Title: this train

Author: Seimei

Word Count: 32,000+

Rating: M

Pairings: Cloud/Tifa, Cloud/Aeris, Aeris/Zack

Author's Note: At its simplest, this is something of a Case of Tifa re-write, but with lots of reference to FFVII, and with personal speculation/insight/bullshit thrown in. It was originally written in 2010, and I sat on it for three years before posting it in 2013. I tried to keep it as consistent with known FFVII canon as possible, though, obviously, as a writer, I do take certain liberties. The writing is also fairly experimental for me. So keep that in mind, I guess. And yes, Cloud is a whiny bitch. And a dork. Newsflash!

EDIT: 2 July 2013 - Go figure, as soon as I publish it, I find a bajillion typos! I fixed everything I could find.

EDIT2: 1 May 2017 - If you prefer, I've posted this story on AO3 as well. My author name and story title are the same. Enjoy!

...

This Train

by Seimei

"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it."
― Rumi

...

Memory – she can't shake her memory, and she can't stop thinking what is wrong with me, what is wrong with me, but this man next to her – his eyes open her up like the sky beyond the plate, the sky she sees stretching out before her with the sea, and she is afraid all over again. She hides it well enough.

"Do you think we might ever ride in an airship together, Cloud?"

She leans over the guardrail, her shadow unable to reach the water far below. He watches the sunset burn red around the ribbon tied up in her hair. The sky and the sea let the deck of the cargo ship pass between smoothly, and for a moment he feels like they are sailing by the wind even though he can hear the constant drone of the Mako propulsion engine below the deck. Her question seems childish, like the ribbon – bright, inappropriately hopeful, but – but here he is, the one feeling like a child. He hasn't felt this way since that time –

She speaks again. "Like the one in Junon?"

He knows her well enough to hear the uncertainty she feels – something she normally doesn't show anyone. She bites her lip for one anxious moment, counting moments under a sweep of breath, but without fail she exhales. She looks peaceful then. He sees this often; a soft smile appears and her eyes ease into the distance, almost like she isn't standing there with him at all, chasing a black cape or a tattooed number or an intangible shadow from his own past. This time is no different, but maybe now he feels a little jealous.

"You want to ride an airship, Aeris?" He doesn't know when, if, he'd ever be able to take her on one – the road they are walking doesn't lend itself to easy promises. Still, he wants to say yes; he's still feeling childish. He doesn't say anything.

"Yeah. It's silly, I know." She lets go of the railing, wrists jingling in aluminum circlets."But, just once, I want to get closer to the sky."

When he finally says something, he regrets it almost instantly. "Even though you're afraid of it?" He doesn't know what prompted those words, why he is always putting his foot in his mouth, especially around her – more and more as the days pass.

"Afraid? I—" She stumbles, catches herself, then scratches behind her ear in embarrassment. "I'm no good at hiding things, I see. Yes, even though I'm afraid."

"So... why, then?"

She pauses, collecting her thoughts like she had once collected flowers – deliberately, carefully, gently; and when she comes to a resolution, she holds her finger to the corner of her mouth. "Well… how can I say it… it's like this, Cloud…"

A quiet laugh. A passing moment. Maybe she won't say anything, he thinks. Instead, she leans forward in one swift motion and kisses him on the mouth.

When he finally looks into them, candles burn behind her eyes, like stars, full of little hopes and little dreads – and he realizes the sun has dipped into the sea, leaving behind a darkened sky, and the only thing in the black is her face. Her face, a face – he holds her close because he has nothing else to keep his legs steady, because she is warm, because she is sad. Because his head is muddled, and she makes it better and worse all the same.

She is the one who pulls away first, and the smile she gives him is forced. She taps her forehead, as if to say think about that, and leaves him by the ship's railing.

"You'll figure it out… eventually," she says.

He can't see her sadness as she goes away from him.

...

Especially you, Miss Tifa. Especially you.

When their bodies have enough, they zip up their wounds and smile into bathroom mirrors, in places where they are alone. For a moment, the image of his lips against hers wanders into her thoughts, but the pang in Tifa's gut chases away the sensation it brings. Cloud is gone.

...

Tifa hates feeling this way.

The counters are clean. The sink is empty. The cabinets are in order, the stools are set, the booths are ready for tomorrow.

The blinds.

She hasn't closed them yet. Like carrots through a grater in her mind, the light. A cold metallic glow. She methodically twists each shut and, with a housekeeper's sigh, slides into one of the seats. Her hip knocks against the table and jars her before she composes herself. She refuses to let her head sink into her hands.

Just look at me.

Cloud isn't back yet. This was becoming the norm, slowly but surely, and thoughts of him gnaw on her until she feels like a dog's bone. Later and later, day after day, the hours slip away from both of them, and unwanted thoughts pool in the empty places she saves for them.

Where is he? Is he okay?

Will he call me if something happens?

The last one is the killer, really. The phone isn't exactly the lifeline between the two of them that it should be; return calls are rare on his end, and he never – never – picks up anymore.

But you've got to have a phone if you're on the road. If you're taking jobs.

True, Cloud has always been on the move. The opening of the new Seventh Heaven had him venturing into the community every day to haggle for provisions. As business grew, so did his territory, and so did his time on the road, but it wasn't until he obtained his own motorcycle and his own business that true distance grows between Cloud and Tifa.

What's yours is yours, mine is mine, but ours – hours –

And Tifa closes the bar once a week, but the motorbike keeps running and she keeps watching him drive away, standing in the doorway with the keys in her hands, thinking to herself but I closed us for a day, I took the hit in my pocket to make room for...

She has trouble finding true fault with him. After all, he simply can't turn down jobs, just as she really can't close down the bar as often as she'd like. And just as he had when he went out every day to fight over vegetables for her, he does his job now without complaint, and – she thinks she senses – that he does it largely for her. For their family.

But of course, there's a catch.

Some time ago, she'd seen him drinking alone, his back in a slouch, the bar dark and empty and the night sky dull through the windows. Cloud wasn't the kind to drink alone, but Tifa thought she might know why — she'd found a receipt for a delivery of burial flowers in his office earlier that day.

Her name was on it. The sender had been Elmyra Gainsborough.

Tifa hadn't said her name out loud for many months, because she was just as afraid of using it as Cloud was.

So, seeing him in a brooding heap, she had asked to join him at the bar counter. Drinking was supposed to be about laughter – about sharing, right? That's what Barret had said. That's why the three of them rebuilt Seventh Heaven – to connect people, to make them laugh, to give them enough wiggle room to hope for something more.

Tifa... I...

He wanted to drink alone, he'd said. A rubber band had snapped in her chest, and heat had risen in her cheeks. Her voice had been sharp.

Drink alone? Drink in your god damned room.

After a moment in which he had seemed not to hear her, his eyes had gone dull, blank, dark, and she had watched him turn away and disappear into his office. The receipt, still in her pocket, she crumpled up and threw in the bin.

She felt guilty afterward – still felt guilty about it, even now – but she'd never apologized, and he avoided her afterwards.

She feels heavy, sitting there in the booth with her memory, so she gets up to shake off the feeling, and the floorboards creak betrayal beneath her feet.

The worst thing is that Marlene can see everything, Tifa thinks.

She and Cloud have done their fair share of pretending to be okay for Marlene's sake, and the act lasted for awhile - brimming with fake smiles and conversations even when the room felt so quiet. Marlene saw through it, of course.

Tifa stands a little straighter. Before Cloud gets home, she has to put Marlene to bed. Tifa crosses the bar, making for the stairs.

The little girl is in her room, drawing quietly. Despite the silence, the floor is a maze of crayons and paper. Tifa hangs in the doorway and watches Marlene, and for a moment, she feels a little guilty that the room has gotten this messy – have I been ignoring Marlene, too? – but she lets the blame roll off her shoulders when Marlene shows her a goofy grin.

"Whatcha drawing, Marlene?"

"Ah, this? It's Papa and Mog on a chocobo train!" The young girl beams as Tifa comes over and crouches down next to her.

"Wow, Marlene."

Barret looks like a monstrous potato, gloriously emblazoned at the rear of several yellow swirling blobs.

Wait – they have beaks. Beaked blobs, then.

Mog looks like a failed rendition of one of Tifa's cupcakes – and are those four eyes or two wings? Tifa tries to keep from chuckling.

"You'll have to put that one up somewhere special – how about over your desk?"

Marlene nods. "Once it's finished, sure! But I was going to add Cloud at the front of the train! I just thought of that." She indicates towards the very, very, front of the train with a confident poke.

Tifa lets herself laugh then – she wonders briefly how Marlene will visually distinguish Cloud from the rest of the chocobo train before she realizes that he will probably be the only blob with a ridiculously serious expression. She says, "I'm sure he'd like that. But, you'll have to add him tomorrow. It's time for you to be getting to bed."

Marlene pouts. "I know…"

Tifa teasingly imitates the pout. "Oh, I know. I'm horrible."

After making a respectable pile out of the artistic experiment, Tifa and Marlene wash up. Soon after, Tifa tucks her in with a kiss. She is a little surprised when Marlene reaches firmly for her hand.

"Marlene, I…" she begins, but Tifa doesn't know what she wants to say. She glances over the side of Marlene's bed, at the floor, and pauses when her eyes go across the drawing, which rests on top of Marlene's neatly-piled art supplies; she lingers at the blank spot where Marlene intends to place Cloud.

"Tifa." Marlene's eyes are bright, even in the darkness.

"What's the matter, Mar?"

Marlene hesitates before she answers. "Is Cloud coming home tonight?"

Tifa squeezes Marlene's hand. "It will be late, if he does."

"I want him to tuck me in, too."

Tifa runs her free hand through Marlene's hair. "Well, I'm here, tonight." Her throat tightens as she speaks.

"I know." The answer is quiet, tiny. Tifa's eyes begin to burn when the expression on Marlene's face begins to emulate one that Cloud makes when he's deep in thought. "Are you okay, Tifa?"

Tifa's heart sinks; she loses a tear down her cheek before wiping away, hoping Marlene doesn't notice.

Little girls shouldn't worry about their caregivers

Briefly, Tifa sees in her mind the reach of mountains through a windowsill, vacant shadows in a doorway, a little cowboy hat upside-down on an old rug. The images fade when she glances at Marlene's window and sees only the streaks of electrical wires.

Tifa leans over Marlene and searches carefully for her words.

"I'm okay, Mar. Please don't worry yourself. I've been tired. Running the bar is lots of work. We've — we've all been tired lately. Cloud especially."

"He's always tired, Tifa."

"Well, he works hard, too. You'd get tired if you drove all over the continent like that, I bet."

"I'm not tired." Marlene frowns, her face scrunching up as only a child can manage. "I just wish he'd look at my drawings. I get so sad when he doesn't listen to me. I was almost going to leave him out of this last drawing, 'cause he never cares anyway."

Tifa waits for a moment to pass as she clings to her breath. Her voice is rough when she speaks.

"He loves you, Marlene. Showing it is... just one of the many things he's bad at." She tries to smile. Marlene doesn't say anything, and it breaks Tifa's heart.

"Marlene…"

"He's going to leave, like Papa." Her voice is tiny, muffled by her blanket. "Isn't he?"

"Marlene –"

"At least Papa said he's coming back."

"Cloud always comes home, Marlene. So does your Papa. No one is going anywhere."

Marlene sleepily reaches out and hugs Tifa, and Tifa takes comfort in holding the little girl close. "I love you," she murmurs.

"I love you, too. I'll see you bright and early," Tifa says, kissing her cheek.

Marlene's grip has already started to soften. Tifa gets up from the bed, turning away quickly before Marlene can notice the tears burning resolutely in her eyes now.

"Night night, Mar."

"Night night, Mama."

At the door, Tifa turns in surprise, but Marlene is already soundly asleep.

...

All that day, it rains above the plate. The people in the slums can always tell because the rain makes the pillars shudder and the drainpipes roar with black water from the upper streets. All the water collects in the middle of the slum pit, making the shortcuts between the Sectors impassible. Rain is rare in Midgar, but it never goes without notice.

Tifa takes the long way around Sector Five because of the flooding, passing through the old train graveyard in order to get back to Sector Seven. Most people never pass through the train wrecks, because it's contested turf between several of the slum gangs, and there's always somebody going missing. But her journey can't be helped - Barret's little girl has been sick for the last few days, and her condition isn't improving. Barret had refused to leave his daughter's side, and the other kids were too locked into their Shinra espionage to spare a moment for a little girl. Tifa took the day off to run to Wall-Market, where she bartered for some antibiotics and a cracked Cure materia. She hopes her efforts will pay off.

Tifa can see the glow from Sector Seven's viable train station, which means she's almost home free. She keeps a protective grasp on the medicine in her pocket, just for good measure.

Whenever Tifa passes the station, she entertains the fantasy of jumping on a train and riding away on it - not caring where she ends up, but just letting it take her wherever it goes. If only the train went somewhere better than here - she'd have been gone long ago. Still, she likes to pretend that it may be a real possibility one day; that's better than dwelling on how little things have changed since she came to Midgar.

The station is more crowded than normal - most likely because of the rain. She waits for the people to disperse before attempting to step out from behind some old wreckage and make her way past; old experience has taught her to be wary of packed crowds and little fingers, especially when one's pockets carry something precious. She watches the drunks stumble off the train, and the tired businessmen with cheap suits and thin hair, and the whores and the gangsters and the peddlers. And then, there is one more.

Her eyes find the man easily enough through the blur of the parting crowd. She is accustomed to seeing them – people abandoned by all promise, trapped along the fringe like lint on the edge of a broom – but instead of passing over this one, she pauses. These sorts of people are never able to fall completely through the cracks – the slums of Midgar are the cracks, so where else can they go? Instead, they linger. Nobody belongs to them, and they to nobody.

"Poor kid," murmurs the trainman bending over the crumpled young man. His attention is unusual. The trainman watches many meetings and partings without offering up his own heart anymore, but maybe he feels strangely curious today. Either case, it is an odd scene in Tifa's eyes.

The young man's eyes hold a strange glow, even though they are partially hidden in a dirty mop of blonde hair. The train doors close, and the lights from the windows cast a sickly weave across the ground, across his arms. Dried blood and a menacing sword. Something in her chest jolts at the sight of him – and then full recognition hits when she sees his face clearly. The plate above her comes crashing down.

Cloud.

Five years, she's lived in this city. Not once has she ever looked across a crowd of strangers and claimed she knew a face. But here is this image belonging to her distant past – his face is seven years older, no longer matching the boy she remembers, but oh my god, is it him—

The trainman steps aside as she bursts forth. She kneels beside the man she thinks is Cloud and searches those eyes, lost again beneath his tangled hair. A lump forms in her throat. The first thing she can blurt out of her mouth is: "Are you all right?!"

Lost and delirious, drain pipes run dry and clanging. His eyes are empty. Maybe if he laughs it will sound like dry leaves – what is this she's looking at, a scarecrow? It doesn't look like a man.

And then his eyes twitch, ever so slightly, when she sweeps his bangs back, and it seems like the response might be purely accidental. And then something in him clicks. Like a doll, his head rolls back, snaps forward. He groans, and then her name tumbles from his mouth.

"T-Tifa…?"

His shoulders and hands shake, and then he grabs her arms, pulling her closer, not looking up again. His grip is tight.

"Tifa, Tifa—"

The trainman gasps and tires to intervene, but Tifa silences him with a sideways glance before standing her ground against the scrambling, confused young man she knows as Cloud. Their eyes finally meet again in a painful stare-down. He searches her face for something, his arms caked with wasteland and rainwater, eyes pleading.

Tifa finds it hard to answer a question she doesn't know is being asked. She stares at him dubiously before murmuring, "…oh, Cloud."

Stillness follows one last tremor through his thin body. His eyes close, open, and he looks at her with startling clarity. Then he is the one drawing her up with a cock-eyed grin. He releases her nonchalantly, unaware of the prior death grip in which he'd trapped her wrists. She immediately feels uneasy – even more than before – but she challenges his gaze in spite of her feelings.

"That's right. I'm Cloud," he says as if he is a gorilla in a man suit, patting at the dried blood and grime on his clothes as if it's only chalk, efflorescence on an old wall. She can't tell if it's his blood or not, but he doesn't look injured, and the expression on his face deters her from asking. She notices that despite the healthy-looking muscle on his limbs, most of his body looks malnourished and brittle. It adds to her unease.

"Is it really you, Cloud?"

The knot in her stomach keeps growing. None of this is right, she thinks. Has he been in the city all along? Has he just arrived? Where has he been all this time?

Instead of asking any questions, she says,"I never thought I'd find you here."

"Yeah, it's been awhile." He flicks a hand through his hair in what should have been a smug gesture, but she sees, for the first time, the underlying confusion poorly masked in his eyes.

"Cloud, are you... are you all right? You don't look well."

"… Yeah? It's nothing. I'm okay, Tifa. Just surprised to run into you as well. That's all."

Ugliness, emptiness, snapping into focus with the return of his eyes.

Always dark under the plate, like dirt under a carpet. Dark with eyes open, even darker in the closing. When he dreams, the black boils with sound and fury, swells with a palpable paroxysm of delirium, carves out the tunnels in his head and uproots the tree of his mind. A thousand whispers, rocking like the sea in his ears, and he is lost in the green fury.

Sometimes, after he's listened to the water drain away, he finds himself in a basement, like an unwanted tool boxed up for storage – tucked behind crates and dust and cobwebs fragile. Dirt all around, dirt below, above – basement, or tomb?All the same now, if completely forgotten. Mud everywhere, mud in his hands, under his nails, in his eyes; mud like sin – mud that never washes clean.

Darkness, and then – and then, a roar, steady, from below and around, rhythmic, the sound of an automated weapon, no, a scream, a whistle – the wailing of brakes, of iron and the spitting of sparks, the beating fist of a train—

And now he is awake again, but there is hardly any difference.

His body sweats through his dirty sleeping bag, but he can't bear to open his eyes, can't stand to let them know that heknows that they know, that he is awake and he doesn't want to be.

