in Costa made him gleam, softened by the ring of lights that framed it. The dark and hunger of the slums hadn't eaten away at the muscle the mines put on him, and not a smudge of soot marred the white. As pure as snow, as new teeth, as Rufus Shinra parading at the prow of the boat. Aerith had giggled as she told him how cute he looked in it, the strip of pink in her hair bobbing up and down as she raised a hand to her mouth. But she giggled a lot, no matter how serious the situation, before whatever she saw in Bugenhagen's observatory sank her sunshine.

And now, Dyne whispered, croaky and leering in his ear, you're bangin' her mom in it. I'd high-five ya if I still had me two hands to do it with.

Elmyra shook her head, turning a shade pinker under the brim of her hat. “I don't think I can have that thing in the bedroom again after poor Vincent caught us. I'll only be able to see his face.” She dropped her shoulders and pursed her lips as they stepped below deck. “Do you think he's alright? I hope he hasn't stopped eating again.”

“Go back to starvin' himself after he sampled some of your cookin'? No chance.” Vincent was a funny choice to head to Corel, all things considered. Dark, dreary, everything the town nestled in the hills, where folks gathered by a fire for song and barbecue every weekend, was not. But they knew all too well fires could ravage as well as warm, and by the sound of it, Barret's thorniest friend did a damn fine job showing them how to channel it right. Vincent told him all under the ribbon dance of the northern lights and it should've been Barret, making it right, leading the charge, throwing himself in front of Seawall guns if it meant they could grow anew.

“And now she's never gonna look at Mr. Owl's Tea Party the same way again,” he said, sat on the bed as Elmyra slipped off her shoes, her back to him in front of the dresser.

She chuckled, her earrings clinking softly as she placed them on the wooden counter. “We had that one, too. I always amended the last page myself and told Aerith a mouse can't trust the owls, no matter what kind of feast they put out for you.” She fell still, a heavy silence settling in the room before she turned to him. “Would you get the zipper for me?”

He rose from the bed and did as asked, tugging it gently. “Y'ever thought about headin' back to the town you moved in from?”

She shook her head, shimmying out of the light silk and bending to catch it where it lay around her ankles. “There isn't much to return to. Last I heard, the lake dried out once the reactors were up and running and the townsfolk left for the marshes, trying to keep ahead of the drought. And Soren and I moved long before we had phones or computers, so staying in touch...”

She sighed and sat on the edge of the bed. There'd been no home for her to return to when the fighting in Wutai took the handsome soldier who stole her heart – or was he only a soldier later and by force, after they'd tried to build a life together under the plate? She didn't have a photo of him, not even a collection of fuzzy squares like the one in Barret's pocket, not after Meteor finished what Weapon started.

“Guess I oughtta be grateful the place is still standin' at all.” He sat beside her with a sigh. “Think they'll say the same about me?”

She slipped an arm around his waist and cupped his face with the other hand, resolute and firm. “They will. After what happened with the train, and now they've had time to heal and realise who the real enemy always was, they will. And don't forget.” She smiled, a cocky little thing not unlike the one her daughter used to wear. “You're with me now, and they made me an honorary Corelite when I was there helping them.”

He kissed her above that defiant raised chin, pushed her back against the pillows, and a full moon through the porthole painted her in silver where she lay afterwards facing the wall. Barret traced her spine, alone in the dark with only Marlene's snuffling in the adjoining room for company – her and the lapping of the waves outside, a little reminder from the dark god they sailed on not to let his guard down.

The photo still lurked in his pocket. A grab from a security camera, mostly turned to fuzzy mosaic in different shades of sepia when it was blown up for printing. The plastic chocobos and balloon letter signs that adorned the Gold Saucer shone in the background, bisected by a dark figure looking into the lens. A line of interference cut the scene in two and obscured his eyes, and the crop showed nothing below the elbow. His face was distinguishable only from a distance, chiseled and grizzly. The thin lips were captured in a rare moment that jackal's sneer was kept off of them, arranged instead into a straight line. Serene, almost, when you couldn't see the bodies piling up just out of shot.

Barret and Dyne were eight when the Saucer's long construction began and twenty when the ropeway opened for business – past the age of scoffing at tacky tourist traps in favour of fumbling, sloppy makeout sessions with the chosen acne-ridden girl or boy of the week, out behind the old coal sheds on the far side of town, and back to thinking it'd make one hell of a night out with the boys. They joined the crowd in the square when the monster hunters came back to the surface from the mines. Looking under the ground for novelty entrants in the new resort's battle arena, they said, worthy opponents for the best Shinra's military might had to offer. Barret elbowed his way through the gaggle of gasping onlookers, and he froze – there he was. Green but for eyes the colour of some evil acid, dressed in sacks, and if their lanterns were dimmer in the daylight their knives gleamed all the sharper. Barret shifted onto his back and Elmyra sighed beside him, stirring with a whimper. The tonberries were taken over the ropeway and Dyne bet Casper a month in beer he could take one in a fight, laughing and jostling, but a shadow from beyond the mountain fell over the town that day.

“What was wrong with you?” Yuffie said after a long and dusty trek through one prairie or another, stopping in a copse to pop the blisters boiling up on their feet. “How did you not see it coming?” And again, scrabbling down a hillside with cuahls nipping at their heels; “Was all of your generation as dense as my father? He wasn't right about much, but he had you mainlanders all figured out.” In a wayside tavern she scowled as they knocked back beer, running her blade against the grain of the table. “You let the Shinra walk in and trample you all without even trying to put up a fight. Not an ounce of courage, dignity, or honour among you.”

“Who fuckin' raised you?” Barret spat after the last one, marching off upstairs. Just days after they crash-landed into Cid's backyard and ruined Rufus' day sailing to that island far to the west, and under the storm of cherry blossom drifting by the tiered temples, they found him. Spreadeagled on the floor like a prone sacrifice with his breath stinking of the finest sake, glazed eyes staring at the dragon hunt painted on the ceiling. Her bruised knees knocked together as she spoke and all the materia in the world be damned, Barret could've fallen to his knees and taken her in his arms then. Yuffie with her bones as light as a bird's and her mangling of an alien tongue that came up with words like “scrutable”, quivering with rage but speaking no quieter for it.

He arched his back and snapped out a crick, bumping his brain gently against the headboard. It wasn't like they didn't try, didn't lie awake on beautiful moonlit nights asking how to stand up to a virus that moved through the new powerlines and covered the whole world. Scarlet was a joke the first time, stumbling up the rugged mountain paths on her high heels, pushing her tits in Barret's face like he didn't have the most beautiful woman in the world waiting at home, lost in reading about rare cancers swelling up in the areas closest to those reactors. He pulled his own shirt down some way instead, exposing swells of muscle honed by years in mines that provided light and warmth to the world long before mako was a word on anyone's lips. The dead dust it became after a chewing in the reactors blew in from the jungles of the south, from Nibelheim over the other side of the mountains, and he'd have none of it.

He reached out to put a hand on Elmyra's waist under the covers, and she flinched in her sleep. Barret pulled the arm away – the right one, the one made of metal cold to the touch. Scarlet's honeyed words weren't so different when she came back, when Myrna had grown pale and thin and her hands shook too much to open her own medicine. The best doctors in the world and a fighting chance, or everything Corel was built on? “Please don't,” Myrna croaked, short of breath and bed-bound just for moving her neck the wrong way to kiss his cheek.

“If it wasn't Myrna, it would've been something else,” Doctor Park told him on the fourth, maybe the fifth session, while bluebirds tweeted outside and Corel could've been someone else's bad dream. Barret laughed alone in the cabin – the first time he met Cloud on their way to the reactor with an armful of fuck you ready to blow, and the sulky kid with the unnatural eyes and sword that couldn't be more obviously compensating for something had the audacity to laugh in his face when Barret told him just why mako power had to go. To tell him to get help when he spoke of the planet's screams of pain. Less than a year later and the same man took Barret by the hand through a tent village in the forest outside of Junon to the shrink who'd set up there. He was damn near bent double just sitting in the place, but she was going to kick him out anyway the moment he mentioned the bombings, so what did comfort matter?

“I wrote my thesis on the way social isolation can drive a young person towards lofty ambitions,” she told him when he described the way the city died for a moment in the wake of the blast. “The simultaneous manifestation of inferiority and superiority complexes.”

“What's that got to do with it?”

She arched an eyebrow and took a sip of her green tea. “Whose research do you think Shinra drew on to create their psychological screening programme for SOLDIER candidates? A socially integrated person has much of what they need within a community, and rarely seeks to touch the sun. But those young men, all so eager to please, to feel any kind of camaraderie and belonging they could – even if being a monster was what bonded them.” She cast her head down, hands clasped in her lap, and shot out a snort of laughter more cruel than any curse. “Some people would call it a choice, when they summoned me and asked if I'd work alongside them. Even when they showed me an aerial view of the house where my parents lived. But what do you think?”

Barret had walked out of the tent and into the fragrant forest air, scratching his head all the way back to the lean-to they called home. “Whose fuckin' session was that, anyway?”

***

“They're here!” Three days into the voyage with the early sun beating down and the planet provided once again. Marlene woke the whole damn deck squealing as she climbed onto a rickety chair and pointed out of the porthole by her head. “Look, they came!”

They crowded around the glass and sure enough, a pod of leaping dolphins below them chased the spray, flipping around like Tifa on a good day. “They gotta get their breakfast, too,” Barret mumbled, rubbing the crust from his eyes. He came away with a photo of Leviathan's squeakiest sons at their play in the big blue, and the camera barely saw the inside of the case on their way towards the peaks. The first fangs of stone rose from a flat horizon to welcome them, and the bow pointed towards the rocky wall of the shoreline was just asking to be photographed, then the port town nestled into the foot of the cliffs and the jostling mass of sunburned bodies disembarking. But he tucked it back in when the cable car juddered to a start, inching and creaking its way up the heights with only empty air and jagged rock below their feet.

“You don't need to be scared, daddy,” Marlene chirped, swinging her legs in their fur-lined boots over the toothy abyss that wanted nothing more than to dash them all to pieces. “Are you sure I can't take a photo?”

