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Plateside
It’s early January under a bruise-blue sky and Reeve is walking against the wind, Plateside.
Sector 8 has whole exposed patches where it’s inescapable, the wind, worse than anything you get Downstairs; it roars across the maintenance and surveillance structures that litter the plate’s edge and accelerates as it is funneled into the city proper, where it shunts down the steep, narrow canyons of the financial sector, making a sound so ominous and distinctive the locals gave it its own name, like it’s a serial killer: the Midgar Ghost.
The Ghost throws dust, scatters broken glass, sweeping up papers and debris as it goes. It gets under the collar of his coat—dry, lifeless, implacably cold.
It’s early January, and the mako cannon Scarlet named the Sister Ray is on its way from Junon to Midgar. Its purpose is to disrupt the energy field around Sephiroth’s redoubt in the North Crater. There is a great deal of boisterous, martial talk in the halls of the Shinra Building these days, but the truth is that no one, not even Hojo, knows whether that field can be penetrated, or what will happen if it is.
Junon’s been left in pieces by the beast from the sea, the weapon the Sister Ray destroyed. Rufus has given it only cursory attention, deploying a few first responders and a convoy of salvagers along with the team of transpo specialists who brought the cannon back to Midgar.
Meteor is visible in daylight now, Plateside. No one looks up.
Instead, it’s business as usual: trains running, restaurants serving food and drink, a painter painting long stripes on modular grey concrete blocks, a manner of construction Reeve himself designed; and here he is, walking through the city with Meteor in the background, red in the sky.
It’s early January and no one here understands what’s about to happen, not even Reeve. But as it turns out, he has the gist of it, the clearest notion; he’s managed to get hold of the best of a bunch of bad ideas about what is coming to his city.
This morning, Reeve is headed for the borderland where the affluence of Sector 8 intersects with the wreck of Sector 7. For his meeting, he’s picked the Café Eschaton, one of the few businesses still alive within view of the cordon. He walks past the yellow tape and armed guards presiding over the sheared-off edge of the Plate, and the wind blows his hair into his face.
If you asked him, Reeve would probably say that he’s trying to support businesses that were damaged when the Plate fell; they do need the custom, but the truth is, he wants to rub Tseng’s face in it, he wants Tseng to gaze upon what he’s wrought, he wants him to see.
The Eschaton
The Eschaton’s lights are flickering; mako out here is unreliable, lines cut by Platefall and never repaired. And now they never will be, Reeve thinks, looking at the face of the server, a kid still in her teens, and the sheer incongruity of the thought, the seeming impossibility of it, makes him a little dizzy.
Reeve has found it distasteful to undertake too granular a causal analysis of the forces that have dominated his life. But now, standing in the debris blown across the threshold of the Eschaton, he is overcome by memories of himself, prancing around like the puppet he is: dealmaking, compromising, trading individual evils for the common good. Getting things done, he called it once, back when it seemed important to get things done, back before it became clear that everything he got done undid something else.
Human uplift. That’s what he called the city, back then, Midgar: a little joke, a pun made of steel and glass.
Waiting to make his order, cold in his coat, Reeve thinks of the old, hopeful days when it seemed like Midgar would be world-class human uplift. He watches it all unfold, parodied—illuminated—by the cartoon antics of Cait Sith, his ghoulish jester, his second self: the brave beginning; the slow collapse of ideals, of ethics, of infrastructure, of everything; and then the decline into apathy, lit up with points of anguish so acute that Reeve’s actual memories fade to white in the clutch.
Through it all, there’s Tseng, invisible unless you knew just what to look for. Tseng the shadow hand of Shinra, making things happen and making sure things don’t happen. Tseng leaving bloody footprints that crisscross the city. Tseng’s voice giving the orders, Tseng’s voice drowned in the snarl of wrecked metal as the Plate fell: Tseng’s extraordinary lucidity turned to malevolent purpose, over and over again.
“Locally made,” the server explains, putting Reeve’s cheese pastry into a little bag.
Reeve flips up the collar of his coat and takes his order back outside.
Sitting at a little metal table that’s bolted to the cement slab, buffeted by the wind, Reeve eats his pastry, surrounded by memorials, flowers, stuffed animals, hand-lettered signs on chain link. Eating his breakfast within eyeshot of all the Sector dead.
The Ghost
Tseng is almost twenty minutes late when he appears at the end of the block, on foot, moving like an old man, his dark suit a blot against the colors of the flowers left at the foot of the chain link fence. As he draws near, Reeve sees that the suit is baggy in the shoulders and hips. His left foot drags, ever so slightly.
When he stumbles right at the table, catching a toe on a bit of shattered marble, Reeve doesn’t get up to help him.
Tseng rights himself and pulls out the chair opposite Reeve, sitting down very carefully, precisely behind the paper cup Reeve has set before him. His color is terrible. He lifts his cup and smiles, a skull’s grin: Reeve can see the path of the sword still in his eyes.
“Coffee, at the end of the world?” he asks Reeve. “A little on the nose, isn’t it?”
A child with no shoes on is beating on the fence with a length of rebar.
Reeve, across the table, looks steadily into his face.
“Try it,” he says. “I think you’ll find it wakes you up pretty well.”
