[fic] FFVII: Gunpowder and Firecrackers (chapter 14)
Soo....because adrenalynnrush's nagging worked, I've started posting this again. XD Enjoy!
Earlier parts can be found at Fanfiction.net

FINAL FANTASY VII
Gunpowder and Firecrackers
[Other header stuff: PG-13, Rude/Tifa, Rufus/Yuffie/Reno, AU to DoC, spoilers up to end of AC]

It is fifteen years after Meteor, thirteen years after Kadaj's defeat. Rufus Shinra, leader of the world philanthropic organization Green Earth, has been having odd dreams about Cloud Strife, about Sephiroth, about the mysterious town of Nibelheim. In a world where peace is as fragile and elusive as the voices of the lost Ancients, the old members of AVALANCHE and Shinra struggle to piece together the secrets of the Lifestream and Jenova's legacy in a race against time to save the ones they love.


XIV. Nanaki

He watched the Wutaian woman as she sat across from him with her legs folded under her, eyes downcast, drink untouched on the table. He'd brought her a drink even though she'd declined. Humans were an odd bunch, and sometimes they'd say things they didn't mean in the name of "politeness." But it did seem like Yuffie wasn't hungry or thirsty.

"What's wrong?" Nanaki asked again, softly.

He hadn't seen Yuffie in almost eight years. She had aged quickly, like most humans, going from girl to woman in that short span of time. The others would drop by Cosmo Canyon sometimes, though even that was rare. Barret had come for a stay once or twice last year, and sometimes Reeve passed through. He saw Vincent most of all. The dark man seemed to flow in and out unannounced, appearing one day and gone the next. Nanaki was never sure what he was up to; sometimes he felt as if Vincent really did not have any sort of plan in mind, but travelled just to travel. Nanaki had never had that urge. His adventures with AVALANCHE during the hunt for Sephiroth was all the travelling he'd wanted to do, and he did not like cities, with their human-built stone and wood walls and the tame, dusty smell that he'd come to associate with them.

"Vincent's hurt," Yuffie said.

His hackles rose. Sephiroth's ghostly visage appeared before his eyes, and he took a deep breath, sat back on his haunches, reminding himself that there was no need to panic. "What?"

Yuffie's clear eyes rose to meet his and he almost flinched at the emotion in them. She took a deep breath. "Here," she said, and laid something on the table.

Nanaki leaned forward and gazed at it carefully. The Materia was ruby red, smooth and glinting in the light of the fire lamps in his room. He nosed it. It was cool to the touch. "A Summon Materia," he said, glancing back up at her. "I'm not sure I understand."

Yuffie took a deep breath. "Me neither," she said, and then looked up at him as if in supplication. "Nanaki, I need to know what that Materia summons. "

"You haven't used it?"

"I'm not that stupid," Yuffie snapped, and then swallowed audibly. "Sorry. I'm...tired. I've heard too many stories about malfunctioning Materia, and uncontrollable Materia. Not going to risk that. Besides the fact that I haven't used Materia in almost ten years."

He looked carefully at the red globe again, and then said, "I'm not sure if we have the resources to do that."

"Vince gave it to me," she said, "and told me to take care of it." She ran one hand through her long hair, and then as if the gesture had opened the floodgates, spilled into the tale of Rufus Shinra's dreams, Vincent Valentine and the monster at Nibelheim, of how she'd been given this Materia on the flight back to Corel, of how Reno had tried to take it from her. The story was exhausting, and at the end of it he could do nothing but sit and stare at her.

"Why," he wondered, "did I know nothing about this?"

She shivered even though it was warm in the room. "I don't know," she said. "Perhaps it's just as well you didn't. I wouldn't drag you into this if it wasn't absolutely necessary, Nanaki - I feel bad enough about it as it is, running away from Corel and hiding out here. I don't want you to think that I'm using you as a shield or anything."

"You're the last person I would think that of," he told her. "Since when has Yuffie Kisaragi needed to hide behind anyone?"

She gave him a shadowy smile. "Maybe since I discovered that I can't do it all on my own?"