“The camera's stayin' where it is,” he said, patting his chest. “Like all of our limbs, least for as long as this noisy old thing takes to crawl up those ropes.” He squinted in the sun but kept his eyes on the cabin waiting for them at the top, sanctuary on solid ground that shone as bright as new snow.

Elmyra shook her head and whipped out her phone, leaning over to help Marlene set up a shot. The car leaned ever so slightly to the side, tipping the girls an inch closer to the void. Barret shivered fit to knocking the thing loose from its moorings, and not just with the cold mountain air trapped in his clothes. Gods knew what they were even craning around to see in that expanse of bleak stone that wanted them dead. The rope shivered, the metal groaned, and the cabin grew taller until the car came to a stop and Barret stood with feet on firm ground for the first time in days, ground that begged him to fling himself down and kiss the soil.

“What'd you wanna photograph, anyway?” he said as Marlene stepped to the side, letting the next car pass unhindered. Elmyra pointed a thumb back over her shoulder. The turbines made a ring on the edge of a steep ridge, a crown of tall white lilies in a slow ballet with petals that looked ready to blow away in the wind they caught. But they were strong, sturdy, Junon-built, breathing new life into a town that refused to lay down and die.

A rough circle of gun turrets huddled behind them. Dyne slouched beside him, singed tobacco choking up the sharp air. Never found a way to make those hunks of metal look like flowers, did they?

Barret shook himself and followed Elmyra down the winding trail, where she stopped beside the growing beds. “Look, Marlene! Here's some old friends.” She knelt and caressed the tender green leaves, Marlene under her arm and pointing. “Do you see how the squash's leaves shelter the bean plants, like they do back home? And the beans nourish the soil, so they can grow together even all the way up here.”

Barret's feet stopped at the top of the ridge, where the rocky road unspooled and narrowed on its way to the square. Skeletons of half-built homes stood a little ways beyond the train, taking a well-earned rest with its tracks long since scrapped for parts. It's a diner now, said Dyne. That thing the coal useta ride on all over the world, sittin' there full of tourists on their way to the Saucer, all thanks to you. The hero of Corel all over again. He spat something blackened onto the ground. 'Cept it ain't you, is it? Was your buddy did the job and hit the brakes, but you did hold off the monsters, so I'll give you that. Wait...

Dyne cackled, a chainsaw of a laugh that grated on the spine. Guy a little shorter than you, gruff, say what he's thinkin', whiskers comin' back in every afternoon no matter how close you shave in the mornin', smoke hangin' off his lip – you went and replaced me, didn't ya?

The old inn the diner replaced was their castle to conquer as boys, knee-high on the secret enclave of smokers that crowded around the door. They cloaked themselves in a vapour of exhaled smoke, lit here and there by the flicker of a lighter. Dyne came to call with a pack the day he turned turned sixteen, some week before Barret, but the pit hound nose of a mountain mother thwarted them. “You're gonna be suckin' enough black into your lungs down the mines, my son,” she said, and slapped the half-empty carton out of Barret's hand. Dyne still sparked up with abandon, lighting one and sniping from behind its smokescreen about the people they knew, gossiping with the intimate precision only a small town enabled. He gave deep sighs when he breathed it out, like taking the smoke into his body came with some hidden truth only a wise elder could understand. Cid never shared, either.

He waved his hand and followed the girls down the trail, past the ghost of smoke and past the tables painted red. The folks clustered around them chattered away over soups and stews, silent behind the glass and the jars lined up in front of them. Peakside Pickles and Preserves, a hand-drawn label proclaimed in looping cursive under a rough pencil rendering of old Corel.

“Taste a lot better than they look,” he said to Myrna the first time she picked up a jar, where shoals of garlic cloves and coriander frogspawn swam in yellow vinegar through bright strips of carrots and beets and searing red peppers. And then “You gotta boil 'em longer up here with the altitude, see,” when she frowned over her first attempt, at home in their kitchen with his hand on her hip.

He cooked for her the first night they spent together. Mountain goat curry, bone in, with hardy greens from the garden and rice flavoured with the spices she brought with her from the city. A real classic Corel dish, he said, hard meat simmered slow and careful until tender. Not that taking care was easy while she perched on the end of the couch in that little red slip dress, eyes dark in the candlelight and fixed right on him.

He smiled, reflected on the stack of jars – better to be under her heavy-lidded gaze than the one she fixed on his supervisor, the first time he saw her in that bluebell dress. “Unpaid overtime?” she hissed, quiet in a way that defied what they said of loud Costa women, but stunning him motionless all the same. “You're sending men into tunnels hundreds of years old where they don't see the sun for ten hours at a time without even compensating them as required by law. If the tonberries don't get you first, I'll be back with the full strength of the Coastal Union behind me.”

Barret made the curry again the night before he left with Dyne and she croaked out her final words to him. A goodbye, probably, maybe a wish for him to have fun on the trip.

They followed the road, and the closer they moved towards the new inn, the more and more faces there were to watch them go, stopped like run-down clockwork. Good to know some things never change, Dyne muttered. You're an interloper now, Barret, no matter how many trains you helped someone else stop. They huddled in the doors they stepped from, three feet minimum between them and the strangers. Look at 'em. Wouldn't know you from some slick on his way to the Gold Saucer.

But one greying woman stepped forward, waving to Elmyra. “It's you!” She wore a gingham shirt over old jeans, she ran the post office once her folks passed on over the other side of the mountain – gods, what was her name? “We never knew you was comin' back, but you're just in time to see those aquaponic gardens you helped us plant startin' to bloom. How's things over the water?”

Dyne snorted in his left ear. You believe that? Folks here'll lay down there lives and die for the coal hidin' under our feet. You and me weren't no different. You're tellin' me that ain't makin' nice, they don't find all this green wind power just a little quaint? He sighed, rattling in Barret's chest. It's like when you eat too much of the caramel your ma makes for your birthday. Sickly. Sticks in the back of your throat. Takes a lot of doin' to hock it back up.

Elmyra heard none of it and only smiled, stood up straighter in that way she had of asking for silence. “Things are peaceful in Junon, as usual. How are the greenhouses coming along?”

“The green's practically bustin' outta the house,” said Powell, the boy from across the street, the first of Barret's year to be crowned supervisor in the pit, walking with a limp and two bands of grey hair behind his ears. “All thanks to your instructions.”

“I learned just as much from all of you,” El said. “I'd never had to think about the soil composition of high altitude terrain, and it helped me so much with the Icicle Inn project.”

A murmuring cheer rose from the crowd at that, a little prayer sent to the town that huddled in the snow and dared to go it alone, too. Bird boxes on the powerlines. Real fuckin' cute. You think there's a man here wouldn't tear 'em all down to take back what we was?

One older man let his eyes wander slowly over to Barret. “Hey, man,” he muttered, with a curt nod and no smile. “Good to see ya back at last.”

“Hi,” Barret croaked, offering a wave of his hand – the metal one that caught stares as he flexed those steel spines like any other fingers. “I can see you guys got a lot goin' on right now. Figured you might want an extra set of hands.” He paused, smiled, and let them have it. “Even if one of 'em ain't good for feelin' these days.”

“Doin' just fine on our own, thanks,” one thin man towards the back hissed. It earned him an elbow to the side for his troubles, but the others were coming closer. Marlene kept his warm hand in hers and pressed in closer to his side, twisting a little at the number of bodies moving in on them.

One woman strode through them, though – short, with silvering hair and crow's feet as deep as her booming laugh. “I'd say welcome home,” she pronounced, cupping Barret's cheek, “but I hear you're makin' a home in that village that don't run on no money. Good for them! That buddy of yours with the big red cloak, he showed us some of the photos, all the houses on stilts and the lights in the trees. He tell you he had all us girls go with him down the mountainside to pull the rug from those Seawall slowpokes?” She whistled, slow and steady. “Best day we had since you came and stopped that train!”

“It was another buddy -”

“You two an item?” said a man in dusty overalls, nodding to Elmyra.

“Couldn't happen for two better folks.” A woman came forward, wiping soil-brown hands on her apron, extending one for him. “I'm Trudie – you remember me, right? We useta blow off math together and get away for a smoke out behind the bunkers, you and me and the gang.”

“Y'all did,” he said, clasping the hand with his own and keeping the other arm around Marlene. “I was a good boy and never put that junk in my airways. Just laughed with the lot of you coughin' and splutterin' like old engines.”

Trudie laughed and punched his arm, the good one. “Good to have ya back, big guy. I mean that.” She bent with her hands on her knees, peering into Marlene's face. She let go of her grip of Barret then, with the world narrowed to one smile. “And who might you be?”

“My name's Marlene.”

“And is this your first time in the mountains?”

“I don't know.” Her voice quavered as she looked up to him for guidance. “My daddy said I was born here, but I don't remember.”

“Well, then!” Trudie sprang up to full height and motioned for the others to follow her to the square. “Sounds to me like we gotta give this little lady a proper homecomin'! You step this way, missy, and see if one of our pickles don't bring back some memories!”

Powell fell into step beside Barret, leaning close to his ear and keeping his voice low. “We're talkin' Dyne's Marlene?”

A cold fist clenched Barret's stomach in a choking grip and held him still, but he winced, and nodded. “She don't know,” he said. Marlene walked some steps ahead of him, brushing past a mountain fern hardy enough to grow in the cold shadow of the peaks.

***

The sky blackened to a char over the bones of the scaffold and drove them all into the inn. That open fire roared but a few feet from Barret, warm light spilling out through the windows in slats – bars of gold more valuable than any other as the sun took all the warmth with it down below. Barret leaned against the pinewood at his back and heaved a breath that steamed in the chill, legs six feet off the floor of what would be the new arts centre, once the work was done filling in the gaps. They hooted and hollered all day about the film wing, and went off inside arm in arm with talk of woodworking out back, crafting their own instruments again.

Figures the waterin' hole would be the first thing they went and rebuilt, Dyne chuckled, nodding towards the long wooden rectangle. They made the stained glass panels on the roof themselves, spun out of desert glass painted bloody and dark by the setting of the sun. It didn't matter what Dyne had to say. What they started in Junon fit just as right in the desert, in the peaks, in the beating hearts of people everywhere who endured.

