Crisis Core: Surveillance Duty (Cissnei, Aerith, Tseng)

[karanguni]

Another monster spawned from a prompt; this time it's obabscribbler (something Cissnei/Aerith, post-Zack).

Title: Surveillance Duty
Characters: Cissnei, Aerith, Tseng
Rating: PG
Summary: Cissnei starts to Aerith; then Cissnei realises she can't stop. (What, she wonders, would it be like to have something and be someone normal?)
Warnings: Set after the Nibelheim mission. Slight timeline liberty taken, spoilers for Before Crisis.

1121 words, and hooray for relationship ambiguity!



Whether it was envy that did it, or sheer loneliness, Cissnei requested that she be put on a more frequent rotation for surveillance duty in the slums. Tseng had raised eyebrows at that, but she pointed out that his own relationship to the Ancient was less than simple, and he'd agreed with a shrug and let her go. One thing Tseng was not: a hypocrite.

Cissnei wasn't a girl who cared much about flowers and dresses, but from high up in the church banisters after coming in from the roof, she'd sit and watch for hours as Aerith tended to a garden - one that grew - and lived in her simple skirts - which made her a woman, with curves in the right places - and pushed her cart from sector to sector, her life a simple wave of day and night.

Cissnei began to wonder, on more than one occasion, why and how the last of a race - one practically hunted by the Science Department - could live so simply. Wedged into the dark corners of an abandoned church, Cissnei - for all that her training had hardened her, for all that her weapons could protect her - felt more vulnerable than that defenceless girl who would sit in the pews and write letters to dead men.

Maybe it was because Aerith believed when no one else could bring themselves to have faith. Sometimes, Cissnei wanted to step out and step up and say he's not coming back or hope will only make it worse, but Aerith wasn't the one, she realised, who needed to hear those words.

Faith and acceptance came easily to the Ancient. It was Cissnei herself who wanted to break down her belief that one day, some day, somehow, Zack would burst back in through the doors and grin and justify everything about being able to be human in this godforsaken city where being part of Shinra meant having no friends, and having no one.

Cissnei could see why Zack'd fallen for Aerith.

Watching in silence became harder, after that. Cissnei didn't know why it was only now that she had to fight this battle against loneliness; every Turk she knew had gone through it, and every time she watched them she'd been glad that her upbringing meant that she never felt the same urge to find whatever it was that they were looking for. They were Turks, practically subhuman: emotion wasn't for them, or so she had believed. Now - now all she wanted was for someone to know her name.

(She should have known, on hindsight, that Tseng kept better tabs on his men than what he'd like them to believe.)

Sometime in the second year, Cissnei broke protocol. She walked in through the main doors, declaring herself in ways that made her trained instincts sound klaxons. 'The flowers,' she said to Aerith without any introduction, 'they're growing well?'

And Aerith, without any introduction, looked up at her, and smiled. 'And selling well, too. You must be Cissnei. Zack's told me about you.'

No questions, no demands, no wrangling about privacy or intrusion or even any sign of bitterness that she was being followed every day of her life: just serenity, and Cissnei didn't know why that appealed to her so much, didn't know why Aerith felt like shelter from the storm of moral decisions and questionable practices that she'd been running from all her life.

'And Zack says you're one of a kind,' Cissnei said, with a smile in return - this one not false or engineered for flippancy.

Aerith laughed, her voice like softly ringing bells.

They talked together until the sun went down, and talked again the next time Cissnei returned.




'You're really afraid of the sky?' Cissnei found that a little hard to believe. 'But it's just the sky.'

'Living down here, we don't see it a lot,' Aerith said, looking up through the hole in the roof and into the sunlight that seemed to have no origin. 'I can't imagine something so wide.'

'I think,' Cissnei said carefully, 'that you just need to live under it for a little while. It can be pretty, at sunset, and sunrise.'

Aerith, who had been alone for two years now, turned to Cissnei, and tilted her head in askance. 'Will you take me up to the Plate to see?'

Cissnei, who had been alone for the whole of her life, turned to Aerith, and nodded. 'Yes.'




She'd barely returned Aerith safely to the church when Tseng found her. It surprised Cissnei, though she supposed that it shouldn't have. One moment the slum street had been empty, and the next he was there, impassive but with his arms crossed, hardened now from loss and too much experience with pain.

'You should know better than to try,' he said, nodding towards the closed door of the church.

'You should be one to talk,' Cissnei retorted, though she could not meet his eyes. She tried to walk away, but he followed anyway, like a ghost of corporate Shinra at her back. She gave up, and turned to face him. 'Wasn't it you who said that things with Aerith are complicated?'

'That remains true. But I'm not the sort of person who is going to try for normalcy when I'm in the occupation I'm in, Cissnei. I'm slightly more realistic than that, and so should you be.'

'At least you had a choice of occupation,' Cissnei the orphan said, and her words were bitter even to her own ears.

'And at least you have a life,' Tseng shot back. 'There are worse places to be in Midgar than in Shinra, and a life in the streets, alone, is one of them. We are the last people who should be talking about choice - you're not the only one who lacks freedom to do what you'd rather otherwise.'

Freedom - wasn't that all what they wanted? Cissnei looked away, said nothing.

Tseng put his hand on her shoulder. 'We try, where we can, to help other people. But we wear the suit, Cissnei.' His fingers touched her tie. 'As long as that's true, it's not particularly noble to try and save ourselves.'

'What's wrong with having a friend,' Cissnei snapped, because the truer Tseng's words rang, the worse it felt, deep in the pit of her stomach.

'I had a friend and mentor in Veld,' Tseng said, flatly. 'And, afterwards, I had a gun in my hand held to his temple.'

Cissnei's silence was as strangled as Tseng's was guarded. Quietly, and as practical as a Turk had ever been, he gave her a nod and turned to leave, saying, 'I think that's answer enough.'