Across the room, Tifa listens to Cloud. He tosses, never comfortable, sometimes pleading with phantoms. The very first time he had trouble falling asleep, she'd asked him if it was because of the hard floor - if that was bothering him. He'd denied having any trouble sleeping at all, and she never brought it up again. But when he is disturbed, like everyone else, she listens for him to go quiet. All of her companions' nightmares weigh heavily on her heart - and Cloud's, most of all.

Sometimes she thinks she hears him whisper her name. Tifa. She is never sure whether or not it's a voice real enough to answer.

When Tifa first brings Cloud back to Seventh Heaven, Barret takes one look at him and sniffs. Just sniffs – and stares. Barret's uncharacteristic silence lasts for several days, setting the whole crew on edge. It doesn't help that Marlene has been sick - Barret is a walking bundle of nerves whenever the little girl has anything more severe than a cough - but even when the antibiotics take effect, Barret is still cold as can be. Cloud ignores him for the most part, but Tifa wonders how long this standstill can last.

One morning, Barret goes behind the bar counter to scrounge up breakfast, not caring that Cloud is already back there, bleary-eyed, manually opening a can of black beans. He knocks into the ex-SOLDER, and Barret breaks his vow of silence.

"Dammit, Tifa, we're runnin' low on food again." Tifa is nearby, wiping down a stained chair. "You shore you're not just throwin' food away?" He clears his throat, rummaging through a cupboard above Cloud's head. "I mean, I know mosta this shit is garbage, but c'mon."

She's mad, of course - he's ribbing her about bringing Cloud home, but what's done is done. She almost throws her rag at Barret - but the look on Cloud's face freezes her.

Tifa watches as Cloud grips the can like he's clinging to a ledge, as he pulls off the jagged lid with unnecessary precision. He doesn't flinch when he cuts a finger on the mangled edge of the lid; he slowly inhales, watches his blood run into his hand. His eyes are dull. Tifa holds her breath. Even Barret side-eyes Cloud, though he seems to treat it like a dare.

Nothing else happens. Cloud wipes his hand on his shirt and fishes the beans out with a fork, and Barret shakes an expired box of cereal and then pours some into a dirty mug, and Tifa sticks the rag in her back pocket and storms outside.

She knows Barret isn't the only one who doesn't like Cloud.

At first, the others – Jessie, Biggs, Wedge, Barret, little Marlene – cast wary glances whenever Cloud comes near them. He said he was an ex-SOLDIER, someone from Shinra, and even apart from that, his manner is unnerving – icy and contemptuous, and then, suddenly distant and lost, like he can't remember what it is he is supposed to be doing. It makes them feel like he could be capable of anything, and they are still unable to trust him even after the passing of a few weeks.

Cloud rarely interacts with the others; they slip past him, always going somewhere else, always avoiding eye contact. Wedge is the only one who says anything to Cloud, but his efforts are largely ignored. Tifa wonders if Cloud even knows their names.

All of AVALANCHE shares four walls when it is convenient, below the bar of Seventh Heaven. Jessie, like Tifa, has nowhere to go, so she stays at Seventh Heaven more often than not, sometimes helping Tifa fix things in the bar – like the sad little electric stove which, for the longest time, only had two working burners, or the wiring on the wall by the fan, which had a habit of switching off when too many lights were plugged in.

To sleep, Jessie usually slumps over her keyboard, ignoring the computer screen when it lights up with a white, empty screen. Biggs and Wedge have a separate place of their own, but they are hardly ever there because Tifa is too eager to keep feeding them both, so they sleep in the makeshift beds Marlene proudly constructed for them out of cardboard boxes and pieces of foam. Tifa has a small cot, which is close to Marlene's, even though the little girl rarely sleeps in hers, preferring to sleep on Barret's arm on his couch.

One night, Wedge snores gently beside an undisturbed Biggs, while Jessie drools over her keyboard, fingers rustling as if they were typing. Cloud is as he always is – turned so that his back faces them, silent. Barret and Tifa are the only ones awake.

"I don't like him," Barret says, making a meaningful gesture with his gun-arm as he leans against a wall. Marlene nuzzles her flattened pillow into his side, breathing deeply, but Tifa can only glare.

"Oh, really? You don't? I couldn't tell."

"He's a jackass, Tifa. Never speaks to nobody."

"Well, you're giving him all the reason in the world to talk, aren't you?"

"I ain't got nothin' to say to a jackass, Tifa. A Shinra jackass, no kiddin'."

"Ex-Shinra."

"So he says."

"Barret." Tifa sighs. "You don't have to like him – he's here to help with the missions."

"Yeah, yeah, that's what you said."

"Listen. We really could use the help, you know. You and I have experience fighting, but the others – they're just kids; they haven't dealt with Shinra before, not really, not like this."

Barret's frown curves into a smirk. "Heh, comin' from a child herself. He ain't... right. Unstable. And a jackass. He'll only brin' us moh trouble, ol' frien' of yours or no. Least of my worries is that he's Ex-Shinra, but you can't trust those bastards, and you know that."

"I—I'm keeping an eye on him."

"Well, don't that jes' reassure me, huh."

"It should. I'm pretty sharp."

"Heh, I gotcha, Tifa."

"And, look, there's a benefit to you."

"Uh-huh."

"With him around, there'll be enough people so that somebody can stay behind to watch Marlene when we're out on a mission."

He raises an eyebrow. "... Huh."

"And, either way, maybe we can't trust him, sure, but maybe we can learn a lot about our enemy by watching him. You never know – he could slip up, betray himself, and his company." Her eyes are more reflective than usual.

He raises his other eyebrow. "Huh..."

"So. Treat him however you want, but he's staying."

A contemplative frown. "Huh."

"Will you go to sleep now, Barret? I'm tired of talking about this."

Cloud listens as their voices end and the dark returns. Minutes pass, and Barret's snores join Wedge's chorus. Cloud can't sleep, no matter how much or little he listens. The train rolls in his mind still, the basement tomb rots away, and there is something missing from all of it. In his mind he turns over a word Tifa had stressed, over and over until everything else disappears.

Betray, betrayal – you can't betray a tool, but I still feel something.

He's dreaming, and mumbling, and he doesn't know it.

"Somebody shut him up, god," Biggs groans, shifting to his side. Wedge and Barret keep snoring, and Jessie's fingers twitch, but she doesn't raise her head. Tifa lies there, hearing her name on Cloud's lips, again and again.

Tifa.

It feels unbearable – beyond mortifying. Almost every night now, he's done this, she thinks. The worst of it is the looks everyone gives her in the morning – pity, confusion, condolences, smirks.

The murmuring grows, rising like hot air, until she can't breathe. She throws off her covers and stalks across the room until the huddled form of Cloud curls at her feet like the skin of a peeled onion.

"Cloud," she says. Barret and Wedge have stopped snoring. "Hey, Cloud." He stops mumbling and she drops to her knees beside him. "Cloud, are you awake?"

He reaches for her, eyes clamped shut, arms trembling. His hand falls against her bare thigh, and she stares numbly at it, seeing a child's hands and mountain paths and scuffles in the grass, wondering what she'll see when he opens his eyes.

"Come on, now. You're dreaming, Cloud. Wake up."

It's no longer dark, but everything's awash in a thin orange haze. Someone's above him, and there's a hand on his face.

"Hey! Are you awake?" a voice breaks. "Can you stand?"

I remember this, he thinks. A child's doll falls carelessly off the bed. A little girl is crying.

He feels stiff. As soon as he opens his eyes, he can't remember what he had just been thinking. A woman is beside him, someone he thinks he's never seen before – though he isn't sure, because that's not quite right. He's suddenly sure he knows her. She wears a pink dress, a dash of color caught in a bowl of soot. She tugs anxiously at the ribbon in her hair. What an odd person to find in the slums of Midgar.

She checks him for injuries with uninterrupted focus. He's too sore to push her away. "I guess I'll forgive you for not remembering me," she says, "You were walking around in a daze, in shock, after all. Violence has that effect on people."

"I'm not – no, wait, I –" He tries to stand, but she presses him down, insistent. His elbows itch because they're being touched by weeds - flowers - a mess of overgrowth and green. Sitting there, he realizes he's in a church with a rotten floor; above him, he can see the beams that broke his fall, and the hole in the roof that welcomed him here. It's been a long time since he's been in a church, and the one in his memories is nothing like the one he's in now.

The girl beside him smiles. "No, it's okay! Really! It's easy to forget a face here in Midgar. Hmm. Well, looks like you're not going to bleed to death on my flowers. That's a relief."

"W-wait ... who are you, uh, again?"

"Geez … if you're really torn up about forgetting, you can always make it up to me!"

"What do you mean?"

"You can start by holding these."

She hands him a basket full of flowers. He hugs the basket close to steady himself; he feels light-headed from the fall, or from the scent of the flowers. He tries to remember why he fell, but all he can conjure up is twisted metal and the smell of grease.

"I was working on these arrangements, you know, just before you nearly killed me," she says cheerfully. "Let me top off the bundle, and then... all right! These are ready!"

"Ready for what?" Cloud feels like an imbecile, and he is only too glad that the woman doesn't seem to notice.

"For selling! I'm a professional gardener, you know!"

Cloud can't help but grin at her declaration. Midgar isn't really a place in want of gardeners, let alone professionals. He says, "Are you sure you're not the slum drunk? You're sure cheerful enough to be." He regrets saying this immediately – it had sounded funnier in his head.

Her cheek twitches, but her expression doesn't change. "At least I have enough sense to keep from falling off the upper plate."

It is then that he remembers how he fell. Tifa's face returns first, with Barret beside her; both reach for him just before he lets go of the walkway that leads to the Sector Five Mako Reactor, just before the President's mechanical weapon explodes. He needs to return to Sector Seven and tell Tifa that he's alright. After a moment, he cracks the faintest of grins. "You got me, lady."

She laughs and holds out her hand; he takes it. "Of course I do. Nice to officially meet you, mister..."

"Cloud."

"Cloud... well, all right! The name's Aeris."

"Aeris. You know the way to Sector Seven?"

"Sure!" She frowns as she studies his expression. "Oh, no, Cloud. You're not thinking of going there in your current condition, though, are you? I'd have to object!"

"Well, I, uh - "

"No, no, just sit there for a bit. Just wait. Don't push yourself."

He spends the next hour regaining his strength. He watches the flower girl work her way vigorously through the flowerbed, fists of fury weeding out the unworthy and sweeping dirt off her dress as she goes. She talks, but she doesn't really talk about anything at all – just darts around something, some big fat thing, and he tries to figure out what that might be. She's careful with the flowers, despite her speed with the weeds.

"Just a little longer," she says to the lilies. "You've got just a little longer to go before it's your time."

He doesn't know it, but she's thinking of a memory of her own.

After he recovers from his fall, Cloud escorts Aeris to the home she shares with her mother upon her insistence. He thinks he should try to hurry her on, so that he can get back to the others as soon as he can, but he can't bring himself to verbalize this. This feeling he has being with her - like floating on his back in a pool - he doesn't want to let it go just yet.

Cloud stands in the road, looking at the house, marveling. It's the nicest thing he's seen under the plate. Despite its peeling paint job and a few crooked shutters, the place maintains an undeniable charm. Furthermore, the roof is intact, and, most significantly, none of it is constructed from garbage, or scrap metal, or – or anything usual at all. It's a house, a real house. It looks a whole lot like his childhood home, and, when he steps inside, he realizes it smells the same, like cedarwood and pepper and cinnamon rolls in the oven. He wonders how they manage to keep it like this, how no one has forced them out of their home, or killed them over it.

There's a lot about Aeris that is strange, he thinks.

Inside, Cloud meets Aeris's mother, a woman in her forties named Elmyra. Aeris insists that Cloud stay the night with them, just to be careful of his injuries – and that it's always better to travel through the slums in the daytime. Cloud wants to protest, but he finds himself nodding in agreement.

Elmyra is polite, but as soon as she has a moment alone with Cloud, she urges him to leave later in the night without waking Aeris.

"My daughter … has been through a lot in her life. You seem like a nice enough young man, but if you're not going to stick around for the long haul, then … you do what you're going to do and leave her alone after this, okay?"

He frowns. "Um, well, if that's what you think is best."

"I do. Is there... anything you both need?" She clears her throat. "To be … careful?"

It takes him a moment to realize what she's suggesting. "Oh, we're not – we're not here for that. I'll be happy enough on the floor, or a couch, if you have one."

Elmyra seems relieved. "Okay, then. We have a guestroom – at the end of the hall, upstairs."

Aeris, of course, has been listening to them from the top of the stairs, legs curled beneath her, braiding and un-braiding a lock of her hair. She feels like she's a child again, listening to her mother tell strange men in uniforms to leave her alone, that she's just a normal little girl - that they've got the wrong person. She can't shake the feeling that everyone is supposed to go away, that everything is better when she's supposed to be alone, but she doesn't really feel that way at all, even if she feels anything but normal.

Cloud comes up the stairs and stops when he sees her. Without saying anything, he sits by the railing and waits for Aeris to start talking. It takes her some time before she has anything to say.

"So, home for you is in Sector Seven?"

"Yeah, I guess."

She sits up a little straighter. "You guess? If it's not your home, then what are you doing there?"

"I've got a job, working for Tifa at the bar in town."

Her expression sharpens ever so slightly. "Is Tifa a girl?"

"... Yeah."

"A girlfriend?"

He is slow to answer. "She's an old friend of mine, yeah. She's been helping me out here, lately."

"Oh, what, you try and fall on her, too?" She keeps a straight face for all of one second, before grinning.

It's contagious. Cloud says, "Something like that."

Memory – she can't shake her memory, and she can't stop thinking what is wrong with me, what is wrong with me, but this man next to her – his eyes open her up like the sky beyond the plate, and she is afraid. His eyes, his sword, his uniform – he makes her feel hopeful, and angry, but most of all, she feels afraid. She can't let him walk out of her life - not without answers. Not this time.

The thought of Cloud leaving is enough to keep her awake that night, listening for his footfalls on her mother's wood floor. That old memory visits her again as she lies there, bare feet stretched over her bedsheets. It curls up next to her in the dark, rests its head against hers, kisses her once just below her ear. She smells fabric, and skin, and steel - she tastes the sky.

After the memory leaves, she is lonely again. It was nice to feel normal, if just for a moment.

When it's time, she finds her boots easily enough in the dark.

Aeris cuts him off at the edge of Sector Six. He is surprised, especially when she insists that she accompany him to Sector Seven.

"Aeris, I'm sure I can find the way from here. Thanks, but ... didn't your Mom want you home today?"

"My Mom? Cloud, she's fine. You're the one I'm worried about!"

"Me?"

"You're still not well, Cloud! That was quite a fall, if you don't remember! I'd be a terrible person if I didn't make sure you got home safely. What if you were to suddenly pass out? Who knows what would happen to you! I mean, think of the rats! Did you know they eat people?"

He doesn't really want to think of the rats, but he nods solemnly just because she looks so intense.

They stop for a break on the outskirts of Sector Seven, near an old playground. Dawn is breaking through the cracks in the upper plate, casting bars of light across the rubble.

"No children ever come here because they claim it's haunted," Aeris says as she climbs up a large slide. "I've never seen any ghosts around, though, so I've always played here, growing up. Kids thought I was brave, at first – but then they just thought I was weird. Huh. Hey, Cloud, come up here, you can see into Wall-Market, a little, from up here."

Cloud follows her up. She's right – he can see the unsteady neon glow from the shops.

"What rank were you?" she asks suddenly, drawing closer to him.

"Huh?"

"You know, in SOLDIER. Your uniform is for SOLDIER, right?"

"Oh." He frowns. He feels his gut tightening. A familiar noise begins to take over, and from the static he salvages a string of words. "I was... First Class."

He feels her body sag, her hands knot. "Just the same as him."

More noise. The pounding of rain. "Same as who?"

"My... my first... my first boyfriend." She is hesitant. Her smile looks uncomfortable.

"You were... serious?" He sees her flinch ever so quickly, masked then by a smile.

"No." She shakes her head. "But we had fun while it lasted, I suppose." He notices her knuckles are bunched so tight they are white.

"I probably knew him, then. What was his name?"

She doesn't flinch this time. She doesn't do anything strange, but she brushes fly-away strands of hair out of her face. "It... it doesn't really matter. I haven't heard from him in years, so... not like it would've lasted, you know. Nothing like that."

He can't stop himself – why can't he stop himself? "You never know. You might run into him again," he says.

"Yeah, maybe."

Shut up while you're ahead, Cloud. "Just saying."

She looks at him, sizing up what he's said. His thoughts distract him, and he doesn't meet her eyes. She giggles. "Are you sure I won't... be in your way when we get to Sector Seven?"

"What do you mean... 'in the way'?" He rebuffs her as she leans in, still grinning playfully.

"Nothing!" she chirps.

...

The window outside Marlene's room lets a little light into the hallway, despite the glass being warped and dirty. Tifa pauses beside it. The streetlights hum in urgency, but the view betrays nothing; the road is as dark as the hallway.

Enough dilly-dallying, Tifa.

She goes into the bedroom she shares with Cloud. It's dark except for a small nightlight – a little 1/35 SOLDIER glowing in the outlet by the door. On an impulse, she turns it off. She's left with only moonlight.

She peels off her apron and her work clothes. She opens her dresser, bottom drawer, dipping beneath a frugal layer of additional bed sheets and a stray towel or two – there they are, hidden in the back corner. She had rolled them together to keep them from wrinkling, even though she had planned to ignore them. She shakes them out and holds them up and, after a moment, slides into them.

Her old skirt still fits well, she thinks to herself. True, it fits differently, but not as differently as she worried it might. The ratty white top is soft in a way that only old shirts can be. The suspenders bring familiar tension between her shoulders, and her gloves are snug and secure. The only things missing are her old boots, which hadn't survived long past the end of their notorious ordeal one year ago.

One year. Had it been that long? Time feels like nothing. Standing in front of the one salvageable full-length mirror Cloud and Barret had been able to turn up (and even that one is slightly warped and has a minor crack jutting into the side of it – intact items such as these are rarities in Edge), she feels a little bit like a carnival freak on display, run ragged as she hops from one enclosure to the next. Who has she been? Who is she now?