He offered no rejoinder, only leaned back and whistled to the sky and the first twinklings of stars. Lookin' like a clear night tonight.

A clear night, the kind that always summoned the town around a big bonfire to roast lake fish in foil and sing the old songs. They were starting up inside, an airy rhythm on the dulcimer pulsating with the shadows of the fire. He told it to Don the baker once, a couple of days into laying the foundations for the village that only existed in blueprints and dreams. The first time in Shiva knew how long he'd talked to another human about something that wasn't mako, Meteor, SOLDIER, Sephiroth, Shinra, or everything they'd lost, and the kind old man never out of his apron didn't know. He taught Barret how far a drop of lemon or vinegar in a hearty stew would go, long before Red watched him cook from the floor and said the same, haughty and proud like he had the hands to cook and stir it.

From the inn's open door, the song picked up its pace. A man with a high and reedy voice began to sing of the strikes of '22, the day the washboards gave up their job as rasping percussion and beat instead with clubs and battering rams once the barricades went up. The company men turned tail soon enough and a mandolin led the shrill fiddle in a frantic do-si-do across the dancefloor, whooping and clapping, keeping time. Dyne beside him tapped his foot to the heavy rhythm of a banjo played with a steady clawhammer, a quiet elder by his lonesome in the corner.

'Member when you and me tried teachin' each other to play the spoons? They make music the same way in your village, right ? Barret whipped his face away towards the faceless loom of the mountain, though Dyne was always there when the village kids struck up a jam on tin cans and plastic boards, wrangling something lovely out of washboards tied with string and broken bits of Shinra tech. Hey, whaddya say we get the two-man band back together. I got a hand still, you got a hand still, 'tween us I reckon we could just about do it.

“If the Cetra had the right of it, and I'm pretty sure they did,” said Barret, “I'm led to believe you got the souls of everyone who ever lived to go be part of. Ain't they tellin' you nothin' better, that you gotta come down and rag on me all day?”

Dyne got him sharp in the ribs with an elbow and cackled, tossing the butt of his cigarette over his shoulder. Oh, you don't wanna know what those souls is tellin' me to pass on to you, old pal.

Barret huffed and followed the movement of the sun, pushing off the decking and landing on bent knees. The open door beckoned as one song faded. Elmyra had followed the crowd indoors, Marlene's hand in hers, a gaggle of the elder women of the town surrounding them and sharing the names they knew the plants by, in the old half-forgotten tongue of the first foolhardy souls to make their home in the heights. He needed to join them, before the bitterest part of the night set in, before the meat started to char.

The band struck up again with one long note on the washboard, and the rattle of a tambourine that followed it, then one sparse and jagged line on the banjo as slow and sonorous as the footfalls of the man they sang of. The Ballad of Gene Brown's Boots. A woman's voice echoed through the empty square as she sang of the fire that swept like a winter storm through the mines some century gone by, leaving two hundred men to become one with their coal forever. Their dug-up souls, they said, still burned in hearths around the world. Her voice was deeper than old widow Barbry's, the only one left who saw with her own two eyes when foreman Gene Brown took his final walk into the mountains and said a long last goodbye to the half-widowed town he failed. Who was it, who grew into the role while he was gone? Her voice cracked on the high notes that weren't there before, an addition of her own. Trudie? Mayelle? The lady from the potion store?

Snow above, fire below,

Into the arms of the mountain he'll go.

Barret put one foot in front of the other, one step and one more closer to that door. Marlene was there, charming the bitterness out of someone old enough to remember when she was the size of the rusted bucket by the old well. They'd hung over the door like some hunting trophy. It rattled in a light wind as he neared. Elmyra was in there, too, taking the magic with her everywhere she went. He swallowed, loosed some of the dust from his pants, and stepped into the room.

A soul and no more somewhere he roams,

The winds of the mountain make dust of all bones.

The singer held the bones as long as she could before her voice stumbled, like the tripping of heavy feet falling to the ground. Applause was light and scattered, a grave look on the faces of all present that the fire couldn't melt away. They were clustered in the far right corner by the window that overlooked the lake. Dusty from work, craggy from hours in the sun, the carpenter who played the banjo and the baker with his tambourine, doing what little part he could. And the singer – Barret blinked, and his jaw tumbled open. There she was in her silk, legs crossed on a rickety stool with all the players patting her on the back.

“El,” he breathed, when he caught her eye and she rose to meet him. “I never knew you had a set of pipes on you.”

“You never asked.” She'd finished what the wind started and loosed her hair from her ponytail, draping it over one shoulder with a twinkle in her eye. “I can hold a tune, if not the notes. It's easier to do it here, if I can tell myself I never have to see these people again.”

She put an arm around his waist and led him to a table where a warm plate waited. Marlene sat opposite, showing an older woman how to weave a slim crown of mountain daisies. They'd put him up a slab of the goat, spiced and honeyed and crisp at the edges, some charred beets and a thick dark beer on the side. He held the fork in his metal hand, clinking softly as he turned it back and forth.

“Don't let it go cold,” said Elmyra, nudging his shoulder. “You had to deal with the boat, then the heights, and then being up and down ladders all day. Go on. You'll enjoy it more on solid footing.”

She nodded and nibbled at her own crusty bread, crammed onto a long bench in a recreation of the room he used to sit in with Myrna, laughing off the dirt and dark of the mines. A rusty pickaxe of a laugh scraped against his ear. Oh, yeah, they built this dollhouse with the rafters, the flagstones, that big fire up the far end.

Barret shuddered, and glared a “Who let you in?” at the sooty presence no-one else noticed. He'd been hovering at the door, grinning like a vampire waiting on an invitation someone must have granted in silence, with the daggers they glared into the one-handed stranger sitting among them who was no longer a son of the mountain.

Dyne shrugged. Sad, ain't it? No notches, no stains, no scrapes on that floor that ain't never been danced on. Y'think they made copies of those old flyers stuck up in the ladies' room that our girls useta laugh about?

Barret fell back against the wall away from the plate and that door swung open, right in the corner behind the bar where it used to be, the stick figure in the triangle skirt painted in the same wavering, arthritic lines. New hinges didn't creak, didn't announce a new arrival to that secret sanctum. Eleanor marched Myrna in there when she first came to town, away from eyes that narrowed when she sounded her Gs, leaving behind a clipboard and folders that carried the fate of the town. The same looks this new Corel threw his own way, furtive and quick, like a poison. Mutterings past the edge of hearing, in the corners and by the bar. They were coal people, Dyne said, Myrna knew, no matter how much glass and greenhouse –

Those sneers seemed to stop one day, as the cage juddered to life and began its slow descent into the mines. “Warmed to her fast enough once she got wages up and hours down, didn't you?” Barret muttered, crammed in with a gang of thirty and the fading lily of Myrna's perfume still on his neck.

She'd been a fixture of the town for a year when he put a ring on her, made from a gold-tinged stone he found himself the day he broke a new seam. She wore it and a dress of primrose yellow cut off just below the knee, waiting for him at the end of the aisle under a trellis of roses that matched her. Corel was out in force that day and long into the warm night, where they danced by the well, every star in the sky shining down their well-wishes. No Shinra floodlights back then to blot them out.

Funny how you never remember the way you winced and stumbled with every step of that dance. Those blisters on your feet, and in your shiny new shoes, too. Three hours there, three hours back, just for plants you saw every other Tuesday.

“And I'd do it all over again,” Barret told him, his best man who scrubbed up like a rough diamond hiding in the mines, grey suit and white peony stuck in his lapel. Those blue flowers she loved, the ferns that took a stand in the hard rocks, the mosses and lichens that made their home under the ground – they were new again, through Myrna's eyes.

“I don't know,” she said in their room for the night, after he'd stepped out of the shoes that pinched his blisters and slipped off his suit. Dark blue silk, custom made for half a year's wages by tailors in Costa used to outfitting pigeon-chested pencil-pushers. She came up behind him, stepping out of her dress, and ran her hands down his chest. Buttons, straining only a little, slipped open in her wake. “If you'd gotten a regular suit, we'd have a picture of you busting out of it when you flexed for the photo album.”

Elmyra's sharp elbow got him in the side as she sawed at her meat. The children moved in loose circles by the open door, hand in hand, and Barret pushed his loaded plate away. He slipped the camera from its case, put it to his eye, turned the dial until the sliver of night blurred behind them – but the firelight was too dim, asking too much time of the shutter, catching nothing but a wavy impression of skipping bodies.

“It was a theory of my own, actually,” Elmyra said, without a hint of quiver in her voice. Hell of a sight it must have been in the empty white plains around Icicle Inn, one woman raising the dirt into the air to fuse it with volcanic nutrients. They were smitten, the little gang gathered around the table, with this woman all the more remarkable for not being a Cetra. Cetra. A little word with a hiss to it, and one he wouldn't hear until years after their ghosts first brushed his life.

“This is so far above our heads,” said Eleanor, sat at their kitchen table with her fingers pressing at her temples. “The people of Cosmo Canyon drew on the words of the Ancients for their way of life, as much as they left behind at least, and they had a lot to say about mako.” She pointed to one of the books Myrna called up from the city library, open on a diagram of the planet's core. “They're powering radios and refrigerators with the essence of everything that's ever been alive!”

Barret snorted as she thumbed the deepening ridge between her brows. “What else it say in there? Got any intel on what the people in that canyon are smokin'?”

Myrna shoved past him with her hand on the swell of her belly, easing herself into a high-backed chair. “Laugh all you want, we still don't know the long term -” She doubled then, a loud gurgle rising from her stomach. “Ugh. Someone's hungry tonight, and their fists are letting me know all about it.”

“You got a little fighter in there.” Eleanor laughed and let her shoulders slump, pouring out more of the dark red wine she drank alone. “Sounds like you need another pickle.”

Myrna groaned, shaking her head. “No, it's been tinned apricots this week.” She shifted, groaned again, that one tailed by a dry, rattling cough. Just a bit tired, she swore, yawning and pressing at the itch in her throat.

