She barely knew Traverse Town before it was gone. Up and plucked from the sky, like an orange fast picked from its branches. The carpet comes unwoven at her feet, stars sway and quiver in their cradles, and within an instant Tifa is stumbling along the Bastion's waters.
The Heartless are not hasty to abandon their fortress. The town has gone untouched, but that is because the town did not exist until moments ago. The gardens are in shambles, the Bastion's water main split wide like a giant's corpse flayed open, streams breaking out between its spread ribs.
The city of light has become an ultimate shadow, here where all worlds revolve around the Heartless marches. Who is she to pray to?—there are only fiends and Heartless here, glowering down from their nest, waiting for the inhabitants to sleep.
Night is the worst of the attacks. Each evening is like the Bastion's siege made new, beasts out of legend slithering up from the cracks to hound guards and stray children. The Heartless come like an air raid, darkness howling in her ears as the tides ebb and floor, yellow-eyed armies that do not have bones to be broken or skin to burn.
It brings her back to Sephiroth.
At the planet's core every breath was razors in her throat, Meteor ever drawing nearer to the waning world. Sephiroth stood proud back then, eyes alight with the fire of darkness; words strung together with cuts, precise letters that lashed out at everything she could possibly fight for. At that time there was nothing to believe in, nothing but Ansem and his research.
Did Squall feel the same way? Gunning down his mother, taking up arms on the sorceress that had raised him? Who did he believe in then—Rinoa? Yuffie? Or did they all really feed from Ansem's palms, kneeling to a master that would cast all worlds into darkness and reduce their very hearts to nothing?
No, at some point she had trusted Ienzo. In the Bastion's upper echelons a pillar wavered and fought with the wind, keeping crenelations stable at altitudes Tifa could never climb. Ienzo had stood like that pillar, a boy whose eyes grew into little saucers when she offered him candy between dissertations on the nature of Meteor's descent. Somewhere between describing how to channel Holy's rivets and writing out equations for elemental resistance, he had given her hope. He was another alabaster coat, another apprentice lingering at Ansem's back on a snowy afternoon. But he was also a child, and in that way Ienzo could be trusted.
Not like Ansem. What became of him—was he too a victim to Ansem's mad hunt? Or did Ienzo go peacefully, shut up in his bedsheets with the cold she'd been trying to cure?
Sephiroth and Ansem. Edea, Adel, the Sorceress War, Jenova—what was the gain in it all, if they're only back to etching out a small town on the horizon of darkness' refuge?
So Tifa grins, forces her mouth to turn up and her chin to go high. Whatever became of Ienzo, he isn't here now—so she'll just have to keep courage enough for them both, and make her own meaning to living.
For a moment Sora smiles at her, and Tifa sees him. Them. Cloud and Ienzo both, spiky-haired little boys who can't keep track of their own shoes but keep on pressing against the darkness. Sora's different, so she doesn't straddle her arms across his waist and squeeze the dark out of him.
Because there's no dark to squeeze. Tifa can hold him all she likes and Sora will do nothing but laugh nervously, maybe squeeze back and ask her what has her down. And she will never, never answer, because he's the Keyblade Master and this isn't his affair and if for even a moment he becomes distracted, ten more worlds are consumed by Ansem's inky scrawl.
Sephiroth is alive.
His lips continue to curdle with words of darkness, his name railing on her senses. Cloud is all the worse for every moment the soldier continues to tread, so Tifa throws herself from one wild patch to the next, chasing a black cape along the Bastion's untamed ravines.
"Does Cloud still delude himself with that word?"
Feathers worm beneath her skin, a boiling anger that vents all the rage from the back of her mind. Sephiroth keeps pace effortlessly, and it's all Tifa can do to match his strikes; steel soles or no, pressing an offensive against the soldier is suicidal. He casts the longest shadow, one that they are all fighting to climb.
So when Sora finally makes him flinch, Tifa basks in the moment like it's the sweetest truffle she's ever indulged. Sephiroth rises out of a fury, leaving trails of tinsel and blood on the air while he hemorrhages comets, and the Keyblade Master doesn't spare the spell a second thought. Prisms knit into the ground, tapered walls of glass that rebuff the dark magic.
At the end of the day, she is still looking for Cloud.
Tifa leaves quickly, less for fear of Heartless and more to avoid confronting the castle. After a decade, the Bastion's crippled facade still lingers; at some point the Heartless had seen fit to gut the castle of its innards and let sewage pour out into the city streets, shifting their emblem over to Maleficent's vale. No matter where she turns, she will see either Ansem's ruined palace or the Heartless' ramshackle fortress, so Tifa leaves altogether and spares herself the pain.
