Author's notes/introduction: Backstories. Those flightly, strange things. This is Cid, this is the Wutai War, this is partial insanity. If I make any errors in the time line, please point them out - I think I've got everything squared, but it's more than possible I'm mistaken. (To quote JKR, "Oh dear, maths.")

Much love to my typo-killing beta, Eva. She's awesome, and any mistakes herein are because of me, not her.

Standard disclaimers apply, I don't own any of this and the things I do lay claim to (Maris et al), nobody else wants.

Rated M for copious amounts of bad language, future violence and low grade sexuality. Standard warnings for slash (i.e. homosexuality) apply.

•••

When Cid Highwind didn’t know any better, Shinra Company – even then becoming less of a company and more of a nation in and of itself – represented opportunity, hope, and (most importantly) his chance to fly. They had planes and Cid came very close to loving them for it. Sure, he’d seen helicopters once or twice, but they seemed too loud, too ungraceful for the sky he’d stared at since he’d been able to set foot outside; planes, on the other hand, were magnificent. From the first time he caught a glimpse of them slicing through the sky he’d been inventing things he could do with them, to them, to make them even more magnificent.

There wasn’t anything holding him in his ‘hometown’. At sixteen he was - and as far as he could remember always had been - an orphan, already notorious for his ability to use seventeen curse words per eighteen word sentence. Nobody particularly disliked him, but he was a little too rough for the country life, grease-stained hands hungry for something other than the few trucks that passed through. He wanted something more alive and moving, something that hummed like a car engine but bigger, something that wasn’t corn, for fuck’s sake

Oh, how Cid loathed corn, the fields and fields of it that made up the town’s landscape and his life. It was downright stupid to want corn dead, but he really, truly did. He was very happy to give up the corn when a Shinra recruiter came through town, waxing poetic about the army and the Turks and Soldier, things Cid didn’t hear a damn word of until ‘airforce’ was uttered. It seemed like a magic word, almost, and became just plain damn cool when he figured out it meant they stuck you in a plane and let you fly. There was something about guns being included in the plane package, but Cid was beyond giving a shit. Not a person to do things by halves, he was downright enamored, captivated, already dreaming.

He left, and his last words to that backwater little place was a message to the corn to go fuck itself.

•••

Their first meeting was not auspicious. Shera wasn’t a tiny girl, but there were very few ways to not fall flat on your ass when Cid ran into you. She stared up at him, blinking behind her glasses, and tried to figure out if she wanted to apologize or blame him; finally decided to apologize, because he had gorgeous blue eyes and she may have been brilliant, but she was also a sixteen year old girl. It was her first mistake.

“I ran into you,” he objected, arms folded across his chest. His country accent was comforting in a city where she sounded like a stranger.

She pushed herself to her feet, picked up her worn duffel bag and took another look at this boy, trying to notice something other than his eyes. Shera was five foot six, and he was only an inch or so taller, his blond hair messy and his long sleeved shirt a size too big and covered in grease. He didn’t look like the sort of person people took an automatic shine to, and she contrarily decided at that moment that she was going to be his friend.

“So you did,” she said calmly, and then held out her hand. “Shera Gild.”

He stared at her for a moment, measuring, then grinned and accepted the handshake. “Cid Highwind.”

Mistake rectified, at least for the moment.

“What brings you to Midgar?” She asked pleasantly, as if she’d lived there all her life and hadn’t just arrived on a rented chocobo out of Kalm.

“Airforce.” It was less an answer and more a grunt, but got the point across.

“Really?” She pressed a hand to her chest in an expression of pride. “Me too.”

She wondered if he was there because he got bored and needed something to play at, like some of the other boys she’d met on her way to Shinra Headquarters, or if he, too, could take apart an engine or a coffee maker or whatever they let him get his hands on, and then have it put back together in ten minutes.

“Huh.” He tilted his head to the side slightly. “Officer training?”