“Lookin' good, big guy.” A thin man slid down into the seat beside Barret, bringing with him the contrary, mingling scents of tobacco and a day in fresh cold air. Stewart from the imports desk of back in the day, looking a little greyer, but slouching just the same with a twinkle in his eye. “Never seen you with so much hair before. You shave that in yourself? Looks sharp as hell.”

Barret ran a hand over his scalp, forcing a grin. “Sure did,” he said, as the metal caught and pulled. Stewart's brow flinched, just for a second before propriety kicked in. Barret gave him a fluttering wave. “Go ahead and ask.”

“Not somethin' we see the like of up here too often, piece of gear like that hand. Y'ain't never gonna fit in down the pit now, lookin' all fluffy.” He laughed softly. “Not that any of us do no more, all this time bakin' in the sun.” He rolled up the faded denim of his sleeve, turning a bronzed arm this way and that. “Even my pasty ass went and picked up a little colour.”

“I'll be damned.” Barret took a gulp of his beer, swilling in his stomach where a lead weight gathered. “First time for everythin'.”

Stewart jabbed his thumb in the direction of Marlene and five other kids, congregated by the door to the bathroom and playing a game with seemingly little in the way of rules besides throwing a card on the floor and stamping loudly. “Your girl cornered me a minute ago, tellin' me 'bout the tadpoles you got down in your village. Finished my whole meal 'fore she was done with me.”

“That's my Marlene. Sharp as a tonberry's knife, sweet as a bit of candied ginger.”

“Well, she sure didn't get it from you.” Stewart chuckled, oblivious. “You done made a hardy Corel girl soft, all that singin' to the trees and city life right around the corner.”

“You watch your damn tongue.” Barret's grin widened, Marlene a dancing pink spark in the corner with a smile as big as the moon. “My daughter outran a Weapon and didn't cry once, so don't you forget it.” He sat back, turning his head to the ceiling, rafters creaking in a wind off the sea. “Up here in the heights, we grow big old maples. They're hard as hell, put on one hell of a show when the autumn comes around and turns their colours, but one mighty wind or heavy snow is all it takes to topple 'em. Back in my village, we got live oaks. They're strong, those roots go deep, but they know just how to bend to keep 'emselves standin' another day.”

“Damn.” Stewart shook his head. “Now I know why the place's been feelin' so quiet. It's 'cause I forgot we ain't got you to be our fuckin' troubadour no-one asked for. And about that...” His smirk faded, replaced with a crinkling frown, as if squinting at words waiting far away. “Y'know, it's been three or some years, and I tried to read up on it when it all came out. The mansion in the hills over yonder, somethin' about an alien queen in the north, Shinra pumpin' its blood into the big hero of the Wutai War – and then you and your buddies. The cat-dog, the pilot, Mrs. Gainsborough's girl, the vampire-lookin' motherfucker who came in last year. Man, I've tried, but all these years on and I still can't understand a half of it.”

“I'd say Vincent is more like a zombie, if we wanna get technical,” said Barret. “But I was there, and some days, I feel like I can't understand half of it, neither.”

“I'll tell ya what I do understand. Those dinosaurs flyin' over our heads, stridin' outta the sea. The big tentacles out by the Saucer, wavin' away like the ball of fire in the sky weren't enough to get our hackles up. Had to tell the kids it was a new attraction, we'd take 'em out to see it once the Meteor was gone.” He sighed, dropping to barely above a whisper. “We're safe up here, ain't we? No chance of those things gettin' up and walkin' around again?”

Barret shook his head. “The Weapons are friends of the planet. Get a little over-eager when someone threatens her, that's all. Don't discriminate as much as maybe they oughtta. But now we're doin' the right thing, healin' her wounds, repayin' the debt, we got nothin' to worry about.”

“Gonna hafta explain it all to us some time, Barret,” said a man sidling in on the other side of the table, a shock of salt and pepper hair over a lopsided grin, what was his name? Skit? Skeet? Either way, he chewed on his lip, shaking his head as he watched the children throw their whole deck of cards into the air. “I'll be double and thrice-damned. Dyne's Marlene.”

“She don't know, Skip,” said Barret, lowering his voice. “Need y'all to knock the volume down a couple notches.”

“Dyne's Marlene?” Stewart whispered. “Nobody told me. I remember first day they brought her home from the hospital, reachin' outta her blanket at all of us walkin' past. We looked the day of the fire, but I guess you musta got there first.”

Skip nodded. “You're gonna tell her, right?”

“Of course.” Barret shuffled up in his seat and pulled the plate of cooling goat towards him, setting trembling hands firm around knife and fork. “Just when she's ready, and she's old enough to get it.”

“Not sure there's a deadline you can put on that one, hoss.” Skip slumped in his seat, opening his mouth a couple of times and jamming up again.

“You got a question, I'd be glad to answer,” Barret said softly.

“Oh, man...” Skip whistled, a long low note that made a circle of his mouth and spared him speaking a moment. “For years I've been wonderin' – aw, hell, Barret, this ain't a night to go pickin' at old wounds.”

“Just ask,” he said, level and measured, sawing at a piece of meat and not meeting their eyes.

“It's...” Skip rubbed at the back of his neck, looked to Stewart, who shrugged. “Alright. The day the town went up – and it weren't your fault, Barret, we all shoulda seen it some miles off. It was everyone's choice, even if we went and put it on you to make the call.”

“No hard feelings, man.” Barret raised the fork to his lips and the meat melted in his mouth, sweet and charred and tasting like home. He let his eyes fall closed, just for a moment, and nodded. “Say what you gotta say. We all went and learned it ain't no good to let things fester.”

“No, no, it needs to be said. All of us sittin' cosy in here singin' 'bout the days men useta barricade 'emselves in when someone came along to trample 'em, and we let it happen, every one of us.” Skip replaced his beer on the table with a sharp slap and growled. “But the day the town went up. Folks were talkin' after, like they do, and maybe it was just some wishful thinkin'.” He sighed with all the weight of the wind and looked to the ground. “But a bunch of 'em still swear blind they saw Dyne walkin' off the way of Eugene Brown himself, up into the hills with a big hunk of metal strapped to him, just like yours.”

Oh , said the acrid voice beside him. Oh, this here's the part I been waitin' for. What'll you tell 'em, old buddy?

Stewart hauled himself up straighter, looking sideways. “There was more.”

You of all folks knows how this town needs its gossip, keepin' 'em in line, givin' 'em someone to step on. There's some things here what don't burn.

“See the Tarstens over yonder? Erica and Jens, you remember 'em, well, they put money in a pot for a whole year to take a trip out to the Saucer. And whadda they get but a stint in prison, huh?”

Wanna tell 'em about the surgery, how it turned out like a damn contest to see which of us could scream the louder?

“Came back all shaken, swearin' Erica did nothin' but drop the wrapper off of an ice cream cone on accident to get 'em locked up. Had to get real good at racin' those birds just to see us all again. Point is, when they got down, they tell you to this day they saw him. Older, greyer, uglier, but no mistakin', it was our Dyne.”

You wanna give 'em somethin' to really talk about? Tell 'em. Tell 'em, Barret.

“Not that he'd say as much, or look at 'em at all. But he was there, struttin' around the place like it was him and not Dio who held the deed, puttin' a bullet outta what's left of his arm in anyone stood in his way.”

Tell 'em how the last time you saw me we talked about that little girl in her pink rubber boots. Tell 'em I offered to take her to meet her mom again.

They looked at him with big eyes, a pair of owls guarding a nest of new eggs. Myrna was agog when he first came home with a bandage on his arm covering a work of art done at the expense of his bicep, threatening to poke the arm if he didn't tell her what was waiting under it. The bandage came off after a month, and she laughed loud enough to bring the snow down from the top of the mountain.

“What's so fuckin' funny?” he said, as if her laughter wasn't infectious, and his arm the only thing bruised in the room.

“I'm sorry,” she said, wiping away tears and collapsing again. “For the love of all the gods, Barret, a flaming skull? You're going to parade that around town like we don't know you?” She slid her arms around his waist, stroking his lower arm and trembling intermittently with bubbly giggles. “My gentle giant. You won't fool anyone.”

The day Dyne walked into the hills, he'd learned just how far a skull could stretch into a scream. Who wouldn't want to believe a little more was left behind, even a burnt and mangled remnant?

Skip cleared his throat and drained his glass. “Maybe I ain't oughtta ask.”

“We weren't so close as Dyne to you,” said Stewart, “the two of you was brothers, but -”

“Last I saw of Dyne,” said Barret, “his hand was slippin' away from me off the side of a cliff. And I can't tell you no more than that.”

Skip nodded slowly and then sprang back to life, diving into the pocket of his left leg. “Got somethin' for ya,” he said, handing over a crinkled piece of paper, singed at the edges. “Went home and grabbed it after you introduced your girl. Feels rough to be partin' with it now, but she oughtta be the one to keep it.”

With an unsteady hand, Barret took the gift.

There was no use in searching the wreckage once he'd found that wailing white bundle and taken her away. The fire collapsed roofs, melted solid metal, turned memories to ash – photographs, diaries, rings and watches and old ticking clocks handed down through the generations, what chance did they have? He smoothed the paper, less its sheen and crackling on the tabletop. Looking would've been a waste of time while that old man in his fuck ugly red suit sat puffing on a cigar in some air conditioned glass box, laughing at their pain. The war on Shinra wouldn't be won with sentiments and keepsakes the shanty town that sprung up in the ruins had no use for.

“Sorry I couldn't do better than one that's all burnt and wrinkled,” said Skip.

“No.” Barret held the photo up to the light, Dyne and Eleanor with the etchings of age and fear smoothed from their faces, a little over-exposed in the sunset and shot at a clumsy off-centre, but there all the same with the ir finest creation cooing in their arms.

“Thank you,” he whispered, slipping it in his pocket to sit beside the other.

***

The door hollered on its hinges, ushering out the last of the revellers into a darkened square. Bedroom lights flickered out one by one, leaving a yellow moon alone to light their way. Elmyra's elbows cracked like burning logs as she stretched her arms over her head, arching her spine. “Long day,” she said, eyes pointed over his head to the spires of stone beyond the rooftops. “To think we were looking at the open sea this morning.”

