Chapter Text
In Shinra Tower, still buzzing with activity despite the late hour, there is a man.
This man hurries down the hallways of the grand building. He wears a high-quality blue suit and red tie, though it is wrinkled from the sleepless nights he’s spent in this building the past few days. His brown hair is slicked back, but several strands lie haphazardly in his face and there are dark circles under his eyes. He walks down the hall at a pace that is just shy of sprinting. He carries only one thing with him: A thick suitcase, which he does not swing as he walks. The man is trying not to look suspicious, but he is failing pretty spectacularly.
This man is Reeve Tuesti, Head Director of Urban Development.
He is singleminded. He moves with purpose, so much so that none try to stop him. Reeve Tuesti knows that if he stops now, he won’t keep moving. His heart hammers in his chest. He is driven tonight by a decision made after too many cups of coffee and too much sleep deprivation. It is also a decision that has been made over decades, coalescing into one catastrophic event.
He approaches an elevator that only high-ranking personnel may use. His keycard would grant him access, but instead he taps in a code that forces the doors to slide open for him. In the elevator, he is restless. His fingers drum on his suitcase, he shifts from foot to foot, he pushes his hair away from his face. Regrets? Regret has yet to touch him. Doubt is being fought off with a stick. Every second, his decision becomes ever-more permanent.
The elevator deposits Reeve Tuesti in the laboratory of one Professor Hojo. The man, with caution that slows his steps, edges forward a few rooms. From one room to the next, he looks around. Whatever he is searching for, he does not find, and moves on. He pauses in a specimen-filled room, swallowing nervously at what he sees. While some appear mundane - rocks or plants - others are eyeballs, bones, fingers, that make the man uneasy.
There is a certain kind of irony here that Reeve Tuesti won’t get the chance to enjoy. If he had not rushed, he would have shown up too late, but in the best kind of too late. This will be where the story ends, in a certain sense, and starts in another. A man with a conscious, somewhere he should not be, at the wrong time. It’s a fatal decision.
He barely has time to look up as the ceiling falls in, and Reeve Tuesti’s world fades to black.
oOo
The first thing he becomes aware of is a scream.
The room around him is a frightening one. There’s shattered glass and strange fluids on the ground accompanied by even stranger viscera. Part of the ceiling is missing, the broken remains now scattered on the ground. And there is someone trapped under the broken ceiling in a pool of blood.
Huh.
That must be him.
He knows two things. The first is that he’s dead. The second is that he won’t just sit around, dead or alive, if there’s someone screaming.
Being dead, the ghost quickly learns, is strange. It’s hard to move around. He had never given much thought to what death would be like, but he’d heard about ghosts before, and he supposes he thought he’d be able to glide and float around, like dust. Instead, he finds himself stuck on things. He has to jump from the rubble to a broken and hanging lightbulb, then to a piece of metal sticking out of what remains of the ceiling. He climbs until he reaches the source of the scream.
The ghost finds a young woman, pinned down by a large beastly dog with sharp teeth and claws. There’s something strange about this woman, he notices right away. Something about her that is different than his own corpse he’d left behind, different than the evil dog, different than the other woman fighting a different evil dog. He’d fight off the dog if he could… but he can’t. He’s still dead. He’s still a ghost.
The ghost reaches over to a nearby cabinet, possessing it, and does the only thing he can.
The cabinet’s door swings open will all the effort the ghost can scrounge up, knocking into the side of the evil dog. The evil dog seems surprised rather than hurt, but it’s enough for the pink woman to get a good hold of her staff and swing it at the evil dog, forcing him off.
Yes, take that you bad dog! t he ghost cheers. That, surprisingly, went pretty well. He looks around the room more, trying to see if there’s anything else he can do. There’s a fan hanging from the ceiling, so the ghost jumps up to there and starts spinning the blades. It takes a while to get them up to a useful speed.
Over here! Throw one to me! h e begs. The two girls don’t actually need all that much help now, but that doesn’t mean he can’t at least try. He's here, after all, and it's very exciting to be a part of this. There's a certain thrill he's getting from watching these evil dogs get beat up. At least from his current vantage point, he has a better view of the two. One, the one he saved, has curly brown hair and is dressed in pink, fighting with a staff and mostly utilizing spells. The other one is fighting with her fists, has long black hair, and dressed in black and white. He doesn’t recognize either of them.
“Huh?” The pink woman looks over at him. The ghost tries to spin the fan even faster, but it’s currently at top speed, and it doesn’t seem like he has all that much control over it. He could probably stop it if he tried, but, well, that’s not what he’s trying to do now is it.