She's standing so still in the dark bedroom that she looks like a photograph in the mirror.

It has been a long time since I've looked like this.

After she had come to Edge, she'd put her old clothes away, wanting to feel something new. She isn't comfortable with the person she sees in the mirror - that person she used to be - but she, at least, knows that woman. Whenever she feels uncertain about herself, she puts these clothes on, and remembers who she used to be, who she's not anymore.

She has her sins, but she wants to get on with her life. That isn't the same as forgetting about everything bad that has ever happened. She pictures Cloud, those strange eyes of his, and the way he had once said her name over and over in his darkness, while everyone was listening, many months ago in a different bar called Seventh Heaven. She never wants to be like that again - a body held together by bits of rage and a drive for revenge.

The day the Planet stopped Meteor, Tifa had looked into the Lifestream and saw all of Midgar's ugliness devoured by light. It was hard not to feel like the very same thing was coming for her, coming for them all, and the Highwind had been cast adrift in a sky now filled with a river of souls. The ugliness they each carried for so long, well, here it was, being washed away - almost like it meant nothing at all. Strangely, Tifa welcomed it. She was so tired of dragging it behind her. Maybe death was the answer to all of that pain and uncertainty. If everything played out like Bugenhagen warned - the Planet deciding that humanity's time was over - well, then, maybe she was okay with that after all.

She took the thought back as soon as she formed it, because Cloud was beside her, smiling. His hand was on hers. She may not have known what he was thinking, but she knew how his smile made her feel - that he was her family now, for better or worse. A family is worth living for, she thought then. That's something she clings to, even now.

When people ask, she tells strangers that she is Marlene's mother, which might as well be the truth. Marlene relies on Tifa just as much as she relies on Barret, and she shares with Barret just as much genetic material as she does with Tifa, and yet there is no denying that Barret is and always will be Marlene's Papa. The same is true with Tifa, and Tifa is comfortable with this answer. Marlene is her daughter.

But when customers nod towards Cloud and say things like, How's Dad hanging in there, with all this business you've got? Sometimes parents need a night off, if you know what I mean! Tifa finds herself blushing, feeling exposed - she usually laughs and tries to change the subject.

"We're all doing just fine, thank you! How are you?"

She hates that she still wonders what Cloud thinks when people say things like that – that she doesn't just know. All these outer assumptions - does he approve, does he like it, does he want this, what the hell does he want. She wants to believe they're a family, now, but it doesn't feel right to trust so blindly. She can't trust blindly.

She hates to admit it, but sometimes, even when Cloud helps out around the bar, she feels a deep-rooted fear rise up in her gut like a balloon – the notion that Cloud will one day leave without a word. She knows enough of him to see him fumble with happiness, treat it like he doesn't know what to do with it – even like he is afraid of it – all the while, moving farther and farther, all the while away from her. Just like before.

She remembers a place of darkness, where a train roars. She never wants to go back there again.

Trains, doomed machines – only going where their rails take them, someone had once said. Cloud had said.

...

Whenever he closes his eyes, Tifa is there – her lithe body stark against the glow of the glass enclosure, light running bright around her. She is looking at the creature behind the glass - a rust colored lion-dog with a tail of fire. Cloud's never seen anything like it before. Tifa steps back, and her eyes shine red, but that's not right. Brown eyes, ruby eyes. Her eyes make him think of fire. Of blood. Of, of – many things.

"Hojo called it a 'precious specimen'... is it going to be used for a biological experiment?"

He didn't know, didn't want to know, really, but it was hard to meet those fucking eyes of hers, and the memory stretches like gum between his ears until there is no face to seen. Another chamber is close, and he stands on his toes to look in. He's peering into a tunnel, a well, caving in all around him like a decomposing cardboard box. Another enclosure, pipes pumping planet like life into a mechanical womb. That's where he is now. He tries to hang on to Tifa's image, but he can't.

"Jenova..." he whispers.

A mouth opens in the back of his mind that sends his legs buckling out from beneath him; searing flash, searing flesh, and he scrambles to keep the thoughts from escaping, fingers entrenched in the sides of his head. Tifa runs to him, breaking his fall.

"Cloud?" She is always fretting. It is mildly annoying. Is that fear or confusion in her eyes?

"Jenova... Sephiroth's... So they've brought it here..." His head wags, shoulders quiver, blood throbs in his ears, and Tifa's grip on him intensifies.

"C-come on, Cloud," she says, "We've got to find Aeris."

He ignores her, and instead, his gaze falls on the silhouette of Barret, back-lit by the grotesque chamber with the lion-dog. Cloud can't see his face, but he can tell he's pissed."Did you see it?"

"See what?" The dark man all but growls, his eyes lost in the shadow of his brow.

"It's moving... still alive."

Gun-arm glinting dangerously, Barret walks over to Cloud and looks inside the second enclosure, into the tiny dark window. He lingers there for a moment before whirling around, his back rigid and eyes white stark.

"Where's it's fucking head? … This whole thing's full of bullshit."

He storms past Cloud and Tifa, moving towards the back of the lab. The shadows take him. Tifa nudges Cloud to his feet, and she hesitates before she finally speaks.

"Let's go, then. Come on, Cloud – don't look in there again."

Cloud opens his eyes. The memory is a dream. His back is cold from sitting like this, against the wall. He listens for anything. But, nothing. No use even trying. He can't hear the others through the walls of his cell anymore - Shinra builds them thick. Reason dictates that sleep has taken them, that they've settled into their own cells, like he has, but he can't keep his heart from pounding with anxiety all the same. Maybe they're sleeping. Or maybe they're gone. Maybe Shinra came while he was asleep and took them all away. Or maybe they're all dead. Maybe.

But she's still here.

He looks at Tifa, who lies uncomfortably on the cell's single cot. Like a gentleman, Cloud had offered Tifa the bed and had settled against the far wall, but unlike a gentleman, he watches her off and on as she sleeps, when he can't. He sighs. He'd been surprised when they'd forced the two of them to share a cell, but he hadn't complained. He knew Aeris was alone in hers. And Barret was with … the creature they had come to know as Red XIII.

He's made a mess of everything. March right into Shinra and retrieve a kidnapped Aeris, just like that? What sort of a fucking trip had he been on?

Though, for all of AVALANCHE to have followed me, maybe they're worse off, he thinks.

Of course, they'd needed to do something. He, Cloud Strife, has to do something, for Aeris. She'd given herself up in exchange for Marlene. And he had said he would protect her. Maybe he'd even promised.

Your words don't mean a damn thing. Why don't you give up the charade?

No, no. He has to pour out his faith, his belief, himself into something. There is no other way to live, no other. Even if that something is a lie, it has to be done.

Pour yourself into a lie. Sure, sounds like a Mr. Cloud Strife.

Well, so what? What is so desirable about the truth? What, even, is the truth? What does the term mean when the language he uses to define it is utterly spent, used up, trash? Now, that was the truth. Sometimes, the core of him itches because he has the sense that his very word is horseshit, no good, broken and unreliable. He can't even define the truth he is supposed to believe, let alone believe it. But it doesn't matter anyway.

That's why I'm only doing this for the money. I don't have the right to ask for anything else.

The air chills around him, and he breathes into a fist.

Great, so you've got some agenda to prove. Is that your excuse for this crappy break-and-enter? God damn it Cloud, that's pathetic. Nothing's changed, huh?

Tifa stirs, waking. The cot doesn't look comfortable enough to sleep on it for very long. When their eyes meet, she freezes, unnerved, muscles in her arm taut. Her own expression is sharp, and he quickly diverts his eyes.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" she says, accusatory.

He frowns. "What? Like what?"

Pulling herself up, she warms her arms and tucks her hair behind her ears, still wearing her glower. "Like... I dunno."

He shrugs. "I really have no idea then."

"Fine, then, my mistake." It doesn't sound like her mistake.

He lets his head rest backwards and peers at her through slitted eyes, a smirk worming across his face. He feels like an asshole, and he embraces that. "Well, sorry, Tifa. I guess I could turn and face the wall."

"You might make the wall uncomfortable."

"Well, great. Maybe it'd fall on me as punishment and we'd have our way out of here." He taps the wall behind him like a dare.

Tifa rolls her eyes. "No. That wall leads into Aeris's cell. We'd all still be stuck."

A contemplative beat follows. Cloud points at the wall with their cell door. "Right. Damn. Well, that one, then."

She rolls onto her back, looking at the ceiling. "You'd better get working over there, Cloud, or I'll be trapped in here all night with you."

"You make it sound like such a tragedy."

"Well, I was just thinking of a billion other ways I could be spending my evening. I apologize if that sounds tragic to you." She is smiling, but it is thin and mirthless.

"At least I gave you the bed."

"Yeah, and it's lovely. But we could be snug at Elmyra's place right about now, you think? Barret would be with Marlene, Aeris with her mom, and we could start our next move against Shinra. I'm not sure where we'd put Jessie's equipment, but—"

She catches herself. All the color drains from her face. Jessie, Biggs, and Wedge are all very, very dead. They are both horrified that it has been so easy to forget this, with all that has happened.

Tifa's voice is hoarse. "I must be numb."

Cloud feels awkward, so he says something in order to distract the both of them. "Well... Tifa. Why don't you stand up and stretch, then."

He crosses the room faster than he can process what he is thinking, and he grabs Tifa by the arm. His voice is urgent, strained. He doesn't want to remember the dead. "Get up, let's walk around."

Something in her snaps. "Walk? Walk where?" She rolls away from him, her voice tight. "We're in a cell. Cloud, leave me alone, okay?"

He still feels strange, and her tone stings him. He keeps tugging on her. "Aw, come on, stop acting like that."

She faces him suddenly, twisting in his arms. "What am I acting like? You're the one who's not acting normal!"

Like a switch, the word 'normal' triggers in him the desire to freeze, and freeze he does. His mind turns on him. He never wanted to be normal, unless being normal meant being with her. Whoever she is. The rest of it is static, nothing, a laundry list of mirrors and milk-carton posters. He can't even see their faces - the chain of shadows hanging in his home. He was a child, once, and he still hurts like a child.

Hey, Cloud, make me a promise.

Promises are for people who can keep their word, whose inner core is a truth that doesn't crumble when handled, for people who aren't full of shit – not for people who don't even know who they really are, the words keep itching.

She frowns when he shuts down in front of her.

"Sorry. It's a joke, Cloud," Tifa says. "A bad joke, I guess I'm tired or something."

His hands don't let go of her, and she squirms a little in his grasp.

"Um, Cloud? Hey? I'm not in the mood to walk around, okay? Let go of me."

"I - I don't know what I'm thinking, sorry."

Cloud turns away. She says nothing else, and he keeps the floor.

...

Tifa stands up a little straighter. A familiar humm disturbs the quiet bedroom – it's Cloud's motorcycle, outside.

The sound has, over time, become the beginning of the end of her day, the most comforting of routines. On a normal night, she will listen to the engine sputter off, her head on her pillow and her body buried beneath the quilt. She will wait another minute until she hears Cloud coming in through the side doors near the laundry room, and then rummaging downstairs in the kitchen for leftovers, and then in the hallway checking on Marlene, and then in the bedroom with her, unbuckling and unclothing and moving quietly in the dark, breathing softly beside her. He used touch her, to see if she was awake, but not anymore.

She hasn't reached out to him and he hasn't held her and they haven't made love since the night she'd told him to drink in his office, alone. She is surprised he is still sleeping in their room, to be honest, but she wonders if he is afraid of the alternative, of what that would mean. They keep a small cot in his office, on the off-chance that someone stays with them, or for the rare occasion when Cloud comes home so late that he doesn't want to disturb Tifa at all. She has been afraid that he will take up a more permanent rest there, now that they've been fighting like this – or whatever this is that is happening to them.

The mirror catches a flash from his motorcycle's headlight. Tifa's head turns. Tonight, she doesn't feel anything remotely resembling comfort at the sound of the bike as it rolls up. "Come on, Tifa," she whispers to herself, and moves into the hallway.

Marlene's door is still cracked open. Tifa pauses by it and gives the room one last peek. Quiet. Tifa closes it securely and makes her way down to the bar and situates herself against the patron side of the counter, arms folded. She waits.

The engine outside shifts into park and goes dead. Silence. Then footsteps, outside. The click of something mechanical, the jingle of keys…

...

"Hey, Cloud, let me drive for a while?" She makes it sound like a request.

"No."

"What?! Why not?"

Aeris sits, one leg folded over the other, haughty hands on her hips, next to Cloud as he maneuvers the Buggy through the southern flat lands of the western continent. The instrument panel stretches out before them, all knobs and lights gleaming beneath the wide windows filled with the undulating landscape. She had asked Cloud the other day if she could drive, and he'd said no, thinking that had been the end of it, only now to find the request emerging once again. And again. For the past hour or so. Or something.

Cloud slouches forward in an attempt to obstruct the line of sight he shares with her. "Aeris. Have you ever driven anything before?"

She smiles broadly. "Well, no! As a matter of fact, I haven't! That's why I'm asking!"

A curt grin. "Then the answer's no."

Her feet come apart in a stomp and she gasps. "Cloud! That's not fair!"

"Sure it is."

Suddenly, she leans forward, elbows on her knees and hair cascading over her jacket. Upturning her brows ever so slightly, she bestows upon him a look of longing. "Why don't you teach me, then?"

"What?" He is completely taken aback – he feels like a sixteen year old dork in a grown man's shoes, for some reason – all self-assurance thrown out the window (but, then, Aeris has that effect on a person). It isn't so much that she is asking – just that she is asking like that.

"Teach me to drive the Buggy." She wriggles her eyebrows.

"No."

"Why not?" Now, she pouts. Aeris lets her head drop into her hands, exaggerating her pouting lips and watery eyes beyond the threshold of believability.

"Um."

She frowns suddenly. "Come on, why not?"

"Uh, well, it's a delicate operation – this is an older model of what we drove in Shinra, and we trained on those for wee—"

And then Aeris erupts in front of him, a flurry of pink and red – "Cloud Strife, are you suggesting I am too stupid too drive this Buggy? Just because it took you smarty SOLDIER guys forever and a day to learn how to drive a vehicle – come on, it doesn't look that hard—"

She reaches over him for the wheel, even as he protests and catches her wrist, nearly jumping up in response; as a consequence, she falls over him before he can slip out of the way, eyes wide in surprise. She is laughing at this point as he holds her, until she slides back into her seat, rubbing at her eyes and mouthing sorry Cloud. Needless to say, the buggy's crawl slinks to a stop.

"Get a fuckin' room, you two," Barret mutters, half-asleep against Cait Sith's giant Mog. Barret is still raw from his recent encounter with Dyne beneath the Gold Saucer, so no one is surprised that he is angry. "I swear, it's like Shinra didn't jes build a fuckin' theme park right over the graves of my friends and family."

Aeris bites her lip, and Cloud sighs.

A pitiful voice pipes up, ignoring Barret. "No way we let Aeris drive. God, Cloud's driving is bad enough, urk—"

Yuffie, pallid and shaky, bends over her knees before dry-heaving into her recently acquired Large Vomit Bucket. (At Cloud's own urging, she had stolen it from a peddler outside of the Gold Saucer when she notified him of her acute and often-messy motion sickness.) She has spent the entirety of the Buggy ride clutching an immobile – and equally uncomfortable-looking – Cait Sith for 'emotional' support. The tiny robotic cat has been mostly goodhearted about it, though he squirms a little under her embrace and mumbles indiscernible things every time she squeezes too tight.

Yuffie gags. "This thing – ugh – they gave us – urk – sucks – no need to make it worse—"

Aeris folds her arms and sighs. "Thanks for the votes of confidence, guys."

Cloud, whose spiky hair seems uncharacteristically out of alignment and whose cheeks look slightly balmy, sputters. "Aeris, I'm not saying you're a bad driver, I'm just saying you're a - "

"Geez. Just let her drive." Tifa speaks sharply from her seat along the navigation panel. She's only been half-listening, but what she's heard has been enough. She adds, "What's the worst that could happen?"

"We could all die." The dry response comes from the creature at her feet; Red XIII cracks an eye, roused from his nap.

"Exactly. It's not like, you know, we've been through worse, or anything," Tifa says. She scratches the top of Red's head absently (he looks mildly offended, but doesn't object), offering Cloud only a sidelong glance. "And chasing after our Silver Screwball, the odds aren't going to look any better for us, so we better not expect any special treatment."

The Buggy falls ominously silent. Cloud tries to meet Tifa's gaze but she won't look at him. Aeris follows his line of sight to the stiff form of Tifa before letting her gaze wander back to his face; after a moment, she turns to look out the window at the sky gently sloping overhead, her expression hidden from view.

"Urg, way to be a downer, Tifa," mumbles Yuffie.

"Man, least Tifa's right – an' I'd go peacefully in my sleep if you did the honors, Aeris." Barret sniffs as he takes in a breath, pinching the bridge of his nose and scratching at the corners of his eyes. "Jes' try and make it quick and all – head straight for a cliff, or sumthin, when you do." He tries not to smile - seems like Aeris has finally gotten to him, too.

With a resigned laugh, Aeris throws her hands up in the air, half-exasperated, half-amused. "Well, if you so insist, guys, I'll be sure and crash the buggy in the most efficient manner as possible – pinky promise. Do I have any takers? Going once—"

"All right…" Cloud rolls his eyes, but there is a smile hidden behind the feigned exasperation.

"—going twice—" just to make her point—

"All right, sit down, I'll teach you, I'll teach you."

She smiles brightly before offering him her pinky; surprisingly (or perhaps not so much), he takes it. She says gravely, "Now the oath is sworn! I'm glad you so graciously offered to teach me. Maybe you'll all survive this round after all. Where do I start?"

Tifa watches Cloud and Aeris when she thinks no one notices. Moments like these are rare, but she is seeing more and more as the weeks roll by. Cloud is changing before her eyes – for the better, she hopes – and even little pieces of the boy she had thought she had known are starting to resurface, here and there. He laughs, he cracks a bad joke, he even blushes now. It's not all confusion and sadness, not all despair poorly hidden beneath a stiff-upper-lip anymore.