“No.” Shera couldn’t stop the slight frown. Oh, she was a genius and they’d admitted to that, but the written tests and the interview had told them she just wasn’t ‘commissioned officer material’; something about being too nice. “I just want to work on the planes,” she said, covering up her disappointment with herself.

“Too damn bad,” he allowed. “I’d like to know somebody where I’m going isn’t a complete fucking idiot.”

Cid, she realized, was quickly going to get himself halfway to beaten to death. You could say things like that out in the middle of nowhere and end it in an honest fistfight, then go back to being friends five seconds later, but she had the feeling that city kids were different. She’d seen knives here already, and grudges that lingered longer than she’d ever thought possible for people so young. Weren’t grudges for old men and women who had nothing better to do than grumble about each other?

“You have to be very smart to get into officer training.”

“Ya? What does that say about you?”

He was lucky Shera had the patience of a saint.

“That doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone intelligent is in officer training. That’d be a logical fallacy.”

He thought about this for a moment. “Smart ass.”

The best thing about Shera was that she was always laughing with you.

•••

Midgar was full of strange things; strange smells, strange accents, strange girls named Shera, but Cid decided that their ‘tour guide’ won the award for Weirdest Damn Person. Ever. He introduced himself as Airman First Class Maris Kassidy, come to lead you to Your Doom (capital letters not optional). He was tall and lean, his dark brown hair hanging down his back in a fashion Cid had never seen on a boy. Those green eyes were just…weird – too intense, too knowing.

“Fuck,” Cid muttered under his breath - though he wasn’t sure what he was swearing at - as he and he other new guys followed Airman First Class Maris Kassidy to meet their officers.

•••

Johanna was a cruel, cruel woman. She’d taken her cup of coffee, pulled rank on her poor sergeant, and then locked herself in her office. Surely, she’d snarled over the rim of her mug, he was competent enough to greet a bunch of Airman Basics by himself. Bryn hadn’t fancied getting bitten, so he’d saluted wearily and followed her orders to get his ass over to the training ground, five minutes ago. He liked his major, really he did, but he did not like Airman Basics; they didn’t know a damn thing about following orders, they were all mouthy little midgets, and they generated more paperwork than they were really worth. Organization fell to itty bitty pieces when they were around.

They were all so short, too.

Kassidy saluted Bryn as the sergeant passed, obviously fighting down a smirk. Bryn saluted back, extremely Not Amused – Maris Kassidy had been in the training school longer than anyone else, going up and down ranks fast enough to make anyone dizzy and sometimes flirting with a dishonorable discharge. The only reason they kept him on was because whatever higher up in Shinra actually paid attention to these matters swore that Kassidy was ‘officer material’. Bryn swore that he was an insubordinate little shit head who kept himself in training so long because he got a kick out of being sadistic to the fresh meat.

Ignoring annoying idiots for the time being, Bryn ran a critical eye over the new recruits. He knew very little about the selection process for commissioned officers, and often suspected it involved picking names out of a hat, utterly at random. None of these kids – and they were just that, children – had any idea what they were in for, most of them armed with nothing more than battered duffel bags and hope.

The vast majority of the recruits assembled in a ragged line in front of him were boys, the two girls standing defiantly and slightly more forward, as if determined to prove themselves already. None of them could be older than nineteen, and he suspected one or two of them were lying about being sixteen. There was nothing immediately remarkable about any of them, but then again, there rarely was. ‘Remarkable’ only showed itself when the poor kids were pushed to their limit, and sometimes reserved itself for the truly life threatening situations.

“My name,” he barked, voice crisp, “is Bryn Cael. You will refer to me as Sergeant Cael at all times.”

Okay, so he pitied the kids a little; that didn’t mean he wasn’t their sergeant. If you babied them in basic, they died in the air. They hadn’t had an airforce or enemies for that long, but it was a lesson all of them had learned very quickly.