Marlene, hands bundled in her long skirts, murmured something out of range of hearing. Elmyra slipped a hand into her hair and smoothed it. “We'll see how high we can climb tomorrow, I promise.” She walked at a gentle lope with Marlene glued to her side towards the inn, where no second set of footsteps followed. She paused, glancing over her shoulder. “Barret?”

He stood rooted in the night, next to the hole where the well and the fire used to be. “Y'all go on ahead,” he said, and swallowed cold air. “I just wanted to remember how the mountains look under the stars, y'know? I'll be right behind you.”

Elmyra remained still, pursed lips dark in the half-light. “There aren't many out tonight.” But she nodded and moved on, holding the door for Marlene and turning away from the peaks painted blue by midnight. Barret walked to the railing that ran along the edge of the cliff and leaned against it, a sheer drop beneath him into the blacker maw of a black night – the lake, reflecting nothing of the heights and the sky. Only a smear of red-gold light remained far out across the desert, a blush on a bashful horizon.

The town watched from a distance as the Saucer went up, a prized gem that crowned the rolling beige beneath it, a bauble hung in the air over cracked, necrotic ground. “I wanna be Master Tonberry!” went the cry on the playground, every year as one ended and another began, and a higher-pitched “No, you were Master Tonberry last year, gimme the trowel!” followed. The cut-throat competition for the starring role spilled out after school hours and into the streets on the walk home, boys and girls in short pants brandishing any shiny metal implement they could get their grubby hands on. The winter play lost a little of its dark magic once you got behind the stage and saw how they made it happen – two tiny yellow bulbs poking out of a black cloth.

It took shape out of the darkness as the gate was raised, Dio's voice booming overhead while Barret reloaded, a trail of blood washed across the neon and noise of those suspended corridors on the way to the battle arena. The roar of the crowd, two little lights emerging from the pit and then a head took form, a roughspun robe with a lantern swinging in one hand and in the other, the knife, sharpened on the rocks of the underworld and gleaming in the spotlight. Barret let his jaw fall only for a moment, put up his shoulders, took aim -

Easy when they don't speak, ain't it? Just those two evil little eyes, shufflin' towards you.

Barret snarled and turned his back on the scrawny man lounging against the rail, back to the scant few stars that bothered to show up. The light was out in Marlene's room and a rosy glow eked from Elmyra's. She was reading, or going over her lists of crops and yields and spells and fields, or waiting for him to slip in beside her. The wind curled in high-pitched whistles around the mountains, it lit up the hairs on the back of his neck, and after one minute and another it put out the light in that window, too.

Dyne threw his head back towards the desert and sighed, a flare of smoke curling and dissolving into the darkness. 'Member how the Saucer useta look? Shinin', beautiful, larger than your life and mine. Was, 'til I got there. All that cheap plastic, howlin' monkeys out from Midgar movin' at a crawl and cooin' over it all, and that fuckin' music. Don't shine so bright now, even with the money that toll's bringin' in . He sighed again, in time with the wind. It's all just snow on the mountains, ain't it?

He said it to Vincent under a different set of peaks and falls, another angle on the same stars, a warm flask in his hand and nature's biggest light show rippling over his head and a sinking in his stomach. Snow was water, something that melted and dirtied, and only a pretty cap on what lurked in the spaces under the hills.

Still , said Dyne, with a grating relish that put Barret's hair on end. Looked pretty damn shiny to her, right? Twinklin' in her eyes, still, by the time the world took her to your dingy door.

Barret closed his eyes slowly, but Jessie's wink and smirk waited behind them. She came to him full of a fire that would've lit up any stage in the world – and a bit of know-how when it came to things that went boom. Don't let him get to you, said another voice from somewhere else, but it wasn't Jessie laughing, it wasn't Jessie bouncing on her heels as she explained how the forged passcodes worked, it wasn't Jessie wearing the crown on the poster in those candy-coloured corridors when Barret broke off from the group, frozen in front of a stranger's smile.

What was it you were gonna tell 'em to call that thing they're buildin'? “The Jessie Rasberry Centre for the Performing Arts”? Dyne snorted. She'd be honoured, I'm sure, her name in lights in this assfuck nowhere strip of scrub she never heard of. Wonder if they ever pulled her out from under that pile of steel. He dissolved into a cruel, hissing laugh, wheezing out the last of his smoke. Or was there nothin' left 'cept a big ol' splatter of Rasberry jam?

Barret lunged, cutting the metal arm through an expanse of empty air. 'Course , said the voice from behind him, she had someone left to go lookin'. Those other two, no-one to remember their names, no-one to miss 'em, you musta been rubbin' that one hand in glee when they found you.

Barret stopped, out of wind with his metal limb extended and suspended. The plate fell, Dyne fell, Wedge fell and slipped through his fingers – there, and then not, only an empty space where he stood a moment before. Funny. He made just the same squeal on the way down as he did when Tifa put extra milly in the omelettes, when he saw a stray cat strutting around the slums and bent to pet it. Biggs, too. Handing out old books to kids with knock knees, dancing on the burned-out lampposts to make someone smile for a second, bleeding out halfway up the tower to buy them all a few moments more.

Same as you, weren't he? Makin' a little collection of waifs and strays with nowhere else to go.

Barret stood up straighter, bone and metal fingers braced on the biting cold of the railing. “They knew what we were gettin' ourselves into. And – and, if you think you know every damn thing that went down,” he said, fast tongue tripping, “then you know all about how it was right at the start. How they tore down the flyers? When Jason fuckin' disappeared for handin' out pamphlets? You think a bunch of topside salarymen were ever gonna listen to a pack of slum rats tellin' 'em their easy lives is what's killin' the planet from right under our feet? You think Shinra wouldn't rain the same fire down on us if we did it all by the book, made some signs and stood around parrotin' slogans instead?” He sneered, and spat over the edge of the cliff. “Guess we never tried drawin' up a petition. Askin' people to pray. Maybe that woulda done it.”

There he is . Dyne cackled, launching himself up onto the railing and swinging his legs in those ragged jeans over the drop. The jaundiced moonlight picked out the finer points of his smirk, widening as he shook his head. The preacher in his pulpit. Couldn't let people alone to bleed the place dry for a few more hours in front of the TV – like you ever had it in you to be a leader. Couldn't even take me out once I told you what I wanted to do to our girl.

The cold grabbed Barret by the heart. Eleanor kept some funny old hours, too, walking home from the schoolhouse the same time the rest of the town kicked out of the bar. That smile would've mangled into something else, a scream no gods could touch when a grinning shade of a husband dumped a blood-soaked child at her feet, taking her hand in the plains of whatever elsewhere she watched from.

You couldn't do it. Face it, only thing you was ever good for was givin' this town someone to hate more'n they hated 'emselves.

“No.” Barret slammed his fist on the railing, metal on metal shrieking into the dark. There was a dream, once, shared around a kitchen table in a mining town a long way from that tower of vipers. The dream of slamming a book down on the desk of President Shinra and pointing fingers black with coal dust at the passages the suits thought they censored. A dream that died in smoke that smelled like roasting meat. A funny joke. “I done my time with this one already. 'Less we wanted the lifestream to bleed out, someone had to be willin' to sleep a little worse at night. That man in that tower, he didn't leave us no other choice.”

Dyne spluttered with laughter, spitting dry hacks like a round of gunfire into the still square. The fuck you tellin' me for? He spat on the ground, threw the stub of his cigarette over the railing, a last point of light trailing into the dark below. You tell everyone walkin' the dog under that tower when it blew. Tell it to the people doin' their job in there just to keep the kids fed, same as you would. Tell the drivers who took a dive off that freeway when the lights went out and everyone in hospital hooked up to some breathin' tube who didn't breathe no more 'cause of you. They're screamin', Barret, even here, where everythin' is one. And when that big bleedin' heart of yours gives out, you can tell 'em all just how much choice you had.

“You shut the hell -”

Protector of the fuckin' planet? I know how your eyes lit up when you saw the big red button on that bomb, no matter if you got that poor kid a few lumps short of seam to push it for ya. And you, takin' my daughter 'round what's left of this town, showin' her how she coulda grown up if you hadn't spirited her off over the sea, breathin' in Shinra fumes with a thousand tonnes of steel ready to drop on her. Any minute, Barret, any minute – that night the sky fell, how close did she come, huh? Right there, buried under the weight of your mistakes.

Barret breathed a slow stream of vapour into the dark. “You can say what you want, when you weren't watchin' it happen.” He snorted. “Didn't see you on the ground, spreadin' the word. Just doin' whatever you went and did that got you thrown down in that hole. Shoot up some tourists that got a little loud, did you? A kid tryin' to reach the cotton candy machine?”

He laughed again with none of his usual malice, stretching his back, clicking his neck to and fro, hair ruffled by the wind. Hell, you shoulda heard the shit comin' out of me when I first got dropped into Dio's zoo. “Anyone givin' you trouble,” I useta say to the new faces, the yuppies with no business bein' down there, I'd tell 'em, “you come to me. You bring me your troubles, and just sit back while I take care of 'em”. Sounds like somethin' what coulda come outta your big mouth.

Barret shivered and a smile cracked his face, not asked for, but spreading into a mirror of Dyne's, their eyes held for a moment. “Ain't I told you enough times what happens when you copy my homework?” he said, shaking his head. “Only ever meant we both got the answers wrong.”

I know what you're thinkin' , said Dyne, slow and heavy. If you could do it over, you wish you coulda known. You coulda bust me outta that jail, dragged me 'cross the sea, had me by your side stormin' the tower. Well, don't. You know as well as I that wishes is for stars, and you couldn't see none of them from under that plate. Just the butt of those reactors, fartin' out the soul of the planet. Nah. Let me be bleached, broken bones in the desert. Ain't nobody to let down, out there. And he pushed off the railing, back on his feet and striding away into the shadows beyond the town's enclave.

“If I could do it over,” Barret said, and it was Dyne's turn to stop in his tracks. “If I could do it over, I'd make a smaller bomb.”

There was silence, then a chuckle, soft as the wingbeats of an owl on the hunt. Yeah, you would. You said it yourself. That hand o' yers ain't clean enough to hold hers, neither . Dyne shrunk in on himself then, fingers clasping the arm that carried his gun. Nothin' changed, I take it. No matter how much stained glass and seed bed you threw over their graves.