Still, underneath it all, she can't completely trust it. Her gut still feels like a roller coaster out of control, still sucked down the vacuum without a parachute, without an escape pod, because he isn't right, the story he remembers isn't right – something isn't right, and she isn't sure what to do about it, but watch, bite her lip and bide her time. The waiting is maddening. How long will this last? How long will she let it last?

She can't help but feel that she, Tifa Lockhart, will end up destroying it all in the end. His peace, his hope, wherever he keeps it. Her efforts seem historically to have that effect.

...

The front door to the bar opens, and Cloud steps unceremoniously into the room, locking the doors behind him. A moment goes by before he realizes he isn't alone. When his eyes suddenly freeze on Tifa, leaning against the counter with her arms folded, staring him down like some wild thing, he stops completely. Her old clothes look strange on her - beautiful, but strange.

She looks ready for a fight.

He hasn't expected to come home to this – and after a day's worth of work, on his feet from the moment he left the house until now, he isn't sure he is looking for a fight. Or anything else, even.

"Tifa." He says nothing more. He looks away uncomfortably, hovering like a ghost at the door. The air stings with silence, and Tifa's cheeks burn.

"Welcome home," she says, barely above a murmur. Her soft voice starkly contrasts with her expression. She watches, he sighs. Words tumble from him, his voice as quiet as hers and slightly strained.

"Sorry. My third delivery ran late. I had to pick up another one in Kalm, a last minute thing—"

She reads him carefully; as drained as he seems, he looks on edge, as sharp as the blade he carries on his shoulder. She cuts him off with a verbal blade of her own. "It's fine. Let me get you a drink."

"No, really, tonight I'm not—"

"Something hard, for your troubles."

He is silent under her tone. He doesn't feel like pushing her tonight, like he had last time.

Let me drink alone. Let me be alone.

Satisfied with his silence, she unwinds her arms and makes her way behind the counter, going straight to work, knowing full well where his eyes will fall and stretching a little more than necessary when reaching for a shot glass in order to put on a good show. She casts him one quick, enticing glance – an indication towards the counter – before returning to her task. With some hesitance, he takes a seat and watches her.

The whiskey in question is something close to a classic brew from Nibelheim - as close as Tifa could get it. He had a passing familiarity with it as a child (mostly on bitterly cold nights, or when he was sick – something to help him sleep, his mother had prescribed). He's watched heavy men drink themselves under the table by throwing this stuff back. He isn't sure what Tifa's getting at with this gesture – is it diplomatic, or is it punishment?

She tops off his shot glass with an elegant knock of her wrist and leans against the counter with one hand – the other was placed firmly on her hip, whose flesh nudged against her leather miniskirt in interesting ways.

"You mind if I pour myself one, too?" she asks.

His eyes snap from her hips to her face and then to the shot glass. The look on her face is a mixture of pleading and warning and leaves a tiny knot growing in his stomach. He stares down the shot glass and feels like a big gigantic dumb kid. So that's what this is about.

He downs the shot and plunks the glass against the counter top with more force than he intends, meeting her eyes in a near challenge. He watches her flinch at the sound of the glass connecting with the counter.

"It's your bar." He shrugs. "It's your drink. Do what you want."

Then you can drink in your room for all I care.

The words slip out of her like water boiling in a kettle and surprise them both.

"I am. I am doing what I want. Every day I open this bar, I make money to feed us all, I keep the house in order, I'm raising Marlene – god, Marlene – but god damn itI want what you want, too, Cloud. And, and it hurts, because I don't know what the hell you want. It's like I'm... And I... I don't know…"

Do I know you, Cloud?

The room is far quieter than any bar should ever be.

Have I ever?

She loses a piece of her nerve after that and can't meet his eyes, but she continues. "I'm sorry. That's not… I don't even know what I'm saying... It's been a long day, I think, for both of us. Maybe we…"

Oh, I've gone and done it now.

His hands fidget with the shot glass, rolling it back and forth across the counter; his eyes are hard, eerily reflective in the dim bar light. What is he thinking? Feeling? Well, that's her problem, isn't it? She can see anger strangled beneath the strain in his jaw, can see hard edges and ravines and tunnels that have no end. She is hesitant to enter, so she bites her lip and wonders what to say next.

For a moment, she remembers all too well the Cloud Strife that had stood before her in the first Seventh Heaven – the cocky, surefooted, defiant Cloud Strife; and, too, the angry one, and the confused one, and the one who didn't know himself, the one whose fever dreams invaded the dark, the failed experiment, the husk full of shame, and the thing in shambles – but who was this person sitting before her, now? What had happened to her Cloud, the gentle one that had called out her name in a sea of names? The one that gave himself up as a promise? The one whose eyes carried kindness and not anger? The one who bumbled? And smiled? Where had he gone? Maybe he had never been there at all.

Maybe this whole thing is stupid.

...

Here they are. Mud huts with thatched roofs instead of proper houses, trailing smoke around the carcass of the Shinra scarab gone wrong. A lonely little place, cuddled like a snake in the hillside.

Her green eyes fill themselves up with the doorway, faltering, one hand clutching her opposite arm.

"Aeris…"

Aeris shakes her head, bidding Cloud to keep his distance as she composes herself. From across the way by the sad little general store, the others watch – Tifa with concern – but no one approaches.

Why is all of this always left up to me, Cloud thinks. Aeris finally starts speaking, slowly.

"What a shock. I didn't know Zack was from this town."

Zack. Mud huts – appropriate that such a name should bring to his mind the mud, the rain. No. Wait. Stop. He doesn't know what he's thinking.

"Aeris, you knew … this 'Zack' guy?"

They had come to Gongaga village to stock up and refuel. An older couple had approached Cloud regarding his SOLDIER attire, and Aeris hung off Cloud's arm and smiled at them. When the couple asked Cloud if he had known a certain Zack Fair, their son, he shook his head. To his surprise, though, Aeris let go of his arm and walked away, tense and trembling, a complete about-face.

"Our son, Zack? He was in SOLDIER. In Shinra. We haven't heard from him in over five years. His letters, you see? Stopped, completely. It's so unlike him, but the police around here can't do anything about it. He's an adult and all. Did you by chance happen to know him? Or know of him? Please..."

He had no answer for them. He soon left them to their silence in order to follow Aeris.

She nods at Cloud now, and Cloud watches as forces a faint smile across her face. "I … sure did. Zack… SOLDIER First Class." With a sharp glance towards him, the smile grows. "Same as you."

Cloud stumbles towards her. "Why didn't you say anything to those people? Shouldn't we go and tell them that you know him?"

"No! No, no, it's... I have nothing to tell them! Please, Cloud, don't. I don't want to get their hopes up, only to crush them again. I ... don't want to be responsible for that kind of feeling." Unconsciously, she grips her the collar of her dress.

Uneasy under her sudden and stinging gaze, he scratches the back of his head; his fingers brush against the handle of the buster sword. "Well... okay." The churning coil of his intestines knots again and again, mud returning behind flashes. "It's strange that I've never heard of him," he says. A concession. He pushes it away, growing angry at himself. "There aren't many who make it into First Class."

Far away, he can still see Tifa's dark head, now turned away from him.

Aeris lingers after his words end, searching still. Her shoulders sag after a moment, but she forces a smile.

"That's all right, Cloud. You don't have to get so torn up over it." She stands a little straighter, the smile quickly vanishing. "It's all in the past now, anyway. I was only worried because I'd heard he'd gone missing."

"Missing?" Cloud frowned.

"Five or so years ago, yes. He went out on a job and never came back."

There is thunder pouring out her throat, pounding through his ears, a trail of echoes over narrow tunnels buried within. Static, static. He tries to focus on her face, but it blurs away from him, out of his reach, and he has to shake his brain again and again to keep her standing.

"That's … that's what you don't want to tell his parents? That he's missing? B-but they..." he stammers through the noise. The back of his neck is warm.

"But nothing, Cloud. And no, I don't want to say anything. That's all I know! I don't want to feed them something that … that may not be true."

"Aeris..."

"You know, look, it's probably nothing, all right – he loved women, a real lady's man." Her throat is tight when she says it. "He most likely found somebody else. Someone less demanding than me, I bet. A life less demanding than … well, you know how it is."

"No, I don't."

She grits her teeth. "Well, I do."

Why does he feel so angry? He thinks of this man's parents, their eyes pleading with him, asking, have you seen our son? Have you seen our Zack? He knows Aeris has the same thoughts. Neither Aeris nor Zack's parents believe he willfully disappeared, which is the most unsettling revelation of all.

"Maybe you should go talk to his parents, Aeris," Cloud says slowly.

She is firm. "I have nothing to say. I heard he went missing. I don't remember where I got that information." She is lying, if he ever thought she was.

Her eyes go to the horizon, momentarily, before she puts on her grin again, hands clasped at her stomach. He wonders if she'll ever freeze like that, always smiling, a picture in his mind under a banner of ribbon and sky. Strange to think that way of her, someone so full, someone so vibrant – but yet someone empty for the things that she pours out, for the things she has given up – someone left wanting, still waiting, always waiting.

"Well, if that's what you want," he hears himself saying.

The water is in her eyes, a mirror suspended, and for a moment, he reaches.

...

When Cloud finally looks up from the bar's counter, Tifa is still speaking. She says, "And maybe we should just call it a night—"

"—Right," he says suddenly, causing her to look at him with surprise. "I wantanother shot, and then I'll meet you upstairs when you're done down here."

She doesn't answer him at first, stunned and hopeful and suddenly nursing a tiny flame within her chest.

"A-alright," she stammers, complying clumsily with his request.

Cloud?

He downs the second shot and lands it with a plunk – still hard, but not as sharp as his first. It rings in the quiet, and Tifa feels vulnerable in her growing feelings.

He keeps his eyes averted from hers except when – to her even greater surprise and growing alarm – he asks for three more shots. He finishes off each with a plunk more tentative than the preceding, getting softer and softer.

"Cloud… are you sure that's…?" she asks after his third, hesitant.

He answers quickly, his voice elevated, a little sloppy, accusatory. "You wanted this, right?"

He tries to look at her but redirects his gaze; she bears down on him, even after, steady like the mountains in which they'd been born, even though she trembles within.

After his last shot, the glass comes down so softly and so slowly it is as if he fears it will break simply by touching the surface. He pauses afterward, focusing on his hand.

She reaches for the glass and her hand covers his.

"That's enough, Cloud," she says. He pulls himself up and finally meets her eyes; for a moment, his are disarmed, sad. She wonders if he will say something. He turns and climbs the stairs, dragging his hand over the guardrail. She listens to his footsteps in the hallway checking on Marlene, and then in the bedroom where he rummages and unbuckles and goes silent – a dark room and a cold bed in her mind, but maybe something else entirely tonight.

Tifa doesn't know what to think. Again. Cloud is drunk and she is apologetic and both of them are angry and sad, but nobody is doing any talking. But, then again, communication between the two of them has never been easy – there is no denying that. How could it have ever been? When faced with the beginning and the ending of the world, the value of words doesn't add up to much, and in the scramble of the aftermath, it is easy for words to slip away in the scramble to pick up the pieces, most of all in fragile moments.

Maybe one really doesn't need words for the crucial things, anyway, she thinks. She's said so before – under the stars, enveloped in him and he in her for the first tentative, awkward, but earnest time. It was enough then; maybe it's enough, now.

Let this be like that first time, she prays as she clears the counters and follows Cloud up to the second floor. Let this be a fresh start for us both.

She passes Marlene's door, now cracked open thanks to Cloud, and Tifa closes it with a tiny grin on her way to their room. She thinks of the three of them, together, before clenching her fists.

For Marlene, too.

...

Aeris is talking again. Babbling. The seats are close, the walls tight, and he watches her lips move in the dark. He wants to ask her why she always sounds so happy on the outside if she really is so sad on the inside, but he knows she'll have no answer for him – that she'll smile, wave it off, ask him about his own insides, and he is closed for business today, thank you very much.

She is talking about the fireworks, and then a man he doesn't remember, and then about the future and the past and the Planet and, in between, nothing at all; and it feels like things are moving beyond his control, words tumbling like clowns in a cascade of mirrors – all the while she swishes her brown hair over her shoulders and giggles nervously in the flickering light. She searches him with her eyes, lonely, lonely.

Because that's what a girl does, right? But then again, he doesn't know. He doesn't know anything about this girl. A beautiful stranger on a train, always waiting, shoulder at his side, standing like a statue without a face. What are they both waiting for? Who? He doesn't understand, doesn't understand—

Cloud… I want to meet you. The real you.

What is she saying? What happened to the fireworks?

...

Darkness. Tifa fastens the door behind her with a quiet click. Moonlight pours across the bed, where the quilt showcases idyllic scenery from the western continent, places that both Cloud and Tifa keep in their memories. (Cloud had bartered a week of his delivery wages for the quilt, though he didn't tell Tifa that.) Against the dresser, Cloud's sword leans over the leather puddle of his equipment.

"Cloud?"

He is standing in the corner of the room, the mirror corner, his back to her, his shoe-laces and his eyes undone like the children lost on the street side of Edge. He's drunk. And angry. Her first thought is a curse for letting him drink so much, or for making him drink in the first place, and then her second thought is to go to him.

Her body stops. Hovers inches from pressing gently into his, feet apart and legs gleaming behind in the glass. He smells like oil, like sweat, like wind. Memories hum in her mind of buggy rides under a bright sun, the steady pounding of their marching through the mountains, the roar of the sky when standing on the deck of the Highwind, gazing into a sea of ghosts. Good things and sad things, all things.

She repeats his name and watches him in the mirror, watches him spin from place to place; and he is on the move again, traveling, from the whirlwind maze to the lost city, and further to the holy forest to the tower of nothing to the light of the last train, from the lonely cliff to the table of blood, and to the inferno, and to a tower under the stars, to a bridge from life to death, and to a window where he looks at her across the vastest of distances – that window is where he is looking at her now, in the mirror, with the same eyes, from the same moment, and her hands travel from the emptiness of space to his own.

"Tifa," he says, finally traveling to her, the woman in the darkened room filled with moonlight. She tugs his hands towards her and he follows her gesture, turning; she pulls his arms around her hips and he takes hold of her, bodies together, his forehead resting against hers, one's breath on the other's lips. She can smell the five shots, and he can feel her breasts against his chest.

"I shouldn't have let you drink that much," she says.

He cracks a rare grin, though it is still laced with anger. "Why not?" As he bends forward, his hands run down the short length of her skirt before they slowly begin the process of sidling the leather upwards, exposing her cotton underwear. He follows the motion with a kiss strangely tender for the antagonism in his eyes. She invites him to deepen it, and in between breaths, he mumbles, "Why are you wearing these clothes, Tifa?"

A groan escapes her as his hands trace the contours of the thin fabric. Her hands go up his chest and around his neck. "I-it's not what you think."

"It's not?" A smirk.

She tries to smile as she kisses him. "No, it's not." Not entirely. A little lie won't hurt, especially now. Behind his head, she begins to peel her gloves off and let them fall. He is kissing her again, now with more fervor, and her hands are in his hair, pulling him down. She gasps when his touch dips between her thighs.

"Oh, I don't know, I don't know—"

She gives herself to the moment, seeing starlight flash behind her eyes.

...

Even in the dark of the Ancient Machine, he can see her. Her dark head of hair swings back and forth with each planetary body that soars past, eyes wide and gloved hands to her mouth in bunched concentration. She is beautiful.

Tifa is beautiful.

But – of course she is. She's Tifa. Any grown man with a taste for women would notice that.

So, why notice her now, Cloud?

The question sends his mind shifting, but like an anchor in the sea, the vision of her remains – as unreachable as ever, as beautiful, as contradictory, like stone fortified with eggshell. It isn't just now. A lie. An ink stain obscures the immaculate page, Can't have, don't deserve, fucker. But why is he thinking this? Bugenhagen's machine is different than the water tower under the open sky had been, all those years ago when the two of them had made a promise, but he feels like he's taken a step back in time – as step back into the shoes of someone he recognizes.

"This is amazing." Her words are mere breath.

It's these stars, this space.

"All the workings of space are entered into this 3D holographic system," Bugenhagen says, quite pleased with himself. "Just so you know."

A zipping light, overhead. Tifa gasps and then turns to Cloud, unthinking, a smile spreading across her face, pointing like a child at the darkness where the streak of bright had been. "Cloud! Look! Look, a shooting star!"

You remember the promise, don't you?

And for a moment, he thinks she will ask him that, but her words end, and she is lost in the now. He turns red and finds himself scratching the back of his head. "Yeah, neat," he mutters, feeling immediately lame. Fucking moron. 'Neat'?

Her expression falls, though the grin remains. "Oh. Y-yeah." Tifa nods, still beautiful, though caught now on the shore, in between this and there, wet sand heavy like cement between her feet.

When she looks away from him, he watches her, ignoring the other eyes in the room, hoping that his expression doesn't betray the sudden longing he feels for her – and then, Bugenhagen begins speaking, after which Cloud fights to pay attention to him.

"When spirit energy is forcefully extracted and manufactured, it can't accomplish it's true purpose... all living things are being used up and thrown away." The old man's voice cracks, as if he feels the very strain of the Planet.

Mud comes into Cloud's eyes with those words, but he blinks it away in a flash.

Across the breadth of the machine, Cloud meets a face. Aeris watches him with a knowing, but sad, smile, and he wonders at the words she refuses to hear trembling all around her.

You and I, we both hear voices.

The only difference is that, in your case, you know what you're talking to.

But I know.

It's hard.

No one wants to hear voices forever.

She walks up to the faint hologram of the Planet, lonely in the emptiest stretch of space, and, after a hesitant moment, her hand traces something across the impalpable surface.

"Just a ghost," she whispers when her fingers push through the hologram. "A delusion."

A feverish dream.

Cloud hears her, even over the steady rumble of the machine, or over Bugenhagen's musings, or over the excited murmurings of Tifa. No one else hears Aeris, but he does. And something, something, deep within the tree of his mind, wakes up – like an engine revving, gears pumping, humming, and a sick twist drops into the pit of his gut. A little voice inside him insists that you've missed the last train.