It was Even who first remade the castle. That is her suspicion—she remembers the apprentice, hunched over and watching the castle's renovation. The Bastion fast filled with machinery, magitek looted from the Sorceress War and cobbled together within Ansem's spiraling throne. Within days Tifa caught her first sight of the Heartless insignia, proudly sculpted over the castle walls, and within a year the Bastion was snuffed out like an old waning candle.
Sora is at her door.
He's heaving, alone and short of breath. Unthinkingly Tifa lets the door squeal on its hinges, leaving him with a wide path into her skeleton of a home. Beds are few, ransacked mattresses dug up from a dead man's house and thrown over a moldy wooden frame. Sora's breath is moist on her neck, and the Bastion's summers continue to be chilly affairs of wind over icewater. Whistling in through the dusty windows, making her back rimy. Tifa draws her arms a little tighter around the Keyblade Master, makes his chocolate fluff of hair her pillow, and does all she can to exploit the boy's body heat.
In the morning Sora talks, of committees and attacks and leaving Donald with Merlin. Goofy is helping rebuild Biggs' shop, and Tifa does not object when Sora sits down to breakfast.
"Is it lonely?" Tifa blurts out as she shuffles through teabags and oranges. Casts a spell to light the stove. "So far from home?"
It's a stupid question, because they're in the same sinking ship.
"...Yeah. I keep looking for my friends, but they don't want to be found."
His brow is furrowed, lips pouting. It's the first Tifa's ever seen of the Keyblade Master being sad, a dejected hound left out in poor weather. A puppy.
"To tell the truth," Sora starts up the conversation again, lips twisting at the corners and fast filling out. Like smiles have been poured all over his cheeks, the most saccharine honey dribbling over a salty face. "I came here, because you're the only one who doesn't know me."
Her hands stammer, fumbling with cherry clusters. A bushel of star carrots teeters at her elbow, and Tifa lashes out to steady the woven frame.
"Leon and Cloud, and Yuffie...they all forgot about me. But you—you were never there to begin with. And it's nice, being able to make new friends."
"Yeah." Burnished raven hair tickles her collar, a thick train that's still fresh from her shower. Like every day before, it was cold and filled with ice floes.
Tifa sets the bowl down carefully, smoked foods singing her nostrils. Her legs bend, giving way for her to squat low—and then she tastes muddy ocean water on her tongue, Sora's mouth hot, off-guard, surprised. Not resisting. A more sensible boy might have bit her.
"I'm sorry." It's the taste of dirt that makes her pull back, and just as soon as she's off him an aftertaste like pine resin and sugar overtakes her senses. Sora is ocean salts and cake, vanilla. "I shouldn't have done that."
A moment drags by, and there is more to say. She's seven years his senior, he's a little boy, it's wrong and terrible and she's a lonely idiot with all the tact of a street whore and— and—
"You have someone waiting for you." Tifa acknowledges the most incriminating fact, curling up in the opposite chair. Sora does not know what to draw from the experience. Abject terror, or mild befuddlement, something writhes across his brow. He reaches, slowly, touching his mouth and in the same moment running his tongue along the lips she so feverishly stole from.
"You have someone waiting for you, too."
"Not really." It's to her surprise he'll even talk to her now, carry on this conversation as though the moments before never happened. The Keyblade Master is forgiving to a fault.
"What about Cloud?"
"He's...not really waiting for me." If he was, her life would be easier. No more chasing around after every phantom splash in the street or odd shadow outside the market. Cloud never waited for her, and he never looked; there is someone else in his mind.
Sora's chair grinds against the floorboards. His movements are impossible—he should be out the door by now. Tifa draws in a hissing breath, cold air flooding her lungs. The boy's touch is as though the whole world had thrown its weight on her shoulder, his fingers worming down until he's plying at leather, flesh supple beneath his thumb.
"I want to...try that again." Sora is still confused, set aback by unfamiliar sensations. "I've never done that."
There's a lot you've never done. The thought crosses her mind darkly, but Tifa dismisses it as fast as she would thoughts of Ansem. It is, she decides, better to indulge the savior of all worlds for a few minutes than to skip over a moment's satisfaction.
They are not in any way particularly good with words, so Tifa talks with her tongue and prays it enough to sate this young hero.