Say It Out Loud
It’s their ‘usual,’ every fortnight or so, a meeting, an exchange: Topside meets Underside. The cynicism they share is how they have worked together all these years now.
“Let’s say it out loud,” Reeve says.
Except for a flicker of his eyelids, a glance cast briefly down at the table, Tseng doesn’t react. The truth of what’s coming to the city sinks beneath his unperturbed surface: it’s swallowed, it’s silenced, nothing remains.
Not this time, Reeve thinks.
“I think we both understand what’s about to happen. Or are you going to mouth the party line, even now?”
“Rufus,” Tseng says, “has full confidence in the Sister Ray.”
“Of course he does,” Reeve says. “And there is no plan to evacuate.”
“No,” Tseng says.
“Tseng,” Reeve says. “Rufus may think—I don’t know what Rufus thinks. But there’s no way Scarlet can prevail against this, no matter what she’s told him. The casualties, the mortality, will dwarf the fallout from Sector 7’s collapse. Hundreds of thousands could lose their lives.”
“Hundreds of thousands,” Tseng observes, “are almost certainly going to lose their lives.”
They regard each other across the table. Tseng, Reeve thinks. The necessary evil. The shadow cast by ambition and good intentions: dark like the canyons of the commerce district, precisely as dark as the buildings are tall.
“That’s not good enough,” Reeve tells him. “I built this trap. And now I’m going to get them out.”
“All of them?”
“As many as we can.”
“We?” Tseng asks. His face is grey, unmoving.
“Don’t you dare play dead,” Reeve says.
Civil Service
“You had a secret, didn’t you?” Reeve says. “You had a certain sphere of materia in your possession. It was way above your pay grade, wasn’t it? Shinra Inner Circle only. And it brought you back to life.”
For the first time, Reeve sees fleeting discomfort cross Tseng’s face.
“You hate it,” he says softly, pressing his advantage. “You’re ashamed of that materia, that second chance you didn’t earn; and you hate Cure. You always have, because you’ve always known what Cure is: progress backwards. A boon with bad, bad consequences.”
Tseng’s mouth is compressed in a thin line, and in his eyes—ancient, vengeful—Reeve catches a glimpse of loathing. Loathing; and, for just a hint of a moment, grief.
Time to turn the knife.
“And you used it, even though you know, same as me, what it will do to you in the end. You used it, and now you’re sitting here talking to me. So no matter what you might think you want to be, after all you’ve done…”
Tseng’s eyes are hooded now, his voice barely audible.
“Still alive.”
“Yes,” Reeve says. “You decided to live, and now you have an obligation, just like me. There will be no compliance this time, Tseng. No playing dead. Because I’m not fooled.
“After this meeting, you will go back to the Shinra Building,” Reeve continues. “And you will coordinate the evacuation of Midgar. The Board of Directors can’t be allowed to interfere; as you know well, they see any effort to protect the public as a sign of weakness. So you will keep the plan absolutely secret.”
“Secret?” Tseng asks. “Like your collusion with Avalanche is a secret?”
“Did you only just now figure out why you’re here?” Reeve responds. “I know I’m blown, Tseng. You thought to control me with that? It’s the other way around. Even if they try to stop me—even if they succeed—the plan will go forward, because you are going to execute it. You will pull every string you have to pull. You will map the routes. You will position the medics. You will requisition materiel and personnel and get local civil allies from every sector on board. I estimate you have about two weeks left to make the operation completely seamless.”
Tseng’s face is a mask, but somehow, here at the end of the world, he manages to lift an eyebrow.
“Is that an order of some kind?” he inquires. “As if I were your employee? Your servant?”
Reeve feels himself start to shake.
“The city’s servant, Tseng. The city’s servant! What else are you? What else can you possibly be?”
They stare at each other as the child with no shoes on strikes the fence, making it ring.
“You owe Midgar that much, after all you’ve done to her,” Reeve grinds out. “And I have no one else left to ask.”
Reeve lifts the cup to his lips: the coffee’s stone cold. He drinks it anyway.
“I don’t know, either,” Tseng says.
In the End
Tseng’s lips are chapped; lines of pain bracket his mouth. His eyes have dropped to his hands in their supple leather gloves. There’s a tremor there, now, Reeve sees--nothing you’d notice if you didn’t know what to look for, just the faintest blur, like a ghost shivering. Tseng, relied upon and discarded, Reeve thinks: shed like a skin in the eschaton, not unlike Midgar itself.
“I don’t know what Rufus is thinking, either. What he wants. He’s… kept his thoughts secret from me.”
Reeve sits back; he feels dizzy again.
“From you?”
“For a long time now.”
“Why?”
A shadow moves across Tseng’s face. Then he smiles.
“I guess he found me untrustworthy, in the end,” he says.
The wind blows; the fence rattles. A brown-edged leaf, carried in from angels knew where, skitters across their table.
“Will they go of their own accord, the people of Midgar?” Tseng asks, looking past Reeve’s shoulder into the empty space beyond the fence.
“If they require encouragement, persuade them,” Reeve says. “You know how. Show them the way.”
Tseng, huddled in his coat, gloved hands wrapped around his coffee, nods once.