But then Tifa laughs, and she is a child again in a blue dress, bright-eyed, unafraid of that which has always frozen him in fear, nailed him to the floor. Standing beside him, the water tower stretches into the dark below their feet, and she is radiant again, like she always has been.

I want a piece of your strength … to be a part of your strength—

Again, Aeris meets his eyes and smiles, obscured by the swirling particles of the Planet hologram. Those tiny pieces are green, like her eyes, like memory. Stars.

...

The hands that hold him close are soon nudging him towards the moonlit bed. The backs of his knees hit the edge of the quilt, and he braces against an insistent Tifa who goes to work unfastening him at the waist. With equal dashes of mischief and inebriation, he snaps her suspenders and she squeaks, doing her best not to laugh out loud, before batting his hands away.

He shrugs out of his jacket and shirt just as she pulls off his belt; likewise, the buckles securing her suspenders soon find themselves as forgotten as his accessories – though not after a frustrated Cloud curses when they don't go willingly, which forces him to throw the stubborn things towards the nearest wall. He misses, but that doesn't keep Tifa – who can't decide whether to giggle or to glower – from shushing him.

Cheek to cheek, clinging tightly to his waist, she joins him – both in his quiet laughter and in his descent to the bed – before silencing him with her lips.

Beneath her, he stretches over the image of the sky and the Gongaga river; her hand partially covers the charming cut-out of a cloud that dances next to his right ear. She lets herself smile – cloud and Cloud – before using her lips to kiss a trail from his own to his throat.

This is how it's supposed to be.

His fingers skim her exposed back, from one end to the other and to the starting point again, before slipping under her shirt, peeling it over and casting it off; she smiles freely, and her earrings catch a flash of light.

This is how it should always be.

Her breasts are open to the air, then, open to him, and he takes complete advantage. After suspending herself over him with one hand, with the other, she follows her own trail down the length of his body and pushes his pants out of the way, before taking him into her grasp. He can't even be bothered to pull her underwear off, and the skirt stays.

In everything, hear these words.

Zippers down and garments aside, they move in each other, arms wound tight and bodies breathless in the same scramble, the same struggle they never seem to escape. The shadows cover them as the motion takes them, slowly at first. Moonlight, lamplight, mirrorlight; he mumbles a curse with each intake of breath and she moans his name like it was the first time she'd ever dared – quiet, eager.

Stars, stars, a sky without clouds, the eyes of the world, an umbilical cord to the sun—

This is simple, it's so simple, so then suddenly, it's not. Instead of flat-lining, his mind races. Like the tendrils of trees in his dreams, her hair covers his vision with threads that run to the moon and slither away, of the serpent and the wraith that fog up his brain and wrap like sex around a tall slice of history – a blade that gives him his gut and takes it away in the same god's breath. Warm and wet. Her name rushes out of his mouth in a pleasurable hiss and his hands goad her hips, but his mind is moving elsewhere against his wishes.

Tifa.

The sensations within, below, internal and eternal, they burn him in ways that leave him torn, like pulling the ends of a fabric scrap, leaving threads to dangle and dangle. There is heat, everywhere, and it licks the stars and the tower and laughs, and the wetness is all around – on his clothes, on her clothes, bubbling at the core and at the mouth, and it pours out of the heart of love as it dies – it's in the mud and in the sky and in his eyes, always. Pleasure and pain, wrapped like sex, wrapped like snakes. They start going through his motions, his thoughts do, and they are unwanted, unwelcome – oh, yes; lonely as he might be, they are never welcome.

I don't remember the path I walked. Do you know where this window goes?

She is a child, dark hair swinging against her back, with pale, delicate skin. Tall grass, a fist full of blood. Fire in her eyes. This is how he remembers Tifa.

But on that day, the usual temerity is gone, and Tifa's cheeks are flushed red and wet with tears. She drops her doll off her bed. Yellow sunlight covers her naked arms, but she's shaking. Cold. She's crying. He stands in the doorway to her bedroom for the first time as an outsider. He doesn't belong there, he realizes with a pang. A storm grows in him as he watches them watch her like that, hanging on the edge, a stranger til the end, wind in a forest without leaves. He can do nothing but follow her when she runs past him like a bird, down the stairs and out the door and into the mountains like the rest of her nightmares.

I wonder if there's anything beyond that mountain. Did Mama pass through the mountains?

He follows, and her footprints urge him on. Upward and over and around, he follows her at a distance, even after all the others go back to the village. He is the only one with her now, but she might as well be alone, for all he's been worth. The path is narrow, steep, but she keeps climbing, following thunder. Her blue dress is so fragile against the landscape, thin, but she is not afraid to be alone – only determined to find what she is looking for.

When their bridge breaks, they plummet into a gorge, thin legs banging against the hard Nibel rocks. His last thought before blacking out is that the bridge broke because he added his weight.

Maybe, if she'd been alone, the rope wouldn't have snapped.

And now he can do nothing, nothing but fall with her.

I only skinned my knees, but…

But isn't he doing something now, yes? Yes, he rolls them over and she onto her back in one clumsy motion, he is damn well doing something. She wraps her legs around him and her skin is so soft and her breasts so supple under his touch. Her nails dig into his back, she gasps, he buries his face in her shoulder, hair. She smells like soap and like cooking oil and just a little bit of laundry – the mundane which both soothed and seized him. The wheels go roaring, rolling, and his body takes him back, back, back—

"C-cloud…"

Cloud has an image in his head – that Tifa had gone into the mountains and had met death and returned with open eyes, undaunted, and she returned to the mountains again and again until she knew them like she knew the scales he heard her practice every night on her piano. That's how she'd become the village's best guide, and why she was the one who led the SOLDIERS to the Reactor on that day years ago.

What fears had she known then? How had she cast them aside? She'd fallen, and yet there she had appeared, climbing again, always climbing, with or without him to guard the bottom as a catch-all.

The thought frightens him – not being needed – but he flies to that strength like a moth to a flame. Hears the taunt in his head, and he hates it and needs it all the same.

Always have, always will, weakling.

Tifa ties up Marlene's hair with a pink ribbon now, and the first time she'd done so, Marlene bounded into Cloud's arms.

Cloud, do you like it? Do you!? Now I can be a flower girl, too!

How can he be happy, when it comes at the cost of so much grief? He had stolen the future from these people, from Aeris, Biggs Jessie Wedge, Mom; stolen away happiness, leaving behind lonely places – where Elmyra remains, forever waiting for someone to come home to her, and those parents in Gongaga, asking about their son and never getting an answer –

"C-cloud—"

How can he deserve Marlene, and everything she represents to him? How can he deserve Tifa, and all that she means to him? A little girl with light in her eyes who looks so much like a friend, lost, or a woman he has crawled inside and hidden from, has wanted so eagerly to please – so much so that a tiny boy in his brain still whispers to this day: you were devastated, you were so pathetic, you called it love.

Back then, he was all tumultuous rage and empty posturing, a boy with a burning need for control but no means of acquisition – and it all amounted to shit. All those feelings, all those hopes – all shit.

It doesn't matter who I was, because it doesn't matter who I am. No wonder I forgot myself. No wonder I sometimes wish I could go back to forgetting.

All of it dissolves into the roar of the machines, all a scorched pile, all spinning out of time. He goes where his body hangs like a marionette, played off by the words of the undying worm in his head that burns forever and ever like a rampaging train. He smells fear, and piss, and blood, and rust.

Where is your control now? And, most of all, where is your love?

There are many things he knows he can't change and never could have changed, but the knowledge is meaningless and painful. He can't change the past because it's the past, but neither could he change the past when it had been the present, and that is because he has been – and most likely always will be – a weakling. He thinks again of the Shadow he used to chase – the man who consumed his mind for so many years.

All the anger and hatred I bore him, it made it impossible for me to ever forget. That's what he gave me.

Time wipes away the space between the two of them, until the Shadow is the worm in Cloud's head, and he is the Shadow, and he realizes he's been chasing himself all this god damned time. It's hard not to laugh, hard not to curl up and want to die, hard not to hate everything and everyone.

I'm so sorry, Miss Tifa.

The pieces that break and fall off still make his feet bleed as he walks. The world shakes. He steps backwards to knock out the shards of glass, like a cassette in rewind, down the stairs of Seventh Heaven and up the site of the Great Northern Crater, out of the city, out of the earth, leaving a trail of blood behind him. All the little pieces are stars, and they burn. Behind the broken glass, that expressionless head floats like disease.

His own head bobs, spit dribbling down the corner of his mouth, and he has become the antithesis of all his aspirations. One hand grips the dirty street wall, train light impalpable but present, even as the rest of him slumps in a wheelchair - and now he can smell formaldehyde - all the while he grasps the sides of his blonde head, and it is just like that time in the green and nothing like it, all at once—

The buzzards circle him as he marches, haze pouring out of his eyes wherever he looks. A thousand voices, thoughts that are not his own, but the ones that were his own left him wondering whether or not he wanted to lift another foot in defiance, but for a memory that he thought he'd lost—

—he just can't do this—

—and he pulls out and pulls away, rolling aside. He is cold.

Tifa, with her breath heaving and her eyes wide, turns to face him.

"I'm s-sorry, Tifa," he pants, voice strained, eyes falling to the wall away from where she is. His skin is clammy. "I-I'm… it's the …" He can't say it, can't make the excuse. His mind fills with excuses, and he doesn't know how many of them are true, how many of them aren't, and god damn, is he still just a fucking liar all along?

She is too accommodating, too easy in her answer, he thinks. She should be angry at him for failing her, for failing to fuck her, for fucking up something as simple asfucking. He let this die – you let everything die.

"It's - it's fine, Cloud." She pushes her hair behind her ear. "It's okay."

She reaches out for him and her fingers brush against his arm, but he makes no attempt to reciprocate, to accept. She has tears in her eyes. Damn her. God damn it. Damn this, this, the drink or the dream, whatever the hell this is.

"Cloud. Are you... feeling okay?"

He wants to tell her to shut up, to just let him think. He says nothing.

Words always seem to fail him, especially when he needs them most. Oh sure, he thinks, let them come when the others are already convinced, when the idea has already been articulated, or when the truth is already known – words willcome for me, then, when it matters little whether they come from my own mouth or from the fucking robotic cat. But when he has to close the deal over a crate of vegetables, or when he has to offer constructive criticism for Marlene's drawings, or when he finds himself sleeping alone in an otherwise occupied bed – he has nothing to say.

It's not that you can't. You won't.

Can't let all of himself hang out, like an unwanted beer gut, like some fat slob unable to keep his lunch down because there's just too damn much of it. Fat old men – suddenly, Bugenhagen becomes an intruder in his thoughts.

Reaching up into the heavens, threatening to snatch the very stars from the great city of Midgar. You've seen it, haven't you?

He just never can get away from it, can he? Get away from it, get over it. That thing, those things he's done – orcouldn't do? Like someone is pointing at him wherever he goes. How long will he have to keep going on like this? Don't answer that – don't answer. But he wonders what people know about him and his little family, and just as much, he wonders what they don't know. Will there ever come a day when a sideways glance – unusual eyes and spiky hair? That guy sounds like a member of that one terrorist organization – will morph into an outright accusation, a total declaration of every sin he'd ever committed in the name of the Planet?

You dropped the plate. You called up the Weapons. You destroyed Shinra, you destroyed Midgar, you destroyed everything – Mako energy and technological advancements and healthcare and the future. It's because of a miracle that the Planet is even here.

He knows there was nothing else to be done. But he has to live in a world that doesn't understand that. It's only a matter of time, he thinks, only a matter of time till the past catches up with us. He knows Tifa feels it, too – and Barret, and many of the others, though no one ever speaks on it.

We've done the best we can to start over, and I think we're doing the right thing, but none of us have to go far before we hear stories about AVALANCHE that make us shudder.

The word sounds like poison on these strangers' lips. Tifa, and now Marlene – now these things might, too, haunt them for all their days. Or, worse – might their lives together, this peace he is so close to having, be the high price he must pay to atone? Might they, too, like all he's ever known, disappear?

Looking up too much makes you lose perspective. When it's time for this planet to die, you'll understand that you know absolutely nothing.

The truth is that he's come this far. This far. He is alive, after so many dances with death, after so much pain and loss. But in some ways, he thinks, maybe he hasn't survived at all. He remembers a day he should have died. Maybe he did. Maybe this life doesn't belong to him anymore. This idea, whatever the hell it meant, makes him angry, leaves him confused. He hasn't done a god damn thing to deserve that.

And certainly not when his incompetence comes at another price – one he's never paid, one he'll never be able to repay. He sees the soft glow of the white materia in his mind's eye, or feels the weight of a dead man's body in his arms, and he remembers that his answers and his actions have always come too late and were always far too little.

So, what is all of this? A charade? A fucking puppet show? A game? God forbid. But he can feel his heart pleading otherwise with him, wrenching, churning, rebelling.

No, no, you're wrong, Cloud, you know what this is, it's—

"Do you love me?"

Tifa asks the question so softly he almost doesn't hear it. She throws him from his thoughts. For a moment, he recalls the one dim memory he has of her at his bedside in Mideel – a flash of her face and her hands in his before the world had begun to quake and he had been lost again. He opens his eyes – when had he closed them, he wonders? – and looks at her across from him, tucked into her pillow, river-dark hair cascading over full, bare breasts.

The question takes him through time and space, and he understands now more than ever what it is to both know and not know the answer. What is the honest truth? She, more than anyone on the whole of the Planet, deserves that from him, but he is so tired of being a fuck up, of being someone else's burden, of being her burden, of being the reason for the weight in her eyes, that for a moment, he considers telling her a lie just to give her an answer. She's never needed words before now, and he catches himself before he says something he regrets.

What does it mean to love someone? Is he really capable of loving anyone? He doesn't love himself. He doesn't even know himself, even after all this time – how can he love something he doesn't know?

His silence worries her now, it looks like. Had he even heard her question? She bites her lip and changes her words. "Hey, Cloud. Do you love Marlene?"

His insides churn. He imagines Marlene sitting at the counter, her little legs swinging over her stool and her hands dutifully working over a silly drawing; her hopeful smiles and carefree babbling epitomize his own yearnings, but such a state of grace is hard to fathom for himself. Marlene's simple, stubborn desire to be happy is beautiful, but it is also alien, strange.

"Yeah," he finally answers, "I just don't always know how to show her, how … how to act around her." He's trying to be truthful, but he's afraid he's lying.

Tifa frowns but instantly tries to hide it. "Even though the two of you have been together all this time?"

Somewhere in the dark, he is sitting the gondola again, watching the roar of the fireworks drown out the words that no one would have dared to say anyway. Aeris takes his face in her hands. Tifa turns away.

"I'm not sure that's enough," he says softly, against the gold and the green and the red.

"Well, then, what about us?" Tifa says. The room drops, the grass surrounds, licks the night sky, and she forces the words against his lips. He snaps into focus again, driven across pavement inscribed in chalk, the crowd obscuring him as she waits.

"Sorry. Weird question." She sighs into her pillow.

"Don't be. It's my problem." The room is dark and cold and he is tired of everything.

"… Why can't it be ours?"

Tifa waits for his answer, but all she hears is silence. Afraid of what his answer might have been anyway, she closes her eyes and waits for the dawn instead. When it comes, there is mist upon the windows, and Cloud is gone again.

...

You little bitch.

Cloud hadn't meant to make the other boy bleed - at least, not this badly - but his fist does the work for him. Busted nose, streaming red down into a gleaming white shirt - the kid's a mess. For his part, Cloud doesn't look too bad – scratches on a cheek and a ding on his arm, but nothing there's nothing like a nosebleed from a good pop, and the other kid's swollen face is a prize.

Now the two of them are scrambling in the tall grass, grunting and growling, drawing a small crowd into the field.

The other boy clutches his face, eyes wide in alarm and anger. Cloud wipes saliva from the corners of his mouth.

You don't even know what those feelings really are.

Arrogant thoughts, he will later reflect. But his young heart holds them up like a marathon runner's torch, proud and righteous.

You want to know what anger is? Let me teach you.

He throws another punch at the boy's head. It misses and hits him in the neck, and the flesh makes a popping sound. The boy gurgles and falls on his ass, a strangled cry escaping his throat. Now the crowd is closing in. Three large boys come charging forward.

Someone is hissing, Leave him alone! And someone else, What the hell is your problem, Cloud! You're a freak!

His problem? He doesn't have a problem. It's the kid. The kid looks like he needs an excuse to wear that smugexpression day in and day out, so when the kid had asked Cloud why he never played with the other children and had suggested that it might have to do with the absence of Cloud's father, well, Cloud thought he'd finally give it to the little brat.

Now he'll have to explain himself to the rest of these goons, apparently.

Three other boys. Who they are, he will never remember in the long years afterward. They circle him, one drawing in front of the fallen boy, the other two pacing along his sides. Cloud sniffs.

The one to his right jumps towards him, leg forward in a kick, which Cloud avoids. The second one also comes, fists swinging, and Cloud meets him by grabbing his arms and twisting. Both children snarl, struggling against one another, until Cloud puts the boy to the ground with a resounding gasp. The first boy throws his arm around Cloud's neck and jerks him backwards, giving his partner just enough time to trip Cloud and send him plummeting.

On the ground, a shoe connects solidly with Cloud's face. A heartbeat follows, and then blood pounds across flesh. It takes him longer to register the pain he feels.

The second boy is on his feet now, kicking as well. Maybe two yards away, the third boy is helping his fallen friend sit up, still clutching his nose; Cloud is sure those eyes are smugger than ever now. In the pit of his gut, he feels cold rage – rage, you understand rage, don't you?

It's the only thing you were born for, if rage means power, and if power means control, and if control means purpose, and if your purpose is to love—

And love is what you want, right? Love.

And then she comes, Love comes down the field from the treeline, calling out his name. Her dark hair swings through the tall grass like the shadow of a cloud moving across the earth.

The boys pause long enough to allow Cloud to dart to his feet.

She's here. You're here. Watch me this time.

He lunges for the nearest boy with an enraged shriek. His fist meets flesh, teeth, blood. Before the boy can retaliate, Cloud lands another blow, and another. His hands twist into the boy's hair, peeling it back like twisting a cap off a stubborn soda bottle, and the boy screams. His friend claws desperately at Cloud's back, but Cloud doesn't relent. The shrill cry waxes in a crescendo before the silence comes.

