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She feels her hand before she feels her eyes behind their lids. Before she is aware of her eyes flickering behind their lids; of being conscious. Of not being supposed to be conscious.
Not her hand. Something in it. If she moves her thumb just a little, she brushes it over something cool, pliant. By the time she becomes aware of a faint, greenish light winding at her lashes, she’s had a second to follow the something down and to her palm, where it seems to -
Not in her hand. In her hand. Through it.
Scarlet jerks, pulls instinctively against the intrusion, is on her hands and knees before she can open her eyes and wake up wake up wake up because this is -
- not what she’s expecting. She knows as soon as she tugs, because she knows as well as anyone the ways to work apart a persons body, that she should not do that. That yanking against something stuck in you through you oh Ifrits flame will only rend and bleed and hurt but-
But it doesn’t hurt. And she feels no queasy pulling at the tendons in her hand, no creek between the bones. When her eyes catch up to her body she catches her breath and then lets it out again in a half awed huff, because there, growing out of the dirt and out of her is delicate web of white-flowered vines. But it doesn’t hurt.
She has her fingernails clutched into the soil beneath her, can feel it crushing into the velvet of her dress where her knees meet the ground, and the vines curl up her wrist and around her fingers like jewelry bands. But it doesn’t bleed.
When she pulls, and she does pull, eventually (has always pulled at things to see what makes them grow, has always been more curious than- well, has always been a curious kind of cruel) it doesn’t hurt or bleed then, either. The roots separate from the soil in the same motion as her wrist flicking back.
Light follows them.
Trails the tangled wisps of anchor; green and glowing and dancing up over the vines, over her arm and fingers. The flora dissipating into itself.
Leaving her. Scarlet. Kneeling bewildered in the dirt and the semi dark. And, she realizes, dawningly, not at all in the smoldering remnants of the Proud Clod, which if she’s honest, is where she ought to have expected to be.
The jerk and stutter of the engine as a leg collapsed, and the machine staggered under it’s own weight. The flash of a spell and the acrid after-smell of inorganic magic before the concussion.
Her last thought, she realized, with no guilt at all, had not been of her colleague, about to meet his end beside her. Had not even been of her own end. It had been the a protest - Her favorite creation given too little time for admiration, too little time. A whir of calculations of heat resistances and bend-points that hadn’t quite had time to form.
But she is not dead after all, and she is alone after all, and she is not in the wreckage. Is not even in Midgar.
She is… nowhere. Not nowhere that she recognizes, simply somewhere not. There is her and there is dirt. There is a sky without clouds or stars or horizon and there is an endless yawning dusk stretched out over the dirt in every direction she can turn.
And there is the light. In the dirt. The same luminescent green as the vines had been veining out under her feet, pulsing slightly wherever she puts her weight on it. Strange. Dangerous? Fascinating. She digs in a little with her fingers this time, intentional. If she could bring a sample of this back to the labs-
She’s not going back to the labs, is she. The battle. The explosion. This nowhere place with it’s veins of light that are the color of mako, but not. Maybe those eco-terrorist pop ups had been right after all. Maybe this was the heart of the planet they were always yelling about. If that were the case then that would mean that she is-
She clenches her fist in the soil and the green light bubbles up between her fingers.
No.
The bubbling bursts, and shifts, a new surge of plant growth twining up her arm again, like wires, heavy this time and pulling her, pulling her down into itself.
No, she still needs to -
Like wires. A better weapon. A better interface. Not reliant on controls this time, not slowed down in the lag between thought and action and the opening and closing of mechanical circuits, but right from thought to machine.
Nobody will know how to build it but her and she has to-
She’s pulled down and through, but she is pulled down fighting.
She claws her way back first through light and into darkness and then into light again. Breaking through is not like breaking soil. Nothing crumbles under her hands. Nothing sticks beneath or breaks her nails. It is not like breaking the surface of water either. No pressure before the give. No cold and then colder.
It is like-
Breathing
Breathing smoke and something acrid and heavy like metal and fuel and – breathing-
She is breathing
And this time it hurts.
This time, when she opens her eyes she sees scratched and scorched cobblestone beneath her, sees twisted metal and the racing crackle of flame and electrical spark. This time she is where she expects to be. Home. In the shadow of her own ruined creation. Somehow, somehow alive.
Scarlet pushes herself to her feet, and she does not stop to look for Heidegger. If she had not been alive a handful of seconds ago, and she thinks now she must not have, then he surely isn’t. And if he were, it would be his peoples job to look for him, anyway. ‘Public safety’ was his purview after all. Her job is to create things.
With the remains of AVALANCHE having just escaped her grasp, with Meteor darkening the sky, she does not know how much time she has to build something, and she does not know yet what she can build that will make a difference. She does know that she has always done her best, and more importantly, her favorite work, under pressure. It takes her a few steps to get halfway steady on her feet. A few more to find her usual poise and stride.
The Clod had been a beautiful machine. Her masterpiece in fact, for the time that it was. But it was done now and she has other, deeper projects that might still yield some hope.
She walks away from the wreckage, and back towards ShinRa headquarters, and her office, and the secondary computer that neither Rufus nor his father had known about.