Barret's hand is on her shoulder. Warm and strong. Heavy and familiar. She'd know those callouses anywhere.
She wants to take his fingers, squeeze them. She wants to shrug them off.
Tifa stands and does nothing.
"Teef," Barret's voice rumbles. In it there's a question she can't answer. She doesn't look at him. Doesn't look at anyone. She closes her eyes. Breathes. There's only mountain air. Not sulfur, not ash. A lifetime later and she still can't forget the taste of it in her throat.
Her eyes ache. The pressure behind them builds and builds.
"I remember the heat of the flames," Cloud's saying. His voice breaking, angry and mournful and terrible to hear. It makes Tifa's throat close; her nails bite into her palms.
She doesn't open her eyes.
She's a coward for it. She's not the only one suffering. Nibelheim is dead and gone and yet here they stand. They could stand together. She could bridge the gap.
Tifa breathes.
In. Out.
It's all she can do.
Tifa knows the drill but still has to clench her hands into fists so she doesn't do something she'll regret when she finds a stranger in her home.
"I've lived here my whole life," the man says with a perfectly plastic smile, and Tifa hears them all in unison, one after the other—fake villagers in a fake town, lyinglyinglying, like this isn't one elaborate game of pretend, like Nibelheim isn't ashes on the wind.
Tifa swallows and says, "Please."
She doesn't recognize her own voice.
He lets her look around for a couple hundred gil.
She's staring at the ebony and ivory keys when Aerith slides next to her onto the piano bench.
"That man is a hustler," she says by way of hello. "He should pack up and move to Midgar. He'd fit right in."
It almost startles a laugh out of her. Almost. It fizzles, dies. Leaves the two of them alone in somebody's sick idea of a joke, afternoon light spilling through the windows, dust motes spiraling all around.
Aerith's eyes shift away, taking in the rest of the room. She looks and looks and Tifa doesn't look with her. She already knows what she'll see.
"Is it the same?" Aerith asks after a time.
Tifa swallows. "No," she says, focusing on her fingers. "There's—differences."
She'd walked the breadth of it, pacing back and forth, examining every nook and cranny, trying desperately to match everything to memory. There are books she's never read. Stuffed animals she's never been given. Everything is wrong except for the things that are right.
A piano. Not hers, but in the way this room is-and-isn't hers. Things that shouldn't be but are. Close enough to hurt; to dig old holes anew.
Fingers graze her cheek. "You'd think he'd dust at least."
Tifa looks at Aerith, mouth dry, skin prickling, Aerith not smiling but her eyes soft, soft, and she's glad, suddenly, Cloud isn't the one who found her. She wonders if that makes her a terrible person.
Lips replace fingers. Tifa's breath stutters.
"Aerith," she says. It's a question and an answer.
Fingers and lips and Aerith's mouth so close. Tifa wants it closer still.
Lips press against her jaw. The corner of her mouth. Aerith pulls away, and Tifa thinks no; Tifa thinks please, Tifa thinks let me have this, please, please let me—
She's in a mockery of her childhood bedroom and she wants—needs—something real.
"Imagine how mad he'd be," Aerith says, and Tifa's surprised she can hear her over the want suffusing her skin, "finding us necking in here like a couple of teenagers."
Aerith smiles sharp and brilliant, eyes luminous in her face, thumb on Tifa's pulse point.
It's an easy thing, tilting her head and kissing her.