***

“Marlene's been asking to go to the lake,” said Elmyra, at the window with her back to him. “She won't let up, and I thought with the leaves growing in and the spring flowers, it might be a nice place for a picnic. We'd be away from all this noise, at least.” They awoke to a symphony of cement mixers and sawing from the big building in the centre of town, on and on they went, no closer to finding a rhythm. “I know it's a little early in the year for fireflies, but it reminds me of the first night we spent together, you and I. You can show me how your stone-skimming is coming along.”

He was supposed to laugh, to brag, to make the motion of a flat stone jumping on the waves and sing a victory jingle. “Sounds good,” he muttered, pressing fingers to his temples as they throbbing in time with a heavy hammering from outside. It bolted him to the couch, sitting where he'd slept, rolling out the cricks in his neck.

“I'll pick up a few things from the store,” she said, pulling the curtains open, frowning as a higher pitched drill rang in the morning with the birds. “I think there's a basket somewhere near the oven.”

She breezed into the kitchen without a word, no more than she'd said on three other mornings waking up alone. “Just a minute under the stars,” he told her, every night after the building work packed up, coming in to place one foot on the stair that creaked and make for the couch ten inches too small for him instead.

Two days. Two more days before the boat came to take them to Junon, rising again from the flat of the sea like the grinning mouth of the underworld. Dyne came back to him the first time on the night they threw a shiny wire of hope to the cement city, a dead man unseen among the throng and standing between him and Marlene, whispering in Barret's ear as he helped himself to beer and barbecue. You can't see the stars so well from down here, but they twinkle oh so bright in the big city streets, don't they? Your big victory . They buried the bodies the next day. The sweat and dirt took almost as long to scrub off, but at least there was an earth left to dig the grave in and hands to hold the shovels. A living earth, not a peach pit sucked dry while towers of steel stood strong. Not a cloud of dust motes floating through space. He clenched his metal fist and Elmyra dropped something in the kitchen, something metal that made the world flash red in its wake, like there wasn't enough clanging coming in through the window.

“Should I make the carrot salad with the currents?” she twittered, rummaging in one of the drawers, clang clang clang. “Or would you prefer the roasted beets?”

She hovered in the doorway, two feet in long black socks in the corner of his eye. Frowning, probably, in the subtle sidelong way she did. Not her smile, the one she wore for him the first stepping off an airship the day of the revolution, a day of pacing back and forth on that rooftop with the adrenaline of the battle seeping from him and no way to get through to Cid on the radio. On the other end they found only crackles and static, the noise a crash might make. A crash, a storm, some faulty wiring torn loose in any one of the trials they put that poor bird through on their journey, the cold whim of the gods – something would come to take Marlene from him, right then, at the last minute. But a dark blot appeared on the horizon and there was no ash in the air, only his daughter running towards him, arms outstretched, alive, embracing the new world about to bud and blossom.

“Get the beets,” he muttered. “Carrots taste all woody this time of year.”

He used to glaze them with honey and cinnamon from Costa, roasted to a char and warming the whole house with the scent. Elmyra had followed Marlene off the airship, and in the moonlight above a battleground, some of her hard angles eased and she was beautiful in a way he never saw in that little house under the plate, outshone by flowers, or curled up on his arms by a lake waiting for the end of the world. The flickering lights of victory made everything a little softer, a little lovelier, especially once the drink was flowing the songs began.

“I brought some of the village honey with me...” She sighed softly and then the floorboards tracked her movement towards him, creak after creak and she was sat by his side, close to touching. A crash outside, and another surge of drilling that splintered in his skull. “I didn't want to push. But it was my idea to come here and I know how empty a place can feel when you remember who used to be there. When Soren left, I didn't know what to do with all that space. I bought the best new cast iron pans I could with only myself to feed, any ornaments I could find from the pawn shops in Wall Market. The house wasn't a home, then. More of a memory of a dream with no-one to share it.” She paused and laughed softly. “No-one to nag.”

She'd fit so easily into an empty space by his side that Midgar gave a man no room to feel, the new knife that showed up the old ones for blunt. A new gun, fixed the same way onto the end of his arm. She was safe in Kalm while Barret tore through Shinra loyalists like a hero who killed a god, flying with the wind in her hair across the plains when he lined up the villains on a podium. A god himself, throwing down his judgement, merciful to the end.

She stood again and crossed the threshold, tutted as she straightened the curtains. “I do try not to, you know. Nag. I'm not how successful I've been. At work sometimes, Reeve has to sit me down and tell me to stop trying to be the team mom. Not that he's one to talk.”

Reeve this, Reeve that, a colder voice than Dyne's said in that cabin up in Icicle Inn, the first time they argued – it was Reeve calling the shots, why not go to bed with him if that's all you can talk about? Are you here 'cause of me or 'cause he only got eyes for Vincent?

“They threatened to drop the Sector Five plate!”, she'd said, springing to attention from her armchair when Barret brought up his suits that cost enough to feed the slums and his TV smiles and the coffee machine outside his office. Nothing good ever came from hiding the truth, he growled, letting Marlene call her time in the Shinra Tower a vacation and think no more. Elmyra paced in the doorway, knuckling her forehead, obscuring a truth of her own for too long. Trapped in that glass cage long before she wore her armlet and its eight glittering orbs, she had no gun on the end of her wrist, no sword the size of a car, and no voice that wouldn't get her shot.

In the end, he took her in his arms and rubbed the tension out of her back. “I ain't gonna unbury the hatchet any time soon,” he whispered. “Not when he made me the hand that first held yours.”

She looked up at him and narrowed her eyes, fighting and failing to stop the spread of a smile across her face. Just a hint of a blush on her cheeks, and her fingers finding his again to lead him up the stairs. Dyne was there with one sandy boot on the bottom step, but stopped short of following into the bedroom.

Elmyra set the wicker basket on the table behind him with a rustle of greaseproof paper and stood by the end of the couch, hands clasped. “When Aerith left,” she said, and Barret's jaw was welded shut, like the prison master out in the desert locked up his tongue and threw away the key, “she'd been away from the real world for so long. It felt like torture to me to live in the slums with everything turning to rust and nothing growing, so I can't imagine what it was like for someone with such a bond with the planet. I thought letting her go had to be the right thing to do, and I couldn't let the Shinra – but I'd been doing it on my own for so many years, I only knew what was best for me.” She sighed deeply. “And even now, all I can talk about is myself.”

She took a seat beside him again, further away, but reached to grip his flesh hand in hers, kneading softly. “Please give me something to work with,” she said, not an instruction, only desperation in her voice. “You've not been yourself at all. I told you to -”

“Ain't you.” He stood, fast enough to blur the world before him. “You only gave me the excuse.”

“I don't know what you...” She stayed in place as he paced to the window, Marlene's footsteps on the floor above thunderous in her hiking boots. She wanted to go to the lake. You said it yourself, said Dyne, waving and smiling outside the window. Your hands ain't clean enough to hold hers, neither.

The sound of a hammer hitting metal into wood put his teeth on edge. Barret clapped his hands over his ears and enclosed himself in his own booming heartbeat. Did none of the blood of the slums wash off that day, when they tore down the Shinra banners and cauterised the lifestream with their gunfire? He charged with all the curves and angles of his body melted into a single ache after the fight in the Northern Crater, one of the heroes who took down Sephiroth – a bunch of cornered animals, backs against the wall, scrabbling through the streets with far too many close calls from a Shinra bullet. Spark after spark, blue and red, but through it all was a clear path cut by Cloud and Tifa leading the vanguard. Tifa, Tifa, Tifa. Tifa, who found him lost in a city's underbelly that had no streets and took him by the mangled arm without hesitation, had him on first name terms with the neighbourhood watch within a week. What were their names, the ones who didn't move fast enough when the steel sky caved in? Tifa would know. Hers was on everyone's lips, the country girl who did it all and welcomed everyone to the haven she built herself. Even her hulking friend with the gun screwed onto his arm who stayed at the back, in the places the light of the neon bar signs didn't reach. And in a second, it was nothing more than a pile of cinders and memories of a time when collateral damage was only an abstract.

He laughed to the empty space between him and the wall. The first time he saw her he charged in, ready to save the kid from men who meant no good. He opened his palms, the real and the one made on an assembly line, fists full of nothing. She'd only found a different kind of predator in his shadow. One with no interest in what she had in her shorts, eyes only on that spark of rage in her fists when she looked up to the expanse of the plate.

Elmyra took herself up the stairs to meet Marlene on the landing, the two of them speaking in soft tones that made a background hum of their words. A quiet came over Cid on the prow of his ship before the end of the world, when he put out his cigarette and looked down upon the planet he called a child, sick and trembling and afraid, in need of someone to protect it. A parent. But not all parents were good parents, and the pockmarks in the planet's face where they dug mass graves in Junon still bruised the fields around it. Did they burn enough of the old world and put it in the ground to do what he promised and keep Weapon down there, too? Rainwater barrels and music powered by the light of the sun wouldn't save that broken town if those tentacles rose over the horizon again. Neither would the noise, the drilling and drilling that was louder than him. A preacher less his pulpit, with nothing but more empty promises as thin as the coloured glass they walked under.

***

“Impenetrable!” Marlene made her declaration to the late afternoon with one arm in the air, twirling on the spot as they ambled down the rough-hewn path to the valley floor. “Impenetrable! Impenetrable!” Her voice ricocheted off high rock walls, passing under bird feeders hammered into telegraph poles, those who feasted there scattering as she marched on with a new word in her arsenal. One for the fog that hung around the mountain on the far side of the lake when a blizzard rolled in. Nice spot for a picnic, for anyone who didn't know what was under the water.

With the sun close to slipping behind the mountains, the shadows of the turbines scythed at the ground, slashing between Barret and the girls he followed. Half-buried roots and patches of reddened spruce met them on the way, the last stalwarts of greenery the mine and the mako couldn't take, scratching at his legs. He hopped down first from a short outcropping, lifting Marlene and twirling her, silent as she giggled and moving in a stiff, programmed circle. Elmyra's hand clasped his and he stood still and steady as she stepped off, the way Myrna did so many lifetimes ago on long, young legs with a dress the colour of Costa's summer strawberries fluttering around them. Did she need the hand, or only the chance to flutter her eyelashes on the way down?