Yes! Let me help!
the ghost calls. The pink woman blinks and then smacks the evil dog into the fan’s blades. They’re going fast enough to do some blunt damage, at the very least, and the ghost cheers. The fan's blades are irreparably damaged now, but so is everything else in the room.
The two women finish fighting the dogs soon after, and the ghost nods to himself.
Great job! You two are very efficient! t he ghost praises. The pink lady puts her staff away and approaches the now-fallen fan.
“Aerith?” the black and white woman asks.
“One moment, Tifa,” Aerith requests. She smiles softly, if a little hesitantly, at the ghost. “You are still here, right?”
Yes I am, Ma’am.
“Thank you for your help,” she says and the ghost non-existently sits up a little straighter. He thinks of the body of himself he’d seen before coming up here, and reaches to straighten a tie. It feels to him like that’s what he’s doing, and he can kind of look down and see some semblance of himself. Blue suit, calloused hands, red tie. He looks right. Or, he's fairly sure he does.
I couldn’t just leave you to fend for yourselves, the ghost says.
“Uh, Aerith?” Tifa asks, a little worried now.
“I think,” Aerith says to Tifa, a little unsure, “That there’s a ghost here. That is what you, right?” Tifa stares at the broken fan with much more attention now. Strange, so only Aerith can hear him?
I think so. I’ve been a ghost myself for just a few minutes, so I can’t be sure. I’m dead, though, so what else could I be?
“A ghost? Like the ones at the Train Graveyard?” Tifa asks, beginning to her fists into a defensive stance. Aerith laughs and shakes her head.
“No, completely different. Or mostly different? As different as ghosts can be? I don’t know much about ghosts either.”
Well, that makes two of us.
Tifa has come over to stand next Aerith. She looks a bit cautious still, but apparently trusts Aerith's judgement on him.
“I’m Aerith, and this is Tifa,” Aerith officially introduces them. “Thank you for helping.”
Ach, don’t mention it! I’m…
The ghost has absolutely every intention of telling Aerith what his name is, he really does. But see, the thing is… He can’t remember his name. At all.
Now that he’s thinking about it, he can’t remember anything. His first memory is waking up dead on the floor below, his own dead body beneath hi.
“Are you okay?” Aerith asks with worry in her voice.
Sorry, just, ah… I don’t know who I am. I died downstairs, so I probably work in this building…? But other than that, I have no clue. Now that I’m thinking about it, where are we? This place seems kinda strange, the ghost says honestly.
“Oh, I wasn’t even thinking…” Aerith looks at the giant hole in the floor. “Did we… kill you?”
I suppose you did?
The ghost shrugs, though he knows Aerith can’t see it.
But you were fighting for your life, so I can't exactly blame you, now can I?
“Aerith, we should probably get going. We still need to regroup with Cloud, Barret, and Red,” Tifa reminds her friend.
“Oh, right. Well, thank you again for your help! I hope you manage to remember who you are,” Aerith says. She stands, brushes some dust from her dress, and moves to leave.
It is in this moment that the ghost realizes that he has no plans for what to do after this. He’s come into existence as a ghost and decided to try and save her. That was it. He feels awkward and untethered now.
What are you going to do? the ghost asks.
“Well,” Aerith trails off a bit, “Right now our only goal is to get out of Shinra Tower.”
Shinra. The name fills the ghost with so much hate, it’s almost overwhelming. Shinra, he immediately knows, destroys people. It’s a terrible thing, something that deserves to die. He isn’t even sure what ‘Shinra’ is, and yet he knows this intrinsically. He also knows that if this is Shinra Tower, he does not want to be there. Especially not wherever he currently is that smells so weird and has weird things behind glass in strange fluids. A place where two women get attacked by evil dogs.
If it's not too much of a bother, do you think you could take me with you? Or, at least take me out of here. I don't think I enjoy this place much. And he could get stuck here, couldn’t he? He can’t possess many things, only items that are big but not too big, that have sort of little cores in their centers. Oddly enough, Aerith looks like she has one but Tifa does not. Out of politeness, the ghost does not reach out for it. That feels like it’d be a little rude, even iff he is very curious what would happen.
“I can’t exactly take a ceiling fan with me,” Aerith replies a little nervously.
Then I’ll be something smaller! How about… The ghost looks around. He hops to a fallen clipboard with some notes he doesn't bother looking at. Would this work?
“Well, I guess I wouldn’t want to be stuck here either. Sure, you can come along.” Aerith smiles, picking up the clipboard. Relief sweeps through the ghost, but with a strange emptiness to it. He doesn’t want to stay, but even as Aerith carries him out of the room, the ghost has a sense that he has left something behind.
In time, the ghost will learn his name is Reeve Tuesti. That is all he will know, and he will be told it rather than remember.
And there is an irony to that the ghost will not appreciate for many months.