i. a cold and broken hallelujah

Tifa is the one with the nightmares, of all of them: she's stronger than steel, certainly stronger than the glitzy pistol Yuffie was eyeing in the multi-world market yesterday, but sometimes she dreams that her knuckles break and bleed, dreams like vomit from the bones. Those nights, she wakes up gasping and shivering and can't remember where she is, trembling and terrified until she remembers that she isn't on a dying planet, on a burning ship. She is in Radiant Gardens. She is safe.

She shares a room with Aerith. When she can't help but cry out because of the shadows in her eyelids (just like the ones that ate Barret and he went out with a bang, she remembers, setting the bomb and then suddenly gone to lights, to the darkness), Aerith will pad over, sit on the edge of her bed and smooth Tifa's hair away from her sweaty forehead. On the nights she cries, Yuffie comes in and slips into bed with her, perching her chin on Tifa's shoulder while Aerith mothers over them both, just like how it was before – before, when they both thought she was dead and Yuffie and Tifa would sit in their sleeping bags and wonder if she was watching them.

Tifa is afraid at night but Yuffie whispers that she's afraider and Tifa just has the balls to owe up to it, and that makes her giggle until she starts crying, because these things take time. And then Aerith pets their hair and whispers soothing nonsense words while Yuffie turns her head away into the pillow, because sixteen is so young and there isn't really an age anyway that's ready for a dying planet, everything that was ever important lost to shadows forever.

Tifa listens to her sister-girls, closes her eyes, and remembers that she is safe.