Nanaki sighed. "I wish I could say with absolute certainty that I could help you. However, Grandfather's machinery is difficult to operate, and even after so many years, I do not understand all of it...I could enlist the help of others who are staying here in the Canyon, but I assume you would like to keep the existence of this Materia a secret."

"Yeah," she said. "You assume right."

"Then it will be difficult."

Yuffie leaned forward, her eyes dark and intense. "I came to Cosmo Canyon because I know that you're the only one in the world who can help me. I need to find out what this Materia is. I'm not leaving without it." She took a deep breath, and then seemed to deflate, sagging as her head drooped. "I can't let Vincent and Rufus down," she said quietly.

His heart went out to her, and he gently nosed the Materia on the table again, feeling the familiar sense of power tingle slightly against his cheek. "If it's possible," he told her, "I'll find a way."

They sat there for a while saying nothing, staring at the Materia on the table, Nanaki's mind full of unasked questions and shadowy possibilities and the memory of Hojo's cage closing in around him as he screamed, wordless screams of rage and despair as Hojo laughed and laughed and laughed. It couldn't be, he thought. Not Nibelheim, not again.

"It was very cold," he said aloud.

Yuffie stirred and frowned at him. "What?"

"When Hojo put me into that cage," he said, "it was very cold in the room. I remember he saw me shivering on the floor of the cage between the bars, and he just laughed. 'When you've learned obedience,' he said, 'maybe we'll make you more comfortable.' I tried to lunge at him through the bars, but of course he was too far away."

Her face had gone pale in the rosy glow of the lamps. "Nanaki-"

"I wanted to kill him," he said calmly, picking up one paw and turning it over, gazing at the scars which crisscrossed the thick, calloused pad, scars from Hojo's experiments. "Just as I wanted to kill Aeris when she first arrived. I had been beaten, starved, and bled almost to death, and everyone and everything was my enemy. I must have appeared a monster to Barret and the others when they found me."

Yuffie was silent. He wasn't quite sure what she was thinking; humans were flighty creatures, and he wondered if he was frightening her. With anyone else, he would have stopped, afraid of offending some hidden sensibilities, but Yuffie Kisaragi was different. For some reason, he thought she understood.

"Are you suggesting," she said after a moment, "that we've somehow misinterpreted Shinra's dreams and the...thing...in the tunnels at Nibelheim?"

Nanaki touched the tattoo on his shoulder lightly, a remnant of Hojo and Shinra that he still carried with him. One of the old Turks - Rude, the man with the sunglasses, who was now seeing Tifa - had suggested that he go to New Midgar and have it removed at the advanced hospital that they'd built there. Rude had meant well, but Bugenhagen had taught him that every experience, good or bad, was a part of what made life whole, and the tattoo was part of him now. "I wish I could be certain," he said. "But perhaps the monster in the caves of Nibelheim could have been reasoned with."

"It's dead," Yuffie said. "Vincent said so."

Nanaki cocked his head. "Is it? I do not remember you detailing that part in your account."

Yuffie frowned at him, her mouth set in a tight line. "Well, no. But he pretty much implied it, didn't he?"

The Materia on the table winked a dull, gleaming red. He stood carefully and nodded at it. "Pick it up, please, Yuffie."

"Where are we going?" she demanded, gathering it carefully in one hand, but he simply trotted to the back of the room and headed up the stairs to Bugenhagen's old study.

The old man's rooms were neat and well-aired. He had made it a ritual to open the windows once a day and let the sunlight stream through the place. For some reason, that seemed to make everything brighter, cleaner. Bugenhagen had been a man of nature and of the Planet, and he would not have wanted his rooms to collect dust and shadows. Nanaki had tried going through some of the man's books and scientific implements after he'd come back to Cosmo Canyon after the war fifteen years ago, but they were beyond him. He contented himself instead with keeping them neat and dusted.

"We can start here," he said. "I know the rudimentary controls of Grandfather's large machineries in the upper laboratories, but I don't think there is anything up there we can actively use in this endeavor. It would most likely be better to try out some of his instruments here."

