Chapter 16

"We haven't been very good at following Elena's advice, you know," she told him.

He had a coy, crooked smile for her as leaned over the bar. "You know, you're right." He watched Tifa as she finished hanging up the last of the glasses. "But maybe I don't care what anyone might think of us."

"Neither do I," said Tifa.

"Oh really?" He settled back in the bar stool and studied her. "What if AVALANCHE found out?"

"I know just what they'd have to say," said Tifa, a defiant note finding its way in, "but I'd tell them where they can shove it."

"Yeah, sure you would!"

"I'm perfectly serious!" She turned back to him. "They're going to have to deal with the fact that I'm doing things for myself now… and that I'm not waiting around for Cloud any longer." She paused. "Not that… not that I even want him at all, anymore. It wouldn't make a difference if he were to show up on my doorstep tomorrow."

"Well," said Reno, for lack of anything better to say, "that's a far cry from the Tifa Lockheart I knew a few weeks ago."

She exhaled, smiling. "It feels so good to be able to say those things."

"So what do you wanna do tonight?" Reno asked her, leaning back in.

"You know, Elena called after intermission… I thought we could go see and see her and Rude."

He began to laugh, a little desperately. "Tifa," he said. "Oh, Tifa. You are SO. FUNNY."

"I'm not kidding, Reno."

"But why?" He gave her his most injured look. "Don't you want to spend time with me?"

"I've spent time with you all day!" said Tifa, coming around from behind the bar with her purse. "And we're going to be together all day tomorrow. Why don't you want to see your own best friends?"

"'Cause I'd rather see you," he said, stopping her in her tracks. "Please, Teef... let's do something else. Anything else. I can think of a thousand funner things to do than going to Rude and Elena's. Rude's not much of a conversationalist, you see, and Elena's just going to tell you about how she thinks she's gaining weight… and their kitchen is full of all this fat-free food she likes to buy and then complain about."

"I had a lot of fun with her the other night," said Tifa, stepping around him. "And I'm pretty sure that Rude's not a mute."

"Hey!" He kept in stride with her. "Let's go to that really great diner up on Circlet and 35th… get a REALLY RICH dessert!"

"We did that last night."

"Then can we just paint the town? Hijack a gelato stand? Hell, we can go down to Under and stare at the sky for as long as you want!"

"But I don't want to do any of those things tonight."

Just in front of the door, he took her wrist and spun her around once, grabbing both her hands and forcing her into a dramatic pose when she nearly fell into him. "Tango lessons!"

"Uh… whoa there, Turbo." She twisted free of his grasp. "That's enough out of you! We're going to see Elena and Rude, and that's that!"

"…yes, ma'am."

Reno grumbled unintelligibly the entire drive to Rude and Elena's, and Tifa ribbed him lightly for it.

Rude buzzed them up and they went in through the glossy chandeliered foyer and took the elevator that didn't creak; Reno only felt more annoyed or anxious as they approached the apartment. Once inside, they found themselves at the end of a side hall that opened into the spacious kitchen; beyond that could be seen the wide doorway to the living room.

After the greetings Elena offered a tour, which Tifa took, being too gracious for her own good. Reno shifted a dark look at their retreating forms before making a beeline for the mini-bar; Rude followed.

The piano sat on the other end of the living room, in shadows. He was wary of it, but it was easy to ignore—especially from inside the bar, where he was going through each bottle. "Do you guys even use this thing?" he asked Rude.

"No," he admitted. "Not often…"

"Well, that's gonna have to change, starting now!" A bottle in each hand, with fingers wrapped around glass necks, he busied himself with studying the labels as Rude leaned over the bar to watch.

"I'm surprised you haven't used it sooner. We sort of figured you'd be the one to break it in."

He scoffed, although the presence of liquor kept him from being too serious. "You held out just for me? Oh, I'm flattered..."

"…annnd here's the bar, which Reno has already gotten into…"

Elena's tour had led to where he was. He looked up at her, holding up a bottle in one of his hands. "Wanna split one?"

Elena made a face. "Of whiskey?"

He lowered his arm, regarding it glumly. Perhaps he was being a little too hopeful…

"Hey," said Tifa, looking toward the other end of the room. "What's that over there?—you have a… piano?"

Reno stiffened in his place. Still armed with liquor, his eyes flew to her and he felt a wild urge to say something distracting, but he didn't know what.

"Yeah," said Elena, and he remained gagged. "Do you play?"

An awestruck Tifa left his line of sight, and he made himself put down the bottles and step around the bar to see what she was doing. She walked slowly to that end of the room, seeming to have forgotten to answer the question.