“I am the authority here. Major Lorick has neither the time nor the inclination to deal with your shit. You want something? Come to me and you might get lucky. Want to whine? Shut the hell up.”

A few of them were beginning to look faintly alarmed, and Bryn felt a twinge of self satisfaction. This would teach them to come in here and screw up his carefully ordered world with all their paperwork and miscreant behavior.

•••

Cid’s well developed mental reflexes screamed for him to say something vulgar and stupid. He didn’t take well to authority, mostly because half the time he didn’t have any ‘parental, authoritative figures’ nagging at him. Certainly not screaming at him like a fucking banshee with an attitude problem.

And his feet were going numb. Fucking yay.

After about five minutes of ‘you all suck, go to hell and die’, Cid decided that yes, indeed, he’d had enough of this shit. The bits of common sense that had taken refuge in his brain cringed as they realized what was about to happen, and Cid’s hand shot into the air.

‘Sergeant’ Cael halted abruptly, eyes narrowing. “Who are you and what do you want?”

“Cid Highwind,” the blond answered. “And I have to piss.”

“What?”

Cid hadn’t thought it a difficult thing to process. “I – have – to – piss.”

Maris Kassidy was snickering in the background, but Cid wasn’t doing it to grab attention. He could care less if he looked tough or cool to the other airmen, or if he just looked like a mouthy asshole. No, he was doing this because he was bored out of his fucking mind and hadn’t come here to get yelled at by some hulking giant of an asshole. Where were the planes?

“What the hell kind of name is Highwind?” The sergeant demanded, completely ignoring Cid’s request for a bathroom break.

Cid bristled. “It’s my name.” Quickly failing common sense just managed to restrain him from adding ‘shit head’ to the end of that sentence.

And, okay, he’d taken his name out of an old, dilapidated history book when he was seven, because he’d lacked anything even resembling a last name before that. Apparently, it hadn’t occurred to the rest of the town before then that he’d need to be something more than ‘Cid’ or ‘that damn kid’, eventually. Highwind had seemed like a good choice at the time – and he still liked it, thank you very fucking much.

“Can I go piss now?” He asked, grinning in a way guaranteed to piss off most adults.

“I’ll take him!” Kassidy piped up.

Before Cael could answer, the brown haired teenager strode forward and grabbed Cid’s arm, yanking him out of line and practically dragging him out of the room. Cid debated resisting for the moment, just for the satisfaction of punching the guy, but this was getting him away from the most boring screaming session he’d ever sat through. Once they were a safe distance away, though, Cid wrenched his arm out of Kassidy’s grip.

“Hey, calm down,” Kassidy said, leaning against a wall. “The bathrooms are that way, if you actually need to piss and weren’t just bullshitting him. Thanks for being a convenient excuse, by the way. That was great.”

He drew out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, and it seemed he was content to ignore Cid now that his usefulness had run out – which was just fine and dandy with Cid. The blond snorted, shrugged, and stomped off down the hall in the opposite direction of the bathrooms. He might get a little lost, but he might also find something more interesting than crazy people and loud, bitchy people.

It’s your first day and you’re going to get kicked out! His last remaining shred of discipline yelled as it died.

Well, if he was going to get kicked out, he might as well see the planes first.

•••

Shera was in heaven. She’d been a little frightened, at first, that all the rumors about horrible, mean superiors and lots of screaming were true. Also rather frightening were horror stories of cruel, torturous bunkmates who desired nothing more than to make your life a living hell. Really, it seemed those just weren’t true.

Their commanding sergeant was a relatively young woman with honey blond hair and a lovely sense of humor, and Shera’s bunkmate Rosalind shared her passion for disassembling radios. Between that and her fortuitous meeting with Cid Highwind (who Shera liked despite all indications that she should do otherwise), today was a good day.

“How long will we be here?” She asked Rosalind, who seemed significantly more ‘in the know’ about these things.