“There's only so many times you can watch the sun set over the sea before it gets a little old hat,” she told him as they sat on gravel shores lapped by gentler waves than those she called home. She burrowed her bare toes in their blanket and called it the most romantic date she'd ever been on. He never told her he took five other girls and two boys the same way, rolling out in faded pictures across the years.

“They make me feel like I'm home,” she said, slipping a plucked blue flower into her pocket as Barret fumbled with the ring box in his. She said it again with shining eyes at the altar, when he took one bloom from her bouquet and tucked it into her veil, tracing the pearl-painted tips of her fingers over his chest. “I was lost until I came here and saw the way you care for each other.”

Marlene stopped in the middle of the path with her hands on her hips, pouting. “Come on, daddy!” she said, urging him along with a wide wave of her arm. “I thought you said you knew the way!”

“Don't -” he said, and faltered, his voice as dry as the ground at the base of the Shinra compound. He coughed and put his shoulders back, loping on down the steep descent. “Don't be afraid to take your time and take it all in, baby. Where else are you gonna get a view like this one, huh?”

The lake gleamed above the thin treeline and between two stone brothers, molten gold poured from the dimming sky that glimmered just as bright no matter what secrets lay below its stilled surface. The path grew greener by the shore, even with the blue flowers a week or two away from breaking through their buds. He walked the miles there and back again to bring a brace of them to Myrna's bedside and found them dried and withered, sucked up into that reactor as she lay coughing and paling beneath the sheets.

Marlene's boots skittered across the gravel and she yelped as icy water hit her feet with a soft splash. They never got around to dredging the pond up in the village, in the shadow of those other, rounder mountains.

“You be careful in there, girl,” he said, eyes closed and throat tightening. “It gets deeper than it looks pretty quick.”

A ghost tore its way across the shore, kicking up small stones and whirling with Myrna's bouncing ringlets and Barret's big laugh. Their face was hidden behind all the hair, moving too fast to see. “We don't want to go putting expectations on the kid before they're even breathing on their own,” said Myrna, lowering herself into a chair and cursing the pull on her back. They'd finished putting the crib together in that primrose yellow room, the cursed flat pack contraption that had them both swearing up a storm fit for a sailor. He smiled, laughed a little to himself, still. The one stereotype about loud Costa woman Myrna never quite managed to shake.

Marlene was wading through the shallows, shivering but striding on undaunted. She kept her eyes on the horizon, as strong and straight as the steel pillars she grew up in the shadow of. It was Elmyra she got it from, no longer withering in the shadow of her dumb old dad's explosions. Myrna smiled in another time with a honey-coloured glow outlining the soft twists of her hair and the sharpness of her cheekbones as she turned back to him on the edge of the water. Where would she be looking from if he'd never asked her to walk to the lake that first day? She'd have picked a good husband with that smart head on her shoulders, a tailor or a shipwright or a scholar who'd match her mind, she'd have two or three happy kids flocking at her feet as they walked the sunset promenade together, ice cream melting into sticky webs on their hands. Stolen, all of it. She was scattered to the winds, graveless, while he stood on the shore where they waved goodbye to a child with no name.

“I knew it was a good idea to pack towels and a change of clothes,” said Elmyra, and her steps on the stones stopped as she turned to him. She was by his side, a nagging breeze, brushing at his arm. “Barret? You're crying.”

She slipped her hand around as much of his human forearm as she could. The same one that held the pink silk ribbon, flapping in the wind, tearing in desperation to get away from him. Not so long ago the woman beside him fell to her knees on the shores of a different lake, howling to a stone chamber that cried in echo with her for the daughter Barret couldn't protect. There was no such commiseration from the planet for Myrna. She howled unanswered in the night, curled up under an overhanging rock, an animal leaving the pack to die alone.

“I never got to cry,” he stammered. She was right – twin tracks flowed down his face, with no sunglasses to hide behind. “I never got the time. We went to the doctor to see what went wrong, and that's when they found the first tumour. I had to keep her clean, keep her fed, keep the roof over our head, get to Costa every month to pick up her medicine. And, damn it, you know all the rest.” Marlene frolicked out of hearing, a glittering curtain of droplets hanging from both arms as she danced in the shallows. “We never spoke about the baby again. It hurt her too much to talk at all. There wasn't no time.” A sob tore through him, erupting out of his throat. “I told myself there wasn't no time.”

The wind blew the way of the lake the day the town went up, carrying all the ashes with it. Did they find each other again, under the surface? He would only have to move one heavy boot before the other to join them down there. Elmyra tightened her grip, placing one hand on her stomach with the basket stationed at her feet. “I know how hard it can be to mourn someone you never had the chance to meet,” she said, quiet and wispy. “I didn't need a doctor to know I never had a chance. It wasn't uncommon for women living under the reactors. I know it's not the same...” The wind swallowed anything else she might have said, speaking in a voice too small to contain it. She cleared her throat. “Would you like me to go in after her? I wouldn't want her to swim out too far.”

Her fingers trailed away, leaving residual warmth on his skin for but a moment. “Think that's prob'ly a good idea.”

“Alright.” She was there, solid in front of him, then her slow footsteps tramped over the stones and away. Through an open slit in his eyes she looked back, walked, and looked back again, before hitching up her skirts and setting off at a run. “Marlene! Don't go any further until I get there, okay?”

The wind rustled the scant leaves above his head. The same boughs, unbent by the years and the bloodshed, that stood watch over the campfire he built with Myrna and Eleanor and Dyne, roasting fish and downing beers and breathing in boozy laughter until all the stars were out and mirrored on the water. The lake was still on a calm night, too calm for the screams that tore through it, for Myrna staggering back to the tent clutching her gut with red blooming on the lavender of her skirts. He never looked at what they wrapped in the picnic blanket and sent out onto the water, where Marlene danced around Elmyra's wiry frame. Just stood as silent as the mountain sentinels while Eleanor stroked Myrna's hair, head cradled in her lap. They made their way home slow and sweating and dark under the eyes, back to the house, to the room painted yellow with its mobiles and picture books and the happy moogles printed on the curtains who danced in the breath from an open window.

“I'm sorry,” he whispered with wet lips. It was three days later when he went into that room and left it in splinters, splinters that kindled when the fire found them and made a grand funeral for the dream. “I'm sorry. And I know sorry ain't worth the breath it takes to say it. You deserved all the time in the world, you did...”

A hand grasped his shoulder. A left hand, warm with blood under calloused skin that knew its way around a pickaxe. Dyne inhaled deeply, breathing in the smell of the ferns like a man pulled up from drowning. 'Member the first day we brought her home?

“I remember.” His whisper was hidden behind the lilting percussion of the water, the little bundle of radiance who nestled in Eleanor's arms walking strong on two legs and spraying golden flecks of sunlight into the air around her. On that first day, her little sausage fingers kneaded the pink blanket Myrna had knitted with the last of the strength in her hands, and he could've sworn the coughing stopped the whole hour that baby girl with the single lock of brown hair on her forehead slept in their living room.

Kept how jealous you was to yourself , Dyne said. 'Preciate that, even if you never had a poker face at all. He shook his head, the barest motion of air by Barret's shoulder. 'Course, when we first knew she was on her way, the future was lookin' rosy. All we could think by the time she got here was just what kinda world we'd be makin' for her.

Barret nodded. Marlene was an angel who slept through it all, the conversations around the kitchen table that grew tearful, Myrna's howls, the nights the reactor hiccuped and plunged the town into primordial darkness. She was all that remained among the cinders, crying with all the strength of her new lungs for the soothing hands of the dead. He found her under torched rafters in a cradle of crumbling plaster, a single shining bright spot wrapped in a white blanket untouched by the flame – or so that slipperiest of dealers, memory, tried to tell him, wiping away the soot for the sake of a story.

“Marlene was born here,” he said and clenched his first – the metal one, that someone else's memory might make whole, some day. “She didn't die here.”

Marlene was made in hell . Dyne inclined his head and smiled the easy lopsided grin he used to wear – a little more crinkled, a little more leathery. She, you, and your lady friend. A pretty good fit, so it seems to me. So you gotta take good care of her, y'hear? You're gonna take her home, and you're gonna do your own darn job, 'cause this town will do just fine without you.

Barret closed his eyes and placed a hand on Dyne's for the moment before it faded away. He opened them again and stepped towards the shore. Elmyra turned back to him, waist deep in clear cold water with the early evening sun highlighting every hard-earned line on her forehead, illuminating the darkness around those sharp eyes of hers no hazy sunset could soften. When Myrna tossed back her hair to throw him a glance she shone like burnished copper, soft and rounded and unlined. She'd laugh again to see him skimming stones with another woman who took what was left of him, the metal and the skin, waiting for him in the lake with a hand outstretched and a smile whose wrinkles were beautiful in the story they told. Barret grinned and lifted one leg, tugging at the laces of his boots.

“Looks like I'm about to be the last one in!” he bellowed, Marlene jumping up and down like the dolphins she loved at his approach. “Does that make me a rotten egg or what?”

He left his camera on the shore, by their shoes and the basket of bread and wine.

***

Sunlight tickled Barret's eyes open onto the empty bed beside him. Their voices drifted up through the floorboards like morning bread baking as he stretched, easing and cracking open the knots the cold water tied in his muscles. He found them in the kitchen, Marlene on her tiptoes on a stool beside Elmyra and her mixing bowl. “When you've done it enough times,” El said, with a flick of her wrist, “you can do it one-handed.” She struck the egg against the counter and tutted, holding two crumbling cups of shell above the bowl. “Though not today, it seems.” She took the rounder end and dived back in, fishing out the fragments and wiping her hands on her apron.

“Pancakes again?” Barret smiled and put one hand on the cupboard above his head. “Gotta use up the rest of that syrup, I guess. And you put it on after, not in the batter, no matter what Red tries to tell you.”

Marlene put one arm around the rim of the bowl and whisked, scraping on the ceramic edge. “Aunt Elmyra's a good teacher.”.