She lifted the lid and ran her fingers over the keys; they began tentatively tapping out scales before recalling bits of melodies. He, Rude, and Elena just watched as the notes grew bolder, attached into lilting songs, and filled the apartment.

Then the music ended. "It's a real fine piano," Tifa said, seeming to have come out of her initial awe. She looked up at them. "Oh! I hope you don't mind that I—it's just been so long—"

"No," Rude reassured her, "you're fine. It's… nice to hear it being used again."

"You mean, no one plays?" she asked, taking care to replace the lid over the keys.

After a brief silence came Elena's reply. "Tseng did."

"Oh." Tifa stared at her before a little smile graced her face. "Well, I think it's wonderful that you guys kept something to remember him by."

Reno's head folded in toward his chest. Remember? he thought, scowling, blinking away images already pressed behind his eyes. I don't want to remember him by anything…

In the silence Rude and Elena shifted uncomfortably and looked to him, and Reno sidled back behind the bar, safe around the corner, until Tifa got the hell away from there.

It was not long after Tifa discovered the piano that Reno found some excuse to leave. Everyone saw through it, but Rude and Elena humored him, and let them go with a promise that they'd all get together again. A strained silence followed them as he took her home, and he didn't let her apologize for anything. Tifa went to sleep confused and worried about tomorrow.

But she heard from him again much sooner than she thought: before the sun was even up the next morning , he called her. He said he wanted to see her. They agreed to meet, and it was decided that they would find someplace in this city where they could see the sun rising.

A few minutes later they collided into each other outside her apartment, under the settled darkness away from the street lamps. The morning air was chilly while he was warm, and he was tall enough to disappear into when she leaned into him. All of this was still so new…

But she couldn't help noticing how thin he felt, or thinking about how he had sounded on the phone. Maybe this had something to do with last night, after all.

"Are you okay?" she murmured.

"I am now," he said into her hair. He pulled back. "Let's walk."

She strained to see him by the dim light of a streetlamp. His hair did whatever it wanted to on top of his head and whiskers dotted his jawline; his eyes weren't clear to her but his smile was easy and ready as ever. It became clear that Reno did not want to be serious this morning, and Tifa didn't want to be, either.

With a thrill she thought of how this was something she could never see herself doing with Cloud—meeting at odd hours of the day, having asinine conversations, setting out together just to find the sunrise…

The two came upon a crosswalk, and they both stopped as if they had never seen one before. Then they took one look at each other, and when the sign changed they knew what to do.

"AAAAAAAAUUUUUGHHH!"

"EEEEEYYYAAAAAAAAHHH!"

All the way across, they booked it while screaming like a car was swerving for them. One they reached the other end, their yelling dissolved into laughter with no regard for how it reverberated in the street and shook off the buildings. She fell back on his arm and their steps regulated in their aimless path. Beyond the lampposts and a break in the buildings she could see the sky getting lighter.

"Are we going to do this at every crosswalk?"

"Why not?"

After the last smile from that faded, something in the lines of his face reminded Tifa that it was still bothering her, so she went ahead and broached the subject: "Reno, about last night—"

"Don't worry about it."

She watched his profile, her voice small. "O… kay..."

"Oh yeah," Reno started. "Forgot to tell you. I got a voice mail last night… Speed Square is in a couple of weeks, but they want me to head out there early… maybe a few days before. Some promotional thing. But they didn't tell me where I'm staying… do you think it'll be that scary-ass hotel in the Gold Saucer?"

She snorted. "You'd better ask!"

"Not that it's actually scary, of course," he amended. "It's hard to be scared by a bunch of cheap crap popping up everywhere. Shinra made us stay there once on a mission and we all hated it."

"I don't think anyone hates that place more than Vincent," said Tifa. "Other guests kept mistaking him for hotel staff the entire time."

"I actually felt pretty bad for Mr. Hangman… now that's a guy who regrets his career choice every day of his life…" Reno looked over at her then, switching gears. "You're gonna come see me, right?"

Her eyes widened. "Did you have to ask?"

"Well, last I checked, you weren't that eager to go back to Costa…"

"But now, I think I'm ready to face them. Or at least I will be by then…"

He kept talking, or he kept her talking; flitting from subject to subject whenever the conversation trailed off. Reno squelched the silences with ridiculous stories from the Shinra days: about the time that Hojo put specimens in the Turk lounge fridge and Palmer mistook one for cracker spread when he came in scavenging; about when they were forced to babysit Dark Nation for Rufus and they lost her in the HQ for several hours; about the many pranks he and Rude devised and executed in their downtime.