Rosa shrugged. “Depends. If stuff in Wutai blows up like they say it’s gonna? We’ll be out of here quicker. If not? I guess it depends on how fast the army and Soldier gets sick of us being here.”

Shera toyed nervously with a strand of brown hair. “The army doesn’t want us here?”

“They think they can do everything themselves.” Rosa waved a hand dismissively. “They don’t even like the Turks. But hell, who does?”

The things you picked up growing up in Midgar were amazing, Shera decided. All they’d heard of Soldiers and Turks on the farm were vague rumors from travelers, horror stories about the things that went bump in the night. Rosa spoke of them without even a hint of fear or mystery.

“What does Soldier…do?” Shera asked hesitantly, desire to look smart and worldly failing in the face of her curiosity.

“As far as I can tell, they follow around that creepy silver haired dude – “ Sephiroth, Shera’s mind filled in, that much she knew. “ – And pretend they’re impressive.”

“And the Turks?”

Rosa grinned, showing almost all of her teeth. “They’re the ones who sneak in and kill you if you’re naughty.”

That didn’t sound…pleasant. Midgar was a very strange, eerie place.

•••

Johanna looked up from her cup of coffee to find a teenager standing in her doorway. She did not, generally, interact with the teenagers, especially not the ones who had just been inducted into training. Commissioned Officers, her ass; they just gave her all the kids with attention deficit disorder and anger management issues, then told her to ‘train’ them.

This was why she cheerfully pushed the job onto Cael, who at least got stress reduction out of yelling at them.

“Who the hell are you?” She demanded.

He narrowed his eyes. “Why does everyone keep asking me that?”

She’d ignore that, for now. “My door was locked.”

“Was fucking not!”

“I distinctly remember locking it.” Or maybe she was going senile. “I repeat, who the hell are you? And what are you wandering around for?”

“I’m looking for the bathrooms,” he intoned solemnly, but something in his tone suggested he was fighting down a smirk.

Johanna rolled her eyes, and then took an extra moment to actually look the kid over. Short, blond haired and blue eyed, not quite handsome but not too scrawny, either. Good, all of his trouble would come from his own mouth, not other kids being jealous or just bullies, which meant she’d know who to punish. That is, if she could get him to give up his name. Of course, she could just ask Cael after he was done with the others, as the sergeant was bound to notice the basic gone AWOL from his little ‘lecture’, but it was more fun this way.

“Does my office look like a bathroom to you?”

The basic made a great show of looking around, and then shrugged. “Kind of.”

Johanna snorted. “Get your eyes checked.” She tapped the name plate at the front of her desk. “And also, hone your powers of observation.”

His eyes widened ever so slightly as he took in the Major’s insignia on the name plate and processed just what that meant. She smirked.

“Fuck.”

“Quite. Are you going to tell me your name now, or am I just going to bodily remove you from the premises on the grounds that you’ve illegally infiltrated?”

“Cid Highwind,” he ground out miserably.

“Now was that so hard?” She asked, smile dangerously sweet. “Now, Airman Highwind. I could have you thrown out of the Commissioned Officers program, or even the airforce unit altogether.” He looked nervous, good. “But I’m feeling nice today.”

This was a blatant lie. Johanna Lorick had rarely even in her life felt ‘nice’.

“What?” Cid managed, an alarmed sixteen year old through and through.

“I’m even going to let you get out of Bryn’s screaming. But, you get to help me do my paperwork. You can read, can’t you?”

Of course he could read, literacy being a requirement for those going into the officer program, but she wanted to screw with him. Either he swallowed his pride and admitted he could, humiliating himself without any help from her, or he lied and she got to call him out on it.

The boy nodded reluctantly, and she smirked. Even Bryn would have to agree that for an impulsive, insubordinate teenager, busy work was the absolute best punishment. Anything else would make him feel rebellious, but it was just too silly and pathetic to get all fired up and indignant about having to file things.

“You and my filing cabinet are going to be good friends.”