Yuffie picked up a metal contraption that looked more like something suited to torturing insects than for scientific examination. "You're the boss," she said, clearly doubtful. She brought it to the table and placed the Materia in it, clumsily working the various clamps and levers in haphazard fashion. Nanaki watched, thoughtful, as she finally gave up and wrenched the Materia out, pushing the thing to one side. "I don't know if this is going to be helpful."

He heard the frustration in her voice mirroring the frustration in his own emotions as he wracked his mind for anything Bugenhagen had ever said or done concerning Materia. "Grandfather was a big believer in the Lifestream," he said. "Materia was something that he viewed as naturally occurring in small amounts...but unnatural in the big buildup of Mako that followed Shinra's advancement as the world power. I know he studied Materia, but only in conjunction with the formation of its natural form."

"There might be notebooks or something?" Yuffie suggested. "I'd think he'd write down his findings, and I don't see a computer around here."

They spent the next few hours rummaging around in chests and cupboards and in drawers for his grandfather's old notebooks and papers, organized into neat stacks with a system that seemed to Nanaki to make sense only to Bugenhagen himself. There were papers on plant life in and around Cosmo Canyon, what looked like a complete categorization by scientific name of the flora and fauna of the Ancient Forest, sketches of different types of chocobos, and one notebook filled entirely with mathematical formulas that seemed to somehow relate to cloud formation above Gaea's Cliffs. The sun rose above the horizon and continued to rise, baking the small room. Yuffie closed the windows and drew the curtains, but that only lessened the heat slightly, and he thought longingly of the cool forests north of the canyon, shadowed valleys and brisk mountain winds.

"Mountains!" he said suddenly.

Yuffie looked at him as if he had gone insane. "Mountains?"

Nanaki didn't answer, instead bounding over to a crate that they'd already searched and from which they'd already pulled several packets of papers, all which proved utterly worthless in their quest. "What is Materia formed from?"

"Mako," Yuffie said patiently, as if explaining something to a small child.

"Right," Nanaki said, pawing at the notebooks and papers. "And where is Mako found in the wild?"

Yuffie scratched her head. "It's not, usually. Everyone knows that. You just said so, before we started looking-"

"Yes, yes," he said eagerly, plowing through her words. He could feel his tail twitching with suppressed excitement. "But when it is, it would be found at a natural mako 'spring,' wouldn't it?"

"Well, yeah."

"Do you remember when we first went through the Nibel Mountains?" Nanaki continued. "Before we had to fight the monster - the one with the many claws - I remember us going through one part of the caves that opened up into a beautiful blue-green spring."

Yuffie stared at him, open-mouthed. He could almost see the gears in her head turning, and as he turned back to rummage through the chest, she said, "The Mako spring at Mt. Nibel!"

"Exactly," Nanaki said, and pushed two books aside, digging up a third and dragging it upward triumphantly. "And we have been looking in the wrong place for four hours."

He batted the notebook to the floor, where it hit the cool stone tile and the cover flipped open. A Discourse and Scientific Study on the Natural Formations of the Nibel Mountains, read the inside front cover, and Yuffie bent down, picked it up.

"You're a genius," she said.

"Merely resourceful," he returned modestly. "Let's see what Grandfather has to say on the subject of natural Materia formation."

Yuffie carried the book back out to the cooler confines of the outer sitting room, and he curled up next to her as she flipped through the yellowed pages of the notebook. "Here it is," she said. " 'The Mako Springs of Mt. Nibel.' Springs? There's more than one?"

He twitched his ears. "I do not know. What does it say?"

"He has some stuff here about Mako being a byproduct of the Lifestream, how Shinra harnessed it to power their reactors. Um. Let's see." She flipped a few more pages. "Here we are. This sounds interesting. 'Contrary to popular belief, Materia formation in natural Mako springs is fairly common. I have in fact observed these formations occurring in the many small springs flowing up naturally from openings in the Nibel Mountains, just north and sometimes outside the boundary of the former town of Nibelheim.' "

Nanaki followed her finger, saw that the word 'former' had been inserted in a scrawled, hurried hand above the main line of text. " 'I have thus collected the following Materia from these springs and tested them in the observatory's field in different blend combinations and singly to draw out the power from within-"

He broke off and they stared at each other, Yuffie looking rather red and flushed. "The observatory," she said. "It must be! Don't you remember, that's where Cloud would go when we needed to perform those Materia blends-?"