Someone throws one last punch, and it hits Cloud in the lip – and that someone also kicks Cloud out from between both boys and gives a shriek of her own.

"Stop it!"

He falls into the grass, and his eyes drink in the trembling form of Tifa. His blood is smeared over her knuckles, the color of her eyes, pounding.

"Cloud, stop! It's over."

All those days of watching her from a distance, peering through her window like a creep – now, when he is strong, when he is proud, when he is making her look at him, he isn't sure if he wants her to know who he actually is.

Who am I?

Bury that truth, deep, deep. Don't let her see. Don't let anyone know. Don't show a soul. It's better that way. You'll find a better way. You alone.

He collapses at the bottom of the Temple of the Ancients. His whole body shakes. He feels like he has strangled someone to death, and phantom spasms rush through his arms. The last thing he sees through slit eyes is the blood on Aeris's face, and as much as he tries, he can't wipe the sight of it away.

Your face is all messed up, Aeris, he wants to say, but darkness takes him.

Moments, hours, years later, her hand is on his forehead and her face is in his dreams, tired but whole and smiling with grace. She whispers his name, like his own mother had done once, whispers, can you hear me, Cloud?

There are trees, green and reaching, all around. Wind slips through leaves, softly, as if it dares not wake any that sleep, and moss beneath silences all other sounds. She is there, like a tree herself, dress aglow with light where the forest would one day end.

He reaches out to her. I can hear you. I… I'm sorry…about…

The hand on his face brushes back his hair, and the woman in the trees shushes him.

"Worry not," she says.

His eyes burn. I can't help but worry. I mean, I…I'm…

She retreats from him, lips pursed. Her voice comes in between the trees, and then her face is firm. "Oh. Then, why don't you take your time and really worry about it?"

He has to worry, though. He gave away the Black Materia. He sold them all out. Maybe worst of all, he - he did something to Aeris. And he has no idea why he did it. He tries bending over the bed to vomit out the memory of his betrayal. He stops himself, because there's nothing in him to spit out. Someone is crying, saying don't be afraid. It's not Aeris, not Tifa. It's not anyone he knows.

Who does that make him? Who the hell is he? He's Cloud, yes. Cloud Strife, of Nibelheim. And Cloud Strife of Nibelheim would hold strong, would fight, would protect the weak, would prove to everyone who doubted that he was different than the rest, would show he was made of something else, would show her, the girl behind the window, that he was better than those losers who could barely hold themselves together, could barely stand on two legs, let alone upright with any dignity, right – right? Right?

"Leave the rest of it in my hands," Aeris says.

She laughs, then, covering her mouth with a delicate hand, almost undercutting the edge in her tone. It makes him suddenly angry, that she can laugh at a time like this. She stifles her mirth and raises a finger in explanation.

"Some bodyguard you turned out to be." She smirks and leans against a trunk. "Even like this, I hope the irony isn't lost on you."

He can still feel the hand on his face, swimming through the trees and the light and the sound of the leaves, and her voice continued.

"That's … not funny, Aeris."

"I know." She touches a bruise below her left eye.

"I'm … I'm so sorry, I..."

She stops him. "And Cloud… you take care of yourself." She stands up straight, hands clasped tightly, knuckles white. "So you don't break down. You might just freeze like that."

Her words leave him addled, and he wishes his mind would go blank again. She is strange, he is strange, neither one of them is quite right. He has always been drawn to the part of her that he shares with her, and she him.

He remembers her words on the gondola. He now has an answer for her, but he now struggles to speak.

You've already met the real me, Aeris. I've seen myself in you ever since I first met you. I hope you've found whatever it is you've been looking for, in me or through me or apart from me.

The forest is silent, and she steps forward and into an open patch of light. The sky sails on above their heads, through the leaves, bright and blue and heavy with clouds.

"The secret is just ahead." She gestures over her shoulder. "In the City of the Ancients, beyond the sleeping forest."

What secret?

She bites her lip. "At least, it should be. … but I feel it. Hah, let's hope my intuition is right." With a smile, she casts her eyes into the trees and beyond. "It feels as though I'm being led by something."

The hand on his face moves away, and lips met his forehead, softly, and then the mattress where she has been sitting rises as she stands.

"I'll be going now. I'll come back when it's all over."

The forest is gone. His eyes open long enough to see her, looking down at him, pack slung over her shoulder, her expression unreadable. Her small body is framed by the doorway of a dark room; her face is covered in bruises, and her arms, and the hand she had been touching him with, as well.

"Aeris…?" He is drowsy and lost. "W-why… are you... Where...?"

She grips her pack as best she can, her knuckles swollen.

"Cloud," she says gently, "When I was a child, I loved like a child. But now that I'm a woman, I'm going to love like a woman. It's... about damn time I owned up to that. There is a lot I haven't been honest with you about, and it's because I haven't been honest with myself. I've been running. That's why... I have to do this."

They had met, they had talked, they had laughed. He might have even loved her. But. The sky is still out of reach in the city of Midgar, a burgeoning tower blooming like a sore in the vastness of the wastes it forms. He realizes then that he is never going to take her flying on an airship, that she is making her peace with the hopes she'd laid to rest in him, and that this is an ending, a good-bye, of one kind or another.

This is all I have to give you.

After a moment of deliberation, she kneels beside him once more. Her lips are close, and without thinking, he reaches for her face, for the marks he'd made, tender trails left now instead across the bruises. Another girl from another time passes through his mind, dark-haired and ruby-eyed, light from the last train spinning on the ground. Who am I? Bruised faces, skinned knees. Blood, mud.

He pulls Aeris close and kisses her, and she kisses him back. He feels something in him move as she does, as her breath lingers against his, as her hair slips across his skin, as her ribbon sways just out of reach. She kisses him like she's done it before, done it thousands of times, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Her hand traces his ear, and she pauses.

He lifts his arms for her, but she pulls away and goes to the door, face hidden from view, her body rigid.

"Well, anyway," she says, "I'll see you around."

Always waiting. Cloud still floats in the void, tangled within an undying dream of stars and wordless whispering. There is no mother he trusts, no hope he wants to protect, no world in which he wants to be known – just sound of a train and the scream of a woman he's left behind on the stairs, a person crying, a cackle dressed in a lab coat.

The last thing he wants to remember is this.

The buzzards are starting to gather, like unwanted flies on a pork roast. He smells death close to him.

He is not alone, though the Shinra grunts have all left. He sees something lying in the mud not twenty feet from him. Even though it's raining, he can smell blood. Something is dead. As he pulls himself closer, he sees the holes first – an abdomen blown to scraps, looking like a plate of leftovers. It might even be that the rain is melting them.

It shouldn't be, but it's a man, lying there. Cloud knows this man's face, he knows that dark head of hair, those strange eyes. But this man isn't – he flinches, still alive, still fighting, and Cloud forces himself through the mud and blood to be beside him. The rain makes everything cold and dark – so many clouds – why did he have to be named after that which brings the rain?

Z-zack…

The dead man can barely breathe, let alone look at Cloud. So much strength, whittled away – in the both of them, Cloud realizes in fear. He's not much better off than this dead man. Both are exposed, stripped of history and integrity and identity, all those things that make one more than just. Cloud thinks of this man's pride in himself, in what he's done, in what he tried to do – and he almost vomits.

A soldier has no honor in life, no pride, unless it is in killing, Cloud thinks. He wants to take back everything he has ever said about Shinra. Both he and Zack have simply been triggers, arms, tools to be used, left to invent their own honor in order to keep from seeing moments like this. And there is no honor in the sheer experience of death, no magnificent blazing moments of revelation, no finish line, nothing good or whole. Only darkness – and then, nothing. Empty hands, empty eyes.

So Cloud has nothing, and Zack, even less.

Cloud can taste the coppery blood, smell the burning and the pain and the intangible but overwhelming odor of fear. All around him, all around, and through the rain and the dread and the murk in the sky he could almost hear someone asking why this? Why him? Why now? Seeing the weary yearning in the other man's eyes – the look that said I was almost home – Cloud crumbles, even in his haze. Zack tried to protect him from Shinra, from Hojo, and it has been completely senseless. Death is senseless.

I wasn't worth this.

Zack coughs, and Cloud expects blood to come, but it's all used up. Instead, Zack reaches for Cloud, who struggles to pull him close; he tries not to tug on any of Zack's intestines, which lie spilled along with other parts of him, all now at Cloud's elbows, knees. Cloud only hears the words because Zack is so near.

"Cloud... Cloud, you..."

The next word, Cloud isn't sure he understands; it's either leave, or live. Cloud shakes his head, ready to say no to either. Everything's a fog, everything's nothing, and it would be better to be nothing now, than to feel any of this.

"I w-won't leave you, Zack."

Cloud clings to Zack, his hands in blood, face to face, as the horizon beings to flatten. Little moments keep running up to Cloud, tugging on him –

Cloud is born from his chamber, wet with Mako, and falls, and Zack picks him up, clothes him, drags him away from that place. Cloud is trapped within himself, but he remembers when Zack feeds him, keeps him out of the rain and away from the wolves. He is safe, there, maybe, and warm – but the thing he remembers above all else is that Zack talks to him even when there can be no answer. Zack has been Cloud's mother, his father, his brother, his comrade, his beloved, his friend – and he has kept his promise to protect Cloud at all costs, and it has earned Zack nothing.

What is a hero but a dead man?

"Zack, Zack—" Cloud mumbles, whimpers, losing himself in the sea of ghosts again, brain wrapped up in the tentacles of trees. For a moment, he sees Hojo standing off by the cliff side, watching the two of them together. "Zack, I…I—"

Zack is louder, this time, more insistent. "Cloud – s-she'll be t-there, in the c-city, waiting-g, a-and—"

Cloud isn't really listening. He keeps pushing forward, filling up with horror and green souls, face pressed into the dark of Zack's neck, trying not to look at the cat grin spreading across Hojo's face. A little pulse remains in Zack, like a person dangling from a cliff – a few more moments before the inevitable plummet.

Zack says that word again – leave, or live – and Cloud knows he means both, now. Zack tries to push him away, but he is too weak, and the strain makes him cry out. How did the buster sword get into Cloud's hands? And when Cloud looks into the other man's eyes, they are fading, black and dull like rocks, heavy curtains closing over a dark stage with one person left in attendance. Those eyes stay open, unable to close. Paper time folds up, crumples, too quickly gone.

I didn't ask for this, I didn't want this—

But Cloud has to go on living, doesn't he? Zack has something else, the greatest of all things, something that lives beyond death – and he has given it to Cloud. Now Cloud has been consecrated by love – an ugly mark for a beautiful thing. Death is always ugly, and love sometimes hurts more than death, and he tries so hard to hang onto his mother's words, that love is beautiful, that love is worth all the suffering in the world. It feels like a sick joke right now.

I can't, Zack. I can't do what you ask me.

He clings to the corpse like he clings to weakness, afraid to move, but knowing the choice has already been made for him.

God damn it.

She is still smiling on that altar.

Aeris.

He is threadbare and gray, digging his fingers into whatever measure of control left to salvage, and she is still smiling, smiling until they drew out the winter from her breath. He doesn't even know what she means by that anymore – is she hopeful? Resigned? Afraid? All he feels is the rush of ghosts.

Aeris keeps her hands together, as if she has just been praying – as if she is continuing to pray. Whether the earth has answered her or not, she has yet to say.

Cloud feels his hands twitch towards his sword – Zack's sword, he thinks ever so briefly – but Aeris stays still, watching him carefully. He thinks she is about to speak to him, but he doesn't think she should. Instead, she keeps smiling.

Tifa's voice cries out and then dies in the noise from across the water – no interventions this time. Barret's roar, only a murmur. The others seem only like shadows caught in the fringe.

"Cloud and Aeris are both star signs! They're perfect for one another!"

Cait Sith's declaration makes him sick. The same, the same. We are the same. Neither here nor there, neither sure nor unsure, neither belonging nor removed, neither moving forward nor tumbling back – caught, like flies in a glittering web, like moths in a whirlwind torn apart. Both liars. Both creeps. Both lonely.

Then suddenly, the blade that stole his mind now takes her body.

Who are you?

Who am I?

He is alone again.

...

I'm sorry, everyone.

Sorry.

Especially you, Miss Tifa.

I'm really sorry.

I never lived up to being 'Cloud Strife'...

Tifa...

Maybe one day you'll meet the real Cloud.

...

After that night, Cloud sleeps in his office. He thinks that maybe Tifa would want that, prefer that, instead of having to lie there night after night with a man that can't do a damn thing right, who can't be right for her when she needs him, who can't even tell her that he loves her.

Tifa lowers her head whenever he comes down in the mornings. She makes breakfast in silence, and wishes him well as he skirts out the door. If she would have called him, he would've watched it ring like he's done before – but she never calls him anymore. The absence of her numbs him. He wonders if this perspective is a new, problematic invention of his, or if he is finally seeing things clearly – but in a perverse sort of way, he is glad he feels so numb. The alternative is too heavy.

Sleep refuses him. That fucking little cot shrinks in on his thoughts, which fly up and out of himself in order to escape. So many things to think about, and nothing to feel about any of them.

Those intangible yearnings he pretends to deny swivel around the cracked door and slip down the hall in order to pull open another door, the door he's closed. They watch Tifa, eyes closed and breathing softly. The sight of her at peace is precious to him. To hold her against him, to make her feel, to make her say his name – he wants her, still, but everything is such a fucking mess and he can't pretend to fix it anymore.

I'm as ineffective as I've ever been, going in circles like a fucking hamster, a bad Gold Saucer game on repeat.

The only things he does right anymore are the jobs. Take shit from point A to point B. Hah. Anyone can do that. Ineffective, helpless, impotent, his mind rotates around these words. Buzzards circle him in the peripheries of his memory.

"…Tifa."

He says her name, and it sounds loud in the late hours. He flinches for a second, but when no one answers him, he relaxes.

God. How pathetic.

He is suddenly so heavy. He's going in circles, always. Trapped, again, by his own nature.

To distract himself from this sudden loss of numbness, he reaches below the top of his drawstring pants and pictures Tifa in the room, with him.

Only, he and Tifa are living some other life. He has just come home from the war in Wutai, and they have just eaten at his mother's house – she made stew, everyone's favorite – and Tifa is happy because he has kept his promise. She's been bragging on him to the whole village all day, and all her old guy friends are both impressed and a little jealous. In the evening, after supper, Tifa's father sits him down and talks with him for an hour about his adventures with Shinra, slapping him on the shoulder when the adventures are painfully funny. Long after the sun has set, Tifa pries them apart and races up the stairs, to her old bedroom, pulling Cloud behind her by the wrist.

And now Tifa is there, on her bed, and she puts her arms around him, and they are busy, and he loves the sounds she makes, and they accidentally kick the side of her piano, and Tifa laughs into the sheets.

Inhale, exhale, his heart races. He is free, even if it's not real.

...

They follow Barret; not because he knows where the fuck they are going, but because he is the easiest thing they can see in the blizzard. The blinding cold breaks across his dark form, and he staggers – it's hard, even for Barret, to rage against this storm.

"Don' fall behind now, bumpkins," he calls out hoarsely, his breath all but a gasp in the cold. With his gun arm, he digs a path through the deepening drift. "We jes' finally getting' somewhere..."

Cid and Vincent march behind him; Vincent's red cape is the only other visible thing in the white, and it flaps like a furious flag with every scream of the wind. All Cloud can think of is blood, so he stays focused on Barret.

Tifa and Yuffie plow behind the men, faces deadpan, clinging to Nanaki, his tail-flame pitiful, threatening to vanish. Following is the Mog, carrying a trembling Cait Sith, whimpering against the onslaught. No matter how sophisticated the machine, it must be just as hard to keep moving for them as it is for us, Cloud thinks.

Cloud brings up the rear, hands gripping the buster sword so tight that he thinks he will bleed out his nails; squinting his eyes against the wind, he bites his tongue to remind himself he has one. Numb. His eyelashes are frozen, for god's sake.

He welcomes it. Scratch open a scab, pour in this ice, and then there'll be nothing left to feel after the cold takes over. His mind can refrain from haunting certain places, certain faces, and he could follow the flame of the future – Sephiroth, god damn it, I'll make you pay for what you've done – without a second thought. He won't have to think about Aeris now. It's easier this way.

Suddenly, Yuffie's pace halts and she breaks away from Nanaki and Tifa; with her shoulders drawn up to her chin and her arms wrapped around herself, she stands her ground. Cait Sith gasps, Lassie, whatya doing, but the Mog keeps moving, unaffected. As Cloud approaches her, one hand leaves his sword long enough to reach for her.

"K-keep mov-ving," Cloud says.

"C-can't," she stutters. "C-c-cold—"

"Yuffie." His voice is thin, on edge, his hand wringing around her arm, eyes icy as the storm. He looks like he can barely keep himself together, and yet there he is, holding her in a death grip, both of them acting stubborn.

"Just cold, C-Cloud." She bites her blue lips in protest. "M-man, Geez-z-z... "

"C-come on," he growls. "Keep m-moving." After that, he goes on walking, pulling her right along with him, now hand in hand, but he lights a tiny Fire spell into her palm, just enough for the heat, and she is able to move her fingers again. She eyes the tiny materia on his gauntlet as it glows with the spell. She isn't sure if she has ever loved materia more than she does this very moment.

Up ahead, Cloud hears Cid bitching to Vincent. "God damn it, we're goin' in fuckin' circles, aren't we?"

"It's plausible," says a gloomy Vincent.

With chattering teeth, Cid groans – a discombobulated sound that would have been funny if not for the severity of the situation.

"Jes' shut yoh mouth! We on the right god damn track!" Barret shouts over the noise of the storm. He follows the outburst with an almost incoherent mumble. "We on the right track..."

"I've definitely seen that patch of snow before, mister," Cid grumbles.

"There ain't no way! Shut the hell up and keep walkin', or you will freeze to death, geez. I ain't leadin' nobody in no circles."

Nanaki finally offers his input. "Maybe Cid's right."