They also became street-crossing experts, incorporating new exclamations and arm-waving and reaching new levels of disruption with every crosswalk they met. Tifa was more than obliged to join in on the slap-happy spontaneity of being with Reno.

Before much longer they found what they were looking for from an old footbridge on the edge of town. And they weren't late for the show: the sun had just broken free of the mountain range and there was nothing to obstruct the view.

For a long moment Tifa took it in, the brilliant colors blossoming on them; the sky was clear and the few clouds there were had flattened into purple shapes against the deep red horizon. The reds and pinks pushed up on the steadily lightening slate of the sky. Observing a spectacle of nature, even from her place in a cramped city, she could almost pretend she was breathing the fresh air of the countryside. And she was glad she wasn't witnessing it alone.

She looked to Reno at her left, seeing only his mess of bright deepened scarlet because his attention was turned the other way—was he straining to see Midgar from here?

But his head turned back, and in the high light Tifa saw what she couldn't earlier—that she hoped she only imagined, but she was sure of it now. It wasn't just tiredness in his eyes, and it wasn't just lack of sleep that had been responsible for the uncomfortable halting in their running conversation. There was something lagging and uneasy and… sad about him.

He studied her face too despite himself, and Tifa struggled in her head to find something to say. She tried to smile for him; he stooped down and her heart thrilled when he kissed her, but once it was over it sunk back into the sick place it had found once her suspicions had been confirmed.

His hands remained closed around her upper arms; his eyes continued to trail down her face and jump back to her eyes, and she could only look back into his.

"You look so sad," he said at length.

"I am," she acknowledged.

Reno let go and began to turn back toward the city. "Well, should we yell across some more streets, or—?"

"We already did. It won't help." She hugged herself, finding it hard to swallow. "I could laugh, I could do anything, but it'll just come back again."

It was a moment before he turned to face her, and another before he said anything. "What's makin' you so sad?"

Tifa had forgotten the sun. She tried to find an answer for that with him in front of her, with that worn look in his eye, the burden he'd been trying to deny all morning.

"You," she broke out.

He gaped at her; she blinked away the sudden blurriness in her vision and asked what she couldn't wait any longer to ask:

"Reno, what's wrong? Why are we out so early?—Why did you need to see me now?"

He frowned. "What do you mean, 'why did I need to see you now?' Do I need a reason to—"

"When I know that you don't like to wake up before noon? Yes!"

His shoulders slumped; he hesitated. "It was just a dream."

'It's always a dream'… "A dream? Was it Tseng? Was he denying his death again?"

"No." Reno swallowed; he looked at anything but her. "He wasn't denying it, it was like I was there when—when he was dying. But I was never actually… we never saw him…" He stopped, and his attention shifted to her afresh. "Wait," he said, the force coming back into his voice with each question. "You—you were there, weren't you? You saw him, didn't you?"

Tifa started shaking her head, despite the memory of Tseng sitting stiff against the pillar, pale and bleeding out, remaining behind her eyes. "No. No… Reno, don't do this…"

"Why not?" he pressed—a tone she'd never heard from him before. "Because you did see him there?—dying alone, and—"

"Stop it!"

"Why won't you tell me?"

"Because you don't need to know!"

The silence settled sharp against her cry and he pulled back to turn away from her. She struggled to find her bearing.

"You don't need to—concern yourself with that, Reno… or torture yourself about it," she said to his back. "I know that… losing him must have been—"

"I don't want to talk about it," he said without turning around.

"Do Rude and Elena even know about these dreams? Have you even—"

"Just forget it. Leave it alone."

She bit her lip. "Reno, I—I just can't stand to see—"

"TIFA."

Her vision blurred over again and she fell against the rail, her hands gripping it. After a long moment he faced the sunrise too, and she was still willing tears away when his hand came over hers. But he stood off to the side and didn't say anything or look up at her.

x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x

Post-Chapter Notes: All right, guys. I'm sorry for the absurd wait again. Now that I'm out of school, and it's darn near impossible to find a job, I'm taking advantage of the extra time I've got. ;)

Seriously, I'm trying to finish this. Oh, and I had to rehash things a bit and there's still THREE more chapters to go after this... I'm pretty sure...

Just a little fact: the silly little Shinra stories that Reno told Tifa, and some other allusions, were all humor fics I tried to write years ago but never got off the ground. Now they've become part of the backstory for the characters in my own mind.

Thanks for reading, guys. This next one's a doozy... wish me luck! =D