El smiled. “I've had enough practice,” she said, stroking the ribbon laced through Marlene's hair. “Aerith was never one to cook with me. If it didn't involve pink frosting, you couldn't keep her away from the flowers for the time it took to make an omelette.” She shook her head then, rolled her eyes fondly, with not a hint of downturn in her expression.

Marlene nodded, resting her arm and clanging the whisk against the edge of the bowl. “Daddy said I used to cry a lot when I was a baby if I didn't get to play with the dough when he made bread. Did Aerith cry a lot when she was born?”

She resumed her whisking with her back to both of them, eyes on the task at hand as silence settled in. Barret winced as El turned to him, something like a question in the tilt of her jaw. He nodded, but towards her; it's up to you.

Marlene paused and turned around, shoes pressed close together on her stool. “Did I say something wrong?”

Elmyra blinked and took her shoulder, coming back to life the moment she saw that bottom lip jutting out. “Of course not, honey. But the truth is, Aerith didn't live with me when she was a baby. She had a different mom who grew her in her stomach and took care of her. But she was hurt badly one day, and Aerith came to live with me instead.”

“Okay.” Marlene hopped off the stool, frowning a little. “But you were still her mom, right?”

Elmyra nodded, beaming again and patting Marlene's hair. “In every way that matters,” she said, without a second's hesitation. “I think the batter's just about ready to go now.”

But Marlene kept still as Elmyra ducked for the skillet, twisting one foot back and forth behind her and wringing her hands. “Aunt Elmyra?”

She put the pan down on the stove and dropped to her knees, joints cracking on the way down. “I haven't seen you look this shy in a long time, my love,” she said, raising Marlene's chin to meet her eyes. “Did I say something wrong?”

“No.” Marlene frowned, looking up to the ceiling. “I'm trying to remember how Miss Folia taught me to say it when you're being proper. Oh! I got it!” She took a step back, decisive, and extended one hand towards the woman kneeling before her. “If you don't have to have the baby in your tummy, Aunt Elmyra, I cordially invite you to be my mom as well.”

Elmyra laughed a short sharp bark, taking the offered hand in her own, firm and sure as any big city businessman. “That's an offer I'd be very glad to accept,” she said, eyes glistening as she pulled Marlene into a crushing hug.

“I wanted to ask before. When you told me you and daddy loved each other,” she said, pressing in close and giggling. “Does that mean you'll come live in the village with us?”

“Don't you go rushin' your mom, now,” said Barret as he helped Elmyra back to her feet and threw his arms around the pair of them. “Y'all only just shook on it.”

“It's early days yet,” said El, “and I need to be in the city for my work, but you'll be seeing a lot more of me, I promise.”

Barret drew back, pulled by the lead weight of paper in his pocket. Elmyra glanced at him, smiling still, raising an eyebrow as she took in his silence. He nodded in the direction of the living room and patted the pocket that housed the photo, the one he'd shown her the night before, drying off from the trip to the lake. Her eyes widened but she nodded, small and curt, her hand on Marlene's back.

“When I was a kid, makin' pancakes,” he said slowly, “we used to let the batter sit a couple minutes to get fluffier. How's about we all go hang on the sofa for a while?”

They filed in and Marlene took a seat in the middle, swinging her legs. Elmyra sat on her left side and Barret took the right, the sofa denting around him and he set down his weight. He cleared his throat, a shaking hand rising to his chest. “There's somethin' I wanna talk to you about, Marlene. I shoulda done it a long time ago. You ain't been bad, don't go thinkin' that.”

He slipped the photo from its hiding place and cradled it in his flesh hand, away from her. She cocked her head to the side and touched his arm softly, the bad one, with a tenderness that stabbed at his throat. “What's wrong, daddy?”

“Well...” he said, swallowing with a throat as dry as the desert and blinking away rain in his eyes. “Y'know what you and your mom were sayin' just now, how some kids get to have different moms and dads when they're born?”

She nodded. “Sometimes the parents they're born with can't take care of them right, or they go back to the planet before their time. Mogi and Petra in my class are like that. They told me their parents couldn't get out of Midgar, so they live with new families now.”

“That's right.” Barret took her tiny hand in his and let her wrap her fingers around his huge thumb, the way she tried when she was still a baby in a sooty blanket. “And you know those new families love 'em just the same way they would if they was their own flesh and blood, don't they?”

She nodded, wide-eyed and barely even curious.

He sighed, exhaled, and let his shoulders fall. “Here's the thing, Marlene. You were born here, just like I said. And I told you about why we had to leave, when the Shinra came, but before – I dunno. Maybe I shoulda told you before. But when you were born -”

She gasped, a tiny flutter in the air as her hand fell slack in his. “Did I...?”

He swallowed the lump in his throat, paused, and nodded. “You always were a smart cookie, kid,” he said, and stroked her hair. “You sure didn't get it from me. You had a mom, just like I told you, but she wasn't married to me. And she was clever as all get out, just like you. She was a teacher at the schoolhouse here, she knew all the plants and animals what used to grow up in the hills. And she had a husband, too. My best buddy. Your dad, when you were born.”

He tore his eyes from hers and reached for the pocket again, where two chains lay coiled at the bottom. They gleamed in the morning sun, through the dewdrops clouding his eyes. The gold pendant that caught the light when Eleanor laughed poured from his palm to hers, and he closed her fingers around it. “Your first mom wore this all the time. The day she got married, 'round our place for dinner, and the nights we all went to hang out by the lake together. And this,” he said, placing Dyne's ID tag in all its aged lustre beside it, “was your first daddy's. It's just like mine, see? We both wore 'em when we went down in the mines.”

She held the crusted chain up to the light, squinting at the faded number stamped there in another age. “Did it protect you from Master Tonberry?”

A laugh erupted in him and he shook his head, a tear coursing down his cheek. “I'm still here, ain't I?”

Marlene picked up both chains, one after the other, letting them twirl back and forth in front of her eyes. He put the photo in her lap, the charred one of the laughing couple, and she stared at it in silence as if redrawing it in her mind, mapping those happy features to her own, wishing away the burnt edges until she put all her totems down on the coffee table and turned back to Barret. “And you still want to be my daddy, don't you?”

“Oh, sweetheart, of course I do.” They fell towards one another and she nestled into his shoulder, sniffling and squeezing him with all the might her little frame could muster. He patted her back and kissed her cheek, with no room between them for bullets and hands falling from cliff faces. “I love you. I love the both of you more than anything in this whole wide world has ever been loved. And I'm gonna tell you all about the beautiful people who made you, 'cause you deserve it and so do they. But not a damn thing in this world could ever stop me bein' your dad, so long as you wanted me.”

“And you're gonna teach me so much.” It was a promise his own father had made, a big hand on Barret's bony one, not knowing the black festering in his lungs would take him before Barret had much of anything to say about the world. “You'll learn so much more than I'll ever know,” he swore. “And ain't I just the luckiest man on this rock, gettin' to be there for the ride.”

***

“We don't gotta get back to the village right away, do we?” He fastened the clasps on his suitcase as Marlene sat on hers in the hallway, lost in wrapping Eleanor's pendant around and around her wrist. “I've been thinkin' how I never had chance to see Cosmo Canyon properly on our world tour a coupla years back. We sat at the bonfire, sure, but I hardly saw the observatory, all the books, the way they live...”

Elmyra folded the last of her sweaters and hummed to herself. “I wouldn't want Marlene to fall behind in her lessons, and I fear for the structural integrity of the Centre if I leave the kids alone with Reeve any longer. And wasn't there a job you were meant to be doing the night we got back?”

He shrugged. “It's only Marle wantin' me to fix up a leaky pipe. Wymer told me he already did a patch-up, so it ain't nothin' that can't wait.”

“I don't know,” she said, hands on hips. “Marle to me is like the ocean.”

Barret frowned. “Huh?”

“I love being on the ocean, and the beauty of it,” she said, “but I maintain a healthy sort of fear when I'm close by.”

“You know she's you in about twenty years, right?”

He cocked an eyebrow as a conflict played out on Elmyra's face, the upturned quirk of her mouth battling the rage in her narrowed eyes. There he was again, making her laugh. She shook her head in the end and turned to the curtains, straightening them where they hung open. Barret crossed the floor and pulled her into his chest from behind, dropping a kiss on her neck where she dabbed rose oil in the morning. “C'mon. A day or two more can't hurt. You know the school ain't so strict when it comes to lettin' the kids see the world, and your gang'll be alright.” He chuckled and stepped into the doorway. “Hey, Marlene! How'd you like to go see your Uncle Cid and Shera for a couple days?”

Her delighted shriek was all the answer they needed, and an airship was underway within the hour. The landing pad was a little ways out of town and they walked through streets just starting to take shape, suitcases in hand. The snow gleamed on the mountains, shining brighter than the gun turrets and the turbines as the people under it bade goodbye to Barret. “Always a bed for y'all here,” they said, and “Don't you go lettin' her forget where she came from!”

There was other talk on the streets, too. The contractors and craftsmen up from Costa, fleeing things they whispered about. One who lost his job for the mere mention of the word “union”, bricks through windows a week later, petitions doing the rounds and husbands who didn't come home not long after. The place where flesh met metal itched for a different kind of weight, one that could blaze a trail down the mountains and walk right into the Seawall building to rain another round of hellfire on those who stood in the way of a brighter world. He exhaled, and let it be. For among the busy folks toing and froing with girders and ladders and cups of bitter highland tea, one man stood still in the middle of it all, paid no mind by the rest of them.

He wouldn't show up in the photo Barret took of the skeleton town nestled under the arms of the mountain, but he'd be there, always. Scarred and smiling. His photo had a new home in Marlene's luggage, waiting for a smith to fit it into the pendant that would hang close to her heart. The other one, all pixels and fear, stayed in Barret's pocket. Perhaps she'd see it too, some day, when she knew enough of the world's light and colour to dip into the darkness again. Dyne locked his eyes through the crowd, a nod and brief salute before he walked away on one of the trails up the mountain. With a hum, Barret sat on his suitcase and leaned back, eyes on the dot approaching from the horizon, away from a town that could dream again just fine without him.