They say youth is fleeting, but theirs had already gone.
Sawdust
"Last call, you two."
Five minutes to two: a couple, young and unkempt, break apart from each other, lips kiss-swollen and gleaming with saliva. The young man, perhaps not much younger than the barmaid but much greener behind the eyes, emerges in a sloppy grin. "Two, uhh, two more shots, please. Tequila. The, uh, 480, not the Cuervo," and he drunkenly beams at his lady as she gives him an approving look.
The air is dank with sweat and liquor, dimmed lights and Friday night sorrows painting the Seventh Heaven in warm sepia. Tifa complies and watches them, amused as she lifts the 480 Partidas from the shelf beside her. She notes the young man's greasy shoulder length hair tucked behind the ears and the woman's colourful assortment of facial piercings and suspects that they'd just come from the Rancid Death gig downtown, likely on a first date gone very, very well. She places three shot glasses in succession on the bar with a plate of limes and salt.
"Oh, um, sorry," he stops her, "we asked for two shots."
Tifa smirks. "Then what am I gonna drink?"
The young couple erupt in a grin of Cheshire proportions at each other, then at their new friend behind the bar before the three knock one back in unison and scramble for the limes, stray spills down shirts and chins. Startlingly azure eyes patiently watch from the other end of the bar, unruly blonde hair propped up on a hand. The dark brunette, the starlet given top billing in the scene unfolding before him, averts her gaze to look right back at him, suckling on the lime with calculated languidness as they lock eyes.
The minutes before closing always seem to tick along slowly, considerably picking her spirits up. It could've been to do with the odd drink during her shift, or to do with being the end of the day, or perhaps to do with the mako-eyed Adonis that would return from work just past midnight, sit at the end of the bar with a beer and carefully watch her like a lioness on hunt until closing. Some days he'd even engage in one-sided conversation with a middle-aged drunkard or a certain mouthy Turk with a grunt here, a nod there, and the intermittent No kidding. It meant he'd have to stay for clean up duty with the brunette, but a bit of mop water on his boots was well worth the tickle war that they'd struggle to keep quiet as to not wake Denzel or Marlene on their way up; maybe childishness to an outsider but a bit of much-needed lustre at the thinning end of the night.
Tifa places the lime in her empty shot glass and begins to make her way towards Cloud, circling the end of the bar and past him to the young couple on the other side. He watches her hips sway enticingly as she walks away, counting his lucky stars, before she approaches the couple and encircles her muscular arms around them from behind.
"Hey, you two. Bar's closed. Beat it," she says with a smile. The two slur their thanks as they leave their Gil, paying her compliments on her mixology and on her God-given assets before walking out, no doubt to the next watering hole—or perhaps a motel. Tifa looks unfazed, seeming to have enjoyed their company. She and the blonde share a knowing look from opposite ends of the bar and shake their head in disbelief. Or perhaps envy.
The greasy young things, in all their naïve and delightful candour, linger in Cloud and Tifa's thoughts as they begin to pack up the bar in an unusual silence. They wonder—that if they hadn't been thrust into a broken world and forced to save it, hadn't been violated for 'science', hadn't been corrupted by ubiquitous, permeating death—if they would also be attending underground punk shows and feeling up strangers in the mosh, only in some twisted faraway nightmare spending the night tucking in a pair of children that didn't belong to them. They wonder if Barret hadn't found Tifa when he did, if she'd end up where all the other young girls go to claw out the ache and smell of death that followed them. And they wonder, if Cloud had stayed in the military without the threat of silver-haired madmen, if he'd remain the same lost boy looking for a piece of himself at the bottom of the bottle.
They reach the top of the stairs, tickle war forgone in lieu of the sombre air that now blanket them, and quietly make it to their room before collapsing back onto the bed with their hands clasped between them. Even when their deadened eyes that have seen too much can't quite meet, they know, without words, that their lives may not even be worth living without the scars on their bodies mapping out more than just their battles and the children sleeping down the hall that are more than just collateral damage.
Suddenly the hedonistic pursuit of temporary highs doesn't gleam so brightly if it's at the cost of the burden of the world on their shoulders. And while they lay entangled in bed and mako-blue marries burgundy-brown, they ruminate over all the loss they've endured, the mark that they've left and the gravity of their unchosen destinies, over the companionship, the family, the divine connection to the Planet and the love that they've captured and everything else, they decide, is sawdust.
{fin}