"Not you, too, Red! Ya'll a buncha ninnies—"

Suddenly, Cid erupts, with his arms flung out to either side like a scarecrow. His breath blows into frosty smoke. "You've got to be fucking kiddin' me! We're lost!"

Barret wastes no time in answering, a twitch singing in his gun-arm. "Cid, I'ma turn around and shoot you if you so damn lost—"

Cid stomps as furiously as he can through the growing snow drift, shoulders quaking and feet sinking into the white, until he is a hand-reach from the dark silhouette of Barret. "Great, why don'tcha, then?! You can start with my frozen ass! Better that than freezing to death! That's what being lost does to a man!"

"Guys, h-hold it together—" Cloud calls out.

Several things happen in the following moment. Barret turns towards Cid, open-mouthed and angry; Cloud releases Yuffie's hand and stalks towards the front; Tifa cries out, loses her grip on Nanaki, and plummets into the snow.

"Gah!"

The entire group turns inward, eyes on the dark puncture in the white where she had fallen. After a stunned pause, a chorus of her name follows: "Tifa?!"

In a half-stitch of a second the static returns, and Cloud fights the irrational fear that springs out of him. He is grateful when it passes; after a weary groan, Tifa's head appears over the threshold of the snow.

"There's something..." she gasps, stealing her breath back from the wind. "Something here..."

"You awwright?!" Barret immediately forgets Cid and bolts to her side. Cloud and Nanaki are not long behind, both wide-eyed like children. Barret provides an adequate shield from the wind as Cloud bends over her, eyes doctoring.

She grips her lower leg, jaw clenched. "My leg... yeah... my foot's under something. Damn."

"Is it – is it broken?" Nanaki asks – it's hard to tell, with him being a lion-dog and all, but he looks worried.

"It's stuck, I can't move it. I don't know," Tifa says.

"Hey, Tifa." Cloud starts to reach for her, but the others rush in behind him in a circle.

"Help her up—" Yuffie darts past Cloud, hands falling on Tifa's arm.

"Her foot is caught underneath something, don't pull too hard..." Nanaki warns, the fire burning brighter at the tip of his tail.

Cid sweeps in and, with a nod from Tifa, begins to carve out the snow; instead of running into a layer of ice, he starts to turn up bits of rock. "Here ya go – can ya pull your leg out yet?"

She shakes her head, her lips chapped. "N-no, I can't wrench it free, I think there's too much ice down below—"

"I got it, I got it—" With a strangled war-cry, Barret slams his gun-arm into the ground, slinging bits of frozen condensation into the wind. Yuffie and Cait Sith shriek; Tifa flinches beneath a suddenly steaming Cid.

"F-fuck, Barret! Yeh coulda given me some warnin' when ya did that!" He raises a gravel-covered glove into the air. "Or are you just tryin' to break 'er legs?"

"Huh, well! You gonna break this ice with your puny little fingers?"

Cloud decides to inject himself before anything else can be said. "Come on, let's keep digging. Barret, you with your actual hand, this time, please."

The team complies, throwing snow over and out, exposing the ground – and something else – beneath.

"What the hell is this?" Barret says.

Wood, and steel. A ladder of planks and metal lines and bolts meant to run into the horizon – only now covered in a mound of snow.

"Oh, it's..." Yuffie has forgotten she is cold.

"It's... a railroad." A sour Vincent has not.

Tifa pulls her foot free of one of the boards, rubbing her ankle through the boot. With Yuffie's help, she stands and flexes her leg. "I don't think I'm hurt. Though... to be honest... I'm kind of too numb to know for sure. Ha ha."

Cloud frowns but is silent. The rest of them survey the exhumed railroad.

"What the hell?" Cid rubs the back of his head, dusting off icicles caught in his hair.

"Oh wow..." Realization spreads in a crawl.

"Where there's one o' these..." Cait Sith pipes up.

"It's got to lead somewhere, right?" Yuffie nearly bounces.

Arms folded, Vincent steps in with a word. "Unless it leads nowhere, because it's old, out of use, discontinued—"

A vein pops out of Barret's forehead. "Now don' go thinkin' like that! What the hell's wrong with you? Morbid, thas' what you are. Morbid! 'Course it leads somewhere!"

"A village?" Nanaki offers.

"Yes, like, a village with houses. Houses with beds and blankets and chimneys and fires and furnaces." Yuffie smiles, rubbing her hands together.

Cid clears his throat. "Fine. Let's get on with our celebratin' then. We jest found the slowest movin' trainride out of this shithole."

Nobody says anything for a moment; even the wind begins to die down a little.

And then Nanaki says what everyone is thinking but no one wants to give words. "Which way should we pick? They both look the same to me."

Barret is forced to mumble a reply. "Now don't go thinkin' like that, or we'll pick the wrong one."

"So, Cloud, which way?"

Tifa catches Cloud's gaze. He speaks slowly, as much from the chill as from decisiveness. He thinks he sees Tifa's jaw tighten.

"... Sephiroth said to head North, so there's only one way for us." He gestures towards the north-westerly direction in which the tracks run. "We follow this as far as we can, as long as the snow permits."

Or until we die. Hopefully we'll find civilization before then.

Cid sneers. "Well, Barret, I guess you were right. We were on the right 'god damn track'."

Barret slaps Cloud on the back, prompting him to cough and sputter before glaring at him. "Heh. So, Cloud. You know what I'm always sayin'."

"Barret, if you say it this time, this time, I think I may have to kill you."

A grin spreads across Barret's face before he marches off down the tracks, leading the team behind him. "Heh heh. Awright, ladies! You heard the man! We headin' that way!"

And there ain't no getting' offa dis train we on!

...

"Cloud! What do you think!"

Marlene ambushes him outside of the bathroom. A new tactic – one she has recently acquired from Tifa. Something on paper crackles in his immediate field of vision; his initial impression is that she has somehow managed to accurately replicate the oddly golden droppings of the wild Bandersnatch – until he recognizes Barret in the mix and wonders why she's illustrated her own father amongst piles of yellow monster shit – an then suddenly –

She taps her foot. "Well?"

His eyes widen. Fuck, those are chocobos.

"Oh. Oh, it's… uh…" His eyes go to one particularly somber looking yellow lump with a big gray meat-cleaver attached. And is that…me…?

Marlene is still left on her tip-toes, paper waving. The ribbon in her hair bounces with her. As the silence lingers, her hands fall.

Cloud isn't going to say anything, again – truth be told, he isn't sure what to say. He's never known what Marlene means when she draws these pictures of him – is she trying to be funny? Is she saying he never smiles, that he is always grumpy? Is she... comparing him to Barret? Is he reading too much into this?

She purses her lips, watching him think over his thoughts. She taps her foot one last time before her little nose flushes red and her eyes gloss over. Suddenly, she turns away, her shoulders quivering.

"Marlene—" he says, confused and guilty.

Oh great, Cloud, add this to your list of accomplishments – making little girls cry.

"I'm fine, okay—" She snaps at him, her face scrunched. She is as bad of a liar as Barret – as bad of a liar as he himself, Cloud realizes. Like fathers, like daughter. Wait.

I think of her as my daughter.

She keeps marching away, paper in hand, crumpled on one end, braid swinging.

In two strides he matches her pace. Without missing a beat, he puts a hand to her shoulder and stops her.

"Marlene."

She stops, and almost immediately she sags against him. The bottled up tears burst out of her. She rubs her eyes to hide the evidence. He plucks her off the ground, her face still red, and holds her. She protests initially—"I'm five, okay, I'm not little!"—before succumbing, hiding her face in his sweatshirt.

He doesn't remember his own father, and his mother had never talked about him. Maybe that's why the word father never held a lot of meaning for Cloud. At most, he might think of Tifa's father, but the association was never pleasant. Like all the other fathers in Nibelheim, he ignored Cloud throughout most of his childhood, and then after Tifa's fall, he actively ostracized him.

Of course, then Cloud met Barret, and suddenly, there was a new definition of fatherto write. No one could deny that Barret loved Marlene, had never thought twice about what that meant or what would happen because of it – he just did it, acted on it, and stayed true to that commitment. He owned it.

Cloud doesn't know if he's doing this right – the whole dad thing – but he realizes that he wants to try. She seems to want it, too, he thinks.

Maybe we both need it.

"I do like your drawing, Marlene," he says finally. "It's... pretty."

She holds onto him a little tighter. "It's a present." She sniffs, still haughty. "It's the chocobo train. You're on it!"

"It's just what I needed."

She pulls away to study him. Then she looks down the hallway once and, after making certain Tifa won't hear, whispers into his ear, eyes still red, "Are you done being stupid, then?"

The secret is just ahead.

He gives her words serious consideration. It's a relief to be asked that directly – no dodging, no worrying, no nothing. Marlene isn't weighed down yet by the world, he thinks, but then, maybe she never has to be – maybe she's a stronger person than he has ever been. At her age, he'd already been afraid of others, of himself, and was only ever direct about where to put his fist.

After he answers Marlene, she giggles – apparently satisfied – and kisses him on the cheek before he lets her down. His own words ring in his head even after she gives him the drawing and goes downstairs to accompany Tifa, shouting, I gave it to him, Tifa, and he liked it! He hopes he wasn't lying to himself anymore, but he is still afraid that he might be.

"I'm trying not to be stupid anymore, Marlene. I'm really trying."

...

The stars move on above her head, like a mobile in a crib, like before, like every comfortable bedtime memory, but sleep evades Tifa in the early hours of the morning.

The three of them – herself, Barret, and Cloud – still have a long journey until they reach Kalm. They had left Nibelheim three days ago, and it had been painful. Corel had been just as bad. They'd left the others on the Northern Continent and had wandered for several weeks, but finally, thoughts of Marlene had turned them towards the east.

Tifa tries not to think too much about what they've seen in Nibelheim, or Corel, or any number of paths that they've walked since Meteor fell into the Lifestream.

Think of what's right in front of you, Tifa.

She turns her head. Barret snores beside her, and she listens to him hack and sniff and drone on, but it does nothing for her sleepless condition. If anything, it makes her ears itch.

She rolls over, and across the camp, Cloud sits with his back to her, lit up by the campfire. She wonders what he is thinking.

Tifa gets to her feet and finds herself fraught with the impulse to lie back down, to not approach him. She knows that as soon as she has stood that he is listening to her, following her movements, aware of her. She clenches her fists and decides to excuse herself from the campsite momentarily, under the guise of undertaking some business in the bushes. She treads into the forest a ways and lets herself rest against a tree, gathering her thoughts.

She can see the camp through the underbrush, can see him in the light.

You're acting just like him, you know. Stop doing it. Everything will be all right this time.

She waits until the pounding in her chest subsides. With that, she returns to camp. He glances at her as she comes through the treeline, but his eyes remain fixed on the fire.

"Hey," she says as she sits next to him. She lets her shoulder knock against him gently, and he cushions her.

"Hey," he says. "It's early for you. You should get as much sleep while you can, you know. We've got a long ways until we get to Kalm."

"I know." She stretches, letting the firelight disturb her white blouse, letting Cloud notice all the same. "Couldn't sleep. How's the watch?"

"Boring as hell," he answers with a sigh, leaning forward. "Could be worse, though."

"True," she says. She sees the stick he's been using to prod the fire resting between his legs, and she grabs it quickly to dig at the fire herself.

He raises his eyebrows at her touch. "Could be better."

She knocks a log into the glowing ashes. "What's ... that supposed to mean?"

He shifts beside her, scratching idly at an itch forming behind his ear. "Well, uh, you know... if you're not going to sleep... then..."

"Cloud." She turns to him, slowly, her bangs falling into her eyes, hair over skin.

"What?"

"What are you suggesting?"

He shrugs. "...That I'm bored as hell."

"And?"

"And... you're pretty... uh... not boring."

His expression is mask-like. Her grip on the stick gets tighter. For such a little fire, everything sure is warm. She pretends she is surprised by his confession.

"Oh. Oh."

"Yeah."

He looks away, eyes on the sky. Is that a blush spreading across his face? A contagious thing, those – she feels it in her own skin, and she works the stick deeper into the fire.

"Not here, Cloud."

His response is playful. "Help keep me... awake?"

She attempts to act as incredulous as possible, but it is hard not to grin herself. "Cloud. Barret is right there."

"Yeah, but, he's slept through crazier things. Like, monsters, and Sephiroth, and shit!"

Almost in response to Cloud's description, Barret gurgles in his sleep and rolls over; both Cloud and Tifa cringe, but then Tifa smiles, too, her whole face tingling. "You have to be more specific, Cloud."

"Tifa."

She looks into his eyes, which is a mistake. "What?"

"We're not kids, Tifa. We can do it when we want."

"No!" She giggles.

"Tifa..." Cloud is pouting. Pouting.

Something Aeris taught him, Tifa thinks, and I'm glad she did. But Tifa isn't done teasing him yet.

She points a finger at the sky, voice wavering. "Oh, hey, look! Look at the stars! So many constellations..."

Cloud folds his arms, eyebrows raised; he has no interest in stargazing at the moment – truly, he refuses to remove his eyes from just below her collarbone.

"Uninteresting subject change."

Still gazing heavenward, she leans against him, drawing her knees to her chest to forcibly avert his eyes; the forgotten stick clatters against the fire circle."The night sky is a beautiful thing. I'm sometimes sad that we have to sleep through most of it."

"Sleep is an optional thing, you know." He casts her a leering sideways glance.

She dutifully ignores him – really, what has gotten into him? "I wonder... do you think we could visit Cosmo Canyon again? Now that... everything's over... I want to see Bugenhagen's machine again. It was such an awesome thing. When you think about it, it was like... man and nature, working together. And through that partnership, we understood a little more of our world, of ourselves."

He wishes he can take her there again if only to see the child in her emerge. Stars. A lump forms in his throat. "... That's out of our way, so I don't know. It may be awhile before we go back to visit Cosmo Canyon."

Her mood changes with his. "Yeah... that's reasonable."

He puts his arm around her. "Hey. Whether we go or not on this trip, it doesn't matter. You have your memories of it, right? Those are a treasure unto themselves, so hold onto them. That's what's really important."

That's how you really understand yourself.

"Cloud... " She wonders how red her face is, or how foolish her grin.

With a sense of finality, he says, "It's what you taught me, after all."

She finally can't help herself anymore. With a wrinkle of her nose, she laughs. "Aw, Cloud. Unadulterated sentimentality? The stars must be aligned strangely. Hmm... maybe you will get lucky tonight?"

Nothing is said in response for several moments, and in the silence, her heart races. His grip on her side tightens. She unconsciously licks her lips. When nothing else happens, her body stills; she worries that maybe she said something wrong.

He finally speaks into the fire, face blank. "Lucky. For once in my life."

Her gut knots and she frowns. "You've been lucky a number of times throughout your life, Cloud Strife."

His expression changes abruptly at her words – from deadpan to amusement. "Now... I seem to remember one night under the Highwind, and a couple of, uh, quickies aboard the airship afterward, but I wouldn't call that 'a number of times' and, well, it's not been throughout my life – we still have to work on that, I think—"

She shoves him. "Cloud, that's not what I'm talking about, because I know that's not what you were talking about just now! You think you're hilarious, don't you?"

"Oh. Well." He lets the smirk fade. "... Would you call it luck, then?"

She sighs. "What else would you call it?"

"... I... well..." The fire is dying.

She wrings her hands.

"I mean, I've been lucky too, I guess. Or unlucky, however which way you want to look at it, but I guess I've always thought of it as luck, ultimately. I lost my home not once, but twice, and still kept my skin. There were a lot of times when things could have gone differently for me, like when I first arrived in Midgar, and I'm lucky they didn't." She tosses her head back, flinging dark hair over her shoulder.

"I almost died, you know, if not for Zangan. He's the one who took me to Midgar, after... Nibelheim burned. I wanted to thank him, but he was gone as soon as my condition was stable. I... couldn't pay the doctors immediately, so I was lucky that they let me wait to find a job before I had to make payments. They waived most of the cost, actually.

"And I found a job, and it wasn't something undesirable or dirty, not like what a lot of folks in the slums had to do to get by – I've always managed to scrape by in any situation, whether I was a bartender, a member of AVALANCHE, or a terrorist on the run. And … of course, I met you again."

Cloud reaches for the discarded stick and sends it into the flames.

"I think... I think they..." he says.

"They...?"

"Would they have called it luck?"

"Who?"

"Zack... and Aeris."

She strokes the bottom of her chin, and silence follows. It would be so much easier to let the silence speak for them both, but a fist knots in her stomach, and it takes all her courage to ask.

"... Okay. What kind of question is that, Cloud?"

"I don't know."

"Well, what do you think?"

"I don't think either of them believed in luck."

Tifa is quiet, and she almost doesn't say it. "I … don't think either of them were very lucky."

She flinches at how cruel she sounds and wants to take back her words, worried that Cloud will recede from her.

Cloud, surprisingly, doesn't react in the way she thinks he will. He simply shakes his head. "I … that's definitely not what I mean." A pause. "We all die. It's just a matter of when. We're all equally unlucky in that regard. What I mean is... When something happened, or when something good came into their lives, they never treated it as luck. It always meant something more."

"Okay, then. What do you think about that?"

"It's hard for me to completely agree. Sometimes, there's no reason to anything. You're just lucky, or unlucky. But..."

The stars again, just the two of them and the stars. Tifa reaches for him suddenly, hands falling over his. "Cloud..."

"Yeah?"

"I..." She wants to say she was sorry for pressing him about this.

He holds her gaze hostage, and when he speaks, it's with unintentional force. "Tifa. I'm okay, I think. … It's like I said before. I have you with me now." With a smile, his face softens, and her body uncoils. "And I don't think it's a product of luck."

She reaches up to brush strands of hair from his face; he leans into her hand, breath against her skin.

"I used to wonder," he says.

"What?"

"What made you so strong."

She frowns, thinking suddenly of all her darkest moments. "Cloud, I'm not strong."

He laughs quietly. "No, you are. I know you. And you're strong. Stronger by far than me."

"Cloud..."