She broke off. Nanaki looked away, thumping his tail uneasily on the ground. "It seems that Grandfather simply took the Materia up and activated them within the observatory's magnetic field," he said. "I suppose the field contained whatever energy the Materia would emit, so Grandfather could study it without being harmed."

"But," said Yuffie suddenly. "This was all based on the assumption that any tested Materia was naturally formed. I don't know if this counts. Vince said he used a sort of morph command on the monster. Wouldn't the summoned monster inside that Materia be somewhat an extension of the original?"

He flipped through the pages of the book, already knowing that there would not be an answer to that, because Bugenhagen had not been a great lover of Materia usage, going to it only when necessary and seeming a bit regretful afterwards. "I suggest we equip ourselves properly and head up to the observatory," he said quietly. "If Grandfather has done it before, the methodology must be sound. As for your monster within the Materia, I would simply say that all Materia are in some form or another unknown quantities."

"I forgot how damned philosophical you guys all get sometimes," she told him, snapping the notebook shut. "But I don't have anything to lose, I suppose." She leaned over and picked up the Conformer from where it lay leaning against the wall. "Ready when you are."

"Perhaps it would be wise to wait," Nanaki said, and then there was a rap on the door. He frowned at Yuffie, padded to the door and opened it. One of the canyon guides stood there with a perplexed look on his face.

"I'm sorry to interrupt, sir, but we seem to have a rather irritated guest who says he has to speak either with you, or with a Yuffie Kisaragi immediately. He seems quite agitated. His motorcycle was also quite loud and obnoxious. We told him that he could not bring it into the canyon, as the noise might disturb other guests, and he was rather hardheaded about that too."

From behind him, he heard Yuffie stir. "Motorcycle?" she demanded. "What does this guy look like?"

"He has red hair," the canyon guide said. "Medium height, carrying some kind of nightstick?"

Nanaki turned and saw Yuffie had gone very pale, clutching the Conformer as if it would save her. "Reno," she said. "He's followed me here."

"That's the name he gave," the guide said, "but-"

"How the hell did he know I was coming? I didn't tell anyone!"

He could, Nanaki reflected, turn Reno away and deny him access to Cosmo Canyon. But he was not an enemy, and there was no legal justification he could use. They were not at war with Corel or Green Earth. "Show him up," Nanaki said.

Yuffie was on her feet. "You can't-!"

"I can," Nanaki said firmly. "I believe that if we're going to perform this Materia experiment, a party of three would be idea. Reno already knows about the Materia, and he has sufficient combat experience. I have no Cure Materia and neither do you. It would be wise to have someone else...just in case."

Yuffie's hands worked, opening and closing into clenched fists. Nanaki recognized the way her eyes darted around the room, like a caged animal, searching for some way of escape. It had been the same with him once, when he had first been given to Hojo. But Reno was no Hojo. He watched her, prepared for a long battle of wills, and then to his surprise, Yuffie shrugged and crossed her arms, leaning against the wall.

"Whatever suits you," she said.

He stared at her in confusion, wondering if this was another human characteristic that he had not quite managed to master. The sound of someone coming up the ladder brought him back to the sunlit square that was the doorway. He saw a shock of red hair, motorcycle goggles, a dirty white shirt half-tucked into black pants, a grunt as Reno hauled himself up onto the ledge.

"Red," he said, nodding to Nanaki, and then his gaze moved further into the room where Yuffie stood, her arms still crossed like a shield in front of her.

"Yuffie?" Reno questioned, oddly hesitant. Nanaki sat and glanced back and forth at the two of them, sensing that there was something going on that he did not understand.

"Well," Yuffie said finally, stepping forward to cup the red Materia gracefully in both hands. "You've found me. You win."