"I used to think... it was something that you had and I didn't. Which was both true and not true, I think. You knew something, belonged to something that I didn't – it was out of my reach because I kept it there, all these years, and—"

She stops him from finishing by pulling his face to hers; when she releases him, she's grinning like a child and he's already reaching greedily for the rest of her.

"Well." She kisses him again. "Whatever it is of mine that you're going on about, it's yours now, too. So you can stop moping about it."

"Tifa, I never mope." She raises an eyebrow playfully, and he pulls her into his lap, hands working up her blouse, warm from the fire and the company. "... So, I was thinking we need to finish this conversation somewhere else."

She wraps her arms around him and laughs softly, stifling the sound in his hair so as not to wake Barret. "You were still wanting to finish the conversation?"

With his face buried, Cloud smiles.

"Oh, Cloud, where did you find this strength?"

No one is going to fucking taunt him anymore. All along the crust of wasteland between the cliff and the steel bones, vapors of gravel blow in his face with the wind. He refuses to cough. His footprints follow him like a long shadow, fading, into the past and into the future.

The worm in his mind purrs like an engine, like a train growling and whining and burning behind glass, warping like faces. A man with a gun on an arm lights up the dark with star-shaped bullets, dark suits file out of doors and disappeared into ruins, someone reaches for him as he falls. A woman in red and pink is silent as she dies. A man moves down from the sky, silver like a sword, enshrined by the clouds, a blaspheme in the name of all that was ever holy, and into the hole of the earth, a scourge in the body, pestilence and plague.

"Wake up!"

With a click of the tongue, the sword runs him through, but instead of choking on his own blood, he pulls himself further onto the blade, seeing through the horizon of everything else, hanging onto the only thing he can. There is no time or space for any other thought – everything is stripped away, and only one thing remains. He throws his enemy into the green abyss below them.

Three times, three times, three.

"Wake ... up!"

Afterward, he is on a plain, guts bare and breathing, hanging onto this thing he's found. A snarl with glasses is there – and a secret lies on a sea bed beneath the dark, and someone puts his hands in fists, formed from clay on worn steps. A fog. He peers through space time, walking with ghosts. A ringing in his ears, like a phone unanswered, a plea for help ignored, and the scar on his body spreads like the years.

"So this is the one. You killed my Sephiroth, did you? No mako enhancements, it seems. Just a grunt. What is the secret to your strength, I wonder? You'll make a fine specimen, then. Take them both; let's get to work."

But even under the invasion of body and mind, even when all else is crowded out, through slitted eyes he sees someone clasp his hands, shoulders trembling with tears, dark hair spilling over a lumpy bed, wheelchairs spinning, and he moves forward towards that voice and that hope and the fire in those eyes. Moth to flame. Weak to strong.

Rising beyond the desert track, Midgar casts a shadow over the outpost. He collapses in front of the great iron beast, the whistle sounding; the trainman frowns with a wondering eye.

Static on the radio speaks about Shinra subduing a madman and his accomplice. Cloud tries to drown it out with his own voice, another man's words merging with his own memory.

"—I – know a girl in the city, there's a girl there, a girl—"

A little old man from Kalm – a Shinra employee of one sort or another – takes pity on Cloud and gives him access to the train.

Here, u se my card, son, here, just take it and go on – you look like you need to get into that city more than I do.

For one moment, Cloud stands and looks at the man, one foot on the platform and the other foot on the train, before he finally takes a seat.

He rides in the belly of the train for miles and miles, out of the burning sun for the moment but still aflame all the same, only seeing footprints and mud and words as they use themselves up like clouds, 'cause this train he is riding is bound for glory, he knows, he just knows it – it just has to be – even if it looks like it's leading him into the heart of the poison pipe itself, only to dangle again in chains – it just has to be, because if he hangs on long enough, maybe it will carry him away from this place, to freedom, to – and then he'll –

He'll ride it until he dies and they have to throw his stinking body out the back, because it had almost taken that in getting here, and fuck it if he was going to demand any less of himself now. This ticket has been bought with blood, so he'll just float on down the stream until he meets the river, where he'll see the faces that conquered death – rising out of the dark like a tremor from the beginning, green like memory, burning rust like all that is true, coming back with a promise to build a water tower all the way to the fucking stars.

There is no secret hidden from view, just the truth here in front of you.

Just keep riding it, following it, until the end of the line—

...

He enters her dreams in the morning, he stands in the back of her head, framed by the doorway of her old room in Nibelheim, blue eyes lingering even after all else fades. Her eyes are puffy, and she almost misses him before he disappears. There are stairs – her stairs? No, steps of iron, a trail of blood into a burial chamber lined with evil faces – but he is there, too, just like he said he'd be, but his face becomes a reflection in a puddle of soot. And then he is no longer a boy, and they are no longer in Nibelheim – he's in their bed, beside her, looking at her with peace in his eyes.

She wakes before the light and can hear him downstairs already. He's up early. The bedsheets beside her are achingly cold, undisturbed. So he hadn't been in here, with her. Her heart sinks a little, and she curses dreams.

She stifles the desire to get up and make him some coffee. It's quiet enough already; I don't need him throwing it in my face. She buries her nose beneath the Gongaga quilt and waits for him to leave. She waits for a while, but eventually, she hears his bike pull away.

She can't sleep after that, even though she tries for an hour. Deciding that she might as well get something of a head start on the day herself, she plods down the hall. Marlene is still sound asleep, so she leaves her door cracked and goes downstairs. The bar is dim, still – customers won't be arriving for several hours, so she has plenty of time to clean, plenty of time to get things together.

Get it together.

Her eyes fall both on the immaculate sink and on the drying rack full of washed dishes next to it. Which is great, except that she had definitely left an enormous pile of dirty dishes in the sink last night – the bar had been exceptionally busy the previous evening, even into the late hours, and she had been too tired at the end of it to finish up the chores. Cloud himself had arrived home and found a few people milling around the tables, in fact.

Cloud.

A tiny smile creeps over her face as she approaches the sink. She gingerly picks up a cleaned dish. It's still wet.

He... did the dishes.

She turns the dish over in wonder. He's never done the dishes before. Not like this, not without prompting, without... assistance. The shy grin grows bolder. And it shows. He's missed a spot on this one.

She picks up another. ...And this one, too.

And, oh, and this one.

Soon, she is picking up all the dishes and scouring them for evidence of his work, until she realizes with a pang that she's looked at all the dishes, and then with mounting intensity she looks at them again, desperate for something, anything now, and before she knows it, tears are streaming down her cheeks, and she puts the last one back on the counter and slumps against it, letting her head weep into her arms, her hair filling the sink, her sobs pouring into the drain.

Cloud—

And then the phone rings, wrenching her from tears. She staggers across the counter, fumbles for it, and answers.

"H-hello? Who is this?"

...

Cloud. Cloud, Cloud...

"Cloud, do you remember the promise we made?"

The nurses tell her he can't hear her, let alone remember anything of his former life. They say he's in a vegetative state, and that he has been in one ever since they found him – that being a week before Tifa came to Mideel. He can't make contact with Tifa, and she can't make contact with him.

She can tell that the nurses feel sorry for her, that the doctor wants to help, but all the same, they're matter-of-fact about it. She can't blame them, though. They can't take their eyes off the swollen sky – there is more on their minds than the status of a doomed patient. Meteor is coming. It is the end of the world, maybe – so what if Cloud ever speaks again?

"The poor dears – he has no higher cognition. All that mako poisoning – I'm surprised he's even breathing. She's sweet to stay here, with him, but really, she might as well move on. None of us have any time left..."

"Well, then again, where has she to go? What is she to do? What can anyone do with themselves, now? You just have to keep going until you can't anymore, or you end it quickly for yourself. Everything else is more futile than that. So! Come on, ladies, get back to work – unless any of you want to cut out of here. That's right – I didn't think so."

Tifa keeps talking to Cloud, however, and after awhile, the nurses stop talking about it, but her insides remain as infected as ever with their words.

When she'd decided not to return to the Highwind with the others, no one had anything to say. When they left her, Yuffie had hugged her goodbye, and Nanaki and pushed his head under her hand. Cid looked at her with pity, with fear, probably thinking about Shera. Cait Sith whimpered, and Vincent shook his head.

Barret didn't actually say anything to her, but when he stopped at the door on his way out, his eyes had been plenty loud.

What kind of person gives up on the whole damn Planet for someone who gave up on himself? He's as good as dead, Tifa. Maybe it's time to bury him.

She had felt like Barret was being cruel, but later, she doesn't think that way. She hadn't then, but later, she considers Marlene. Of course Barret was thinking about Marlene. She forgives him immediately, because all she was thinking about was Cloud.

Cloud's head lolls, eyes glazed like marbles, and a disconcerting smell comes and goes when he opens his mouth. The nurses tell her it's part of the poisoning, an unpleasant side effect of the inflammation of the gods-knows-what-if-she-was-in-a-state-of-mind-to-r emember-it. She simply checks the information under Cloud's gone.

They keep him plugged into a machine most of the time, monitoring him. His condition doesn't respond to Cure spells, or any other kind of Healing materia. He can't eat like a normal human being, so they insert a long feeding tube into his mouth that Tifa helps maintain. He has trouble keeping it in, and they consider inserting it directly into his stomach, but Tifa begs them to wait on being that intrusive. His fluid levels drop each day, and they put an IV in and out of him. Tifa is never hungry, never wants to eat what the nurses bring her, but she tries. She and a nurse help him from the bed to his wheelchair every couple of hours, trying to keep him from physically declining. The worst of it is the catheter and everything that goes along with that, but eventually, everything becomes a routine for Tifa, a routine she practices like she had with her music, turning of the sun.

Tifa waits for the nurses to give this all up – the world is ending, and yet, they stay, doing their jobs. Cloud's life is over, and yet, they keep maintaining it. Tifa tries to keep her upper lip as stiff as she can. She's often too tired for words, but she won't give them up.

The sun set an hour ago, but the glow from Meteor casts a red light through the windows of the clinic. Tifa leans in close to Cloud. "Cloud... that night... I know you remember it. You promised you'd always come for me... whenever I was in trouble."

Ironically, she's never felt more vulnerable – never been more in need of saving – than she is at that very moment, tethered to a man drowning, a man the rest of the world has stopped seeing as a man. But, as vulnerable as she feels, he is far worse off, and he is not coming for her this time, not coming to save her.

She reaches for his hand; it's cold, so she breathes on it, and when that isn't sufficient, she lays her cheek against it.

"Well, I'm still holding you to that, you know." She tries to smile for him, but she is too tired. "Just because you're... like this... well, you're not getting out of this one, mister. I'm not going anywhere until you snap out of this."

He bows forward, his face inches from her, and mumbles nonsense. She can't look into his blank eyes.. She has been constantly fighting her fear that the nurses are right, and for Cloud's sake, she won't believe such horror.

"But, you know, a promise works two ways. I was really thinking about that, about a lot of things. About... about what this, you, what you really are to me."

With those words, she looks up – not into his face, because she is afraid, but at his collarbone – something safe at which to direct her resolve.

"I don't think I really knew … until... until, you'd left us – I didn't know 'til then how much I'd come to depend on you."

His head drops beneath hers.

"Before you came along, I didn't really need anybody, you know? I mean, sure, okay, you need people in your life, but you know what I mean. I managed without needing one single person. I'd lost my parents, I'd lost my home, I'd lost my identity. I had nothing else to lose, and I was doing just fine. And then, here you are, one day, dropped off by a train, and suddenly, all those things I'd lost – I felt them coming back, through what I thought I knew of you. That person I used to be, that life I used to have... I gotta admit, I... I think I used you, in that way. When you came back, I started to see how consumed with revenge I'd become, and … could I really live with myself, like that?

"To make it worse, none of what you said about our past made any sense. You were wrong about a lot of things, … but even worse, you were right about so many wrong things. You really weren't the Cloud I once knew, not really, but I didn't want to believe that, because, well, who was I, then? How true were these fragments of my own memories, if I couldn't trust your own? Who are you? You never gave me an answer. And I never had one I could give to you, either.

"I'm... so sorry. After we lost you in the Crater, Barret kept telling me that I was crazy for falling apart like I did, that it's not how the Tifa he knows would act, and I'm thinking, yeah, I'm crazy. I'm stupid. I made a little boy promise to come for me, to come back for me. And he did." Her eyes darken. "And he didn't."

Light cuts through the blinds, falling across Cloud's hair. As he rocks himself, the light moves over his form like a spring. His hands fall against her arms, loose and aimless. She cries openly in his lap.

"But you know what? I gave my heart to that boy." She shakes her head and laughs through her tears. "Maybe I know why, but maybe I don't. Either way, Tifa Lockhart, you're nuts. I feel nuts. But, Cloud, it's the truth. I gave it to you, of all people."

For just one moment, she thinks she feels his hands twitch, his breath hitch, but it's gone as quickly as it comes. She keeps speaking, hoping for another response.

"I … Okay. So, it's official now. I'm giving it to you, to all of you. Cloud Strife. Vegetable or no. It doesn't matter to me."

The honest truth is that I cannot bear to parted from you, now that I've found you, whole or in pieces. I don't care what that makes me – weak or strong, devoted or stupid – but I can't hide from this any longer. Let the others worry about the Planet. Let the others take care of the world. How can I keep a promise to the world if I can't even honor the one we made to each other?

"It didn't happen all at once, okay, but... it happened. So, here I am, because of it."

Silence follows her words. Cloud moves on like a doll, and Tifa closes her eyes. She does something then she hasn't done since she was a child – since her mother died. She prays.

"... And … if I can come save you this time, somehow, some way, then let it be."

In the other room, she can hear the nurses and the doctor rustling papers, peeking through blinds, speaking to one another, their voices growing in a steady drone. She looks away from Cloud, color draining from her cheeks.

"Listen to me gush," she says, wiping her eyes. "It's really silly, yeah. Maybe I'm beginning to believe that you can't hear me after all, Cloud."

Regardless of what she believes, she is there the next morning when they begin their routine anew, and the next morning, and the next. She is there until, weeks later, Weapon attacks. The sky bursts open like rotten fruit and the earth parts like hair beneath her feet and beckons her into the undying river where all things are opened up in full.

She doesn't know it then, but her prayer has been answered.

All these years, he's managed – against everything – to hold back the open mouth into his mind. But now the broken glass is coming together, the pieces in the water are floating up, and the conductor of the psyche is waiting as his orchestra tunes itself. Hands are brushing against his face, a gentle caress. A melody on the piano, wafting from the window.

A dark-haired girl, bruised knuckles and breath heaving, and a lonely little boy, skinned knees and bloodied lip, standing across the meadow.

A blue dress and a blonde head under the stars, water tower. A promise.

Blood on the reactor floor, a caress of the face. Light from the last train, grinning blade.

Every gleam of the head, every graze of the body, a touch to light a hundred suns – he feels her. Presence in the absence of all others, abandoned even by one's self – and still, possessing a will to love until the ending of days. He hears her.

Standing affixed to the eye of his mind, he is filled with the intimate knowledge of a voice calling out his name. Hisname.

I know you.

He might not have known himself then, but she knew him. How could he have ever believed that he had been alone?

When I was a child, I loved like a child.

The orchestra is in tune, and a song begins. As soon as it does, he realizes it's Tifa, playing the piano. The orchestra is one sound, one instrument, and it almost sounds like a voice.

But now that I'm a woman, I'm going to love like a woman. I wish I had more words…

Words, words, always there is talk of words when the gods finally weigh in their final judgment, always before the sins of the world are held up to stars, always for and in the name of love, but for this one last moment, the first moment they are truly alone with one another, all of that falls away, to shatter like the earth into the great stream of green and light.

I guess nothing's changed at all. I want to say so much, but I don't know the words.

She stands apart from him, turned away. "Words aren't the only way to tell someone what you're thinking…"

He doesn't wait long to close the distance. His arms are around her, she's turning around, and he's kissing her for the very first time. They're in the grass, and it's itchy and cold but they both don't care, and the water tower is in his mind, up and up through the window to the stars where she is, where they both are now. The past and the present are an illusion, and this moment lasts forever.

And for that moment, in that moment, they know—

...

"Do you love me?"

Many suns bring him to the doors where he feels like knocking but he knows that it wouldn't make any difference. They are always heavy, always dark, but they greet him like old friends by now. The pews behind them are always empty. Aeris's church. It isn't a lonely place.

This is love.

Many suns, many footsteps, all to see light streaming over the lilies that grow here. He thinks of Tifa, of Marlene, of bar stools and chocobo trains and bouncy pink ribbons, of that state of grace standing just out of arm's reach. He remembers Zack, and Aeris, and he wonders what memories they would have made in this place. He can see the sky here now, complete and uncompromising. Nothing is perfect, but maybe things can be all right. He is just one man among many, and the planet keeps turning night to day, and the rain makes the flowers grow.

You owe everything you have to love – and love's nature is that it begets love, not that it begs for retribution or recompense, not that it worries it will disappear in a moment's notice, not that it gives into fear and despair.

The boy in his arms should weigh more than Marlene, but he isn't anything more than scraps of cloth and grime and bony limbs with a heaving chest. He is unconscious now, but a moment ago, his eyes had fluttered and he had clawed savagely at the blackness oozing into his vision and had wept. Cloud feels anxious to touch him – it looks like Geostigma – but he picks him up anyway, because if he doesn't move him, the boy will surely die.

Love demands struggle, love commands submission. Love is to outlast, to commit beyond question, to surrender and reveal the self, to live forever—

Before standing, before reaching for his fallen phone, he holds the boy to him, trying to keep him from struggling. The boy gives in and the two of them crouch by Cloud's motorcycle. Cloud feels the sun beat down onto the back of his head. So different from the rain. A tremor runs through the child and Cloud wipes away the stigma from the small, weary face.

Cloud looks from the boy to the open phone, whose screen is lit up. He hears a woman's voice, frantic, on the line.

Love let you live again. Love saved you, guided you, even when you did not know its face, or its force. It brought you back here for this boy.

So let love guide you again, now that you finally see it.

The soft breath of the earth and sky rolls across them both as Cloud clutches the boy, as he reaches for the phone, as he slowly stands, as he answers, "Tifa—"

.

.

.

.

/ end /